I'd like IDEs a lot better if they didn't bury stuff like build information in menus and dialogs. Android tutorials and such always encourage new developers to start from an example, so that's what I've done on multiple occasions. But I quickly get annoyed because I don't know everything that's happening under the hood, so I basically have to google every time I want to do anything. If it could give me one big, organized text file or script that controls how it's built (with environment variables for portability), I'd be so much happier. But no, I have to right-click on the project, open a submenu (the 17th of 38 menu items), click on Project Build Path or something like that, click on this other tab, click the Add JARs button, browse to the desired files...

The first part is okay, but the second doesn't necessarily follow. Establishing a permanent presence on another planetary body will take a long time - even if we started ASAP - and technology can be developed in the meantime. One such technology is in-situ resource utilization. The more resources the base can pull from its surroundings, the better. Mars has carbon and the Moon doesn't, which is pretty huge. If water is also significantly easier to extract, then even despite the far greater distance, Mars might be a more attractive location.

But who knows, we may find out we can deal with near-zero gravity better than we thought, and there may be a decently large, carbon- and water-rich asteroid at one of Earth's L-4/5 Lagrange points or something. That would be even cheaper in terms of delta-V to reach than the Moon. Or maybe we set up shop on a co-orbital body like 3753 Cruithne, which orbits the Sun every 364 days, and will be within 13.6 million km of Mars in 2058 (Earth and Mars only come within 56 million km of each other).

Or we just do all of the above, because humanity is awesome.

The total cost of Ares development was expected to be upwards of $40 billion in 2009 dollars. The total cost of SLS development was expected to be $18 billion in 2011 dollars. It might not launch if Tea Partiers like Ted Cruz gets their way, but with the pro-NASA congressman expecting to head up the appropriations committee over the next two years, there's still a good chance it will.

Just because we can't hear them doesn't necessarily mean they're silent or don't exist. Due to the inverse square law, most of our signals are indistinguishable from background noise by the time they hit Alpha Centauri. A couple years ago we pumped a lot of energy into a directed Arecibo transmission toward the Wow! signal, but even that will get lost in the noise a couple hundred light years away. This is not to mention that we transmit on and listen to a certain band of frequencies. My understanding is that, for SETI to hear anything, an extraterrestrial civilization has to aim a very high-powered signal toward us in a frequency band that isn't already saturated by local electromagnetic signals.

Actually, TFA links to an earlier article that discusses a sample of ringwoodite (the transition layer material between upper and lower mantles) that had water trapped inside it. The whole thing was encased by a diamond that emerged in Brazil. They claim that it "confirms predictions from high-pressure laboratory experiments that a water reservoir comparable in size to all the oceans combined is hidden deep in Earth’s mantle." The ringwoodite sample was 1.5% water by weight, so water is still a small percentage of Earth's mass, but there is more than just surface water.

As someone posted below, here is the forum post with some data, and here is the raw data with more plots. This is really awesome, but you have to temper your enthusiasm when you realize he knew exactly when to look and how much the brightness should drop, and he chose a relatively bright star (apparent magnitude +7.676, which is just barely too faint to see with the naked eye) with a relatively large exoplanet to image. There is some wiggle room there, but the data is pretty noisy, so it will be pretty tough to spot new exoplanets like this.

In comparison, Kepler-67b is a confirmed exoplanet 3610 light years away, orbiting a star with an apparent magnitude of +16. That is, take the light received from the star this guy imaged, divide it by 2000 (less than 0.05% the brightness), and Kepler can still detect exoplanets passing in front of it. The Hubble and Keck Telescopes have imaged stars with magnitudes of +30 or higher. So to answer the headline (in case it wasn't already obvious), we still kinda need NASA.

Not sure of full details, but I got this much:

18 counts of cyberstalking: filling out a public contact form on the "victim's" website with junk text.
15 counts violating Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: scanning sites for vulnerabilities using commercial available scanning tools.
Not sure what the other 11 counts were.
The only charge he pled guilty to was a violation of the CFAA, downgraded to a misdemeanor, for trying to log in to the Hidalgo County website server 14,000 times, causing a slowdown that prompted them to hire specialists.

That's just the hard limit. There will be many catastrophic events between now and then. Sure, the odds that the next one occurs in the next couple of decades is astronomically small, and we have a really, really long way to go to settling on another planet or in space. But your statement "if there's still a civilization" is telling: if we left it to people like you, humanity would keep kicking the can down the road, over and over, until it's too late.

Both of my original DS's have a cracked hinge (rough handling from the kids), but both of them still work. Our family still uses them occasionally to play multiplayer games like Mario Kart and New Super Mario Bros DS with our two 3DS XLs.

That's a pretty awesome feature. Several months ago I picked up three used copies of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time for cheap, and the 3DS XLs my wife and I got last Christmas can play multiplayer with the systems we had even before we had kids.

I understand why they haven't tried it yet, but if it's about to run out of juice anyway, there's no reason not to give it a shot.

From Wikipedia:

Yikes. There are still 20,000 pages of unpublished manuscript around, written before the early 1990s. Hopefully most of it was written before these encounters.

And Philae bounced twice, finally settling in two hours after first touching the comet, which is enough time for the comet to rotate almost 60 degrees. The two systems meant to prevent bouncing - the thruster and the harpoons - failed, so it ended up some kilometer away from the carefully chosen site. That we are getting any science at all after that potentially mission-killing news is just fantastic.

I'm hoping they make some last-ditch effort to have Philae try to jump over to another part of the comet to get more sunlight, though I'm not sure what kind of resources they have to try it. Can they command the drill and/or the legs to jab downward relatively quickly? Command the harpoons to fire? I don't know, but you can bet this will be part of the design on future missions. I actually did some work on this, which made hopping around a key part of the mission.

You know what's anti-American? Calling other Americans anti-American because they disagree with you.

Here's a funny little factoid for you: the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist.

This is not quite correct, because robots don't have brains, and that is unlikely to change in the near future.

Some parts of our bodies are easier to replace than others. We have been replacing skin, blood, and bone (albeit imperfectly) for a long time. We are becoming better and better at replacing or removing parts of organs like kidneys, lungs, and even the heart. We are not even close to doing the same with our brains. We are starting to learn to do some awesome stuff with it, like control other people's limbs, and we may have even found the on-off switch for consciousness, but we can't replicate or replace the brain. We tried removing parts of it before, but even ignoring the horrid ethical violations, lobotomies had disastrous results and are no longer practiced.

Anyway, the point is, yes, robots could (and will) be a very significant part of colonization effort, but they can't replace humans entirely. I'll give you the idea that much of the human body is low tech, but our brains, though far from perfect, are more advanced than anything we've got.

A solid outline of the challenges, but a simplistic understanding of the proposed solutions. You don't put 100,000 colonists in orbit as fast as possible and put them to work building a metropolis on Mars. You put a few fertile and healthy couples on Mars at a time, over and over, and you grow the colony over hundreds of years. In fact, you grow several independent ones simultaneously, so one can evacuate to others in the event of an emergency. An additional 300 launches spread out over, say, six Earth-Mars launch windows (about 10 years) could mean 1200-1800 colonists, not counting any children they may have, and the infrastructure, agriculture, and industry involved in supporting those people would grow with the population. It would be heavily reliant on Earth for a long time, but that reliance could slowly disappear over time as Martian humans make do with what they can produce themselves, which could end up being a lot more than we can imagine with today's technology.

Of course, also on those timescales (centuries), the ability to recolonize Earth is questionable. Even the first human that grows up on Mars would have a great deal of trouble adapting to Earth, which would have three times his or her native gravity! They could probably do it with some fancy exoskeleton technology that might not exist yet, but their bones wouldn't be used to the stress at all, and they could easily have some crippling agoraphobia. But who knows what other adaptations the human body will undergo, given enough time. If anything, colonizing Mars is a stepping stone to a mostly space-faring civilization, but that's far, far into the future.