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Showing content with the highest reputation on 10/29/21 in all areas

  1. "You can't take the sky from me" Damn straight. That's one of the things nobody can take from you without your consent.
    1 point
  2. When discussing such radical and long-range possibilities as this I (like Elon Musk) find it much more useful to reason from known principles than what does or does not sound plausible. Will we ever have truly faster-than-light travel? No; according to our current understanding of physics that is impossible and not worth mentioning outside of fiction. Will Mars ever have its own proper magnetosphere? If a magnetosphere is caused by the motion of internal molten metals (which Mars appears to lack) then probably not; certainly not in the next thousand years or so. Maybe in a thousand years we will have ways of injecting such moving lava into Mars (PERHAPS) but as for our own moon that is out of the question. Can human beings survive on Mars? Certainly, if we send them with adequate food, water and oxygen (and especially if they have the means to produce these in situ, as we already know how to do) then they can live there. Granted, whether or not one could ever enjoy an autumn sunset on Mars as we do on Earth is debatable (not on any time frame; whether or not such atmospheric conditions could ever be created is debatable). However, if it isn't then Mars would have its own sort of seasons and its own sort of Autumn, which I would like to experience. Especially in power technology? The track record of artificial intelligence is much worse. We thought we'd have basically-sentient-machines many decades ago and we're currently still trying to teach them how to drive. However, even in cases where real technology has utterly failed to live up to the dreams of sci-fi authors, this does not equate to the stagnation of such technologies. We may not hit the targets we've set and yet this doesn't mean we're hitting nothing at all. I assume you're familiar with AlphaGo; the AI which beat the best human Go player on Earth several years ago? Well since then there's been AlphaStar (a StarCraft-playing-AI) which also went on to beat the best human players on Earth in an incredibly hectic and fast-paced real time strategy game. Just because our actual progress doesn't live up to our expectations for it (and sometimes embarrassingly so) does not mean that no progress at all is being made. Oh, yes, there will never be a society without money; not even a communist one. That certainly is true. There will never be any truly faster-than-light travel or travel through black holes, either. It's interesting you mention Star Trek, though, because there are other aspects of that show (besides the Communist sympathies) which actually do stand up to proper scientific scrutiny. Have you heard of the Alcubierre Drive?
    1 point
  3. To my mind, this is the most compelling argument for off Earth colonization.
    1 point
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