Pahoa is Native town... these people don't have the kind of money that most Hawaii immigrants do, nor the financial ability to move elsewhere on their island.

The Oort cloud is supposed to be a veritable treasure trove of these things, all you have to do is tip them sunward (decrease their negligible orbital velocity just a little) and be precise enough about it to achieve Mars impact. The trick is getting a ship with any kind of delta V capability into the Oort cloud in the first place - solar power ain't gonna cut it out there, probably need a massive Thorium or Plutonium pile to make it go. Extra bonus, when you get there, the objects you are moving provide the reaction mass you need to move them (volatiles!)

I like the Dodge approach - build one level of trim, then strip out the customer facing "cool stuff" to make the base model... all the underpinnings are still there, base model probably costs about the same to make as the premium.

They already had fission power, and the fusion bomb, seemed reasonable at the time.

Question is: what would society look like with unlimited free energy? Even without greenhouse problems, can you imagine every hut in India, China and Africa powered with 500 amps of unmetered 220VAC? Stick a 50,000BTU wall unit in the side of an uninsulated hut, and you can have any temperature you want inside. Carbon arc perimeter lighting for the village, turns night into day. Melt the sand to make glass roads... it's all great fun in a first settlement colony in a science fiction novel, but when you've got a whole planet full of people doing it at one time, I think the ecology would be in worse trouble than it already is.

Advancing at 100x per year, they're only 2 years away from breakeven.

Of course, advances are rarely regular, so they could be much closer to breakeven, or further.

Yep - that fits the funding model pretty well, but from a practical standpoint, the astronauts probably need some non-flammable suits. Nothing says the suits can't be see-through, though - for, practical reasons.

Lately I've seen a lot of flak about excessive use of drones, etc. etc. etc. So, sure, even Jimmy Carter tried to use the Seals, and it's always the CinC's fault when something goes wrong. Pulled out too early? That's why we've got ISIS. Pulled out too late? Fathered another Vietnam. Nuked 'em all? Oh dear, can't do that. Well, then, what are all the damn submarines and waste plutonium for?

In whatever year it was that Obama was elected, the USA had a choice, and we chose the less warmongering of the two parties... it's really the US voters who got that peace prize, the committee just needed a single person to award it to.

Can't get elected without a name and birth certificate.. oh, wait...

He's not Bush.

He's never stood in a flight suit under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished"

He's actually ramped down foreign deployments, not just planned to do it.

He's proactively involved special forces in trouble spots before full scale deployments become necessary.

He's just a figurehead in front of a much larger machine that makes his decisions for him - well, o.k., on that one he is just like Bush.

But, the machine that Obama represents, corrupt, inconsistent, and self-serving as it is, seems to be an improvement over the machine that Bush represented. Now, if we can get an improvement over Obama next time, we can call ourselves an enlightened, empowered electorate, at least for a few years.

Romansh will fall first. (I came here with a similar thought...)

If you're going to live 24:39/7 in a 100% oxygen atmosphere, you might also want to shave (all the parts) and do everything you can to avoid oily skin. When (not if) the flash fire comes, you really don't want to provide any fuel for it with your body.

In the late 1980s, I had a MS, and virtually zero chance of getting a meaningful university post until I got a PhD. There was one faculty member in our College with just a MS... not sure how he pulled that off, but when I was invited back to do a PhD / TA, I inquired about a position that might pay something better than 50% of what my MS degree was worth "on the outside" - I was politely told "we don't do that anymore... very rarely." To which I politely replied "I think I'll be looking for something else to do."

Malaria. Went the other way than Small Pox did for the Spanish.

Exactly this, I'm not saying there ever were Atlanteans, but if there were, and if they discovered electricity and the electric light, does it count?

Apparently not.

According to the summary, he didn't write his book - a popular shadow author did, and as such, you can imagine that the shadow author filled in a lot of the material from his imagination, rather than Polo's actual experiences.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if scholarly analysis of the book finds it full of holes and inconsistencies... the communication between Polo and the author itself is bound to be imperfect, as is the author's desire to sell copies, rather than give an accurate account.