Wild species are extremely good at adapting to evolving conditions. Their ability in this is many more times more powerful than any developments these searchers will produce.

Evolution is famously slow though. And there is a deadline here, so to speak... Human technological advancement on the other hand is famously fast, and constantly accelerates.

In other words, even if this is an overly optimistic plan today, it wouldn't be overly optimistic in 5 years or so. And if it would be feasible in five years, then now is a great time to start working on it.

This reminds me of the human genome project, the effort to sequence the entire human genome. This was an international program started in 1984, sequencing really started in earnest in 1990, and by 1999, after fifteen years, they had only 10% of the genome sequenced. But just four years later they declared the project "complete" with 92% of the genome sequenced. Comparing those final four years to the previous nine years, you get a 1800% increase in speed.

I have to say, I do wonder if reefs will just gradually shift to higher latitudes.

It may just be that the water temperature is increasing faster than the reefs can migrate. But if that's the case, we can work with that. There has been remarkable success growing reefs by putting starter structures on the seafloor and then seeding them with coral. If we start doing that in places we previously thought to be to cold for coral, that has potential to work...

Truly, the Ron Swanson of toast.

I've been having trouble with this too.

So far my best assessment is that the problem stems from the Chromecast not playing well with my router. Resetting the Wi-Fi on my router tends to fix the problem, but it's seriously annoying.

Separately, I also have issues with the play/pause not working when casting and some other weird interface behaviors sometimes. But all in all, it's worth complaining, but it still works better than everything else.

Oh I know! It turns out space suits are just really tricky. I was hoping to see some innovation and improvements in mobility from SpaceX, but, not so much apparently. I guess we'll have to wait for NASA's xEMU for any real improvement.

Oh man, movement in those suits seems... shall we say, more than a little restricted. Pressurized, they look as rigid as a zeppelin.

Well, that's really an attempt at saving money. And it's a strategy that actually works with some of their contractors. (Not so much with Boeing and ULA)

The problem is that they really need more budget. There's absolutely no reason they couldn't have five times the funding they have now. The US military had a budget of 820 billion last year, NASA used 200 million. Meaning, that you could quintuple NASA's budget with an additional 800 million by shifting 0.1% of military funding their way.

Personally, I think NASA is more than 0.1% as important as our military, but that's just me.

And the cycle will be complete...

Heh, as our reach into space increases, we may end up with "multiglobal" organizations. (Interglobal?)

Oopsie doodle!

Get a ford focus. Or, gasp a Toyota.

But don't give me that argument, because it's 100% bullshit.

Americans don't have the choice to do most of these things, or the choice to do most of anything.

You have the choice what car to buy. You often have a choice of when you fly somewhere. I mean, you can always skip that California vacation and go camping somewhere local, I'm not asking you to skip your brother's wedding.

That post also misses the biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. Eat less beef. Reduce the amount of beef you eat, substitute chicken or even pork, that will have a massive effect on your carbon footprint.

Americans don't have the choice to do most of these things, or the choice to do most of anything.

You have the choice what car to buy. You often have a choice of when you fly somewhere. I mean, you can always skip that California vacation and go camping somewhere local, I'm not asking you to skip your brother's wedding.

That post also misses the biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. Eat less beef. Reduce the amount of beef you eat, substitute chicken or even pork, that will have a massive effect on your carbon footprint.

(Again)

I mean we know trump supporters committed domestic terrorism, they shocked the world, doing it on live tv. This just shows that it was more than once, not a single isolated incident.

Wtf... There's no narrative or throughline, it's just like... if you distilled "unsettling" and put it on paper.

Well, successful art I guess, it made me feel things...

Water from non-Earth sources might contain dissolved minerals at poisonous levels for agriculture, much less human consumption.

Oh yeah, it's practically guaranteed to contain nasty stuff! We're gonna drink it anyway though.

Most of that water on earth that we'd consider "not useful" would fall into the "100% useful" category if found in space. As long as the contaminants have a different boiling temperature from water, you can always boil the water into steam in order to separate it. Or you could also use electrolysis to separate out the hydrogen and oxygen and then recombine then in clean tanks.

These are expensive methods of purification, energy intensive, but solar panels really well with no atmosphere and 24/7 sun exposure, so this is all feasible.

Well, we have multiple launch vehicles, we have multiple crew capsules, multiple cargo vehicles, and just about all of them are cheaper than our previous options. The crew capsules we're using now are all several orders of magnitude safer than the space shuttle (even the Starliner in it's current state is an order of magnitude safer than the shuttle). And now we have options that don't require us to negotiate with Russia to use them.

Or maybe the advantage is not having to counter any sail movement with gyroscopes... which cost energy too.

I think you nailed it right there.

And they're doing a real bang up job of it... Dropping tanks of Nitrogen Tetroxide and hydrazine to explode near towns. Really killing it.

And you should know, China is not doing it themselves, there are about a dozen launch companies and aerospace manufacturers making rockets in China.

The Long March 2C that carelessly drops its booster all over the place (a poorly designed rocket) is government made, but they aren't all that way.

Private companies have always been a big part of space flight, except it used to be only large defense contractors (Aka, Boeing, Raytheon, lockheed, etc). Honestly the situation is better now than it has ever been. But we'll never get all private companies out of space flight, NASA can't do it all themselves.