dudettenoire asked: Considering our past and our present, how do you see human beings evolving over the course of the next 100,000 years?
I’m pretty sure we’ll start genetically modifying ourselves, you know “correcting” things about humans to make us more suitable. That’s where we’re headed right now, and we’ll probably continue in that direction until some mass extinction event; a war, a CME, a meteor, a disease. The fact is that we won’t last for another hundreds of years at the pace we’re going now, so we will find ways to make changes. We’ll survive. As far as space travel…I can’t even fathom what that would be like. There are too many technical issues right now. I can’t even give you a clear picture of what I think it would be like for us to branch out to other planets. It’ll probably start with the Moon and Mars, for scientists, and stay that way for a while. Maybe some ships will sail out in the far future to far away places. We’re a long way away from that, politically and technologically.
astronomynerd asked: why haven't you been on in so long?):
I’ve been very busy lately: working on a novel, teaching myself math, reading voraciously. I’m about to head out and get some sushi. It never ends for me.
Chasma Boreale, a long, flat-floored valley, cuts deep into Mars’ north polar icecap. Its walls rise about 4,600 feet, or 1,400 meters, above the floor. Where the edge of the ice cap has retreated, sheets of sand are emerging that accumulated during earlier ice-free climatic cycles. Winds blowing off the ice have pushed loose sand into dunes and driven them down-canyon in a westward direction.
This scene combines images taken during the period from December 2002 to February 2005 by the Thermal Emission Imaging System instrument on NASA’s Mars Odyssey was part of a special series of images marking the orbiter as the longest-working Mars spacecraft in history.
