A friend told me over the phone that Toyota had announced that the next model of the Prius will be a 17-mpg V-6 non-hybrid. Turns out that about.com actually has an article to that effect. Dated April 1, of course. Go to about.com autos and search for Prius. I don't know if the article will still be there tomorrow.
Virgle: The Adventure of many lifetimes For thousands of years, the human race has spread out across the Earth, scaling mountains and plying the oceans, planting crops and building highways, raising skyscrapers and atmospheric CO2 levels, and observing, with tremendous and unflagging enthusiasm, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply across our world's every last nook, cranny and subdivision. An invitation. Earth has issues, and it's time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.
It's humanity that has issues, not Earth. As much as the colonisation of other worlds has been a fantasy for eons, our place is here. Running away from our responsibilities isn't going to change them, or us. If we can't make a go of it here, where the living is easy, Mars is not an option.
I take it you're not filling out the application or submitting a video? Fine. Better odds for me being picked.
Never been to Underwater city, can't imagine you'd see much, the Minnesota river is not known for it's clarity. I've been on the MSU campus a number of times, but never had a chance to see the pyramid. edit: but then again, much of what you might read is not as it seems ;-)
Yep. That's the article. And it's still there today, April 2. Let's see, where would I rather live, on a planet with an atmosphere, albeit one with rising CO2, and with lots of water, though fresh clean water is becoming less common that it was, or a planet with no atmosphere, where I'd be dead if my space suit or an airlock sprung a leak, and where there's no surface water at all, and might or might not be a minuscule amount of water under the surface and getting it out would probably cost a thousand times more than mining oil on Earth, and where the sun provides less light because it's farther away, but more ultraviolet because there's no atmosphere, and I'm not sure, but I think there's less if any magnetic field to deflect the solar wind of particulate radiation... Hmmm... hard choice. Not! I'll stay here on Earth, thank you very much. Even as an April Fool's joke, the idea of "colonizing" a planet without an atmosphere is lunatic.
Reminds me of George Carlin, who said, "Save the planet! HA. I've got news for you, people. The PLANET is going to be just fine. We may not be on it anymore, but the PLANET will still be here. The PLANET created us so it could have plastic..."
