http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/the-left-right-political-spectrum-is-bogus/373139/
"The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus
It might be a division between social identities based on class or region or race or gender, but it is certainly not a clash between different ideas."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/plans-for-worlds-largest-telescope-may-give-us-clues-to-existence-of-alien-life-9554613.html

"The Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope, will be the most powerful telescope in the world and will be able to analyse atmospheres of planets and solar systems up to 30 light years away"

The article's spin on 'searching for alien life' does a disservice in that analyzing the atmosphere of planets in our corner of the galaxy has a far more important purpose: Helping determine whether planets in other nearby solar systems could support human life, and thus help determine which star systems to prioritize for interstellar colonization. In that sense projects like this are literally the most important thing humans are doing right now.

I must admit I think 'finding alien life' is an almost irrelevant goal.

Hilarious:

@Mr_Mike_Clarke
This shocking image shows the dangers of Superglue.

https://twitter.com/Mr_Mike_Clarke/status/479927887601360896

> In that sense projects like this are
> literally the most important thing humans
> are doing right now.

Yeah… Sure. Teaching girls to read is an indulgent distraction, right?

Also, inoculation & micronutrients are for fags.








Sometimes I think Gene Roddenberry and Robert Heinlein must share their own piquant corner of Hell, spinning in an endless and precise two-minute cycle of poking each other's eyes out with soup spoons while Charlie Rich's 1974 chart-topper "Did you Happen to See the Most Beautiful Girl in the World" loops in complete playings, arhythmically, from a mid-60's AM-band clock radio sitting on a nearby dinette.

(The country music thing may* represent an especially deep psychological fear on my part. Probably not, though... So know that, OK?… If you find yourself tempted to compose a fantasy realm which envelopes a planet of daydreaming ninnies in a narcotic cocoon of semi-literate wish fulfillment and shallow scientific understanding, there will be consequences.)



Thing is, I remember life before Star Wars, y'know? And then I went to college (college!) and dated all these young women whose (even-younger) cosmologies were composed around a force which surrounds all living things, and introductory philosophy classes didn't help.

*Hey...

> Yeah… Sure. Teaching girls to read is an indulgent distraction, right?

No, but spending trillions on pointless wars is.

It's objectively the most "important" thing because it's an action toward becoming an interstellar species. If you can't see why that's going to be considered the most historically significant transitional event in human history 100,000 years from now, you need to think about it a little more.

Crid, what we're doing now is for the very first time in our history, creating a proper map of our stellar neighborhood. These maps will form the basis of our first travels to other star systems. If you honestly claim this is insignificant then I submit you're being dishonest in order to insult someone on a blog, and I hope you're simply being dishonest, because the only alternative is that you genuinely cannot see it.

Are you 13 years old? Ever kiss a girl? Smoke a joint? Wreck a motorbike?

I'm certain that in the improbable circumstance that humanity persists for another 100,000 years, people will look back at your life and wonder why you were such an asshole, about outer space and the other things.