People riding on buses are not also driving cars at the same time. I am not making that up.

The lowest projected cost of CHSR is $58 BILLION dollars. No one believes that number, and even the most fervent CHSR advocates have now admitted it was a lowball estimate. But for the sake of argument, lets use it. The plan is to run 100 trains with a capacity of 1000 passengers each. $58B/100,000 = $580,000 per seat.

You are wrong by a factor of ten. Buses are standard products sold in competitive markets. Passenger trains are custom designed and sold to governments where cost is not an important consideration.

No. Because the highways ALREADY EXIST, and the buses displace cars, so no additional capacity is needed.

Even if you accept the lowest of the projected costs for California high speed rail project, the cost is over $500,000 PER SEAT. Show me a bus that costs that much.

The government subsidizes it.

Not true at all. It is the government keeping Amtrak afloat. Support for Amtrak is surprising broad. Democrats support it because they like big government, and especially like trains. Republicans support it because service to sparsely populated red states would be the first thing cut if the subsidies were reduced.

It seems to me that they would have been developed even sooner if we had spent more on scientific research and less on rocket fuel. Instead of spending X dollars on Y to get Z as a side effect, why not spend a lot less than X dollars directly on Z?

No. That is the "bullshit" number made up by politicians. No one actually believes that, since that number is from 2012, and even the politicians are no longer sticking by it.

The best way to estimate the cost, is to issue bonds that pay on a sliding scale, with a normal payout if the projected cost is met, more if the cost is under, and less it there is a cost overrun. Then see how much people investing THEIR OWN MONEY would be willing to pay for those bonds. Of course this will not happen for California high speed rail, or any other boondoggle, because the market would expose the real costs.

Breaking news: The system is really broken. Pouring another few trillion into it won't fix it. It will make it more broken.

Yes. That is about right. Moving people by train is about as efficient as moving two people in a car. That is why trains make some sense for local commuting, since most people commute one-person-per-vehicle. But they make less sense for long distance travel, where people mostly don't drive alone. But in either case, a bus is generally even better than the train, with much less up-front cost, and is more flexible when commuting patterns change.

No. Trains move people for about 350 kJ/passenger-km. Passenger aircraft average 1.4 MJ/p-km. So that is 20%, not 5%.

Unlikely. A bomb on a train will kill far fewer people, and also generate far less psychological effect. People have an instinctive fear of heights, and falling from them. Our society has put disproportionate effort into aircraft safety, compared to almost any other area of risk.

After 9/11 many fewer people flew on airplanes. Passenger volume took quite a while to recover. The train bombings in London had almost no effect on ridership.

Also, it is hard to hijack a train.

Spending trillions on nationwide high speed rail (The SF-to LA run alone is projected to cost $300 Billion), that will require hundreds of billions more in subsidies, cater mainly to the relatively wealthy, and do little to reduce pollution or reduce CO2 emissions, is not a "great thing".

But nobody is locked in to faxes. To get info from one digital format to another, a read-type-print-fax-print-read-type cycle is never preferable to email. As a last resort, you can scan a document and email the scan. Fax machines need to die. Other than doctors, lawyers, and bureaucrats, they are already dead. They are still used in those three areas because all three can push the cost of the inefficiency onto someone else (patients, clients, and taxpayers).

That doesn't work if Earth's civilization is exterminated, by a comet, nuclear war, super Ebola, or whatever. A major reason for colonizing Mars is so humanity's eggs (and sperm) are not all in one basket.

You don't even need that. Even with existing technology, DNA can be spliced and patched. So you just take a flash drive with with the genome of a few million people.

Let's do the math: The human genome has about 3 billion base pairs, each of which has two bits of information. That is six billion bits, or about 750MB. But most humans share 99.9% of their genome, so you would only need 750kB to store the "diffs" for each individual. But even that way overstates the storage required, since most people that differ from the "base" do so in the same sequence "chunks". You should need less than 100kB per individual. So a one TB drive, should, with proper compression, be able to store the genomes of ten million people.

You would, of course, need more drives for the microbiome.

Most of the child rearing could be done by robots. If we can put a colony on Mars, we should be able to build a robot that can change a diaper.

It means maximizing human happiness, whether God(s) exist or not.

All the water that used to be in the Aral Sea, had to go somewhere. Today it is in the oceans, raising global sea levels by several millimeters.