[Reality Blows]

Hopefully the technology will come about one day to eradicate this terrible disease. I feel sorry for your friend and others who are afflicted by this. It is harsh reality but the only way to over come it is to keep advancing our medical technology, one day this plague will no longer be a threat to us.

[China prepares their first space station]

Hopefully this will show NASA that the world will not wait for us to take the next big step in space. Other countries will be progressing along and not only do they have some ambitious plans, they also have the political commitment to get it done.

The politicians here seem to think that there's no point in going back to the moon and we should just dither in LEO. I fear that we will one day get a rude awakening when we see a chinese flag being planted on the moon.

The politicians here, that includes President Obama, need to grow a backbone and do something ambitious in space. Constellation was bold and had a vision. And now it seems like we will be staying in LEO for a while, until 2025 when they will hopefully land on an asteroid (but no doubt there will be considerable debate and squabling when it comes time to work on that)

If we could go to the moon in the 60's, right after the dawn of the space age, who's to say we can't go back there today? Or even go to Mars and beyond? There's a lot out there, and I expect to see a second space race between NASA and CNSA. RoskoCosmos will probably not do as much as either of those two, but will probably help NASA, same goes for the ESA. It looks like JAXA also has plans of their own to build a robotic moon base by 2020.

I think our best chance right now is the private space agency. They won't be going past LEO but they will definitely cause more interest in space, which is what we need to get the government to do bold things again.

[China prepares their first space station]

Do you honestly think China is funding a space programme for the benefit of all mankind? They're doing it to posture, the same reason as the US did it, and the funding will dry up whenever it's no longer convenient, same as US.

It may be posturing, but at least a lot of good comes from it.

[Protecting Dead Alliances...is it Wrong?]

They should receive protection for a couple of weeks after the alliance disbands. After that though they'd probably be considered fair game for tech raiding.

[China prepares their first space station]

Its nice to see that finally a country that is not the US is taking serious interest in space.

I think it is shameful what the US is doing to its space program, We cant afford things that will benefit all of mankind, but we can afford bombs to bomb third world nations with oil.

I think if the US keeps this up, we will lose superpower status.

I don't know if shameful is the right word, but the guys in the 60's and 70's were progressing a lot faster than we are now. If NASA had been smart enough to use the Mars Direct plan we could've already had manned habitations on Mars. Instead, they gave George Bush Sr. a $450 billion Mars ticket that consisted of orbital construction facilities, moon refueling stations, orbital drydock staions, and massive spacecraft that carried all of its provisions.

When they did that the Mars plan was banished to a netherworld of political and economic impossibility (It's pretty sad though that we're willing to spend $700 billion a year on the "defense" budget and not $450 billion for a Mars landing)

If anyone is interested about the "live off the land" approach that Mars Direct takes, you should read the book "The Case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin. That plan only costs $50 billion, for comparison the Apollo program cost about $170 billion in today's money.

[Possible fossils on Mars?]

not too familiar with the current martian theories of possible life. would they be looking for unicellular or multicellular organism fossils?

We don't really know what we will find there when we investigate. We just have to wait and find out, because the only thing we have to go off of is the controversial martian meteorite. People have been studying and debating that for 14 years with no clear answer. Further investigation at fossil sites will be necessary to truly find out.

[World's first space dive]

The idea that this could possibly be of value to astronauts needing to 'bail out' of errant spacecraft is ludicrous.

Spacecraft orbit at much greater heights, making a bailout impossible. Craft that develop problems before achieving orbit (or those, like Columbia, that have problems during re-entry) are traveling at thousands of miles per hour. Just try stepping outside at that speed. Other than having your arms, legs and head torn off in an instant, and the rest of you turned into a thin red paste spread across the sky, you should be absolutely fine.

There is zero scientific value to this. Hence the reason it's sponsored by Red Bull and not NASA.

While I admit this is mainly being done to break the record and get some publicity for Red Bull's extreme sports campaign there is something that can be gained from this. Spacecraft orbit a lot higher than that, but if they have issues, then it could descend to a safe enough distance for the astronauts onboard to leave the ship.

The reason it's not being sponsored by NASA is because as we've seen in the past, they really don't have any type of discussions or provisions for rescue missions out in space. They pretty much give the people on board one chance to get things right, if not they're dead or they narrowly escape with the help of mission control like the Apollo 13 mission.

The astronauts onboard Columbia could've been rescued. The engineers knew that some damage had been done to the heat shield, but the people in charge decided to not really look into it because there "wasn't much we can do". There could've been a space walk to repair the damaged part, or Atlantis could've been launched on a risky rescue mission.

But that is the topic of another debate. As it stands, it's just pretty cool to see someone jumping for 120,000 feet.

[The Aliens Are Coming! Well no....not really....]

I think that overall this was a little pessimistic. There could be thousands of intelligent civilizations in the stars but don't use radio or TV equipment to communicate with eachother. Maybe these civilizations are intelligent but have no interest aside from maintaining their own civilization on their own world.

Since the only way we could determine if there was/is another civilization out there is by radio contact, there really is no way to know how many are out there. I think that it would be prety low though, considering that of the millions of species on Earth only one is "intelligent" (but there are a few others which communicate with eachother verbally and use tools).

I think the prospect of life beyond Earth is pretty likely. We see life living in the most extreme environments on Earth, so what's to say there aren't aquatic life forms living beneath the surface of Europa? Or methane based life living in the thick atmosphere of Titan? There's also the possibiliy of fossils on Mars of life that could have existed there billions of years ago.

These three worlds are the most likely to contain life in our solar system, so the best place to start looking would be there. Do not be discouraged by the fact that we have found hundreds of gas giants but only one exoplanet in the habitable zone- this is just a sampling bias, it's a lot easier for astronomers to detect these huge planets than it is for them to find one the size of Earth.

Over time our technology will develop where we can actually view exoplanets in high detail. The possibility of manned interstellar travel is there too, though that is quite far off from now, as we haven't even been to another planet yet.

As long as humans devote more of our resources to space exploration and technological advancement, I firmly believe we will discover life elsewhere within the next 30 years.

The fact of the matter is that our technology to detect alien life is pretty weak right now, so the only correct answer to alien civilizations and extraterrestrial life is simply, "We don't know". Life here on Earth could have just been a miraculous fluke, or it could be pretty common throughout the galaxy. But the fact that there are billions of stars in our galaxy, and the fact that life is in extreme abundance here on Earth, means that it could happen elsewhere. It's only a matter of time I think until we find life beyond Earth.

[CN Generations and Eras]

The history of this game is a lot clearer for me now. thanks.

[Would you like to read an interview with admin?]

I would be interested to read such an interview.

[The "ex-Hegemony" web cluster]

I have read the cybernations history of the first couple of years, and I enjoyed the intrigue and simplicity of essentially the same sides getting into different conflicts.

But I look at todays' alliance politics and I am utterly confused. How can there be global wars if every alliance is connected to each other in some sort of way?

[From Cyberpunk to the Zombie apocolypse]

This was very well written and very relevant. Especially the bit about the road and the obsession with the end of the world. Is it because some people's lives have become so meaningless they have nothing to look forward to other than what happens after the apocalypse? Movies like the road are quite realistic and should frighten everyone about such a prospect as the post-apocalypse.