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“We think of terraforming as something we’ll do in the future to other planets, but we have thousands of years of experience changing the shape of our own planet in profound ways.”
According to a recent press release: NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, will complete the exploration phase of its mission on Sept. 16, after a number of successes that transformed […]
Shiveluch continues its noisy summer, we hope to avoid unnecessary noise at Crater Lake National Park and former noise spotted on Mars.
“The new national space policy calls on NASA to target missions beyond low-Earth orbit — such as to an asteroid — by 2025, with the eventual goal of sending astronauts to Mars.” The CSM reports.
It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.” I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth). Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay. Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.
Skeptic Michael Shermer thinks we deceive ourselves because “we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns.”