In the long term, they're pretty much the most important missions possible - even absent disasters, Earth only has so many resources, so designing and testing the technology for extraterrestrial habitation is rather essential.

Admittedly, there are alternatives to manned colonialization (e.g. seeding), but it seems rather worth exploring multiple options, considering the stakes.

Just because something is valuable in the long term doesn't mean it's justifiable in the short term. Perhaps the route to colonizing Mars is to develop technologies that have nothing to do with going into space right now.

Perhaps we can focus on quantum teleportation instead?

Solve that first, and then we can easily quantum teleport ourselves to anywhere in the solar system. Then reconstitute ourselves at the destination point. And hopefully your device didn’t make a quantum error during the rematerialization process.

You’d have to send the complement quantum teleportation receiver device to Mars, and set it up there first.

Then the device would have to rematerialize you back into fleshy form from pure quantum information residing in your quantum storage buffer.

Oh and make sure that a fly doesn’t enter the quantum teleportation device with you, as you initially get quantum scanned and dematerialized from Earth.

And you must enter the quantum teleportation device without any extra external clothing on. Since version 1 of the device has difficulty differentiating between organic and inorganic materials.

I was thinking more of advances in manufacturing that would make living on Mars more self-sustaining. Labor will be extremely expensive in space, so extreme levels of automation would be very useful.

I doubt the sort of teleportation you are talking about there could be made to work, but if we assume that it could, it would make Mars more like Antarctica than colonial North America. It would be a place to visit, but would just be a research appendage without its own self-sustaining population or manufacturing infrastructure.

I think the other way around: we don't have the knowledge or technology to even make a reasonably feasible teleportation theory.

Once we colonize the solar system, the next frontier to explore will be interstellar travel. I think research on faster than light travel will be what brings teleportation to us rather than the other way around.

I see no reason to think FTL will ever be possible. That FTL is a trope in SF stories doesn't meant it's an aspect of the reality, it just means that it enables one to write more interesting stories.

With our current knowledge and technology, you are right, but nobody knows what we might discover in the future.

Even if FTL were indeed impossible, I think pursuing it would bring interesting discoveries and technologies.

Replace FTL with witchcraft and the argument would be identical.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

So.. invent faster than light travel, go to a distant planet rotating around a distant star, to find a bunch of friendly advanced aliens, that will bequeath us some advanced teleportation technology?

Long-term, there's no solution at all. In the short-term, it's a waste of resources that could be put to better use.

From Wikipedia:

> NASA's budget for fiscal year (FY) 2020 is $22.6 billion. It represents 0.48% of the $4.7 trillion the United States plans to spend in the fiscal year.

NASA uses less than half of 1 percent of the federal budget. If you care so much about budget waste, there are a myriad of other places you could complain about (how about defense or healthcare spending?)

The practical benefits of NASA's science and engineering efforts have been laid out many times in many different places. There are also less practical benefits; for example, how can you quantify the impact that the Blue Marble photo had on the environmental movement? That was only possible because we put someone on the Moon.

Curmudgeons like you will always be around, and those of us who enjoy seeing humanity push itself and accomplish incredible things are happy to ignore you :)

It is technically possible to travel beyond our solar system with current technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...

Well with that mentality why don't we just give up all human endeavours and let entropy wash over us?

Yes, the universe will ultimately end, but there is no reason to believe that travel beyond our solar system is impossible.

We have the technology to do it now, but it would be a suicide mission.

> You can't opt out of competition any more than you can opt out of gravity.

Perhaps not as an individual, but I wonder about as a society - I don't know how we would get to this point, but imagine the sheer potential we as a culture could unlock by moving to a more cooperative model; consider the billions upon billions of person-hours wasted on things like stock trading, internal politicking, and marketing/advertising: all the things that provide no value to the race, but "required" to facilitate interpersonal competition.

Of course, none of that is against your primary point, which is that hard work is still, on the whole, required. It just irritates me to see competition equated to a law of nature; we're not animals, we can choose whether and how competition applies.

Sure, I agree with that. There is plenty of cooperation in the world, when two strong parties come together and say "this will work out better for us if we do it together."

My main point and I think you agree, is that you can never get there from a position of weakness and laze. No one is going to throw in their lot cooperating with you if your ethos is to "do nothing" or if you aren't functioning as an adult (whether an adult individual or an adult nation/country.)

> "Water is blue because it mirrors the sky."

Seeing that people believe this was quite unexpected, at first - it's such an obvious phenomenon looking down into any slightly deep body of water. But on reflection, it makes sense: many (most?) people in the world might live most or all of their lives without going beyond the shorelines of a sea, ocean, or larger lake/river.

It's a good reminder to always be critical of the assumptions you make, and how much they depend on your own context.

(If you ever get the opportunity, visit Crater Lake. The drop from blue to midnight to pitch is beautiful.)

Did you read the whole answer, including the bit at the end?

>...So the major reason the oceans look blue, if they do look blue, is indeed that they mirror the sky.

I contest that, the sea looks blue in overcast days too.

Hum... The sea color changes a lot depending on the sky condition. In overcast days it's way more likely that it will be green than blue.

(And, of course, after it rains there is a good chance the water will actually be green, but it's a different timing and a different shade of green.)

Personally, I much prefer the manual ones, where I can trivially tweak the settings without having to think about it or look away from the road. But that's in part because I usually have the windows down, so constant adjustment is needed to compensate for speed, outside temp, wind speed/direction, etc. - at this point, changing it is second nature. With a touchscreen, even if I could get used to the lack of tactile feedback, it's impossible to know if the right screen is up without looking away from the road (the same issue arises with radio settings).

This demonstrates the amazing savings of crowdsourcing appeals.

It only took 2-3 hours for Apple to assess the PR cost of banning the app and decide it's not worth the income increase.

Throw enough nukes around and Europa might start to look a pleasant alternative.

At that point Kessler syndrome will be the least of our problems.

Every nuke on earth would not do that. The Earth is really big, and even a nuke would not affect a large portion of it.

And that's in the best case. In reality, consumers don't get anywhere near a local maximum, as they are neither well-informed nor entirely rational.

Well, IIRC no BD-10 ever actually went supersonic.

Or the rest of Y2020, for that matter.

`datetime.fromisoformat()`, as of 3.7 :D

Though `dateutil` is still recommended for most cases.

That parses a subset and is only guaranteed to be compatible with Python’s “.toisoformat()”. (I imagine it would be backwards compatible to expand it to cover all of ISO8601 and I can’t tell why they haven’t.)

ISO8601 is quite large, they probably don't want to ship that big standard library modules which would parse 100% of ISO8601