To get an idea of the scale of the thing, here is a picture of the comet relative to the size of London :

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/11/Comet_over_L...

I had no idea the thing was so small. To get something to intercept an object that size traveling at 1000's mph is an amazing feat!

I'm not sure about that status of the harpoons, but I generally use http://reddit.com/r/space to keep up with all of my space related news. Article quality is generally very high and there are a lot nice folks over there who answer questions in the comments.

Thanks, I'll be sure to keep my eye on that sub

I don't think we've gotten any further details than the fact that they didn't fire when they should have. There's a press conference at 2 pm CET.

Textbook comment right here.

Yes it is golden age as long as you disregard percentages and trend.

"Some 805 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth." http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats

Economy seems like a boiler ready to explode, rich-poor chasm is widening like hell.

Global peace doesn't look very rosy either.

Not to mention what's happening on the environmental front.

All in all, sorry but I cannot feel the joy of "us humans doing well". We don't. Some technical sectors are doing well - that's all. Socially, ethically, politically we're still at middle ages and speeding backwards.

My 2 cents (which is most than millions of people can spare ;-) )

805 million means the number is down more than 100 million over the last decade, and 209 million lower than in 1990–92. In the same period, the prevalence of undernourishment has fallen from 18.7 to 11.3 percent globally and from 23.4 to 13.5 percent for developing countries.

Source: http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/

That's insane, I had no idea there was any improvement, let alone that much! I just casually assumed the number would be growing along with our total global population, but to know it's actually decreasing as population increases? Wow.

If you're in the mood for good news, 2012 was estimated to be the most peaceful year (percentage of humans to dies by violence) in human (and hominid) history. Slight regression in 2013 & 2014, but still.

The world is big and there are lots of problems, especially when you think of suffering on the scale of millions, but a lot of things are getting better. If you visit some places that are behind on care for orphans, you'll be struck by how foreign it is to see small children begging, stealing and fending for themselves. It doesn't exist in many many places, but you don't have to look more than 2-3 generations before you'll find widows and orphans being a big, huge societal problem. Supporting widows and orphans was often synonymous with charity, "righteousness," and similar. That holds true from the early 20th century back to the beginning of written records.

China is a big part of the high speed exodus from absolute poverty, for all that is wrong with it politically.

The instinct to reject the notion that we are improving on the grounds that there is a lot left to do doesn't come from a bad place. Each life is an entire world of potential, suffering, happiness and love. That makes it hard to quantify. A million people hungry is an unfathomable amount of suffering. Empathy and solidarity are some of our most redeeming qualities. In my opinion, so is exploration. All that said, it's important to know the achievements that have been achieved. There's a bad way of knowing them, self congratulatory nationalism is a terrible one. There are also a good ways. If nothing else, we need to know if we should keep going.

For these things the videos by Hans Rosling are a classic, all of them are great and shine a completely different and positive light on where we stand:

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be_...

Look for the other videos as well, he has a few.

Most of this has been accomplished by economic growth in the most populated areas, mainly China. The situation elsewhere didn't change that much.

Additionally, the UN millenium development goal of halving world poverty by 2010 was met ~2005.

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/half-a-billion-people-escap...

Even if it is so (and we can talk for hours on the validity of this or that data) how do you find the fact that there are enough damned means of production to feed everyone and it's been so for decades now? Also how do you like the fact that there are now about 50-60 MILLION people in US that get food stamps. Or the fact that the wages for most of the western world are falling for 30 years now? ... Whatever.

Unfortunately, it is a basic ecological principle that an increase in food results in an increase in population, and humans are not exempt from that. Yes, we have enough food to feed everybody. We have (usually) had enough, not just for decades, but for ten thousand years—ever since agriculture took off, and even more so since the industrial revolution and the Haber process.

However, food production is not enough to eliminate starvation. If you simply transport food to people in an area that can’t support a population increase, all you’re doing is ensuring that there will be more people there to starve in the next generation, and continually increasing costs of transporting food there.

You need to establish local economy and agriculture, or it’s not sustainable. And if such infrastructure can’t be put in place, you need to get people out of there.

Of course, I don’t know how to do that, nor do I know how to solve the economic problems you mention, but that is what needs to be done.

1. Food production IS more than enough. Logistics and storage is not there.

2. Growth of population declines as countries get more developed, while the food availibility increases. That was true in Europe, USA, Japan, China.

I don't see a reason why this shouldn't work the same for remaining undeveloped countries.

So I don't think your ecological principle works on human.

When I said “food production is not enough to eliminate starvation” I did not mean “we don’t produce enough food to eliminate starvation”, I meant “producing more food is not enough to eliminate starvation”. So yes, I agree and already stated that the problems are economic.

Suppose this principle did not hold. Then how would the human population of Earth continue to grow? In other words, what would all the new people be made of?

Population won't grow forever, not because of lack of food, but because (most) people would have better things to do than care for 6 kids, and 6 kids won't have positive effect on their wealth (it's already the case in the developed world - check out natural growth in Europe or Japan).

So more food = more people is not true.

People may indeed limit themselves to having only two, one, or even no children at all, but that will only lead to extinction of such self-limiting groups. Besides these, there also are people that see nothing more important (but not necessarily better) than leaving behind their own kind as offspring. Unless some effect kicks in, like a social drive that instill in the masses the idea of breeding less as it's in western culture, or a government-enforced program to artificially control the demographic dynamic as in China, these kind of people will prevail in the long run. And that's a good thing, I think.

> People may indeed limit themselves to having only two, one, or even no children at all, but that will only lead to extinction of such self-limiting groups.

This is not "if" this is "when".

But it will take centuries, a lot things can change in the meantime, so we don't know what will happen in the end, but assuming constant growth when the growth in devleoped countries is over already is weird.

Prognoses for world population already show the growth stopping in next few decades.

Before we cut space missions, can we please stop paying so much for warfare and spam first?

> can we please stop paying so much for warfare

an awful lot of research for space has been done with defense budgets

I think you should look at these things in perspective, by no means is our society perfect, in relation to literally any point in history before maybe the fall of the Soviet Union, this world was objectively worse. Global conflicts are operating on much smaller scales, the environmental front has a hell of a lot of people fighting to improve current conditions, the economy isn't a boiler ready to explode. We are NOT in the middle ages in ANY of those sectors, to even suggest that tells me you've actually got 0 idea of what this world or what historically we looked like. We aren't burning witches or beheading people, we aren't accusing mentally ill people of being possessed by the devil. We have medicine, we have food, we can communicate with people around the world instantaneous. People are moving away from separated communities and becoming a global entity.

Look buddy, in the end our perspective on the world is what you decide it is and while we aren't living in the Garden of Eden our world is pretty top notch presently and in relation to any point in human history the world is great and only getting better.

So remove your pessimist spectacles and try and enjoy life and think optimistically, you only get one whip around and would you rather spend it disappointed and grumpy at the world or hopeful and excited?

>My 2 cents (which is most than millions of people can spare ;-) )

Also that was probably the snarkiest smug comment and it makes me think you like the smell of your own farts

I'm not well versed enough in world hunger problems to talk about it, but on the Global Peace side, we are currently in the least violent period in the last 2000 years.

The wealth gap can be misleading too, since the quality of life for those at the 'bottom' is often better than it ever has been on just about every metric you care to consider.

Every age has its little people whose entire contribution to public discourse is to complain about how dreadful everything is. They add nothing good to the world. They don't feed the hungry or clothe the homeless the way creative people operating within the framework of capitalism, the rule of law and global trade have been doing for the past several hundred years. They just complain about how awful everything is.

I'm not sure why they consider this a worthwhile thing. Clearly they are capable of identifying problems, but aren't capable of doing anything about them. As such, they should get out the way of the people who are actually solving them. A hundred years ago such people were complaining that capitalism and global trade were evil and destructive, and they and their fellow-travelers attempted several more-or-less violent approaches to overthrowing them, which held back human development by decades and destroyed tens of millions of lives.

Despite those abject failures, the same anti-empirical wingnuts are back today, when capitalism, the rule of law and global trade have created an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity--exactly as their irrational predecessors predicted would never and could never happen. But they don't let anything so Enlightened as mere empirical reality prevent them from continuing their litany of complaint and opposition to progress.

Seems some people complain as a survival strategy: enough whining will persuade others to resolve problems & supply needs, if only to shut that person up.

Of those things, especially if you compare it with, say, a century ago, only the environment is really in trouble. Which is bad enough, of course, but when looking at hunger and peace, we are actually doing pretty well.

Actually, the statistics today are largely better than at any point in history we have statistics for.

Here's a nice aggregate:

http://daeken.com/2014-04-16_Spoiler__The_World_Isn_t_On_Fir...

There is a shitload of good things going on in the world. You just have to pull your head out of the negativity echochamber present in a lot of Internet communities, most notably parts of reddit.

Yes the world isn't perfect and theres still a shit ton wrong, regardless we're better off than we've ever been before except perhaps on the environment.