And yet despite all this amazing intellectual capability we seem somehow unable to balance a government budget, year after year after year. Hmmmmmm....

Perhaps we should just leave it at "there are humans that can do incredible things, but most humans just sit around and argue about who should be allowed to do incredible things, who should be allowed to allow these things, and who should get credit for those things if they ever happen to get done."

In that context, the technical wizardry isn't the miracle, the miracle is that the stupid monkeys could cooperate long enough to actually get it done.

Everything is amazing and nobody's happy.

haha, nice! yes the great Louis C.K. routine. "You're sitting in chair. But it's thousands of feet in the air and hurtling along at hundreds of miles an hour but you're perfectly safe. Yet we complain about the taste of the coffee not being just right." to summarize.

well played :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itn8TwFCO4M

There's a certain kind of person that's drawn to politics and usually they are not the enterprising productive type.

Or that fossil fuels are incredible...

Discovery doesn't use fossil fules. The main engines are powered by oxygen and hydrogen and the solid rocket boosters are made up of ammonium perchlorate, aluminum and iron oxide.

Hydrogen is a storage medium. Fossil fuels are used as the energy source to make the rocket propellant.

I can also guarantee you that fossil fuels were used in the production and distribution of the rocket boosters and that the airplane the video was taken from wouldn't be flying if it didn't have any jet fuel in it's tank.

Humans are smart creatures, but we shouldn't kid ourselves into thinking we would be where we are at now if it weren't for a cheap, albeit limited, supply of highly concentrated energy.

By that logic, fossil fuel is a storage medium too. Solar energy was used as the energy source to make fossil fuel.

True, with the difference being humans (and our predecessors) had to wait hundreds of thousands of years for the fossil fuels to form under the immense pressure (and additional energy input) of the earth.

And you believe that the value of this observation is what, exactly?

That we are wasting energy which has been stored and untapped for hundreds of thousands of years? Do we really expect that our ancestors will be better able to exploit this value than we are... without our given expliotation? Will this be true forever? Should we just let that stored energy remain forever?

Ceteris parabis, we will extract exactly as much value from our ancestors as makes sense. And our ancestors will do exactly the same. I do not begrudge them that any mire than I begrudge us this current state of affairs.

Fossil fuels are only incredible because humans figured out how to use them. They have no inherent value apart from our minds.