So because death always wins at the end you want others not to try and not to work towards increasing their own lifespan? Yeah, death always wins, as long as we let it, it wins. We will all die, no question about it. What are you going to do about it, just return to the slime you came out of? You won't even try?

Those who will try, do you know what will happen once (not if, once) they succeed? They will be called 'the rich' (and they may as well be, it will be painfully expensive to achieve those results) and the rest will go to WAR to get a piece of that cake, which they did not bake, which the likes of you are spitting upon in its general direction.

Don't pretend you won't be on this or some other forum should this happen within your life time, yelling and screaming that the rich are the bastards that prevent the rest from having something that they have achieved. Your position right now is most likely in direct contradiction to your future position, should that future materialise, where you will be willing to do just about anything, including murder and theft, anything to get a piece of that.

Guilt for what? Clearly you don't understand why people who are rich are rich in the first place, they are not your 9-5 workers, they are where they are because they always thought outside of your particular box.

They have no guilt, they should have no guilt. If anybody is driven by guilt, it should be those who steal, not those who produce, and the most of those who steal are government and the mob.

Seconded.

Either postulate warp drive OR postulate "the Singularity".

But requiring warp drive AND the Singularity to fuel your dreams of being an immortal star-traveller ... now you are WAY into the science FANTASY realm.

I'd be more interested in what effect "the Singularity" would have on the people living in the third world. Will everyone become immortal? Or will it be just a few of the very rich (by world standards) and billions of people living their regular lifetimes?

Evolution is not more important than individuals, isn't it comparing apples and oranges? I agree with TFA, death is wrong. The author is 27 (I count, since he says in 2045 he'll be 58) and that's much younger than I am and he is thinking about it now, which shows his personal progress, which always a good sign.

In any case, saying that some complex environmental process, like evolution, is more important than lives of individuals that exist strikes me as very foolish. You don't know what will happen in 2 years time, we could have a massive war or disease that would eliminate 90% of population right there, given how interconnected the world is. Should we be waiting for evolution to produce humans that can withstand wars, diseases, environmental changes?

Why?

Who says that humans have any more entitlement to live on this planet than bacteria? And at the end bacteria will win out, and is that a better outcome from our own perspectives? Why should we root for bacteria than for ourselves? You think that evolution will give humans a better chance, I think you don't what you are talking about, evolution could as well lead to our extermination and let jellyfish populate most of the planet. Maybe even ground crawling jellyfish, and from my perspective I prefer to be here rather than having some jellyfish supersede myself.

Anyway, we have brains that allow us to modify our environment and those of us with any sense at all should do everything possible to ensure that our own lifespans are increased. Not lifespans of whatever may or may not come after us, but ourselves. If we don't do that and just disappear into the nothing sooner rather than later, as everything does, then there is no major distinction between us and the rest of the slime out there. As a thinking creature, I refuse to accept that. If we can't figure this out, then too bad for us of-course, but to consciously deny ourselves that very possibility, of extending our own lifespans is nothing but defeatism. The poor of mind and spirit can have that, let them perish. Those who want to reach for more than what we are given by the system that surrounds us must fight to take what we can.

A 30-year senior GOP insider said explicitly that the agreed strategy to destroy government, and then blame the other guy.

Ah, I see we're dealing with a crank. Well no-one expects a true believer to give due diligence to counter-arguments, but for those reading... both provided links are pithy, and highlight just how screwed up our situation really is.

Given that you use the term welfare in two different senses. If we consider welfare to be generic entitlement spending as it is with corporate welfare, then Social Security would be the obvious counterexample to your assertion. It uses roughly 20% of the budget.

[...]

But we aren't operating from a position of complete ignorance. We have a fairly good idea what things have near future value. I'm tired of the people who push this myth that science has incredible future value conveniently off the horizon which we can't even begin to determine.

If that were true, then there would be no distinction between funding thousands of US colleges and funding me the same amount of money. It's all Science and my parties (I'd bring a whole new meaning to the term "state-wide party") would be better. So why fund all those people when you can just fund one source?

The argument is just a shifty dodge of responsibility and accountability.

It actually was a hot spring, Mushroom Spring in Yellowstone National Park, not a geyser - though it is close to a large geyser.

I look for people who are interested in software development, who are willing to take the opportunity to learn on the job and can demonstrate that they can learn, that they are intelligent and that they understand that if they do not possess the skills that allow me to bill my clients for their work, they will not get paid until they acquire those skills. I train my people the way I see fit and within a few weeks they become productive members of the team, at which point they can start commanding a wage.

I have very little interest in their academic achievements, the degree does not matter to me one bit. However I do have a few examples that show that people that drop out of the school that they started are in some cases very flaky. Seriously, I wouldn't have thought that previously, but I have examples where people that were drop outs in computer science also drop off the radar at work! Even the talented can be the most flaky people apparently, it's kind of surprising.

OTOH people who are still students, even if their education has nothing to do with computing, are actually hard working and they show up, which apparently not everybody can do - SHOW UP. It's quite amazing, honestly.

Even if "people" actually were more powerful and altruistic, which I disagree with, then there's still the matter that actual public funding doesn't have much to do with the "people" or their desires. There's millennia of history indicating that even in democracies a substantial deviation between the workings of a government and the people it supposedly represents.

Discarding government for tasks for which private enterprise is superior is a fix. Instead, you're proposing the following destructive cycle:

1) Implement a costly, poorly thought out, terrible government intervention in some area.
2) It fails hard.

3) Blame "the people" for screwing up.
4) Go to step 1).

I think a simpler approach is to simply don't do that. It's worth noting that there are now more effective ways to collectively and privately fund "people" research, such as Kickstarter or starting a non profit.

"What they are really afraid of" ....

I just read some of the comments on TFA, at this point 219 comments, I read the top 10. Read them. The only thing you will find there will be hate, hate and more hate. Oh, and jealousy, hate, more hate and jealousy, nothing else.

"tax them", "steal from them", "global warming", "infrastructure", "would have been better if they never had that money", etc.etc.etc.

The commenters are CERTAIN that these guys stole the money that they have, not MADE it, but stole it. They probably believe those guys stole it from them personally, no less. OMFG, I wish I could collect these types of people specifically onto one continent, while the rest could live on another continent and we would have a WALL between us, a wall so tall, they would never have to see the other side again. The problem is, the people on the other side would be coming up with methods to IMPROVE lives of the people on that other continent to try and make more money by GIVING them the fruits of their labour in exchange for something... a promise, I guess, a promise of a fair exchange?

There can be no fair exchange with those people, they produce nothing, they think money is some sort of a limited resource and we are stuck fighting for that one pile, one limited resource. They don't even understand how stupid that is in the article, that explains that people who fund research CREATE NEW STUFF THAT NEVER EXISTED BEFORE. That's how they made their money, that's how they view the world - by changing it and by creating what didn't exist before. Money is MADE, it's not taken from a constant pool. There is no constant pool of money.

When Rockefeller saved the whales by single-handedly growing the kerosene industry into one that could light up the night for everybody pretty much, did he steal something from somebody who already had it? NO. He created the new wealth and others wanted that product, and eventually, as he lowered costs of kerosene over 40 years so much, that others couldn't compete with him, what did they do? Just like these folks, leaving those comments, what did they do?

They got with the government and destroyed an extremely efficient company, because they couldn't compete with it. The prices for kerosene never went down again since that moment in time.

It is very hard to like people, and there is no reason to like people that are that selfish, ignorant, stupid, jealous, thieving, cunning bastards. Very hard to like them indeed and we should not fall for that. Just because they cannot do it themselves does not mean anybody owes anything to them, just because they are incapable of it themselves.

Yet even they get helped by the free market capitalism that allows some people to elevate themselves from the MUD and the slime of the rest and never to stop thinking in terms of creating.

I wonder what effect if any mouthwash (with and without alcohol in it) has on this type of fungus.

You're right, I didn't think this through properly. I'd still bank on the microbe side pulling though easily since this is a substantial, ever-present selection pressure (and they've had almost three decades to evolve), not just happening when humans happen to bring UV around. Microbes would have plenty of time (at least tens of thousands of generations IMHO) to pull through and evolve solutions.

Fungi might not though. If it is a radiation-induced impairment of soil organisms, I'd look first at the organisms that have the longest reproduction times.

But having said that, it still remains that the same factors which concentrate radioactive contaminants may also sufficiently often inhibit decay processes.

Maskirovka.

Well, it would certainly appear that you also have a very significant problem with your courts, perhaps having popularity contests to elect judges wasn't the brightest idea after all. Without doubt the US justice system has systematic problems throughout the whole system with justice not so much being blind as being blindly greedy. Trying to eliminate the corruption with out prosecuting those causing the problems, with out recruiting more of the same kind, will just leave you chasing your own tail. It is the management of your systems of justice that is a severe fault.