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Comment Re:The obvious response. (Score 1) 333

You know, when the early explorers made it to the New World, there wasn't any religious explanation for the Native Americans. Somehow the religious managed to cook one up that kept their faith intact.

On one hand I think that discovering alien life, hostile or benign, would usher in a new age of atheism for the planet. More and more though I think the religious would pull the same thing they did in the early 1500s.

Comment Re:It'll never happen (Score 2) 333

I think you are referring to the Fermi Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

It can be stated briefly as "The apparent size and age of the universe suggest that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it."

Comment Re:Yuck (Score 1) 440

Read the guy's blog. He eats "normal" food on social occasions, or when he just feels like experiencing a certain taste. Soylent is just supposed to be about the vast majority of meals you eat where it's just about fueling your body so you can get on with more important things.

Comment Re:Docking with the International Space Station? (Score 1) 44

Orbital and SpaceX could easily take their craft in for docking themselves, but NASA's rules require them to do it this way. NASA's rules are that nobody is allowed to put something on a trajectory that intercepts the ISS, even for an instant, for any reason. This is the reason that a secondary payload on an earlier Falcon launch wasn't allowed to be put into its desired orbit. An engine failure on the Falcon's first stage required it to take a modified trajectory into orbit, at which point boosting the secondary payload would have required that, for an instant during its boost, its trajectory pass through the ISS. For this to be dangerous, it would have required the engine to fail in the middle of its burn at a very precise instant. NASA disallowed it, so the secondary payload wasn't able to perform its mission.

So, bringing a spacecraft in for docking requires you to put your craft on a collision course. Docking is just a low-speed collision, after all. NASA will not allow this, so anyone bringing payload to the station has to rendezvous and place the craft within range for the ISS to grab it and bring it in.

Comment Re:As soon as the smart car counts as the driver (Score 4, Insightful) 662

If routine commuting is "fun," then you're doing it wrong. Driving safely and efficiently is, and should be, boring as hell and I can't wait for it to be illegal to operate a vehicle manually on public roadways so I can spend my commuting time doing more interesting things.

You'll always be free to do your driving for fun on private roads and tracks, but keep your "fun" off the roads that I have to share with you.

Comment Re:Hookers (Score 1) 335

A "need" is not necessarily something you have to have or you will die. You won't die if you're locked in a room for the rest of your life with no human contact, but there's a reason that solitary confinement is considered a form of psychological torture. Social contact is a human need, emotional bonding is a human need, sex is a human need. Hell, Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs puts sex in the *bottom tier* of the pyramid.

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