If you compare the total mining efforts of the entirety of human civilization, it will about to a small enough fraction of the moon that it would do less to destabilize the orbit of the moon than energy loss due to tidal forces.

Most of these costs are in terms of energy, one of the most plentiful things in space. Also, if we do things right (a huge if, I know), the bigger idea is to bootstrap it by sending enough tools to make the tools you need to extract and refine resources. This doesn’t require a von Neumann machine since we can control them, either directly or remotely. Also, if we are going to extract resources in space, a lot of infrastructure will need to be built first, which is cheaper if we use resources that are already in space. And as the saying goes, the surface of the moon is halfway to anywhere in the solar system.

Moths wearing jeans, eating beans.

Don’t you hate how you will relive those minor mess-ups that barely matter for years after? Most people probably don’t care if they can even remember it.

I’m absolutely not going to buy a mapping robot vacuum unless it keeps that info local, or on a server I can host. I have one right now with cloud controls, but it’s only for the schedule.

That is just brutal.

I went through this in my middle teens. It took 10 or 20 years to go away.

I’ve never been diagnosed with tinnitus, but I’ve been living with it for decades. I mostly have a low-level, staticky whine, but sometimes I’ll have attacks that are high-pitched, loud, and painful. I will also rarely have bouts where my hearing is muffled and definitely feels like someone is behind you blocking ambient sounds. The in front of you part is probably blocked out by our eyes showing nothing there.

English is perfectly reasonable… if you think taking root words from 3 or 4 languages as a core and fleshing it out with words from another half dozen languages and stitching it together with grammar that kind of matches a couple of those languages is reasonable.

There’s no real evidence that people are smarter today than they were 5000 years or so ago. We just have more knowledge/technology.

Here’s a link to the list of JEST approved programs. After some brief poking around, I also discovered they’re doing a exoplanet search around Altair, which is completed.

It’s what helps Dianetics stay in the Bestsellers lists.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to implying here. Is there some industrial espionage happening, where you think Iran is going to lose some secret to the other nuclear powers? Or do you think the international watchdog isn’t going to report on the facilities and activities they’re mandated to monitor?

I once had the perfect job for biphasic sleeping. I would get up at 4 AM, work and be home by about 1 PM, sleep til 4 PM, stay up til 11 PM, then back to bed til 4 AM. 8 hours of sleep a day, 7 or 8 hours for work, 7 hours in the afternoon and evening for whatever I wanted, and I felt well-rested the whole time. It’s the only thing I miss about that job.

The atmospheric temperature of Jupiter varies, but is well below zero degrees, Celsius or Fahrenheit. This means you could make a habitable shelter using neutral buoyancy to keep it in the desirable pressure ranges simply by keeping it at room temperature. You could even do the hot air balloon technique and have a large balloon heated to possibly above room temperature to allow for a larger habitat with stronger materials, so long as the net density is about one atmosphere.

None of this solves the question of how you power it, or do that orbital insertion in the first place, but Dr. Robert Forward discusses the mechanics of a similar idea in his novel Saturn Rukh.

I can appreciate what you’re saying, but it’s kind of like action adventure films. They mix the genres because the audience they’re targeting wants that. So, if women are interested in romance, they can expand the fantasy readership by putting that in there. I’ve read some that aren’t bad and some that are pretty tiring, but Allen Dean Foster wove a romance element into the Flinx series now and then, and it was a key part of the Spellsinger series. So not really just a women-only thing, and likely for the same reasons - expanding the market for the books.

In basketball, you must always have two limbs touching the ground when you have the ball, unless you are standing, shooting, or jumping. Why? I don’t like basketball and think it would be funny as he’ll.

I prefer to think of merging it into the gestalt.

I forgot about the orbs. Maybe I’m less of a wizard type and more of a lamp type than I thought.

There is generally a greater range in the physical capabilities of either sex than there are between the sexes, and in our modern world the number of jobs that require brute strength, those traditionally done by men, are progressively fewer simply due to the benefits of advanced machinery.

As for mental tasks, there are almost none that men or women are better at for any other reason than social programming and, again, in those the variability within the sexes are very nearly as great as those between the sexes.

So, at this point, the biggest reason for gendered tasks is tradition, which is generally the stupidest reason to do anything. So it’s just as ridiculous to bring gender into the task in the first place.