So let’s all become i-Thing zombies, staring at pocket-pets in our palms as we wander into traffic on the street, burning up finite resources on frivolous entertainments, and foreclosing the future of our distant descendents’ option to get the heck out of here before the Sun goes Boom.

Oww, that makes my head hurt.

IMHO the greatest benefit of QM to humanity, is that it has forced everyone with a working brain to contemplate deep paradoxes at the heart of reality. That sort of contemplation is one of the most effective ways known, to light an unquenchable fire of curiosity in the minds of the beholders, whereby some of them will seek further knowledge and new discoveries.

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/12/18/how-quantum-mechanics-made-liv/

He asks questions like why we have not colonized the other planets and why we don’t have jet packs, and his answer is that instead we have the internet, high-def TV, DVDs, LED’s etc.

However, we weren’t thinking about the internet, high-def TVs and online shopping which in my view are acceptable alternatives.

For those who say “no more space, feed the hungry and house the homeless,” the undeniable fact of history is that the cuts in the space program have never been used to alleviate poverty: they have been just more cuts, alongside other cuts, in the “slow death of a thousand cuts.”

In point of fact it has been the lofty goals and the efforts to achieve them, that have lifted up our entire society time and again. The will to achieve those goals strengthens the will to fight poverty, discrimination, and ignorance, lifting up “the least among us” and feeding a “virtuous cycle” of hope and results on all fronts.

Congratulations to NASA for a successful test of Orion, and may we soon be on our way to the Moon once again, and then to Mars, and some day, beyond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RbgegMSQL0

43 minutes long but good highlights and experts discussion.

Fourth : Took long enough for me – kept me up till 3 am my time! definitely did read all the graphics & onscreen info though!

Third good at taking selfies? Check. Absolutely yes.

Secondly : Agreed. That worked well – although I gather from the NASA fb page that the feed apparently broke up at just the wrong time for some folks. (I missed the actual launch -clicked in to see replays of it thinking it wouldn’t be on for awhile and stayed with it till after splashdown. With a a few celebratory beers natch!)

Firstly : Yup.

” ..speaking as a Gemini (not my horoscope sign, but the space program going when I first gained sentience) …”

Good one. My first spacecraft launch witnessed would be the very first Columbia space Shuttle – attempt – stayed up late as a little kid wowed by it all and then they aborted it with a computer glitch.

So, in my whole lifetime, this is the furthest I have seen a human-capable spacecraft fly. Great is an understatement – as is about time!