Great music for sure.

So here we go with the same song and dance of "It's the people's fault.  Feel guilty and give up more tax dollars ok".

It's not the peoples fault.  Quit misusing tax dollars and laundering money for your own personal gain ok?

oldpbnoob wrote: I watch shows about whether warp drive propulsion, phasers, light speed travel, artificial gravity and other Star Trek fantasy is ever going to be a reality and most often it seems that on the big questions, the answer is "probably not."

• No poverty, hunger, etc. (Essentially a utopian future as far as Earth is concerned.)  My question would be what happened to all the slackers?  You know, the guys that would rather play video games than join Star Fleet and make the Universe a better place.  Did they all suddenly become more mature or are they still sponging off of society?  Or were they eliminated for the common good of the rest of Earth civilization?
• Phasers.  The military will never have phasers.  The urge to misuse the stun setting would just be too great and eventually someone would lose an eye.  (Or get accidentally vaporized.)

I've thought of other examples at times, but these are my main ones.  Feel free to add your own.

Is this one step closer or something completely different?

 Taken from DiscoverMagazine.com
9: Teleportation Gets Real

by Kathy A. Svitil
From the January 2005 issue; published online January 3, 2005


The science-fiction fantasy of teleportation became reality this year, at least on the atomic scale. In independent papers published in June, groups led by experimental physicists Rainer Blatt of the University of Innsbruck in Austria and by David Wineland of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, described using laser pulses to transfer information from one atom to another in a different location. Although their methods were slightly different, the results were exactly the same: The second atom became completely indistinguishable from the first, just as if information had disappeared from one atom and appeared at the other one without traveling through the space in between.

The distances involved are slight—less than 200 micrometers—and the technique works only for information about the atoms, not the atoms themselves, making it a far cry from the images conjured up by Star Trek’s transporter. Nevertheless, quantum teleportation is a giant step toward one of physicists’ most ambitious goals: building a quantum computer—an ultrafast, supersecure, huge-memory number-crunching device that uses atomic particles instead of transistors to retain and process information.

No stun option?

Taken from FoxNews.com

One if by land … lasers if by sea.

A futuristic laser mounted on a speeding cruiser successfully blasted a bobbing, weaving boat from the waters of the Pacific Ocean -- the first test at sea of such a gun and a fresh milestone in the Navy's quest to reoutfit the fleet with a host of laser weapons, the Navy announced Friday.

"We were able to have a destructive effect on a high-speed cruising target," chief of Naval research Rear Adm. Nevin Carr told FoxNews.com.

The test occurred Wednesday near San Nicholas Island, off the coast of Central California in the Pacific Ocean test range, from a laser gun mounted onto the deck of the Navy’s self-defense test ship, former USS Paul Foster.

In a video of the event, the small boat can be seen catching fire and ultimately bursting into flames, a conflagration caused by the navy's distant gun. Some details of the event were classified, including the exact range of the shot, but Carr could provide some information: "We're talking miles, not yards," Carr said.

The Navy, Army and other armed forces have been working to incorporate so called "directed energy" laser weapons in a range of new guns, from tank-mounted blasters to guns on planes or unmanned balloons. But this marks the first test of a laser weapon at sea -- and proof that laser rifles are no mere Buck Rogers daydream.

“This is the first time a [high-energy-laser], at these power levels, has been put on a Navy ship, powered from that ship and used to defeat a target at-range in a maritime environment,” said Peter Morrison, program officer for the Office of Naval Research.

"The Navy is moving strongly towards directed energy," Carr told FoxNews.com.

The weapon, called the maritime laser demonstrator, was built in partnership with Northrop Grumman. It focused 15 kilowatts of energy by concentrating it through a solid medium -- hence the name.

"We call them solid state because they use a medium, usually something like a crystal," explained Quentin Saulter, the research office's program officer. It was used in Wednesday's demonstration against a small boat, but Carr told FoxNews.com that this and other types of laser weaponry could be equally effective against planes and even targets on shore.

"To begin to address a cruise missile threat, we'd need to get up to hundreds of kilowatts," Carr said.

The Navy is working on just such a gun of course.

Called the FEL -- for free-electron laser, which doesn't use a gain medium and is therefore more versatile -- it was tested in February consuming a blistering 500 kilovolts of energy, producing a supercharged electron beam that can burn through 20 feet of steel per second.

The FEL will easily get into the kilowatt power range. It can also be easily tuned as well, to adjust to environmental conditions, another reason it is more flexible than the fixed wavelength of solid-state laser. But the Navy doesn't expect to release megawatt-class FEL weapons until the 2020s; among the obstacles yet to be overcome, the incredible power requirements of the FEL weapons require careful consideration.

Also in the Navy's futuristic arsenal: a so-called "rail gun," which uses an electomagnetic current to accelerate a non-explosive bullet at several times the speed of sound.

Railguns are even further off in the distance, possibly by 2025, the Navy has said. But the demonstration of the maritime laser demonstrator this week proves that some laser weapons are just around the corner: Northrop Grumman experts aim to have the final product ready by June of 2014.

"One of the things that amazes me about this business is that the future is getting closer every day," Carr said.

It took me a while, but it dawned on me why Darurs post bothered me. All these situations, aside from saving mankind, are activities that should be carried out by private enterprises. Neither mining, nor semiconductor manufacturing are activites that should be carried out by the government. If mining is such a tremendous and profitable activity, let the private sector have at it.  Your post is actually a near perfect support for reasons why space exploration should be privatized.

Rofl_Mao wrote: So, because we have "stalled," we should just keep cutting funding until we have nothing left to go on and rely on for-profit companies that have no interest in furthering humanity other than their own interests?  Even if private companies wanted to go to new planets (or hell, even the moon (which is completely possible)) to mine their resources, it would cost way more than any company could afford or be willing to risk. And that is the major problem that we have with privatizing the space industry. I'm not trying to say we should travel through space and time, which I agree is well beyond our grasp for the next couple hundred years, I'm saying that we should be able to reach within our own solar system in a relatively short time - if we put the effort into it. Edit: punctuation and formatting

Gubmint has a way of funding the private sector when it benefits them.  

What happened to Johny Private Sector Moonshot from England?

So we as a country should invest billions upon billions of dollars into research and development so that commercial companies can make money? Seems that much like oil shales. They aren't profitable to use unless oil is above X number of dollars per gallon. I would think the same principles should apply to building spacecraft for the purpose of mining. Why should the government foot the bill for building clean rooms in outerspace so companies worth a kagillion dollars can make semiconductors easier? Answer is, we shouldn't. The people standing to make a profit from such endevours should be the ones footing the bill.