Hypothetically, suppose we knew for a fact that some sort of seemingly aircraft-like objects were flying around that were not built by human civilization as we now know it, and are also not an unknown phenomena of nature.

All of the following explanations appear improbable in the extreme, but which explanation would you consider to be the *least* improbable?

A. Extraterrestrials (biological or robotic)

B. Time travelers

C. Travelers from an alternate dimension or alternate timeline

D. An ancient advanced civilization that has been hitherto undiscovered (for instance, living deep within the Earth's crust, or deep undersea)

E. A supernatural phenomenon such as ghosts

F. Other (explain)

Personally I think the least improbable answer is D. Not that I think that answer is within the realm of realistic, but at least it requires fewer violations of the physical laws that we know than the other explanations.

> As much as I'd prefer that there were starfaring alien civilization...

Elizondo didn't say they were aliens; he said they were UFOs. I've heard a few Air Force pilots opine on this same topic: they believe there's definitely some strange phenomenon that we don't understand. Not necessarily aliens, but something.

When a government agency funds something that works, the headline is always, "NASA builds this..." or "DARPA builds that..."

But when a government agency funds something that doesn't work, the headline instead is, "Lockheed mess up this..." or "Boeing messed up that..."

Did DARPA "create" this as the headline says, or did they just fund somebody else to do the research, design and implementation?

http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/2012/07/northrop-grumman-demos-850-ghz-integrated-receiver-circuit-aiming-at-terahertz-photonics.html

There doesn't appear to be any sexting icons. How can they expect this to catch on? ch'uh

Wikis are great for this.

Democracy works only in theory as well:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury."

              - Alexander Tytler

The Soviet Union lasted for almost a century despite the flaws of communism. We in the U.S. have lasted for a little over two centuries. From a purely empirical standpoint, neither economic framework has yet proven itself to be stable in the long term. (A couple of centuries isn't really long enough to prove long-term stability. If we make it to a thousand years though, I think that'd be a pretty good argument.)

I've been thinking for years that NASA should be "dismantled"...reduce its mission scope to military-related matters and take all the civilian stuff that NASA does now and take that commercial instead.

If the government bought its civilian space needs exclusively from commercial suppliers "off the shelf" that would be a huge boost for commercial space industry and would accelerate development of low-cost-to-orbit technologies.

It's not that a governmental entity like NASA *couldn't* accomplish the same thing, but they've spent the last 35 years proving that they *won't*. It's almost impossible to change the DNA of a government agency. The only alternative is to scale them back so far that they essentially have to re-invent themselves, and use the funds saved to nurture industry alternatives.

(1) When you talk about *what* a systems administrator does, it doesn't sound that hard: installing and configuring software, patching, installing and configuring hardware, researching and comparing potential upgrade options, troubleshooting problems, etc.

What 4th graders probably don't think about is that none of these things by themselves may seem particularly hard at the scale of an individual computer, but when you multiply each of these activities by a gazillion servers, routers, clients, etc., then it has the potential to become a real nightmare. So you have to use tricks & technologies in a company's computing environment that you'd never bother with at home.

E.g., "Ever seen your mom or dad install a Windows update? Remember how nuts that made them? Now imagine doing that across 20,000 desktops in 10 cities, and being given only 3 days to get them all done!"

(2) Probably a lot of your time is spent being a detective, trying to puzzle out why something that oughta be working ain't. Telling stories about some of your successful detective adventures might be entertaining.

All people (including kids) like to be told stories, so the more you can populate your presentation with interesting anecdotes, the better.

And, as one person already wrote, bringing some old or broken hard drive, circuit boards, etc. to pass around the classroom probably couldn't hurt either.

Also, many 4th graders I know think that the *monitor* is the computer. They point at it and say, "That's the computer, isn't it? Why are you fiddling with that other box?" I know that sounds crazy, but that's the way many 9 year olds think. So don't assume any understanding of computers just because they know how to play Spore.