History reflects you're incorrect. Trillions of dollars have simply been used by the elite to remain elite. There's 111 billionaires in California; project your accusations at them. I simply want our species to survive the next extinction event vice simply making things better just in time to catch an asteroid. My high price includes people having adventure and increased economic prosperity. Your status quo is more of a race to zero.

Someone mentioned that AppleTV removed HuluPlus from their latest release. Talk about suicide, especially with all of the competition supporting Hulu.

So the only place to view Sintel is piratebay now. There's some Sony genius.

Just give all the guys a copy of GTA CIX. You know where they'll be.

So, something capable of FTL couldn't possibly hide from us and our barely evolved manipulation of the various spectrum technologies?

Oh noes... common sense.

The sad thing continues to be postings how staying safe, playing video games, and watching football games continues to be more "fulfilling" than the real adventure you describe. /sigh

There are MANY communities within the U.S. Military that live this type of life for extended periods of time. Heck crews in Alaska and Norway do spend more than six months inside in the remote areas.

I would call the value the adventure. People work oil rigs at sea with a high injury rate. If your life is nothing more than sitting in a cube forever its value is certainly different in my eyes. I've down my multiple times around the world and I'm still doing out-tours into my 50's. I admit my spouse would hold me here, but if she were to go I'd be begging to be a brick layer/janitor/whatever on Mars.

That was true before we took over the evolution of our species. Today, saying natural selection drives humanity is the worse joke.

There are hundreds of thousands of people that already disagree with you to the point where they have already signed onto these missions to do anything at all. Build bricks, janitor, they don’t care. The sheer human effort that goes into entertainment alone is mind-boggling in our current planet. I place those hundreds of years investing into getting a nation like America MUCH harder than the Mars mission would be. The sheer cost of wars in human lives and economics wouldn't begin to compare to the minor investment a Mars colony would incur.

As to your last point, I wonder if you've ever been on an air craft carrier (CV or CVN). I seriously doubt all those sailors care about another. But they care to keep living and fighting in a war so they work together for a common goal. The goals matter more, I would think, when mother nature doesn't hand them a working biosphere. In my experience, adversity builds comradery more than it breaks it down.

Very nice link. Many thanks!

It may be a bad reason for you. I, OTOH, think you have an odd notion that you imply the lack of terraform capabilities on Earth (that also happen not to exist) constitute the reason to statistically doom our species to extinction. There's been a lot of comparison to new world adventurers of the last millennium; but we are thousands of steps advanced from those humans and they survived must worst odds than colonization of Mars would entail. The idea that we need to carry everything to Mars (as some people have stated) is silly, too. There's plenty of raw materials on Mars.

We should have a forming base on the Moon and Mars now. The only reason we do not is because governments are too slow and lack forward sight. The necessary testing for dealing with M-theory explorations and fusion are too dangerous to conduct inside the Earth's atmosphere/gravitation. We could have a million-person research facility at least in progress now for Mars with companies building toward extensive space stations. The technology for those stages has existed for decades but we sit on this rock and listen to Britney Spears. Do you really need a list for reasons to conduct space exploration? Isn't self-preservation enough?

Yep, you keep believing that.