> As for 50ft topsoil....merely to have written this suggests your connection with farming is extremely tenuous.

Absolutely, that statement baffled me too. I've dug many pits down to over 5 meters and I've never seen topsoil more than 2 meters deep. In those cases it wasn't even proper topsoil, more like loose turf which collects on low lying land due to erosion and percolation. The average is roughly 0.5 meters in my area and it is renowned for the quality of the agricultural land.

Taking more fish out of the sea will cause the water level to drop. They should be fishing everything they can find out of the water. For an added bonus they should invest in researching how to build walls out of fishbones.

Someone should really consider using parroty checks on the data as it arrives.

We had FVWM95

I'm pretty sure there's a couple of these nesting in one of my sheds.

Interesting, I didn't know that.

Take a look at the large version of that photo. It looks like someone in the office was busy playing transport tycoon instead of trying to manage some real world logistics.

Ceres isn't an asteroid.

Let's burn down the observatory so this kind of thing will never happen again.

Our nearest stellar neighbor is 4.7 light years away.

Proxima Centauri is 4.2 ly from Sol.

Multiple citations needed.

I don't know where you pulled those numbers out of, but they're completely wrong. Depending on the process used electrolysis can have an efficiency rating of 30%-60%. Nuclear reactors are much better than 20% efficient, unless you think an RTG is a nuclear reactor. Solar thermal power is a better bet for generating large amounts of power for running a space factory. No fuel needed and a few square kilometers of mylar will set it up nicely.

So 1 horsepower is approx 700W and 1 cowpower is approx 2000W. Who would have thunk that 1 cowpower ~= 3 horsepowers?

Flying cars == falling cars

Water is 89% oxygen by weight.

DirectX goes all the way to 11.