You mean like our resounding success against primitive tribesmen armed with Kalashnikovs in Afghanistan? Fucking hell, we had to pull out of Iraq with our tail between our legs and you think we have a chance invading a country where military training is mandatory, where thousands of tons of weapons are in depots all over the country, which has never been successfully invaded since the time of the Mongol hordes, and which is armed with nuclear weapons.

You're a special kind of stupid, aren't you?

Actually it is very well done, very factual and analytical, this was the material that the Pentagon planners used to draw up attacks on Moscow and Stalingrad. The Strategic Bombing Survey's report on Dresden was also of the same caliber.

What laws wilI have to break to get sent there?

Yeah, because our civilization is only capable of doing one thing at a time . . .

The impediment to feeding everyone while maintaining a viable ecosystem is not technological, it's political. Powerful people get that way and stay that way by ensuring that the overwhelming majority have nothing. The Pentagon budget for JUST LAST YEAR was larger than the inflation-adjusted cost of the entire decade of the Apollo program, and what do we have to show for all that expense? Nothing. In fact, less than nothing as the Pentagon manages to suck the world economy deeper into debt and further from freedom and peace.

If you want to eliminate the truly nasty byproducts of things like rare earths mining and chip fabrication move the process off-planet. For less money than the bottomless pit of the F-35 program a workable skyhook or space elevator could have been developed.

NASA had nothing to do with this. Private organization. Kindly remove your head from your posterior and re-insert it into the sand.

When Comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter astronomers estimated that it was a once in a century to once in a millennium event. Since that time, with our improved telescopes, we've seen evidence of half a dozen more similar impacts. When astronomers started observing the Moon for impacts they expected to see a noticeable strike every couple of years, instead they're seeing a couple every year. I think that estimates of the amount of junk floating around the solar system may be radically low.

Ubar (Iram), on the frankincense trail in the Middle East seems to have been either destroyed by or abandoned after a meteor strike in the area, possibly associated with the Wabar craters. The site is in what is generally referred to as the 'Empty Quarter'.

Its the aftermath of the A-bomb that was so gruesome.

No, it was the actual event that killed almost everyone, residual radiation killed relatively few compared to the initial blast. I highly recommend the US Army's Strategic Bombing Survey's work "THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI" , the definitive work on the subject and about as horrible a read as you'll find.

The Eastern Mediterranean Event was a 12-20 kiloton explosion over the Mediterranean Sea in 2002. It occurred during a period of tension between India and Pakistan, and if it had arrived a few hours later and exploded over that region it would almost certainly have been interpreted as a nuclear attack.

Unless of course you think the more complex theory full of mysterious unobservable entities like dark matter is correct and better uses Occam's razor.

Well, yes. There is no evidence at all supporting the Electric Universe folderol and none of the predictions that it makes come true. For that matter, most of them are impossible. On the other hand, the current construct is internally consistent, can make predictions that work, and is supported by a couple of centuries of observation. So-called 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' simply mark the threshold where our current powers of observation fail, we need better equipment to explore that section of our universe. So yes, Occam's Razor would come down on the side of current cosmology.

The hill, and then the other hill.

I live in Seattle. If the hill where my house is located existed back in the Midwest there would be a ski resort on it (really), and the Park and Ride is on the top of the taller hill on the other side of the valley. I only have to walk a mile or so, but it's a good 20 minutes.

And most companies require you to invest your money in the Ponzi scheme if you want them to help fund your retirement in any way at all. My statistics professor, whose day job was an actuary for the insurance industry, said, "Insurance is a big casino, and the companies have made sure everyone is required to play. And the house will always win." I'd have to say the same about the stock market.

Fruit juice concentrate and powdered alcohol on a backpacking trip, in the ISS, or shipped to Antarctica comes to mind. Sometimes weight really does matter a lot.

Synthehol was one of those dumbass things that can only exist in Star Trek fantasy land

Why would you say that? Humans have been testing random drugs in a rather scattershot manner for the last several tens of thousands of years. It's only recently that any sort of methodology has begun to be applied to studying chemical effects on the brain. I actually would be very surprised if something were not found in the next few years that gave a similar high to alcohol but without the nasty hangover.