There's no dark side of the moon. It's all dark, really...

Confident? I'm just stating the obvious. There can be life on planets. It can be intelligent. It can go to space.

I don't need confidence to make those observations; even a vague awareness of the world around me suffices.

And I fail to see what my intelligence has to do with any of it. These very simple facts wouldn't change any regardless if I was Einstein or a drooling idiot.

Your comment is downright strange.

My worldview wouldn't change a whit.

We're already aware of life on a planet. That's what we are. Us, and cats, and dogs, and everything else living here. As humans, we're already aware of the great diversity of life even sourced from just the one planet. Likewise, the range of intelligence. Life, intelligence, on some planet? Spacecraft? Interest in exploring? Nothing groundbreaking there. Not a thing. Already known facts. It happens; we've watched it happen.

So, another case? Ok. Interesting? Sure. Absolutely. But already a 100% fit with what we know. The whole shebang is going to be about things to learn in the areas of culture and technology. Just specifics. The rest, we already knew.

How about tin? (can we hear some L. Frank Baum, here, the only example of tin based life in literature I can think of)
Lead?

Both Tin and Lead are represented in Gold Key's "Metal Men"

Ask the aliens what their views on hacking their own bodies reproductive reward system, in order to avoid the reproduction part but still get the reward.

Hacking? Honey, I'm not hacking, I'm practicing. No, no, don't take them off. I like the way the line of the stocking goes up the back of your leg.

What makes you think this hasn't already happened?"

The uniform lack of any good advice indicating a technology in any way advanced from those the insights were supposedly given to. Nothing so advanced as "wash your hands before touching any wound", or a reasonable tip about cooking to eliminate parasites (instead of, for instance, forbidding shellfish and so on... just dumb, straight up primitive stuff.)

All religions fail this simple test: Their all-knowing patron (of whatever type) manifests as utterly clueless. So whatever else might have been going on -- and that certainly leaves a very wide field -- visiting aliens can be very cleanly ruled out.

the current administration has done more than any previous administration to expand it's[sic] intrusive power

No, sorry. Nothing's been done during Obama's terms that even remotely compare with the instantiation of the PATRIOT act and the TSA as far as harmful changes to the previously existing state of affairs by the government.

And then during Obama's terms, we've seen the drug war lighten up on marijuana, we've seen expansions of gay rights, we've seen increased rights and capabilities for consumers and less for credit card companies, access to Cuba has opened up, private sector spaceflight has been encouraged...

Obama's got his warts, all right -- constitutionally speaking, the man seems to be insane -- but on the scale of making life worse for all of us, he's done nothing even close, singly or in aggregate, to measuring up to the Bush/Cheney administration's insults to the body politic.

That's kind of funny, actually. Wonder what genius thought there was a usable market segment for a tablet without a touchscreen?

Just wish it had some level of IR control in addition to wifi.

Consider a Raspberry Pi B+. You can add IR (or bluetooth), it's full HD, has four USB so you can add WiFi and other stuff, has a camera interface, there's a media player configuration to fool with right out of the (NOOBS) box, Youtube et al are all available over the web, etc... and it's pretty easy to move, too. HDMI cable, power supply, that's all. Presuming you've an IR or bluetooth remote working with it.

And it's all about as open -- hardware and software -- as most stuff tends to get, which is handy if you want to get all hammer and tongs on it.

in newbamamerica, you have no rights or freedoms.

If you think even for a *second* that this would not have happened during the prior administrations, or that the majority of damage to your freedoms had not already been done prior to Obama's terms, you really should see someone about that brain tumor, because it's made you into a flaming idiot.

I bet the NSA has had this, and more than this, for many years, and will only see to it that this fellow is stomped into mush.

That'd be the American public you're asking about.

When congress decided to shove the PATRIOT act up everyone's colon, lubricated only by a healthy dose of TSA, all the American public did was enquire how far they should bend over. They're still bent over. The majority likes it that way. Because fear. Unreasonable, agit-prop and ignorance based fear.

...are you assuming sequential scans are orbits apart? That's not a reasonable limit. Heck, we don't even have that limit today on an *orbiting* sat, much less a geostationary one. ...rocks don't move continuously down the center of valleys, and this would have been quite visible.

mmmm.... no. :)

No problem. *I* didn't remember the lava tubes, so we're even. :)