Oh my Bob, please stick to movies. If you're serious then you're waaay out of your element on this one. When I saw the title for this I knew it was going to be trouble. See, gamers can be the nerdy sort (I mean that as a complement), and the same can be said for scientists. Therefore, there's bound to be some gamer/scientist overlap on the Escapist and there's a distinct possibility we may know a thing or two. As a person who has studied science for a good portion of his life, I'll try to address your grievances even though a lot of people already have. I'll give my version, I guess. Plus there's some things on here that aren't exactly right. So:
1. The goddamn jetpacks:
The problem with the concept of a jetpack is, or a least was, the problem of the power to weight ratio of the device. We only recently have materials that are light and strong enough to allow a jetpack to lift off and not be held down by its own weight plus the person controlling it. Also, the things in use now aren't really "jetpacks" because I'm almost certain there's no jet turbine on them. They're merely short term rocket engines that can scoot a guy around for a few minutes. Optimistically (last I heard), the makers of these hope to eventually have one that can last 20 minutes. Still, you have to be under a certain weight to use one, the training is extensive, and the units themselves cost a shit-ton. I still want one though. Flying cars actually may prove useful, but more as an emergency vehicle, or a cheaper, more easily controlled alternative to a helicopter. Not a thing for everyday use.
2. Lab grown meat:
Okay, I admit that I know worlds more about aerospace than I ever will about biotech, but I just see glaring logistical problems with this. The most obvious being
where the hell is all this lab grown meat going to come from ?! Look, if you want a lab grown liver for a transplant, that's one thing. The average human liver weighs about 3 lbs (googled). To make one in a petri dish of sorts in more feasible due to size. The average cow can yield up to about 600 lbs of beef (also googled). This is for steak cuts as well as the lesser stuff that can be ground up for burgers, fillers and such. From my understanding, and once again I'm not a biotech guy, creating cultured organs/flesh is a very precise business. To create 600 lbs of cultured flesh that may or may not even be palatable to us, seems to be an undertaking several orders of magnitude more complex and expensive than simply raising cattle. I can't even imagine how that much could be grown let alone what would have to be an astronomical cost of doing so. You could have a burger, but it would probably cost a few hundred dollars. And while those assholes at PETA may leave you alone, the anti-GMO nuts would go ballistic. Both groups are full of idiots, in my opinion. It just doesn't seem like a feasible solution to what I, frankly, don't even believe is a problem.
3. Space!:
Now here's something I know quite a bit about and am very passionate about, so maybe there a bias here, but most of this is quite well accepted by engineers. If you want to know why we haven't landed on Mars ask a politician, not a scientist. While they looked cool as hell, the Space Shuttles (the STS system) was a massive misstep by NASA. If we'd continued to develop more advanced heavy lift vehicles; successors to the Saturn V, for example, the Moon and Mars would be easy and done by now. But that's not to say those missions would even be hard as it is. A couple things though:
Rabidkitten said:
Whats up with the human space program?
Answer: It's useless. And I'm serious, it's completely fucking useless. Now why is it useless? Because people in space is unnecessary and will always be unnecessary. Robots and AI are the key tools to space exploration,[...]Tell me who was better for scientists, Spirit and Opportunity or Neil Armstrong? Spirit and Opportunity killed the human space program.
Really? First off, do you mean Neil Armstrong or Armstrong/Aldrin/Collins themselves, or the six Apollo missions as a whole? Because if that's true then the answer is Apollo by a long shot. The manned lunar missions furthered our understanding of the Moon much, much more than the MER rovers furthered our understanding of Mars. Hell, I'd say they did better than all the Mars probes combined. Apollo certainly did better than all the lunar probes. I had an opportunity to attend a talk given by Steven Squyres, who was the head honcho for the MER rovers (Spirit and Opportunity). He talked a bit about the project and was quite pleased that the rovers lasted more than three times as long as intended. The mission was a huge success. However, he was absolutely adamant that a human mission had to take place because, in his words, "It would take a human 6 hours to get the same amount of data it took those rovers 6 months to gather." There are a whole slew of reasons that manned missions are inherently better, I'm not going to list them all because this post is long enough, but if you think I'm full of shit, say so and then I'll list them.
Gluzzbung said:
Hate to say it, but the reason we're still on Earth is because any type of bacteria on another planet would kill everyone it touched, most likely.
Actually it's most likely the opposite (fuck I'm coming off as a douche on this post). It would be next to impossible for an alien microbial organism to infect us. The reason is this: You know why we don't get Dutch Elm disease, and trees don't catch a cold? It's because the pathogens that cause those problems have evolved to be tailored to their hosts. A tree won't catch a cold because the cold viruses have adapted themselves to make their home in our warm, comfy bodies, and not in wood grain. There are sicknesses that dogs get that we don't and a dog is much closer to the way humans operate. An alien bacteria would have pretty much zero chance of infecting a person because it hasn't evolved in any way to use us as hosts. It's never touched a single terrestrial organism, let alone humans specifically. We'd be as alien to it as it would be to us.
Any-fucking-how... The reason a Mars mission or further lunar missions haven't taken place is because NASA is making some truly bizarre decisions on what is needed to accomplish them. After spending so much on an only moderately useful space station, and keeping up the shuttles, they felt that they had to justify those costs by including them in the mission architecture. This meant that you couldn't just fly to the Moon or fly to Mars, you
had to use the space station in the process somehow, so NASA could give a better excuse for it being there. This lead to a policy in which every person who had a tech concept insisted that what they were developing was absolutely necessary for a Mars mission in order to get funding, even though they most certainly weren't. The mission concept simply got too bloated by this and has stagnated as a result. Fortunately, private industry has been picking of the pieces of the manned space program at an alarming rate. In fact, the private sector has accomplished more in the last five years than NASA has in the last 30, one company intends to do a Mars mission by 2025. If private industry can accomplish the first human landing then good! Both NASA and the RSA deserve to be humiliated by their lack of clear vision and engineering common sense that these guys have.
4. Hamster-bear:
I'll admit that this I'm not that qualified to on the specifics. It just seems to me that the amount of genetic manipulation require to accomplish this would result in health problems for the animal. I'm somewhat sure that certain animals simply aren't able to be certain sizes. But I'm not a geneticist, and I've been writing long enough as I could do about three more pages on space but won't. That being said, I find no use for a hamster-sized bear, but could find a use for a bear-sized hamster. I'd have to be able to ride and mount two chain-guns on it. People would think it'd be awfully cute until I opened fire. I'd feed it artificial meat and mount it by flying to the top with my jetpack... on Mars. Yeah, that's it.
