This has been bouncing around in my head for a while

The good news, discovered circa 2040.

Some ancient and now long vanished race of aliens constructed portal network across the Milky Way. Even better they were obligate gardeners and part of their heritage is a vast assortment of life bearing worlds.

The bad news:

1: The liquid that ran in their veins was down around the boiling point of oxygen and they had only intellectual interest in hellworlds like Earth (they did fiddle with Mars for a while to see if sunshades could cool it down to Titan circa 2,000,000,000 BP temperatures but gave up on it as a bad job).

Their portals (which, heck, are wormholes why not) connect systems that were interesting to them, not hellworlders. As a side effect of that, while there is no reason they could not have hauled the mountain-massed portals down into inner systems, they generally didn't. Portals tend to be several AU out from the local star, beyond the frost line, and sadly, humans do *not* have 1 g forever ships. In fact, while what's available in 2040 is better than what we have today, it's not remarkably better. Pack a lunch, it will take a while.

2: It's been two billion years: even for stars whose brightness doesn't evolve quickly, that's enough time for some interesting changes in planetary orbits.

Most of the alien relics are too battered to work. Many are completely enigmatic. A few are comprehensible to us, the way a cave man would figure out uses for a Swiss Army knife, and those things are interesting enough that there's a market for them.

I see a lot of robotic exploration in this future.

Wait

I live near a failed rift valley?

Today's lesson

Putting an over-excited kitten under an overturned laundry basket is not giving him a time out. It gives him a mobile fort from which to attack things.

According to Mitt Romney

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

(I wonder who the class traitor was who recorded this?)

Interesting map over on Pharyngula I will link to for no reason.

Mindwebs: Nature Boy

Nature Boy

The problems of the idle rich are the worst problems of all.

There was a weird resonance between this and the time my family went to hang on the land we'd just bought. We caught a glimpse of three girls spying on us who took off like deer when they saw we saw them.

One of my nieces had never met anyone named Ilia until she met the mother of a friend of hers. The other Ilia turned out to be the youngest of those three girls we saw that day in 1968.