You forget these "private rockets" are almost fully funded with government grants at this point.

It is true that Space X seems to have a had a lot of leeway to try some new ideas. It may be that at NASA, engineers have not been given enough leeway to try new ideas, perhaps due to the politicians and congress which may be more dictated by corporate political affiliations, such as the insistence that scientists only use a certain technology on a rocket project, such as Space Shuttle technology, rather than thinking outside of the box. Not that I am saying that this technology is bad, but there are questions as to how much NASA is driven by politics rather than engineering and science. When driven by politics, we can end up with much more expensive and difficult to develop systems that are not the best we can use.

with the immense problems the USA has with poverty and homelessness (problems the GOP in particular wishes to ignore), spending a billion dollars on a city no one will live in is a good idea? I think not. This project has waste, boondoggle and white elephant all over it. This makes the GSA scandal look like efficiency in comparison. I think we all, as a Democrat, have every right to make sure that government money is actually being spent properly such as to help the poor. And thats what Democrats are really all about, the GOP spends trillion dollars on wars and ghost towns and then attacks the truly beneficial things like Medicare and Social security, then after filling the govenrment with corruption, the GOP uses the corruption they created as an further attack on all of the positive things that government does such as to provide a life saving safety net for the poor.

Combined with the fact that many people have little idea about Tech and what they actually need. Someone probably was suckered by a salesman into buying these, because, they didnt know any better. They didnt know you could use some used PCs from 2002 which are perhaps available for free, or at most some $200 barebones systems, running Linux, with dual NICs costing $20 or so, would do the job just fine.

We need good regulations. That is the civilized way to deal with issues. Not mob rule and going and blowing things up. You sound like some sort of a "libertarian" who doesnt like any civilized laws and so on to try to get a hold of our problems, but you would be the first to take to your guns and start shooting the place up when you think something needs to be fixed. Such a mentality of extremes.

By the way we are stepping forward, in a civilized way. You act like violence is the only way to solve problems. Thats a conservative way of thinking. Regulations, laws and rules is how we solve problems non violently. But it seems like the GOP, this is the hypocrisy, they are against moderate forms of problem resolution like regulations, but they are the first to run for the bombs when they see a problem that bothers them. It seems like they go between two extremes, doing nothing about problems or are on a full blown bomb throwing war.

To really address climate change we need to get accurate information to the people and that mean we need independant media outlets that report scientific information, not outlets that are controlled by wealthy corporations that have an axe to grind. The problem today in the USA is due to the fact that due to Conservative ideologies themselves it is not a Democracy, wealthy special interests such as corporations control the media and the information that people recieve and use that control to manipulate people into supporting agendas that benefit the wealthy but harm everything else, without people even knowing that is what they are doing. We need a media that simply reports facts and the consequences of decisions, not tries to white wash and ignore them when convenient. The Media through advertising is funded by corporations if not directly owned by commercial corporations. These corporations have one overriding goal, to make profits for the owners of the corporation. it is not to help the community or protect the environment. Corporations will do anything they can get away with, if they are allowed to pollute a river, they will. the only way to protect the river and those who drink its water is make regulations.

  Corporations such as oil companies have huge profits to protect. The interests of environmentalists are in human welfare and the future of this planet. No environmentalist wants global warming, we wish it were not so. Conservatives have problems with seperating what they want from what is possible. Environmentalists wish we didnt have a problem with global warming but we have to look at things objectively, if there is a problem with global warming there is, and we cannot try to distort or deny things because we dont like to face them. We have to look at facts, no matter how unpleasant they are, and do what is best for protecting our planet and human, animal and environmental health.

The reason fossil fuels are well known to cause climate change is the effect is, practically permenant since we are raising the level of the CO2. The CO2 will STILL BE THERE after we stop burning fossil fuels, even after we have depleted every bit of coal and oil, it will be in the atmosphere for a long time. The idea that wind farms would cause warming is absurd, since wind farms could displace Co2 consumption they would reduce it by reducing Co2 emissions. The effect of reducing or eliminating CO2 would have a far greater positive impact than any negative of wind. The effet of Co2 is permenant and irreversible. A Wind farm can be turned on and off at will.

Another reason for these renewables is they are renewable, climate change is happening but the fact tht solar and wind are renewable alone makes them better choices than fossil fuels. Fossil fuels will be depleted, first hitting peak and then decling, hence peak oil. THAT is an absolute, gauranteed physical certainty. It is hard to precisely estimate how much longer fossil fuels will last but they WILL run out. And sooner than later. Since data on how much is in the ground is imprecise there is uncertaintly in the precise amount but we have a general idea. Its like you have an hourglass and you can see that the top half of the hourglass is a certain size, but you dont know how far it is filled with sand, because the top half is opaque, but you can see how much has poured into the bottom half and how long it has been pouring in there, thus a rate of depletion,, you know that there is a finite amount of sand in the top half and that it is emptying out, and you can see by the rate it is emptying that the sand will be depleted not too far from now, even though you do not know exactly when, you know it will happen and it is not that far away. The "cornucopians" who think thje earth has an unlimited amount of fossil fuels and that basically we can do anything, that the laws of nature dont matter, that we can if we want generate infinite amounts of fossil fuel energy, basic physics be damned, well, they are basically saying that since we cannot see the amount of sand in the top half of the hourglass that since we cannot make a precise measurement that therefore we might as well just assume the amount of sand is infinite. This is despite thje fact that the top half of the hourglass is of a finite size, the sand is pouring out quickly and already a lot has poured out.

Basically the cornucopias, they are living in a fantasy world, insisting the top half of the hourglass contains an infinite amount of sand, are in denial about the dire state of affairs and the fact we are headed towards practical depletion of fossil fuels.

The fact is he is wrong, there has been significant warming already due to global warming. Also he could be wrong about affects, there have been a lot of disasters and the frequency and trends could be increasing. The problem with human perception is that unless something happens immediately, it is not happening. Climate change will be a gradual trend, its not like we go to bed one day and everything is okay and the next day its a total disaster. With gradual worsening change, lets say 2% per year, people often end up seeing the new situation as the "new normal" and "just the way things are". For instance, the level of malnutrition has increased drastically to 1 billion, but because the rate of change has been 1% per year or whatever, it happens overnight, for many people this has just become the new background, the new normal, just the way things are. The earthquakes get news coverage and are immediately recognized as a disaster because it lies withim peoples short memory span, but, a longer term trend which takes centueries to occur, like malnutrition. All people see is the 1% change per annum, not the big picture of the really long term drastic changes. Humans have caused drastic changes to the earth in the past 100 years, vast areas of wildlife habitat have been destroyed, vast amounts of resources have been consumed, the CO2 level has increased greatly, and so on.

The blame for this squarely lies on the Republicans which control Florida's Legislature. To understand what is going on here Florida Legislature has been cutting funding for all universities and therefore are leaving schools with not enough funding to operating, leaving difficult tuition and funding choices. UF would not have made these cuts had their funding not had taken a massive hit. If the media did its job and tracing this back to Republican policies it would be something that people would remember at the polls. Don't like attacks on our schools so we can give more tax breaks to billionaires who move jobs overseas? Maybe time to vote Democratic.

Most countries highly prize computer science and technology, that the US seems to no longer be able to afford to develop a skills base for being a leader in technology. While other countries are increasing their investments in technology education we are cuting them. This indicates the Republicans path they have the US on to a third world future.

An asteroid may have a lot more metals since on earth the metals have mostly sunken to the core, the surface of the earth really is not rich in them since as the planet cooled billions of years ago heavier elements gravitated towards the center of the planet due to gravity. The asteroid would haev these metals more evenly through out it. BUT it is at this point very expensive to capture and mine an asteroid.

Also 500 tons is not big enough to cause a K-T like event. With a bigger asteroid though it might be better to mine it in place and just transport the ore back, avoiding the risk of trying to bring a big asteroid near earth. Not sure.

First point is it mentions the british stats on denial, but the American ones are far worse at 50% denial or so.

Second point i'd like to make, the effects of global warming are especially long reaching and likely will be a gradually worsening trend, over decades. The predictions are very dire, indeed. The predictions being dire does not mean they need to happen overnight, we will likely see the catastrophy gradually set in over decades, things will just keeping getting worse and worse. People have problems seeing something really devastating when it sets in over a period of decades or centuries. That is a problem with human perception. When things dont happen overnight, its harder for people to see. its like with possible malnutrition problems, as these things get worse, having a billion people becoming malnourised becomes the "new normal" and they only see the short term 1% annual change or whatever that their short attention span allows them to see, not the longer term trend. They forget that at some point in the past the number of starving people was vastly less and fail to remember how much it has really gone up, because it happened in centuries, rather than days.

An earthquake gets a lot of attention because it lies within the short attention span, but the gradual global environmental degradation is a lot harder for people to see, even though its much worse than an earthquake, the damage does not suddenly occur.

Christians ideologies and all sorts of popular myths such as 2012 tell of the day the earth ended. Many people think that if the earth will end it will be a sudden disaster like that. the fact is if the earth deos not end in a day many people will say its just not in danger at all. But the fact is the things that could ruin this planet can take centuries to occur.

1701-D would have been huge, perhaps too large to be feasible, the !701-A was 289 M long, 72 M high and 127 meters wide which would make it a lot more feasible