I was trying to think of the "every case". Yes, I believe some humans may leave the solar system. It will probably be accidental. They won't have a particular destination. They will likely be dead. But technically, though dead, they are still "homo sapiens". I expect it will happen as a result of some sort of accident. Think in terms of an Apollo 13 malfunction where the crew is killed, misses its target and eventually drifts out of the solar system.

However, I don't think of shooting frozen corpses out of the solar system is particularly helpful to any rational endeavor.

It took Voyager about 36 years to leave the solar system. There's no life support on board, no cosmic shielding, scarcely any power supply. Its departure is secondary to its primary purpose. If they'd put a corpse on board, then a "homo sapiens" would have left the solar system.

That clear things up?

Regards, "Dark Energy", it still hasn't been detected. They have an unexplained phenomenon for which they do not have a known cause. They're calling it "dark energy" - but they have no clue what it is. In case you haven't noticed, even science is getting into the "sensationalism" game. A few years back, one of the local news stations announced that scientists had created a "Star Trek warp drive". Turned out they were talking about an ion drive - which isn't even close to the same thing. But that's what you get when science funding is driven by popularity contests. (Same thing with breast cancer research, by the way, which enjoys far more funding than prostate cancer research - though the latter kills more people.)

The imbalance in matter anti-matter is one of the mysteries for the "big bang" guys. Formation should have been symmetric. Apparently it wasn't.

My confidence level that a live homo sapiens will leave the solar system in the next 100 years? Zero. That man will ever make it to another star (alive)? Zero. That a live human will ever leave the solar system? 1 in a trillion. (I expect the species to go extinct before it is ever accomplished.) Will this be true in a million years? I have serious doubts the species will last that long, but it if does, space flight won't be a top priority.

I doubt you reached your decision to eat egg yolks through the process you describe. More likely, you started out with the conclusion, "I want to eat eggs". From there you said, "How can I justify doing this in light of evidence that it might cause my cholesterol to rise?" And from there, the rest is easy.

And what if your cholesterol had risen? Would you be touting your "intuition"? No. You wouldn't. You'd be quietly trying to ignore the fact that you were a dumbass. Don't worry, there are LOTS of dumbasses in America. The obesity epidemic is proof positive. Being overweight is bad for everything from your knees to your pancreas, from your heart to your brain, from your ability to move to the cost of your medical care, from the length of your life to the quality of your life. There are probably a thousand ways that people justify being big fat slobs… none of them are logical. All of them are "intuitive" to the point of self-delusion.

There are smokers who do the same thing. Smoking is pretty much universally (though not uniformly) bad for your health. One person might smoke for 60 years and not die of a smoking-related illness. Another might die as a direct result in a period of a couple years.

But you know what? We will only hear about the former case, the woman who has smoked 60 years and isn't dead from cigarettes. You know why?

All the ones who have died aren't talking!

In fact, everyone you know who smokes is still alive… by definition!

Taken to the final "intuitive" conclusion, cyanide won't hurt you. How do you know? Well, a million people downed supposedly fatal doses yesterday, and the survivor told you personally that it didn't affect her at all.

Back to eggs for a second. How would you react if your cholesterol were to increase to an unhealthy level?

Operation of the brain is massively parallel in nature. How we "feel" about something - the "intuition" is (I believe) simply processing data about which we lack the tools to do rational processing. It's sort of like trying to do mathematics without knowing what mathematics is and not understanding any of the axioms, postulates or theorems. Sometimes, you might even get the right answer, but more often, you might only get a sense of the general direction, and because you lack any rules to test the intuitive conclusion, you have no way of knowing whether an answer is correct.

If you have 2 rocks in your left hand and 3 in your right and someone asks, "How many rocks do you have?" an intuitive answer might be "4" or "5" or "6". You know you have more than 3 because you've got 3 in your right hand. But precisely how many do you have? Intuition won't tell you. (I've read of societies where the entire number system consisted of "none", "1" and "more than 1".)

As magnitudes, whether quantities or time, get greater, intuition gets less usable. Suppose someone says they walk 2.7 miles per day, and have been doing so for 5 years. Quick: How far have they walked? 1000 miles? 3000? 5000?

Now let's explore a space where intuition is essentially useless without a rational foundation. What is the square root of negative 1? There isn't any intuition for this. You either know it or you don't. It's an abstract construct that has myriad computational and theoretical applications, but no real existence. This is the sort of area where women are notoriously unable to function… abstraction where intuition cannot work.

But it's a continuum. If someone hands you a hundred $1 bills, you have a reasonable idea of how much it is. But when someone tells you that the National Debt is $17 trillion dollars do you have any idea what that looks like in $100 bills (assuming you haven't already seen the illustrations)? How big a pile of money is that? As big as a refrigerator? As big as a house? Will it fill a semi-trailer? Two of them? Could you cover a baseball diamond to a depth of 1 foot? 10 feet? How about a football field?
How much is $211 trillion (the amount of unfunded liabilities facing the US government over the next 50 years)? Is it as big as the moon? Try writing down your assumptions: Expressed as a pile of $100 bills, how much is the Federal deficit? The debt? What does $211 trillion look like?

This video is a bit dated, but compare it to what you wrote down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nDHUDkpx...

Here's a fun one: If we took all 7 billion people on earth and stacked them up in coffin-sized spaces, say, 2.5'x1.5'x7' how many cubic miles of space would they take up? 100? 1000? Some other number?How good was your intuition?

Will the books be finished before everyone now alive is dead? :-P

The research into telomere manipulation probably holds the greatest promise for longevity. Of course, telomeres that don't shorten just open the door for cancers. I'm doubtful that any million year old humans will be knocking around come terraforming time.

To achieve the sort of things we've been talking about here would require an end to disease, war, politics and a half-dozen other items that won't likely be resolved in the next 1000 millennia (assuming the species lasts that long).

Just for chuckles, it might be interesting to know if the United States is putting more money into developing and manufacturing weapons and spy equipment, or solving health problems like heart disease and Alzheimer's. You know, one side of that balance sheet at least increases the likelihood of a successful species. The other? Not so much.

> It'd actually be easier than Terraforming Mars.

I disagree. It's generally easier to heat a planet than it is to cool one. To warm Mars to ~20C would "only" require a +65 temperature change. From a thermal standpoint, we could survive on Mars right now. Colder temperatures than Mars have been recorded here on Earth.

Venus? You'd have to cool it by 440C… roughly 7 times the change in temperature. Venus masses about 10X what Mars does, so a lot less thermal mass to heat/cool.

>Yes, it would take a few thousand years.

More like millions of years. Or tens or hundreds of millions.

Are you bored now, Bambi? A lifeship would have plenty to do, from harvesting crops to manufacturing goods, to selling health insurance, to making inane youtube videos.

"Is C really the utmost speed in the universe?

Yes, it is... in the universe. Once you achieve it, you'll have left the universe.

As matter can neither be created nor destroyed, how is mass "created" with an increase in velocity?

When you achieve the speed of light (which will be inevitable if you go fast enough, btw), your conditions become identical with those of the singularity of a black hole:

Your length becomes zero, so your volume becomes zero. Your mass becomes infinite.

You, effectively, tear a hole in spacetime and fall through. This is the basis for every interstellar drive ever conceived. If you can achieve .942c, you *will* achieve 1.00c very, very quickly.

I'm surprised no one has suggested "life-ships". Interstellar travel is daunting, because we live out here in the boonies.

Ocean voyages of exploration in the past often took years to complete.

I'm trying to remember the title of the story where John Ben Pertin is "teleported" to a ship on a suicide mission, while the real John Pertin (several of them, actually) stays alive and safe and enjoys his honeymoon back home.

I used it as an example; I would have used Stargate as the example, but then everyone would think I was talking about portals on planets which would be very difficult and dangerous both.

In The Mote in God's Eye and the Falkenberg Legion series, ships had to travel to specific points, activate their "jump drives", and then travel to their destination. In Mote, what protected us from the aliens was that the jump point was within the corona of a red giant star.

"Still another under consideration is to "fold" spacetime and create an access point that creates an artificial bridge between two points allowing instantaneous travel. "

exactly.

::bites tongue::

Read the book(s) when I get them written and see... you could be wrong there, too. :)

It'd actually be easier than Terraforming Mars.
I read an article on one possible way back in the late 70s, and for the past several years have been working on methods for Terraforming both Mars and Venus for the purposes of fiction stories.

We have hydrogen bomb technology. This means we can move asteroids and moons, with enough effort and patience. Over a period of a few thousand years, we can bombard Venus with asteroids to both blow off some of its atmosphere, and increase (or reverse) its spin rate. Using icy asteroids and moonlets would introduce much-needed h2o.

This could be aided by the introduction into orbit around Venus of a moon (I favor Titan, but it may have to go to Mars; Venus may have to settle for Vesta).

Bio-engineering will permit us to create tiny, oxygen-fixing plants capable of surviving the S2O4 in the atmosphere and pooping the carbon (of the carbon dioxide) out, releasing the oxygen, as they float/fall through the atmosphere. Unlike when Earth developed oxygen-releasing plant life, we can keep pumping fresh new drop plants into Venus' atmosphere.

Once she's spinning fast enough, with a moon around her to both stir up her core and help generate a stronger magnetic field, she'll be easier to cool.

Yes, it would take a few thousand years. You got someplace to go?

your solar mirror idea is interesting. I'm wondering if we couldn't use it to heat selective parts of the atmosphere to separate out gasses and maybe make some of them "outgas" into space.

There'll be some wild, electrically active storms as we cool Venus; the atmosphere will contract as it cools, and angular momentum should cause tornadoes and "dry hurricanes" that dwarf anything we have on Earth....

Of course, I'm not laying everything out on the table, cause I want to leave some intrigue for my book(s).

Cockroaches cannot outlive the Earth... without Man.

"A Howell is never wrong! Break off a piece and MAKE it fit!"

Statistically women are better drivers because they're not as territorial, nor as prone to take chances as men while driving... in my opinion.

Sinister/Dextrous. LMAO. 100% accurate.

I would suggest that men are better drivers because they have better spatial skills. They can more accurately judge the interplay between velocity, friction, distance, etc.

Conversely, on a statistical basis, women are better drivers. The thing that makes them horrible voters is probably the thing that makes them less inclined to have traffic accidents - risk aversion.

BTW, women are better suited for a whole range of tasks that would drive men insane. Sorting, inspecting, assembling on an assembly line. Repetitive tasks of almost any kind. It is a rare man who can stand to do something like electronic assembly or fruit sorting for days on end.

Sitting around a camp fire prepping a skin, or sorting grain from chaff, or stitching together a garment may have set the precedent as much as hunting wild animals and defending the home.

Possibly. But what's the point? Are you proposing the human brain be slowed down as well - say, to make someone think 1000 times slower? Or are you proposing 1000 years of boredom to get to the nearest star?

Wormholes? As in Stargate SG-1? No.

Dark energy hasn't even been detected.

For particles with mass? Yes. (And the "article" is fluff from someone who doesn't know what he's talking about - and who does not even reason well.)

Is my prediction true today? Yes. Tomorrow? Yes. In a million years? Homo Sapiens may not even be around in a million years, but if the species isn't extinct, it still won't have left the solar system in significant numbers… unless a rogue planet collides with earth sending the earth (and all the dead bodies) on a trajectory out of the solar system. (The sun exploding is another possibility, but a less likely one.)

I'd bet on extinction of the species before I'd bet on FTL travel.

Will anti-gravity powered machines be possible? Probably not. A clearer definition of what you mean is necessary.

You don't have to believe my statement is "warranted". I don't believe your non-analytical fantasizing is warranted… except perhaps as entertainment. I like science fiction. It's been a great harbinger of success in many fields. But just as one might imagine something one can do, it's also possible to imagine something that cannot be done.