You should be sorry for commenting in ignorance. ...Asimov wrote extensively on that exact premise.

His argument only works if the failings of human vision are ones of actual vision, but they're not. It also equates human vision to that of a camera feed, which again, is not at all the same. A camera feed is FAR more detailed within a particular scene than human vision which is highly dependant on awareness, and scanning the scene as our fovea is the only real part of our vision that can see detail.

Most of the mistakes people make are ones of attention. It is very rarely to almost never because of an optical illusion.

That's the bar he has to compete with.

Also, LIDAR is basically vision, but with a focus on 3D depth instead of texture.

The question is, how important is 3D depth? Not very. It doesn't really matter if that car is 50 meters away or 55 meters away. What matters is it's approach speed, orientation, trajectory, etc. All of which are done just fine by "vision only" systems.

That's actually a pretty good time range - Sun-like stars in the Galactic Habitable Zone have been around for about 9 billion years, and if we assume Earth's 4.5 billion year history is typical, 5 billion years ago is about as far back as you'd expect to find little green men.

We are on the verge of being able to scan the atmosphere of exoplanets in bulk. It won't be that long (relatively speaking) before we'll know if there are any planets in our sky with chemistry that suggests a living biosphere. I hope to live long enough to see the results.

Expecting respect from the current US government.

I'm all for keeping a nice environment, but whenever someone trots out the word 'sacred' I want them to fuck all the way off.

You know what should be sacred? Science and discovery. Even before it had a name and was formalized, science was advancing humanity's state. It's the reason we're not still wandering the savannahs and forests of the world in small groups, subject to every random whim of Nature.

It's a bad time to invest in anything knowledge-based in the US anyway.

I had some business reasons to have an account and participate in a few niche subs. The subs were niche enough to mostly be enthusiastic friendly people, but it didn't take long to notice the patterns of the same ideas making the rounds.

Then one of my posts was removed for reasons I don't understand (and didn't try). Whatever the mod was thinking, I just gave up, deleted my historical posts and removed my account. Not worth the effort.

Up to that point, old.reddit.com was working (with or without signing in, mobile or desktop) despite the threat to shut that down. I wouldn't use the new interface unless you paid me a decent wage to do so.

I've quit Reddit before - it's very toxic overall - but now it's not even worth it for business. I doubt they'll ever lure me back again.

Even if you live somewhere with good cops, they're still human beings and will often put themselves above duty.

Only the fear of consequences drilled into them during training followed by robust monitoring and security audits will keep it under control (note I didn't say 'prevent entirely').

The range and payload penalties will be enormous.

If you can build an enclosed habitat that can keep a population alive for 1000 years in deep space, you'd find it a lot easier to do the same on Earth. And if that's not an option, Mars, or the asteroid belt. Places where there are resources to exploit to resupply and repair, or even expand.

And that's before you think about how your destination is an entire alien biosphere - you might know the air, water temperature and gravity are all fine... but you won't have any idea if you can digest the locally available flora and fauna, if it'll be toxic, or if it'll be digesting you.

Interstellar colonization is for when your star is cold and all the rocks around it are used up.

'Years' is soft-peddling it. We lack the technology to reach the nearest star to the Sun in less than 80 years, and even that is so expensive and unlikely to succeed that we'd never fund it. A 49 light year trip would take 980 years to get there, and assuming nothing critical broke enroute, it's incredibly unlikely you'd successfully beam any useful data back.

We could eventually build a fusion drive and halve that time. There's still nothing at the end of the trip to justify the investment. Telescopes are the vastly superior tool.

And no, nano probes accelerated by giant laser to near light speed are not realistic. At all.

Reporting doesn't really work. It will be weaponized to suppress competing content and the reporting mechanism will become untrustworthy.

Blah blah blah. Same mindless response. "You're stupid because you maintain personal relationships and don't consider everyone you know to be your best friend".

You're just a blithering idiot with a shitty handle on English... if you were functionally literate, you'd have noticed I differentiated between friends and acquaintances - just like you did in your second paragraph.

Jobs will be automated to save money - Government services will do it to reduce tax burden, companies will do it to maximize profit, and people who still own things will do it to protect their things. This will result in fewer workers and more desperate poor people for the people still working to protect themselves against. There will be more and more cameras in more and more places, there will be AI monitoring them, and this will continue until there is a strong enough backlash.

It's not the Meta glasses you really need to worry about, it's when the tech is inexpensive enough that people willingly add a Google or Amazon bodycam to their daily fashion choices. When every car has as many cameras as a Tesla. And the government will demand access to all of it.

Everything will be justified and rational every step of the way, and it will very predictably end in oppression.

It might actually be time to work on some skills of worth in a pre-industrial economy; the rich and their robots go one way, the poor get to survive if they can find enough productive land the rich don't claim and patrol with drones.

Once the rich have robot enforcement, there's no way they'll stop taking more and more and marginalizing anyone who tries to stop them.

The sad part is it's the poor who are enabling this - we build the robots, we design the AI. Right now, we are the servants to the ultra-wealthy and any one of us close to them could start a French solution to the issue of billionaires.

We're all so desperate to be rich in the current economic system that we're selling our own futures and we'll enthusiastically drag down anyone who tries to stop us.

Yep. And many domestic Canadian flights transit American airspace - if there are any issues, you're landing at an American airport.

Even with slightly longer flights and current fuel prices, I'd rather Canadian airlines stay on the Canadian side of the border going forward.