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This thread needs a little relevant humor. NDT vs. Colbert discussing Pluto

How in the heck did we get from "rogue planet mucking with ice giant orbits" to alien cover-ups?

Pluto was only found by accident, while searching for said planet. Anyway... from Wikipedia. Looked this up because all this Pluto excitement had me wondering, "What ever happened to that 'other' unaccounted-for planet?"

Secretly, I was hoping there might be a landscape feature that looked like 'giving the middle finger.'

If there was an Earth size planet out in the Kuiper Belt, there probably wouldn't be a Kuiper Belt anymore. Though I guess there might be a Kuiper Ring.

It's very romantic. It has great cuddle weather.

It still boggles my mind that we even know about it. Finding Pluto was blind luck.

....nibiru? *cough*

If any future generations play classic video games that involve traversing the solar system for (insert reason here) they're going to be a little confused.

Meanwhile, Voyager 1 & 2 are thinking, "Check your privilege."

Alright enough of this! Your eyes are all screwy and there's only one way to fix such a problem. Everyone look at the red light now.

Interesting how these "conspiracy theorists" took it upon themselves to rotate the freaking enlargement of the photo so the 'pyramid' looks like its sitting on a plain somewhere. The darned thing is sticking out of the side of a hill. I have a theory that the conspiracy theory is a conspiracy.

Same goes for just about any sci-fi definition of high-tech. I know for instance, that smart phones are among the most advanced pieces of tech that are available to consumers. But they're also designed to NOT feel like computers. For me, THIS ...still feels high-tech. Even though all of that could fit into... ...which really doesn't feel like much of anything to me. It's a kind of aesthetic, which I'm sure also affects my perception of what a "robot" is in my mind, just not in the literal technical sense.

But they're talking about wanting melee capabilities. I know there's plenty that can be done to make the cockpits secure, but it's still going to be pretty darned dangerous. Like a demolition derby using monster trucks.

Pilots possibly being maimed or killed.

Sounds like they DO want to be able to go all-out with this and avoid legal ramifications. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-versus-japan-robot-fight-214300258.html

I was wondering that too, about how a paintball fight between a pair of slow, lumbering machines, could make for good entertainment. Maybe if the battlefield is large enough it would turn into something more strategic? Could they use an abandoned urban area with enough room to stomp around for half an hour?

I've never wanted a Mustang this badly before.

Mech is probably a better term, but FFS, FASA probably has a copyright on the word. But... yeah. A vehicle that has legs instead of wheels. That still makes it really freaking cool though, no matter what you call it.

Oh relax. Our smoke detectors have radioactive material in them. There's no way they'd get away with putting these on commercial aircraft if it couldn't be done safely.

Many times I've wondered where we would be right now if the current patent system was in effect when humans started developing tools. My guess is: practically nowhere. Just imagine if all "simple machines" were patented.

Am I understanding this right? Seems like they took the yet-to-be-tested fusion reactor prototype and turned it into a propulsion system.

A bigger concern for me isn't whether or not something could withstand the elements. But the amount of ambient energy available on a comet is so ridiculously inconsistent. Near the sun, you have tons of energy. But then you can go hundreds or thousands of years with practically none. That would mean one heck of a hibernation period. But then, panspermia is a rather popular hypothesis. If life got here via a rogue object of some kind, it would've had to have been capable of dealing with these problems.

If you're talking about Star Trek style scanners, you're out of luck. And we've been to nowhere near enough places to have a clue of just how diverse life might be, and whether or not the very building blocks of it could be radically different on other worlds. All we can do now is look for signs of what brought us into being, because life on Earth is currently the only template we have. But if you wanted a smoking gun, I think the first probe to ever do it was Viking. You take a soil sample, put it into an airtight container with some atmosphere, and then test for changes in its composition. That will tell you with a good amount of certainty if there's any kind of organic synthesis going on (such as breathing). But even then, you've got to repeat that experiment many times before anyone will believe it, because a lot of bad things can happen to a probe before it gets where it needs to in order to conduct those tests. The Viking tests yielded positive results for the presence of microorganisms. The trouble is, some of the tests yielded positive results even AFTER the chamber had been baked to an insanely high temperature that should've been enough to kill anything. So either the test was flawed, or Mars has critters with better heat resistance than anything on Earth.

I hope this will be more interesting than that "giant robot fighting" reality show from last year. I'd like to see this be an actual fight to total destruction rather than whatever weird rules they had for that game (which seemed completely scripted, btw). The one robot was demoing shooting paintballs for crying out loud. I can't see how this will ever be actual combat since there's actually people inside. Unless both teams have agreed to do this thing on Sealand and nobody cares if they get maimed or killed.