Four years ago the  Smithsonian Channel  featured Steven Hawking on four space documentaries.  One was  Leaving Earth:  Or, How to Colonize a Planet .  He passed away in 2018 at the age of 76 before the program was completed.  I just watched this episode and it helped me synthesize variant thoughts in my mind about the ultimate fate of Humanity. In 1976 I spent a summer at NASA's Ames Research Center, joining a group of university faculty on Project Orion to  design the first device capable of detecting an extrasolar planet .  At that time, the planets of our solar system were the only ones ever seen.  After meeting Carl Sagan at Ames during that interval to view the first photo sent back by Viking 1, five years later when I was working for the U.S. Senate, I helped him convince the U.S. Congress to gain the initial funding for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Established was annual funding for 12 years, leading to the formation of the SETI Institute in Palo Alto. Sinc

David Leonhardt of the  New York Times  this morning in his briefing started with: Good morning. An unvaccinated child is at less risk of serious Covid illness than a vaccinated 70-year-old. That statement was based on an article by Emily Oster, a Brown University economist, from an  Atlantic  article in March, which got angry reactions as being insensitive and misleading.  The key point is that, sure, this kid will not get seriously ill...BUT COULD SPREAD THE VIRUS!!! Oster was right about the risk factor: Oster more recently said she would be vaccinating her children once they became eligible, and also: I do not want them to get Covid. I am worried about their immune-compromised grandparent. I would like to avoid quarantine and keep them in school . The Leonhardt report went further to say: Different elderly people will respond to the risks in different  ways, and   that’s OK . Some may decide to be extremely  cautious until caseloads fall to low levels. Others —  especially those wi