A lazy and ignorant comment.

You don't know anything about Richard Garwin, clearly. Nor do you understand how Federal funds are allocated. I could go on but that is already a lot of stupidity packed into one sentence.

Richard Garwin is the most distinguished defense scientist in the U.S., and provides scientific advice to the government (like the advice quoted in TFA). At age 85 he is unlikely to be cooking up any billion dollar projects of his own.

What?! The evidence is consistent with Neanderthal men being welcome in Anatomically Modern Human society, but not Neanderthal women!

This is exaggerating the evidence of social unit size differences. Neanderthal sites are smaller, but the Cromagnon sites are quite small also. It is the difference of an average group of 10 and an average group of 20. Extrapolating to major differences in social skills seems unwarranted.

Indeed theories that hold the reverse (that Neanderthals were in some way significantly inferior to modern humans) are actually difficult to support convincingly. Neanderthal sites are far more similar to contemporary H. s. sapiens sites than they are different, and differences that can be well supported are not generally good evidence of any sort of inferiority. The technical skills and tools and social practices of Neanderthals and modern humans are virtually identical for the same time periods. The implicit assumption of inferiority has long permeated and contaminated the interpretations of Neanderthal archaeology.

This is a theory we know is wrong. If it were true there would be lots of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (passed on by the mother to her daughters) in the modern human population. Instead there is none (http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002947).

This is an outdated theory (I used to like it myself though). There is evidence of gene flow between H. s. sapiens and H. s. neanderthalensis, but not very much. Theories that modern humans simply outbred them and replaced them are viable, but not ones that propose that the two species interbred to form a new single hybrid.

Consider this recent article: http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002947 .

A key quote: "Although mitochondrial DNA from multiple Neandertals has shown that Neandertals fall outside the range of modern human variation, low-levels of gene flow cannot be excluded." In other words we definitely are not them, but may (probably do) have some of their genes.

It is all about verifiable, repeatable experiments - Oh Anonymous Moron.

Tell me how those N-Rays are working out for you. (Google it.)

You are right to point out the quibble of "no time to train the crew" is straining at a gnat.

But you are having some trouble in trying to swallow the camel. Project Apollo cost $200 billion in current dollars to solve a much easier problem (an 8 day trip) compared to a year-and-a-half trip with an enormously larger delta-vee requirement (if you come back). Perhaps, in a similar national level high priority crash project, like the U.S. undertook in the "space race" it could be done in not much longer than 8 years. But you are looking at something exceeding the cost of Apollo.

Yes, I know Mars One claims they have a plan for a one-way trip that will only cost 6 billion: "The six billion figure is the cost of all the hardware combined, plus the operational expenditures, plus margins." (Emphasis added.)

But they also claim "This plan is built upon existing technologies available from proven suppliers." apparently blissfully unaware of the fact that (as rudy_wayne posted above) that no one knows how to build a workable re-entry system http://www.universetoday.com/7024/the-mars-landing-approach-getting-large-payloads-to-the-surface-of-the-red-planet/ . I guess if you wave away all of the really hard problems its all quite easy.

They also don't address the costs of maintaining the colony in perpetuity - it saves on the really hard problem of return but creates a permanent multi-billion dollar annual obligation to the Earth to keep their colony of four people alive.

Einstein appears in The Simpsons. As a zombie. Since he is dead there aren't too many other opportunities for him to show up in Springfield.

There is still no general theory of superconductivity.

Time slowing the faster you go is weird. Matter and energy being the same is weird. Gravity warping space and slowing time is weird. Plenty of weird stuff came from Einstein.

It didn't take Einstein.

There was a already a deep, apparently insoluble contradiction in physics -- the ultraviolet catastrophe. Blackbody radiation - a commonplace thing in everyday life - could not be explained by physics (quantum theory would be required). That should have been enough by itself to put claims of the "completeness of physics" to rest.

It didn't since just one glaring anomaly can be dismissed.

And then radioactivity was discovered. Vast amounts of energy appearing from nowhere. That caused the notion that physics was nearly complete to collapse.

As far as I can tell the only information available on this is what Cecilia Kang at the Washington Post says about it. Absolutely everything else seems to be simply a rewrite of her article. Given the track record of any popular media reporting on technical issues it is hard to tell for sure what the proposal actually entails.

This being a non-classified Government proposal circulating freely among businesses, it should be readily available to the public somewhere.

Absolutely. Not only does the government, businesses, employers, health care providers, schools, etc. automatically assume you have Internet access - and make their plans for interacting with you accordingly, but they are already generally assuming you have high speed Internet access AND mobile phone Internet access also.

Not having Internet access is much like not having access to a telephone 25 years ago - you basically cannot function in society effectively.

Wow. You have decided that electronic warfare doesn't really work at all, since an incredibly weak signal (10^-16 watts per square meter) can be detected against a 200 watt jammer directly overhead "without much difficulty". Electronic warfare experts everywhere will be amazed. The U.S. Navy only has the best electronic warfare planes in the world.

First off GPS antennas detect signals from satellites in different parts of the sky - they are non-directional (or else have a very small gain since they don't need to look down). Second, the jamming signal strength will be on the order of 100 billion times stronger than the GPS signal. Only a gain of 110 db will overcome this jamming signal, and the highest gain antenna in the world in the 305m Arecibo radiotelescope with a gain of only 70 db.

This also means that the supposed telecomm link to the army of controllers via satellite (must be geosynch to stay in position for hours) cannot be maintained. A high gain antenna would work here, but a 60 cm satellite dish only has a gain of about 35 db, meaning the jamming signal will be 10 to 100 million times stronger.

10,000 drones churn around completely unguided whenever they come within miles of the ships, while any that blunder into an intercept trajectory get blasted with 100% success rate. Number of drones hitting ships: zero.

Satisfied?