While this is no surprise, I still think that we'll eventually have to transition to large-scale organic farming anyway. Present forms of industrial farming destroy topsoil and rely on fossil fuels which will get too expensive to be used for fertilizer. It might work for now, but hopefully we'll still be alive when present methods hit a wall. To stay alive, we'll simply have to transition to organic methods. What we need to do is to engineer crops that produce high yields even when they're farmed organically, which is to say, they should resist pests, fix lots of nitrogen from the atmosphere and yield products with a higher nutritional content. Organic farming is a method that makes sense to combine with a genetically engineered product, something I would much prefer to whatever it is that I'm buying in grocery stores now.

How is it different, exactly? They have a chain of command, uniforms, salutes, orders, gunships... Even their headquarters are in a fucking fort. The only difference I see is that they never show the slightest hint of being answerable to, or even checked by, a civilian authority, elected or not.

You must have not been watching the actual episodes, geek-pretender! It's pretty clear that the United Federation of Planets is basically a symbolic body about as potent as our UN. There have been many important diplomatic negotiations in many episodes and movies. Did you once see the president or any other democratically elected figure even participating in them, much less leading them? No, you didn't, because it was always admirals or some other higher-ups from the Navy/Starfleet. So while there may be a token civilian democracy in the Federation, it's really the military that exercises all the executive power. How could you miss that?

I don't really care that much if we get a man on Mars. That's bound to be an anticlimax anyway, as it turns out that Mars is pretty boring. I think that picturing awesome future science in terms of a mission to Mars shows a real lack of imagination. It's just a copy of something big we've done almost 50 years ago, except bigger. Instead, I want science to do big things that are *unlike* anything we've done before. For example, I want the world's most advanced AI to be something that educates students. And lo, it's Neal Stephenson himself who explores that idea more deeply and insightfully than I could have ever imagined. This is the kind of thing for which we need professional imagineers. Every moron can picture a mission to Mars, and think it's cool. But the real progress in technology will be not in the obvious stuff that every moron can imagine, like flying cars and faster trains. The true innovations will be brilliant things that we don't even realize we're missing! And insightful forward-looking authors like Stephenson or Bruce Sterling really might help us expand the range of what's worth aspiring to.

I totally agree, and I think the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" is the best piece of sci-fi inspiration that anyone could have. If I were to complain about our slowness of progress, I wouldn't blame science. I'd blame the entrenched interests of our civil authorities. One glaring mistake we know we make is in how we educate young people. Everyone who knows anything about this stuff understands just how much better we can do, and there's aren't even technological impediments holding us back. It's just that we can't get up off our asses and actually do it. That's the perfect situation in which a little inspiration might go a long way, and I certainly find the technology in "The Diamond Age" to be the most inspiring educational invention ever. Also, Stephenson has the wisdom to explore what it is that we really want from an education, and how the right use of technology could help us realize it.

Say what? Sending the Navy into space and administering an empire that's apparently not subject to any kind of civilian authority? There's a rigid military chain of command, people obey their superiors and the captain has to say "at ease" before you can so much as slouch. Seriously, is there even a civilian government that has any kind of check on the Navy/Starfleet? I know that there's a civilian United Federation of Planets, but in terms of real executive power, they're basically as impotent as the UN. As far as I can tell, all the high-level negotiations with Romulans, etc. were conducted by admirals, not prime ministers or presidents. Isn't this exactly what right-wingers like?

You're also forgetting Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009 - that's profits, not revenue. But not only did it DODGE ALL TAXES, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings. (source)

So please, if you want to rage about Solyndra and you don't first rage about this, it will be obvious to all that you're full of shit.

Solyndra was a government investment that didn't pan out. Given the number of such investements that our government makes, it's kind of impressive that Solyndra is the only one to really go wrong. For example, the government made money on its loan guarantees to carmakes, while also keeping them from drowning and firing everyone.

Yeah, but you forgot to mention that next to climate models, general relativity is a dead simple theory. These days, bright high school students can completely master it. The climate, on the other hand, is a gigantic non-linear system with feedback effects and uncertain inputs. One chronic mistake that smart physicists and engineers always make is that they underestimate the complexity of the climate. The old joke is that if you ask a physicist how best to milk a cow, he'll start his answer with "OK, let's assume a spherical cow homogenously filled with milk." The point is that if you do that kind of thing, you can't have too much confidence in your solution. (Physics is comparably simple, so there you can, but you can't import these heuristics to a messy subject like climate science.)

That's how physicists and engineers can become know-it-alls about things which are actually far more complicated than anything they're willing to appreciate.

Did anyone else wonder if there's someone among these named people who aren't being paid by some CO2-dumping company? If so then they're the real fool!

I don't think that's right. In Nova Scotia and in places like London, Ontario, people speak very strongly in that way and many of them don't know any French. I thought it had to do with the fact that so many of the original Canadians were Scots, and in Scotland they also say "a-BOOt" and "a-GAIN-st".