Tim Kreider Wrote:It may be that my friend Rob is right, that we’re all fucked and the best thing to do now is hunker down, rig up some solar panels, and start seriously gardening. I am still haunted by Cormac McCarthy’s comment that if you could have told a group of intelligent people in the year 1900 what the coming century would bring, their response would’ve been: “You’ve got to be shitting me.” But I tend to subscribe, believe it or not, to the scientific and political optimism of science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who in his books frankly acknowledges the seriousness and complexity of the problems we face but also envisions a future in which we use our intelligence and technology to solve them. As he writes in Antarctica, optimism is not some easy, empty-headed, cheerleaderish denial of the facts, but a stubborn, willful act of faith in the face of hopelessness. He predicts, “It will be a difficult century, and ugly, but I don't think that in the end people are so stupid as to kill themselves off.” Robinson envisions futures in which no one is hungry or homeless, in which health care is a right, no one owns land, there’s a cap on personal wealth, and women have truly equal status. Which I suppose may sound like some hippy-dippy California liberal utopia. But we live in a country where slavery is illegal, suffrage is universal, people can practice any religion they want and say anything they want against the government. Europe is unified and at peace; the Soviet Union disappeared without a fight. Not very long ago this would’ve seemed like an implausibly utopian vision.

Quote:Mars whacked by object bigger than Pluto

Quote:Cassini spots liquid hydrocarbons on Titan.

Quote:That's it. Sometime, Post-OGJ, Benjamin will be starting his business: Black Aeronaut Spaceframes - "Creative aerospace solutions for the discnerning spacer."

EDIT: This will probably be where our Nubian J-Type comes from. Among other nifty-cool things (The Tie series, X, Y, A, and B-wing fighters, Talons and EDI's from Stealth...).