Adventures in Tab Closing #5, and other random things

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CURRENT FAVORITE:
Porcelain Raft, "Dragonfly"

--I'm just gonna go ahead and dump all the remaining links I have -- no quoting and very little commentary this time around.  And because Iran (and to a certain extent, the Green Movement) is back in the news again, I'm starting with that:

Comments

Charlie Stross' soul is held down by gravity

[childings]

Charlie Stross examines the economics and physics of colonizing other planets, and he isn't at all optimistic. Forget going to planets around other stars - the distances are absurdly excessive. But also forget about colonizing planets in our solar system: not only is it ridiculously expensive just to put a human being on another planet, it isn't even an attractive proposition.

LOL well then enjoy humanity's extinction since that's what's going to happen if we never leave this planet, ever. Since it's only a matter of time before one of several astronomical events destroys this planet (if we don't first).

The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really.

Way to miss the point. Not to mention that I don't hear a lot about people living

Re: Charlie Stross' soul is held down by gravity

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These are definitely some good counterpoints -- space exploration is something we're going to have no choice in doing in the future, and I really hope we can make some progress on that pretty soon. I think Stross' perspective is strictly in the short-term, though, when it is expensive, and we don't have tech yet that can allow us to travel long distances. Which is no reason not to try to develop those technologies, of course, but still. Especially at the slow pace that sort of R&D is going.

[politicette]

* io9: "Your fantasies are not acceptable"
(Basically, what someone on fandomsecrets has to say to others every other day, only much more thorough and eloquen

This one goes to a page about non-mathematical shapes? The link seems to be broken

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It should be fixed now.

[politicette]

Thanks!