Fancy toys. lol
Years ago, kids played together. Now they live on their various devices. Kids don't get near as much exercise as they used to and it shows in statistics of overweight children.

overweight children with chicken legs .. that is

I'm very much into astronomy, cosmology and space travel from an extremely early age and built my first homemade amateur rocket at age 12, from scratch... no kits for me. By 15, I was sending up capsules with cameras and parachutes and my Physics teacher came to some of the launches. When I discovered that the housing project I lived in at that time used one of the houses for storage of appliances left behind awaiting a trip to the dump, I inquired if it was OK to take some parts and after given the go ahead salvaged electric motors from washers and dryers and compressors from refrigerators. I built a wind tunnel with the motors (failed to reach air speeds of even 200mph though) and stacked a series of compressors in attempts to make liquid oxygen to move up to liquid fuel rockets but failed in those attempts, too. So I went into Engineering in college with an eye to the Aerospace Industry.

I'm not in any way bragging but rather just providing some background so you understand that I know both the Math and the Engineering involved in how reaction engines function.

As much as I wish it weren't so I'm afraid Star Trek may be 1000 or even more years off.

It takes quite a lot of background to grasp how vast even just our Solar System is. Example - If there was a road from Earth to Saturn and somehow you could drive continuously 24 hours a day at 100 mph without a gas, food, or bathroom break, it would take you roughly 1200 years to complete the trip, considerably more than 10 generations. At 1000 mph that's still 125 years and at 10,000 mph 12.5 years, at 100,000 mph (note that the fastest manmade outward bound craft has ever traveled is about 4000 mph and will take 70,000 years to reach our nearest star) it would take a mere 1.25 years to Saturn but still take almost 3,000 years to get to our closest neighboring star.

It is not a trivial thing to reach the currently WAY out of our ability 100,000 mph since once these high rates of speed are reached it begins to take ever more energy to achieve each next incremental increase. Once we get to even 1% of Light Speed (1% is roughly 7 Million mph but would still make the trip to Alpha Centauri a 400 year journey) relativistic forces become substantial enough that the logarithmic energy requirements really increase extremely rapidly.

To provide anywhere close to that much energy with the least amount of mass, Star Trek did get it right that the most powerful production of energy occurs when matter and anti-matter annihilate each other. The engineering requirements even to create a usable mass of anti-matter (we can make a only few atoms at a time now) let alone contain and utilize it are...well...astronomical AND even if we could, we still could not reach even 50% of Light Speed. The only way anyone in the know can even imagine any meaningful interstellar travel is by not traveling but rather warping SpaceTime. That's theoretically possible but nobody can even estimate the energy required to accomplish that by any also unknown process or even if the theory bears out to be true and workable.

Sorry to be so long-winded, and depressing, but it takes that just to grasp the daunting fact that unless we vastly extend our lifespans or overcome an immense array of engineering problems currently far beyond our wildest, but practical, imaginations we may be forever stuck in our own system, never to reach other stars assuming humans survive that long..

I love Star Trek, especially TNG, but it will remain Science Fiction for a VERY long time.

That is a quadrotor helicopter.

don't kill the messenger, I just seen .. not interested enough to actually watch it. so it like an over grown toy drone. ???

Drones can also be quadrotor helicopters, though not always.

I suggest watching the video - it's quite worrying. It's not a case of if there's going to be a crash...

cops on gadgets in the city is always going to be a set up for disaster. kids on skateboards is bad enough.

Oh well. Won't be around long enough anyway.

Electronics was my preference. Back when the AppleII+ was in Radio Shack stores, I was going to make my own computer, but the cost of all the components was double the cost of just buying a computer, so I took the easy way out. I had lots of fun with electronics when I was younger. My car had variable speed wind shield wipers before they started being manufactured that way. A year or 2 later they were a standard feature on most new cars. I miss my tinkering days. I still have cabinets and boxes of electronic components, but they've been packed away for years. My favorite components were my microprocessor chips, like the 8080, 8086 and z80 chips. Those chips ran at a whopping speeds of 2-10 MHz.

Anyone whose never heard of those numbers can see more here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8080
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8086
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80

Processor chips went to 1000 times the speed in about 30 years, so maybe our speed of travel will do the same.
Another possibility...
We may not be able to travel through space in the near future, but maybe there is life out there that is far more advanced and they will come visit us.

Though getting to know an alien form of life (and furthermore, an alien civilization) would be beyond exciting, if they had a technology advanced enough to visit us and they were not precisely friendly, we would be at clear disadvantage (I believe some scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have warned about this), so I am not completely sure I would like they would visit us (if it was possible at all).

I have great respect for Stephen Hawking but specifically in his chosen and studied field of theoretical Physics. Outside that field I find his point of view to be far too provincial to make good sense. He even stated that he based his opinions and concerns on Human History since so far the meeting of technologically advanced civilizations with less developed ones has almost always been disastrous for the lesser. Not only does this ignore that there are tribes that now have clean drinking water and access to proper medicine not to mention information to lift themselves up in ways impossible just a few decades ago, but more importantly there simply is no parallel with a civilization so incredibly advanced as it would require to be in order to be an interstellar civilization. The distance between our current civilization and Stone Age tribes is orders of magnitude smaller than the distance between an Interstellar Civilization and our own. It is literally inconceivable to us.

Our Human civilization is still in some danger of extinction at our own hands now that we have nuclear energies to work with at a time when we have yet to shed our instincts for power, property and competition, not to mention one's noted by Hawking himself of such things as the instinct to blindly follow charismatic leaders. Imagine how much more difficult that will become as we approach the kinds of energies required for interstellar travel. For a civilization to even get there and then spend the generations required to make such travel commonplace and trivial enough to visit backwater planets on a mere whim is extremely unlikely. I'm saying on a whim because we have literally nothing special to offer them but difficulty. Any resources we imagine we have we now know to be common throughout the Universe and we, as a species might be interesting curiosities on the level of one-celled lifeforms to them, but since that too is likely rather common, I see no special attraction that would entice them to even come here, let alone to do harm. There's just nothing in it for them beyond hidden, distant study... you know.... the Prime Directive and all that.

We shouldn't promote Learning so-much as unlearning!

?I wouldn't want to stereotype or statisticfi the south or slavery as religion but would hope you're at least smart enough to build skateparks by now

I must also say as time travel doesn't happen we will spend generations getting where we need to be... fingers crossed but not a cross.

I would. While there were several underpinnings for slavery, not the least of which was an Agriculturally based civilization (Industry opted for indentured servitude, only marginally different) but the moral justification absolutely came from Organized Religion. As soon as Others can be classified as "Heathen Savages" while "Those Like Me, Who Believe As I Do", are The Chosen Ones on The One True Path... it is a short stroll to Beasts of Burden, Seventy Two Virgins, etc etc etc.

I'm learning to despise stereotypes as opinions tho "statistics" only slightly more merit, eg: "Americans*" why am I lumped together with billions of other people,,, when some speak of such; what are they f-ing morons like we... https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post5929601