One of the better features of The Hobbit (or There and Back Again) is that Bilbo is knocked unconcious at the beginning of the battle of the 5 armies. And since the story is written from his perspective (or he wrote it) there is virtually no dewcription of the battle itself. SO I was hopeful that we would not be subjected to yet another boilerplate over the top battle scene where actually fearsome creatures (trolls, wargs) repeatedly fail to kill their enemy and participants appear to be able to defy the laws of physics. I mean, for Manwes sake: if i wanted to see acrobats I'd go to the circus. Actual character exposition appears ot be confined to clumsy dialogue. Apparently there is no screen time for visual exposition on the change in Bilbo from comfortable, insular shire hobbit to a slightly amoral but very plucky thief. Instead he (bilbo) needs to convey this through long, confessional speeches with the dwarves, whilst 2 dimensional elves do stupid things.

Well, you always try www.rsvp.com.au they might have the cure for what ails ya.

Yes. A plan which involves billions of people dying unnecessarily seems, well, not like a good plan. Good thing that nobody would ever agree to such an insane plan.

I'd like a real reason, but I'm not holding my breath.

That's not a reason. That's like saying: "We should build a popsicle skyscraper - because we can!" It's nonsense.

The last real attempt at settlement was Greenland and prior to that 10000 years or more ago. On what are you basing your assertion that this was an a time of social expansion (more than say, the Enlightment, or Pax Romana)?

No, we're not.

There has only been one significant imapct event in the Earth's history, which is the one that created the moon. The rest have ben relatively minor - a danger for life at the time, but not dangerous to us, with our ability to adapt, tunnel and otherwise mitigate the dangers associated with abrupt climate change. At no point since the moon calved off has the earth been less habitable than mars.

And as time passes the danger of imapct diminishes, since Jupiter is doing a great job sweeping the inner solar system clean of likely debris - thanks big guy! The sun is now middle aged - chances are we will never be hit by anything likely to make us extinct.

Well, we don't have lift capacity to lift 9 billion or so humans, plus all the other life forms to Mars - plus the obvious disadvantage that if we move there, we can never come back, and even on the worst day the Earth is more habitable than Mars will ever be. So the other option is looking like the viable one.

Well, you certainly wouldn't try a nuclear bomb, that would hardly have any delta V at all. And if a robotic mission is not going to work, sending a human certainly won't. What are they going to do - push it with their arms?

- from the people who wanted to invest in robotic missions, because if we had done that, then the big rock could have easily been diverted using an advanced robotic mission.

Well, for now at least. But I guess that the idea of shooting a police officer gives you an erection - does it not? And the mention of the wife's ex-husband, do you feel a surge of pleasure in your genitals at the thought of pointing a gun at him? Does the idea of evening the odds make you want to masturbate?

And do you act out these fantasies? Do you seek out those special places on the web for people with your dark pleasures?

Do ever you post similar diatribes on facebook, blaming women for your loneliness and absent sex life? Ever talk about shooting up your school?

Fixed.

Yes, you are a real law abiding thug aren't you. You didn't choose the whiteboy thuglife, the whiteboy thuglife chose you. You can say what you want, when you want - provided the what and when are on the list of permissable places and times set by the government. You're a real icon of liberty!

Yes, I'm very turned on by your display of suburban badassery. You're the king of the thugs in my mind. Or perhaps you just look and sound like an idiot. Should I call you keazy? Are you gunna get your cinna on at the cinnabon?.

If you self description is accurate your peers are going to be low order drug mules, prostitutes, drug addicts and/or thug wannabees with hoodies and chains on their wallets. Somehow I don't see them turning up to court (unless in the dock). Likely too moronic to find their way down the street.

This from the guy who admitted freely that his firearm is useless for defending his liberty and in fact his main purpose for keeping it was to threaten others and fantasise about shooting cops. You'll excuse me if I'm not inclined to take civic lessons from you.

Sounds like someone sold you a rock that keeps bears away, and consequently you are sure that there can be no bears regardless of people pointing out bears on the street, in your garden, rifling through your trash.

You can't say what you like, to anyone at anytime. You probably never had that right, you certainly don't now. You just choose a subset of topics to discuss, to a subset of people, in a subset of times and places. Your own personal 'Free Speech Zone'. You are deluding yourself. Wake Up!

And lastly can I just point out how useless your firearm is for defending your rights: If you point your firearm at an official or member of law enforcement, you will be arrested and thrown into prison. Most likely, you will go to prison for longer that *I* would, were I to do the same thing in Australia, because despite other insanities, our sentencing laws are sane and our judicial system relatively free from corruption, whereas yours is utterly insane and utterly corrupt, and if you go to prison in the US you will stay there, stuck in the system for the rest of your life. So - what's the use of your firearm? Who are you going to point it at - tyrannical rabbits?

I've been seeing this Cis a lot in these bash all men posts recently - and it's still not clear to me from your description what that means - when I went to college CIS was Computer Information Systems - a degree path.

Would an advanced race actually do something so illogical?

In what other ways are we assuming alien life is like us?

Not sure why you decided to quote half a sentence, instead of the whole sentence, unless you wanted to burn a strawman by quoting me out of context to change the meaning of what I said. If you have some other intent, then I'm all ears.

What I said was:

To suggest that we, ill adapted to space as we are, ought to go physically into space instead of sending a machine is absurd - like saying that a field is only plowed if dug by hand, or the only correct calculation is done without the aid of a computer, calculator or abacus.

This is in response to the OP's assertion that the boundaries of our push into space are actually defined by how far our physical bodies have travelled - which is an absurdity. To suggest that the discoveries of Voyager, Pioneer, Spirit and Opportunity, Cassini/Huygens are somehow trivial because they didn't happen to contain any meat is deeply insulting: insulting to us as humans. The presence of meat, or lack thereof is an arbitrary scale for judging achievement. If you don't think this scale is arbitrary, if you don't think the O.P's comment was absurd, then explain why. Don't burn strawman.

That's what I said.

That's what I said. Just because our physical limitations prevent us from bodily travelling any significant distance through space, doesn't mean that we should not go further than those physical limitations practically allow. We just need to accept that, like ploughing is best performed by machines, so travelling in space is best done by machines. Thus: the term "we travelled to Jupiter" or "we landed on Titan" does not imply that our physical bodies are located near Jupiter nor on Titan, anymore than saying "I ploughed my field" implies that I did so with your hands, or saying "I flew to New York" requires me to have flown there using my arms.

You didn't need to explain it at all. I have a clear memory of what I said.

Except for the OP whose views you irrationally decided to defend, despite (apparently) not agreeing with them. Here the OP said (quote) The next manned lunar landing will not be so much for scientific exploration there as much as to start laying the foundations for stepping further into space. implying that our efforts stepping further into space: New Horizons, Voyager, Cassini Huygens, travelling to Pluto, Mercury, Jupiter, Titan - even to the edges of the solar system itself somehow don't count as "stepping into space". What an absurdity.

Thanks again for burning the strawman.

But who is suggesting that? Sounds to me like a subtle strawman. The distinction between a robot landing on Titan and a robot which contains a human is arbitrary.

Rather than focus on arbitrary distinctions, we ought to focus on non-arbitrary distinctions i.e. the gap in capability between human bodies and robots. In space, robots are far more capable than human bodies - to the extent that humans rely entirely on machines to survive.

I don't see why it's embarrassing or unsatisfactory to apply a machine to achieve a particular purpose e.g.

I need to plow my field,

I would like to fly to New York,

I need to write an essay

We use machines all the time. Therefore, why did we decide we needed to arbitrarily send human bodies into space, rather than use a machine to explore, unburdened by lumps of flesh? How would carting a lump of flesh to Titan, for example, have enabled Huygens to explore it more?