When did i say i find it hard to publish. What i said was its very hard to publish against popular views. I pick/work in areas where such established facts are less of an issue.

Spot the guy not doing science. Just cus crap gets through (that backs up the popular view points) doesn't mean that good stuff doesn't. And I never said anything about a conspiracy. I am talking about people. For some reason everyone seems to forget that we (scientist) are just people.

Science doesn't have a way to deal with the idea that a large number of scientist agree on something that is wrong either. As a scientist working in a different field, I assure you it is very hard to publish anything on the unpopular view point. No matter how much data you have.

These are from NASA, but in no way just spin off from a manned program. If there was no apollo or ISS theses things would have probably still happened. That is really my point. NASA is in fact not good at manned space missions. Its pretty good at remote sensing missions.

Even if you are a space buff, wanting NASA to take humans to mars is not the way to humans living in space. Apollo push that goal no further forward and neither will another more extreme Apollo.

And for the same money we could send a much faster and more capable rover. Hell we could probably send dozen and even 100s more of much faster, more capable rovers. The current missions have cost about 1000x less than project manned mission.

Well the thing is we have centuries to get our eggs in other baskets without changing the probability of a ELE much at all. Its on the order of once every 10's of millions of years. And no not having one for a while does not put the probability up. And even then these events are sterilization events, and anything less than that is unlikely to wipe out homo sapiens.

Right now the space station has cost us more than $100B, and for what? Even Apollo? Where is my return on investment, and no i don't mean money, I mean scientific return.

We are a tool making species. Use the right tool. Meat bags is not the right tool.

He doesn't have $76B. That is his net "worth", which is a useless measure really. He can't dump all his MS shares without that net worth going down far faster than he could ever liquidate for example.

And likely will be for a long time to come. And so it should be, at least while we are doing for the science.

Hollywood respectfully disagrees. They don't pony up 200M to make a movie for the "good of the people".

If you measure your happiness, worth and wealth with the same numbers that the 1% use. Well your going to be unhappy. Those are some pretty misleading graphs there.

I don't care how rich the rich are. Good for them. I care that i have enough and am content. And I do. I am taking up skydiving this summer at the tune of a few 100 per weekend with the goal of going wingsuiting in about 2 years. And its not even a stretch for the budget. The only consideration is opportunity cost. And my time is the biggest part of that.

Your dreaming.

Even a 1 GW coal plant takes that long and longer just to build, even smaller ones are still 2+ year construction projects. LFTR have not had full scale demonstration or shown *any* breeding. So you need to run one for a while first at least. Your looking at 5-10 years before its even running *if* there are no other regulatory hurdles. Then assuming that the prototype works as planed after 5-10 years (they typically never do) then you can start rolling out the rest.

And don't assume that LFTR are a panacea either. Pebble bed reactors were promoted with similar zeal. Yet the prototype was a disaster. All these claims that "its completely safe", more or less was wrong. You only didn't hear much about it because the worst leak was about the same time as Chernobyl and remains to this day a decommissioning nightmare.

No it hasn't. Most of our technology right now is used for our entertainment. Your cell phone, if your really understood everything about it, is the pinnacle of modern science and technology. Not a missile.

This is already the case for many products. Cloths are so cheap now people *expect* to buy complete new wardrobe every year and throw away the old one. Phones and laptops are so cheap, that you can get out of fashion models for free most of the time. And this is during the "worst recession since the depression".

3d printers are so far away from even getting close to the marginal production costs of modern manufacturing its embarrassing. And that's just for the parts they can print, never-mind all the things they can't.

I agree about relativity. But there is nothing to suggest the universe is not causal. Really when doesn't it apply?