Even when you try to keep the implementation fairly practical just deciding that there should be a city somewhere without any historical logic for the presence of a city is a strategy with a pretty dubious success rate. Doesn't fail every time; but unless you get lucky and manage to find an attractive chunk of real estate that was missing nothing but critical mass; or you have a very specific purpose in mind like 'new administrative center without restive urban population' that allows you to just tell the civil service to live there unless they like 8 hour commutes and declare victory your odds aren't good.

In this case the Saudis started with that downer; picked a particularly grim environment, likely to get at least a couple of degrees grimmer in the comparatively near future, and treated aggressive deviations from practicality as a virtue. There's probably something they could have done to doom the plan harder; but I'm not sure offhand what it would have been.

You debunked your own comment, there's nothing for me to do here :)

What you're missing, as usual, is that IT DOESN'T EXIST YET but you're claiming that it does, as usual.

FTFS, "it's the first version of UNIX in which the kernel and some of the core utilities were rewritten in the new C programming language"

Yes, this place really has gone to shit.

Yes, but we could also develop the same technologies and then not spend the money going to space, and instead implement them here, and think about space exploration once we're sure we have a future.

People do it to me constantly (a day without a 3-5 comment serial downmod is unusual) and I don't have to post AC to keep my Karma in the excellent range.

The game alpha centauri is a lot more applicable here. However what you are talking about requires future technology. You would need self repairing machines for that. While this is arguably semi-feasible (design machines to be more modular and therefore serviceable by robots which could swap modules) they don't exist yet. And once they do we will be too busy dealing with the upheaval from the destruction of service jobs to think about colonizing other planets or moons.

"Time to switch to iPhone then and keep that AI cruft off the phone."

How would that help? You don't seem to have been keeping up with what apple is doing to your precious toy.

I wasn't expecting you to self own so quickly, obsessed cuck.

If you can tear yourself away from protecting child molesters long enough, why not touch grass?

Slashdot should never have allowed them to begin with, and failing that, should have eliminated anonymous posting many years ago. It was never a good idea. Naturally the cryptocucks think it's great.

If it's not clear which cards will be taken where based on the logo, then those logos will be devalued. Whichever processor STOPS doing this first will win.

I'll bring this up again next time you ride on my dick.

Barring pretty exciting advances in biotech(along with either the psychology or...less wholesome methods...of keeping people on-task when they learn that their 4-century lifespan will be dedicated to a period of drifting through nothing and a life sentence studying the surfaces of Kuiper belt objects inside a tiny habitube or something) you are going to hit a line where (human) exploration is not going to be readily separable from human colonization; just because shipping times become prohibitive: Anywhere on earth you can just pack some extra canned goods and a few spare parts and be there and back in under a decade even with age of sail era tech; even faster now unless the obstacle is political objections by people who already live there, in which case it's 'espionage' more than 'exploration'. Hasn't really been a notable case of 'exploration inextricably linked to colonization' since humans crossed the Bering straight into the Americas, with some weaker alternatives from the colonial period where it almost certainly wouldn't have been as cost-effective; but would have been theoretically feasible.

Near-earth objects are mostly in the same board. Shipping cost are higher, so presumably lunar mining overseers will receive less frequent breaks than offshore drill rig workers; but the moon is only 3-ish days away. As you move further away the numbers get less favorable; though they still remain within the realm of "there were people circumnavigating the earth in that time, even before we knew how scurvy worked" or at least "modest chunk of your expected working life"; and it may well be relevant that a lot of the more distant objects are either gas giants that you would only ever observe rather than land on, or very small solid bodies that you could potentially just have a robot slap an ion drive on and bring back for your perusal.

Ultimately, it seems like it boils down to an irrational emotional position. Some people, don't know why, just look at a situation and are all "the most fulfilling outcome possible would be making this the next generation's problem!" Leads to enough bad calls earthside; I assume there will be some particularly grim outcomes in more hostile environments.

I like it, but can we just skip to the end part?