>What would you spend all the money on if you knew we'd all be gone in 50 years?

I think this is one of those really character revealing questions if you can get an honest answer from someone. Most of us will be dead in 50 years no matter what, but you're probably not living like that's all that matters. Even while you're alive, you should probably give a shit about your fellow human beings and the quality of their lives.

If you're response is, "what the hell, let's burn it all down" then you're probably not a great person to know. I'd like to keep things going at least as nice as they are until I'm gone, and I think it's not the worst idea to try and help others have a decent life too.

On the other hand, if your response is, "Well, we probably shouldn't invest in anything that takes more that 50 years to return value", that I can get behind.

Pretty much anything past the frost line starts requiring prohibitive amounts of solar panel to get decent power, and Voyager is much, much further than that.

If you could send a refueling mission, it would be for sentimental reasons only. Any vessel you send that could catch up to Voyager would be much better utilized simply carrying a new and improved instrumentation and communications package.

If you give up your nuclear weapons, the next greedy sociopath to lead a neighboring nuclear power is going to kill you.

If you have nuclear weapons and are self-sufficient in critical areas, and you don't go around making enemies every time you open your mouth, you're fine.

Pakistan and India haven't nuked each other, because the people in control of the weapons want to live. If only one of them had nukes, the other would be gone by now.

This isn't a Val Kilmer performance, it's an AI performance wearing Val Kilmer's skin and using his voice. There's a difference, even if it's just in the viewer's head.

A little cameo in a series to show the writers haven't forgotten the past work of an actor is nice to see. A hour of screen time is ghoulish exploitation of his legacy by the family.

Why would you dedicate any storage to permanent GPS logs in a car? The way to monetize that data is to actually have it, which means periodically sending it back to the company's servers.

Car manufacturers will often make choices to save fractions of a cent per car, so why would you have them put any more storage capacity in them than the bare minimum?

US economic policy is destroying American advantages in global trade at an unbelievable pace, while simultaneously undermining the domestic economy.

Even if Ford managed to build an 'affordable' EV, I suspect the percentage of the population able to afford it will be vastly reduced by the time it gets to market.

I would watch that show. Seriously.

I'm not sure how straight you'd play it, it'd need some degree of comedy, but an investigative procedural where there's no human conspiracy, just some jaded and worn out alien gumshoe... there's potential there.

That was a fascinating read, thank you for posting the link - especially the ideas for motion and transmission of data to space.

I'm not sure how they'd process and analyze samples and transmit results, but things temperature, pressure, and wind speed seem like relatively easy wins once you have the radar reflector idea in play.

The actually unidentified flying object investigator that you want to figure out if something was an odd atmospheric phenomenon, something civilian, a foreign spy craft, or one of your own that wasn't supposed to be seen... or the kind who thinks he's Fox Mulder and wants to prove little green (or grey) men have nothing better to do than fly across light years of space to buzz rural closeted homosexuals and give them dreams of being sodomized by sex toys?

They can be processor, they can be storage, they can be combined to create more efficient transistors, they can handle more than binary states. They're essentially a hardware-implemented neural net node and I am still waiting to see someone manage to use them for that.

I suppose a Venus-tolerant surface probe would be pretty impressive too. Or a home computer that didn't fry itself if the cooling fan seized.

I like dogs, so I'm reaching for a use case that justifies the little robopuppy. I reluctantly concede that the virtual cane is likely far more practical.

>I'm hugely open to the idea that other life forms might not share our morphology. So why do they all look like humans with big fucked-up heads?

Two reasons: the more 'alien' your aliens, the more difficult it is for an audience to interpret them, and production costs.

The goal is to tell a story within a budget, so as Pat Tallman once said, "they sit you down in a chair and put a vagina on your face".

The dog is good for carrying the power required for extended run time (though you give some of that back to the motors making it move) and for providing physical cues through the harness.

My change would be to route the voice system through a Bluetooth headset. There's no need for the dog to talk to the entire environment, and it would be harder to hear in urban settings.

I'd argue TOS wasn't bad. By today's standards, sure, and there were some episodes where the writing failed to overcome the budget limitations, but it was adult science fiction taken seriously and often based on very good stories in days when that was uncommon.

It wasn't Lost in Space.

There's a difference between being inclusive and pandering. TOS didn't pander. Well... maybe a bit. Roddenberry wasn't above it.

Still, there did seem to be a more genuine (though occasionally ham-fisted) attempt at inclusiveness. I doubt a focus group of the times would have given us the Star Trek we got.

The new stuff is often hollow. It's checking boxes. It's pandering. That works better in pop music than in science fiction.