1) The US doesn't have a left, it has a 'less right'

2) Never, outside a few weirdos so small in number as to be irrelevant.

3) Regardless of the first two items, what's your point? "Trump isn't bad because the Democrats would have done this too"? Because everyone is getting tired of that false equivalence.

Russia's been a brutal kleptocracy longer than I've been alive. It's slapped a fresh veneer on a couple of times, but that's about it. Despite this, after the burst of progress after WWII and the decline afterwards, here we are decades upon decades later and Russia is still able to launch rockets into space. We laugh at them because they're generally not consider as safe as other nations' space programs, but they do it. For a while longer, anyway.

Maintaining capability is a lot different from creating new capabilities. The US is diving so rapidly and enthusiastically into the kleptocratic model, combined with a revival of rabid anti-intellectualism, that I don't think it will be able to establish a lunar base before it finds it has lost the ability to engineer one.

I expect they are indicating there's no depth / distance data, but I'd still call it a 3D map because it is the inner surface of a sphere. You can't really compare even the relative 2D positions of things on this map correctly without considering an additional spatial dimension.

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

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.