This is just another gynocentric "girls-are-better" story that just is not supported by the world at large. Sad, really. They just keep trying to prove the unprovable. The whole tech environment, including gaming, was produced by male geeks who, apparently, cannot program themselves out of a paper bag. Right.

Metrosexual types will be happy to hop down to the corner and jump into a "pod" rented by the hour to go get their nails done, but the feeling of power and freedom that comes from driving is not going to go away. Note we are not flying to work as futurists of the past predicted. They seldom take into account practical problems or human psychology, instead replacing both with youthful enthusiasm.

Here it comes, the good sounding arguments for absorbing an asset of the mass of people. The macro-parasite identifies, targets, and absorbs any asset of the mass and does it with increasing efficiency due to technology. Interest rates on savings are essentially zero, transferring well over 400 billion dollars from the mass to banks since 2008 (Stockman, The Great Deformation, pg.583) because that part of the macro-parasite is "too big to fail." Now the government part of the macro-parasite is set to absorb the asset of more money in the pockets of the mass from declining energy costs by increasing taxes. How about the government handling it's costs more effectively instead? How about cutting spending instead of going on a spending binge? No, that unexpected decrease in fuel costs to the mass (gasoline and home heating oil) has got the macro-parasite drooling like a starving dog before a steak, and that increased tax money will go into general revenues and ultimately be used to increase the reelection prospects of politicians by bribing electorates with their own money. How about letting the people have a win for a change?

The pilots and engineers are immoral. To aid and abet a program that must inevitably lead to prominent people getting blown up on the way to space after paying 250,000 dollars for the privilege is just plain lacking in a moral concern for other's lives. They are willing to spend other people's lives to indulge their personal interests in engineering and space. And people will get blown up because nothing is 100% safe in this world, especially spaceflight. Wasn't there just a spectacular Antares launch vehicle failure? We know these things are inevitable. Space shuttles have exploded. Branson is planning multiple flights per DAY. Look for a future headline screaming: "Branson spaceflight disaster kills Stephen Hawking, Katy Perry, Tom Hanks, Ashton Kutcher, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie next."

Who are the mysterious "they" who discouraged women? You disrespect women when you refuse to acknowledge that they are responsible with men for any culture they create and live in. When enough Saudi women want to drive, they will. The first woman to get a bachelor's degree in the U. S. did so in the 1860s. Madam Curie won a Nobel prize in physics in the 1920s. You argue that women should be given. I say create aggressively and take it, just like men. Stop whining about not being allowed and non-existent glass ceilings.

Jeff Bezos does not have the goal of making money for investors; his goal is to amuse himself. His company is his hobby. Amazon is a hobby company and I would not invest in it.

I work in the USPS as an Electronics Technician (with an engineering degree) and I'd like to point out that our OCR system is accurate, fast, and robust. Our read rate is up to 98-99% and most of our human REC centers (humans read the addresses the OCR system cannot and send the result back to the machine in real time) are now shut down. Our scanners read and our image computers interpret typed and handwritten addresses, bar codes, id tags, and indicia at up to 30,000 letters per hour per machine. And they do it while having dust and glue and ink accumulating on the quartz windows of the cameras. They do this in an electrically noisy environment and with continuous heavy vibration. Yes, they run "unsupervised" and they have replaced hundreds of thousands of USPS employees. Any problem with CV at a higher level is a back end theory and programming problem and that will just take time and effort.

I sympathize with those infected by gynocentric, gender-levelling political correctness, but the proof is obvious. Men invented business, industry, science, technology, government. Steve Jobs and the Woz of Apple, Bill Gates and Ballmer of Microsoft, Hewlett and Packard, Thomas Edison, Ford, Dell, Zukerberg of Facebook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon,even Thomas Savery who invented and patented the steam engine that fuelled the industrial revolution - the list is unending. Men invented and developed every aspect of the internet. These are men that pushed the exploration of the world and each and every subject that has advanced mankind since the beginning. Where were the women, the "founding mothers" of the United States, or ANY state? Where are their political philosophies, their physical inventions that significantly altered and advanced mankind? And please don't say they weren't "allowed" to achieve and invent. Women are half the population of the world and always have been. You cannot keep half the world from doing that which is natural for them to do, yet, women have not been aggressively creative anywhere near the level of men. You believe what you believe (if you are an American) because the 19th amendment to the Constitution of the United States created a political equality that has forced over time a phony physical, social, and economic equality that requires us to lie about the real differences between men and women. That is nice. If the world were 100% safe and there was no need to advance every aspect of life creatively I would embrace the lie. But, there is still, and always will be, a need to perceive and deal with the brutal realities of life if we wish to survive and prosper into the future. And that means we must perceive and deal with the real differences between men and women, not hide from them.

Males are not optional. The psychology of the trip without males would be toxic. And male aggressive creativity would be essential to survival both on the trip and on Mars itself. In any case, the trip would be suicidal and anyone aiding and abetting it would be culpable, at least morally.

the Area 51 guys were finally able to decode the alien symbols! Good job guys!

I don't understand how spacers and spacing can exist for two seconds at a university that is supposed to be just chock full of intelligent children and experienced professors of the highest caliber. On the face of it no "colony" is possible outside of the Earth. Come on now. We would have to replicate the Earth environment we evolved in. And the Earth is a paradise with all the resources we need. How can anyone with half a brain think that the survival of the human species depends upon our moving to a barren rock called Mars? Lunacy. Or, in this case, Mars-acy. The whole idea of a space "colony" is immoral (defined as deliberately causing suffering in and the death of others) and any attempt to actually create one is likely to do nothing more than construct tech history's greatest tort factory, leading to major corporate bankruptcies and stupendous continuing and growing government expense. Understand what it would mean to "make whole" a child forcibly born on Mars and therefore deprived of its right to be born, live, and die on the planet of its origin. Parents do not have infinite rights over their offspring; and deep pockets would be hit deeply.

It is up to you to prove (your "validate") that self-sustaining colonies anywhere outside the Earth are possible. You prove the positive, not the negative. Otherwise we'd have to prove there are no pink polka dotted elephants hiding on the far side of the moon.

The daily social interaction we get across our society by driving will evaporate and with it the benefits of having to compromise with and even conspire with our fellow citizens to attain the common goal of achieving our destination safely. Autonomous vehicles will introduce a degree of separation and alienation to our society that we can only imagine today.

At best "colonists" can expect to be mining dirt all day for their requirements for water. And why is it ok to strip the surface of Mars of its soil and process it but not the Earth? Aiding and abetting the idea that a "colony" on Mars has meaning is supporting a crime against humanity. Stop the breathless boosterism for (at best and if it is possible at all, which I doubt) a miserable existence on Mars. Would you send your great grandchildren to the Gobi desert to live and force them to mine dirt, leaving mountains of waterless dirt slag behind? Imposing human misery on others is immoral. Aiding and abetting suicide is immoral and illegal.

Perhaps drug researchers can find a way to allow the original organism in some antibiotic sources, say penicillin mold, to react to the evolved bacterium, thus changing its antibacterial toxin naturally as it must have done for millions of years to keep ahead of whatever was trying to consume it. Could we let nature battle the evolving immunity issue naturally? Large tanks of naturally acquired, say penicillin mold again, with its natural genetic variations placed in close proximity to the antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

And, another thought: could drug companies herd the evolving drug resistant bacteria into a cul-de-sac where we are waiting for them by adding a "hook" of some kind to the antibiotic that they (the bacterium) would also change for - to their future disadvantage. We (humans) would be waiting with another antibiotic specifically formed to take advantage of that "hook."