Stargate525

Because you can't drink radioactive water? And you'll lose a ton of it to sublimation?

Your best option is still really a lottery among the suitable candidates (passing a physical, not infertile, within an ideal age range). A genetic pool of 250,000 people is more than enough to really worry about inbreeding issues.

And if they get found? "I'm sorry sir, you need to remove your... fangs... Ohwait.

...Are you suggesting we projectile vomit on them?

You're kidding, right? We're some of the tougher animals on the planet when it comes to surviving damage. Besides somehow mitigating the psychological effects of shock, I'm not sure what you'd do. Except that we don't hunt that way. We can't CATCH our targets with speed, and we aren't, generally, good enough at hiding to pounce them. The venom's no good if we can't get close enough to deliver it, or if it makes the meat indigestible. If you want to save people from starvation via genetic engineering (rather than, you know, feeding them), I would look at our digestive microbiome. Making us able to digest and process rougher food, or do so more efficiently with what we can eat, would help tremendously. And we could then do the opposite, toning down the number of calories we extract from food in developed countries to combat obesity. (Ironic that. We've beaten our environment so well that we're dealing with the problems of our biology being TOO efficient.)

Uses? Depends on how expensive they are. If they're very expensive or finicky, I'd see them in cargo movement and industrial uses. Instead of a crane, you have a repulsor, and those massive dump trucks dump their wheels/treads and get repulsors. If they're cheap, I'd imagine them everywhere; floaty desktop toys, replacements for sliding door wheels, wheelchairs, lawnmowers... I'd love to see someone cheat with a repulsor bat.

Well, if your ship flips, we clearly need moar boosters asteroids! One on the front for your shield, three in back as a dragchute.

Worth it simply because of the hilarity. It would be like a Mars lander grabbing Deimos on its way in and using it for a heatshield. The image is completely kerbal and must be done.

No, no, it's clearly a large rectangular warehouse, several outbuildings, and a launchpad of some sort. :|

Radio telescopes don't give a damn about atmosphere.

Because you can't just DROP a radio telescope onto the surface. You'd have to be there at least once to install the thing, and go back to regularly maintain it.

Wrong kind of Tourist. We aren't talking about the ones who stay in a Hilton fifty feet from the beach and whose definition of 'roughing it' is skipping their morning Mai Tai. We're talking about the playboy millionaires who climb Everest for fun, or backpack to remote jungles to look at wildlife. Largely they are their own cooks and entertainment, don't need hosts... Really, hook em up with a connection to the net (which shouldn't be THAT hard to piggyback) for e-mail and they should be fine. And if you want to be highly cynical about it... There's a lot of potential profit to be made on research avenues which aren't entirely legal (or safe) on Earth. Genetic testing, nuclear engineering... Mars is one HELL of a quarantine. Less cynically, you're further removed from radio noise and light pollution; stick a telescope array on there, link it up with one on earth, and that's a MASSIVE virtual aperture size. You want resolution, that's how you get resolution.

The LAW of gravity is F= (g*m1*m2)/r^2 The THEORY of gravity is that the masses of the two objects attract each other from a bend in spacetime. It could just as easily be that particles actually love one another very much, and they hate to be away from one another. The lack of any sort of mathematical thing like that is why Evolution is a theory and will never be a law. It reasons the observed evidence of archeology and biology, but there is no equation for evolution at work.

Oh God... No. Theories are HOW things happen. Laws are the MATH of things happening.

Are you going to still call it lame when you can get from here to the moon for a few thousand dollars? I prefer steam engines to diesel, but I'm not going to quibble that I can get from place to place at 150 miles and hour without airport security.

Mythbusters tested it. Turns out that on small scale, that actually does work.

How great would it be if the thrust wasn't linear? Apply too much juice and the thing rips itself off the mountings and hurls itself into the nearest wall xD

^ This! This whole argument sounds like a postmodern sort of... thing. I'd also recommend some St. Augustine.

And I would posit that you don't want to be free of ALL collectives, merely one you perceive yourself to be in. You are a member of the collective of your nation, of your region, of your town, and of this website, at the very least. You want to be in at least one of those. Ergo, you do not wish true independence. You're not providing definitions of any of these things, and your argument is flawed: -What is 'your goal of independence' and why is that great? -This 'paradox' would only arise in a society which values independence. Totalitarian states, and essentially any society before the postmodern era does not have this problem. -There is a difference between independence and individuality. I can be free and still exercise my freedom to conform. -Everyone is unique. There are millions of variables to account for that go into a person, from their upbringing to their residence to the genetic abnormalities they carry. It's like taking an orange, an apple, and a banana, putting them together, and declaring that they're all 'just fruit.'

You seem to be assuming that independence is a virtue in an of itself. Why is that the case? I am free insofar as my freedom does not intersect with anyone else's. I am free to do what I wish, but there is no guarantee of being free from consequences. Further, I'm a social creature. We naturally crave companionship and community. We're wired that way. You're NOT supposed to be independent of 'the collective,' and it's very rare to find someone who truly WANTS to be. I'm not even certain where the paradox is here, to be honest.

I find the idea of the Second Coming of Christ being heralded by a massive barrage of anti-aircraft fire. xD On the actual thing... Yeah, probably just a bit of trigger-happy panicking by the gunners.

Can't wait THAT long. At the speed's we're capable of, the only people able to debrief the astronauts when they return would be a professor of dead languages.

If by 'at once' you mean 'as quickly as the company decides to dole them out' then yes. You're also seeming to think that these resources will simply appear one day by magic. Organizing and launching the operation will take a few years, and the mission itself could take years more, depending on the asteroid. The markets would know about the additional supply for at least weeks, more likely months, and any company capable enough to do this would also go diamond cartel on the whole operation and regulate supply.

Oil companies didn't do offshore drilling until it was profitable, we convinced them by buying enough of their product to have them search out new avenues of acquisition. In the same way, rare earths and other hard-to-find-on-earth materials will, soon enough, mean that mining asteroids and the moon will turn enough of a profit for corporations to attempt it. Already there are asteroids valued in the tens of trillions of dollars worth of material. What I was referring to with publicity is that there's more to a company than its figures; publicity and popular opinion is also a huge factor. Imagine the PR that would come from the first asteroid mining operation, or the spin from a large iron production going completely green by moving offworld?

The same way that we 'convinced' the corporations of Earth that offshore oil rigs, fraking, early steam engines, and trans-atlantic colonies were profitable enough; we let them in on the ground floor, showed them the potential numbers of a profitable venture, and let them bask in the publicity of the thing. Before steam locomotives were ubiquitous, they were short haul freight movers, and before that they were circuit tourist attractions (much like modern spaceflight is becoming). There are tons of minerals and ores on the moon that would be excellent for possible mining operations. We'll need the helium up there for research purposes soon enough. If we can ever get beamed power to work, it's also a nice safe place to stick nuclear reactors without pissing off Greenpeace. It would be an excellent place to stick some very large telescope arrays, especially on the dark side. Hell, get a coalition of Universities together to set up an array on the dark side, and watch the new exoplanets roll in.