Elucidate a tad on this "4 month contract" deal. Are you providing full benefits? When hired, does that time count towards your vacation days and so on? Is there a well-defined set of criteria for how someone on this 4 month criteria is evaluated, and how it will be determined if they get a permanent job?

See, for someone like myself who's not at their first rodeo, this sounds like "bait and switch". The fact that you're not willing to even name your employer speaks volumes more.

Right now, we can't even agree on greenhouse gases, something that every reputable scientist agrees is a major problem for the planet.

Now imagine a species significantly more advanced than ours making contact.

The US would try to be a "world leader", whatever that means these days. China and Russia would be jockeying for influence, claiming the US did not speak for everyone. Venezuela would be sending pictures to the aliens of how the US massacred civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki just this century. Europe would try to the mediator. The Arab states would scream imperialism. Africa would ask why a minority of white people are deciding the future of the planet. The UN would try to come up with enough votes to put together a strongly worded letter.

Would you want to deal with that? It would be smarter to wait until species XYZ had its shit together enough to come up with a single government. World government is a bad idea to you because you only see the negative attributes in people. A civilization that was peaceful, intelligent, and cooperated with each other would have no problems at all with a single government.

The math does not work out in your argument. The universe being old should make the search easier - there are planets much older than Earth, so why would we be the first in the galaxy to become intelligent? And our radio telescopes are already reaching out across a sphere billions of light years in diameter - out of all that space, why is there not one single clear signal? SETI has been searching for 46 years now, with nothing to show.

At this point in the search, it makes more sense to assume that there is something else going on that we're not aware of. Maybe there's a periodic galaxy wide event that destroys consciousness, so civilizations never get beyond a certain technological level, and we just popped up between clean slate events. Maybe we're in quarantine, and no one is allowed to talk to us until we develop a world government that can speak for us with one voice. Whatever the case, it's starting to look like listening for radio is a dead end.

... is the phrase "WHEN the search finally succeeds" (emphasis added). There is not a single good explanation of why it has not succeeded already, which is a red flag that we are missing something fundamental about the nature of extraterrestrial intelligence.

I'm an application deployment guy, not a programmer. Every time we push something that needs .NET Framework, the end users complain about it being hideously slow. Our MS developers of course want everyone to have a Core i7 machine with 64GB RAM and SSD hard drive - to which I reply "learn how to write some fucking code without seven layers of frameworks and abstraction layers".

Then of course, I can never get a straight answer from the developers on which .NET to install. Do you want 4, 3.5 SP1, 2? The usual answer is "load all of them". I get that .NET Framework is great in theory, but if you have to deal with the actual implementation, you'll see things differently. A lot of times we'll get screen glitches which the devs are convinced is a MS issue, but there's no available fix, so we go with "that's not a serious enough problem to fix".

On the other side of the fence are the Linux apps I have to deploy. The Linux devs send me a .DEB file. I generally have that pushed out the same day.

Relax, pal - frameworks that don't particularly care about accuracy have been around for years now. If you don't believe me, talk to anyone who uses .NET Framework.

The question is not whether organic chemistry is too difficult, the question is whether it is even necessary. My brother is a practicing physician, has been out of premed for 20 years, but can still look at a sketch of Ibogaine and understand what he's looking at. Which is completely useless in the context of his job.

However, he has no clue what Bayes' theorem is, or how it is relevant to his decisions. If I'm seeing a doctor who's evaluating me for an angioplasty vs Lipitor, I damn well want someone who understands Bayes' theorem and has a good intuitive handle on probability, not someone who can sketch complex molecules.

"They were trying to find a method for improving fuzzy images, such as the ones generated by MRIs when there is insufficient time to complete a scan. On a hunch, Candes applied an algorithm designed to clean up fuzzy images,[...]"

Wow! That would be the last thing I thought of in that situation...

Police officers are constantly in environments where their pistol could be taken by a criminal. Why are the proponents of this technology not requiring cops to use it? And why are cops refusing to even consider these kinds of mechanisms?

I can't tell if you're being intentionally dense or just querulous...

In 1969, the aerospace industry itself was a novelty. The computers they were using were custom designed for the project. Computers were by no means in widespread usage - to the lay person, not the expert, they WERE new. Hence the word "novelty".

Use this thing called "Google" if you don't believe me. Curiosity, in comparison, was running a PowerPC 750 design. Released in 1997. On top of VxWorks. Which was first released in 1987. The design was criticized for being archaic, to which NASA responded that they wanted to go with safe.

The dots. Connect them.

These are just stale NASA talking points.

The shuttle program was NOT a success. It was a colossal failure. It was intended to be a cheap, reusable vehicle to get cargo to low earth orbit. Per Wikipedia, the original target was $630/lb to get payload up to orbit, in 2011 dollars. The actual cost wound up being $27,000/lb. That's 4,100% over budget. If you consider that a success, I'd hate to see what you consider a failure.

Hubble? You mean the telescope that they launched with a mirror that was ground in the wrong shape? The one that cost millions to fix while it was in orbit? That one? We got a lot of pretty pictures, sure, but there was nothing revolutionary about the technology itself.

JWST is a fine idea. But it's just a better version of Hubble for $8.7 billion. All I'm saying is that when you're talking about budgets of billions, we should expect more than we're getting from NASA.

I'm sorry, but you're making about zero sense. If the sky-crane explodes and drops the 1 ton robot, who exactly is going to get hurt? The Martians? What exactly is the risk in this operation?

Nitpick much?

When we're discussing a time span of a hundred years, maybe 16 years is not enough for the "novelty" factor to wear off. Computers certainly weren't widespread, and only experts had access to them.

By your idiotic logic, you can't be an expert on the French revolution unless you were alive in 1789...

I meant 500 experiments on the ISS - but even looking at your list, isn't that a perfect example of incremental science? Mapping, more mapping, more detail. Better resolution of the Hubble constant. Some more probes (technology that dates back to Voyager). The Mars rovers don't have any technology that wasn't around in the 80's. Nothing wrong with any of this, but it's the clean up work that happens in dull periods. Contrast that with the 50 year period going from the development of the modern rocket to landing on the moon. With the first artificial satellites going up along there.

If someone in the early 70's had seen your list, they would have laughed and said "that's it"? By now we were supposed to have permanent settlements on the Mars and moon, space elevators, Bussard ramjets, exotic matter factories, mineral harvesting in space. We were supposed to be comfortable operating in the asteroid belt. On the other hand, everyone knew we were going to find extra-stellar planets. The math dictated it. Actually finding them was tidying up loose ends. And dark matter is the new ether - it's so obvious until one day it's not. This isn't any sort of "golden" age. We still don't even have a viable candidate for a unified theory, and everything since Einstein and Dirac have been increasingly wild attempts to get equations to balance.

So what's NASA going to do with more money? Throw bigger and bigger mirrors into orbit? Create another boondoggle like the shuttle, which was supposed to be a "cheap" launch vehicle? That's all old science. Show me something new.

Look at your list of projects. If those were Kickstarter projects, how many lay people would throw their own money in?

No. A thousand times, no.

"If I had money, I would do great things", is how a bureaucrat thinks. Someone without vision does not suddenly develop it when they win the lottery.

An explorer on the other hand, has a vision first, and then moves heaven and earth to make it a reality. If we gave NASA serious money, they'd spend about half of it on toner for their printers, and for new conference rooms and educational programs. Giving NASA more money will mean more incremental science, more staid experiments in low earth orbit, more refinements of the measurement of background radiation. You can rest assured they will not risk one penny on something that could blow up on them.

We don't need that. We're tired of that. The space program should be run out of trailers in the desert in Texas, not air conditioned offices in Washington. We need the PhD who has a model of a space elevator in his basement and is raising $50 at a time on Kickstarter to take it to the next level. Would you donate your own money on Kickstarter to a single project that NASA is running? Hell no. Neither would I. Neither would my neighbor Bob.

How exactly is James Webb going to "change our world view"? Nicer pictures of galaxies? Big fucking deal. The moon landing united an entire nation because it was so audacious in its thinking. Now all we do is sit back and take pictures of space. It might change the world view of some physicists, for whom it is a jobs program. Bob next door probably isn't too excited about his money going towards it after putting up drywall all day. A space elevator? That's something Bob can get interested in. Vision is something almost all Americans appreciate, even in this day and age.

Fuck NASA. Come up with something that shows you have balls, then you can have my money.