It is images of OTTHER PEOPLE, not just images.

That is pretty much what JPL did.

This is why I believe first manned mission to mars should require staying at least 10-16 years. Hate to say it, but canary in a coal mine. As to these samples, I would think that most microbes on mars are already here. Still I would prefer that extreme caution used and collect these earth or even lunar orbit, and test at iSS.

Offering up a competition to do this is not the way to go. Why? Because a JPL designed approach was already offered up and this is why we are looking at $8-11B to deliver in 15 years.

Need a prize approach in a set of objectives are listed and variable-level prize rewarded based on ranking. Get it done first, and you get $$$, with second getting $. Finally, upon successful return of Up to 1/2 of the samples, they get $ 3B/1B. Finally, limit this to 2-3 groups register for this.

With this approach, it will likely have SX and BO as entities, but it may also produce a 3rd group. This way, a great deal of infrastructure gets quickly developed and will be reused later for Martian/lunar/asteroids missions.

Hopefully, no federal $ is going into this. Or perhaps federals SHOULD produce some $, but require that all of the cells be made in america, with american, if not western elements.

Seriously, some of it, esp. the early stuff is interesting. A lot of words, poetry. Now? Just junk with a lot of cuss words esp the n-word, and is just garbage.

It's also worth noting that even objectively terrible movie treatments (for example, Soylent Green's failure to represent the actual storyline of Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, while also being cheesy and stupid, and Without Remorse's failure to even remotely resemble Tom Clancy's book, while also being... well, lame) didn't hurt those books.

Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!

Newton submissively begs scraps from Einstein's table, suh.

No. Leave the fucking books alone.

Protip: Just don't buy into new motion pictures based on books. Your problem, solved! Because as you probably will understand if you give it some thought, the existence of a first-time movie treatment of a book doesn't hurt the related book. Quite the contrary, most often.

For those of us who don't want to see yet another Roadhouse or Bladerunner or Poseidon or Total Recall — and for the authors — new motion pictures based on previously untreated stories are a good thing. At least once they're out on physical media. Movie theaters... [shudders] :)

Pretty much all tech we have today is entirely possible without burning fossile[sic] fuels

One of the apparent filters is simply that above a certain level of gravity, chemical rockets will not suffice to reach space. We're near the edge of that condition ourselves. Any number of civilizations might be out there, pinned against their planet's surfaces. The only way that's not true is if there are physics yet to be discovered that can accomplish surface-to-space in high gravity without using chemical rockets. We certainly haven't found any sign of such science/technology here. And fission or fusion powered rockets... the engineering for that is at least completely non-obvious thus far. And before anyone says "nukes against a pressure plate", yeah, a delightfully bang-y notion, but no.

The assumption made in the Fermi paradox that any civilization could reach space if they try may simply be wrong.

As there are so many wonderful books out there just begging for a motion picture treatment, Hollywood will oblige by... releasing more pointless, vapid remakes.

It used to be that we were full of hope, but prepared for the worst. Now, we have a generation that is afraid of everything and prepares for nothing.

Ownership of media was limited BEFORE 1995?6?( give or take ). Before Clinton and GOP pushed a re-write on media ownership, we had some 50-100 companies that owned media (and that was LONG before the explosion with the Internet).IOW, we had competition. Now? Less than 10 companies own American media ( may be 5, I do not recall ).

If we return back to requiring limited ownership (as in how much someone can own), then we would see competition and would see decent media. As it is, we are as bad as China and Russia.

It is LONG past time for us to be able to SUE companies for this, AND to have criminal investigations against the C*O of companies that are breached. Why? Because they are not doing what is needed to protect this data. It is really not that hard to do.

Roll back the Clinton/GOp bill that limited ownership.there is no real competition and all of the majors are as horrible as China daily and RT. Hell, MOST of Aljazerra is better than the trash from America, China, and Russia.

This might be what is needed for the prince to realize that it is better to think long-term for his citizens as opposed to killing short-term critics. IOW, learn from his recent ancestors.