Carl Sagan

For the Warne thread I suppose, but as I've said before, 90-95% of managers would have us in a better position. With no striker, Warne benches our most dangerous attacking midfielder? He got lucky.

Nine wins now needed from the remaining 13 matches. If one of those is away at Barnsley next Saturday, it effectively makes it impossible for them to catch us and cements this as a three-horse race for automatic promotion. Absolutely crucial victory.

Excellent. A vital 3 points. For me it's a win despite of rather than because of the manager, but at least we got over the line. Sibley should have been on the field 81 minutes earlier, but at least he was finally brought on with a whole 9 minutes to score the goal. Come on you Rams!

Absolutely we have to go for wins, even if it risks losing. How does no one understand this? A draw is as bad as a defeat, unless against Bolton or Portsmouth. If you want automatic promotion, you need 3 points from almost every game.

Over an hour for Warne to realize we didn't need five at the back and two holding midfielders. A tactical genius at the helm. Is this last last half-hour enough to win the match in? At least we've had a shot!

In fact Smith for Nyambe. Finally the dynamic exciting attacking substitution we were all hoping for.

Subs on their way. Sibley and Thompson warming up. Alas I suspect that means Sibley for Elder in defence and Thommo in midfield. We need Sibley in midfield.

Going well so far. How on earth can Warne not change this?

Surely we need to bring Sibley as an attacking midfielder?

We'll have to agree to disagree. In the heady days of Apollo and just after, people were planning for massive O'Neill orbiting colonies and Mars in the 1980s or 1990s. Yet Human spaceflight went backwards for decades. The occasional brilliant robotic systems fired off towards Mars or the outer solar system are like surviving off scraps - a tantalising glimpse of what might have been, had we progressed. By now we should have orbiters around every planet and swarms of robotic probes everywhere. The most impressive robotic probes are perhaps the Voyagers from the 1970s, still going strong despite having travelled so far they have crossed the heliosphere, where the influence of the Sun is overcome by that of the rest of the Galaxy. Voyager 1 is almost a light day away. I presumed by now that Human spaceships would long ago have overtaken it, but we cannot get beyond low Earth orbit!

This has to be the setup. Very surprised Elder starts over Sibley.

In the unlikely event this was Jonson Clark-Harris, it would simply have been naive to think MacAnthony ever had any intention of selling to us. So I hope it was someone else. If Collins is really out, then that's terrible news.

So @Highgate doesn't hold with the "short window" argument, but if I've got this right (apologies if not) neither does @TigerTedd. Yet before the perfect storm that was Elon, there seemed no hope whatsoever of Humans becoming multiplanetary. Here's the opening of the space chapter of a book I wrote a few years ago about the future: Look at that extraordinary progress in powered flight from 1903 to 1969. And then the regression so that we nowadays can't send anyone to the Moon - instead we can only go a thousandth of the way there to the ISS. You might think, "so space travel has stalled a bit - so what?" But then think about the intervening time. Think about technological progress which can be measured in many ways, but an easy marker is Moore's Law. By a conservative measure, computers are now more than a billion times faster than in 1969 - that puts the extraordinary regression in space capabilities into context. Other technology is a billion times better, yet spaceflight is worse? Doesn't that tell you something about the potential future of spaceflight? In 2000, we had the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, who dreamed of a human future in space, create his own rocket company Blue Origin. Twenty-four years on, it has proved so hard they are still yet to send a single gram of anything into orbit! In 2014, NASA gave experienced aerospace company Boeing $4.2 billion to build a small spacecraft to take Humans to the International Space Station. Have they succeeded? No! A decade on, even now they might give up on the project given the problems that have beset Starliner. It is only the combination of Musk's extraordinary visionary engineering and business mind, and his passion for the future, that sees us where we are today. If he were to go, that may very well still be the end. If he stays it will still be incredibly hard and needs vast resources. Just in the last couple of weeks he has moved the incorporation of SpaceX from Delaware (where most US companies are incorporated) to Texas, in order to protect it. The Delaware courts forbade him receiving his Tesla compensation package, which his court documents stated he would use to fund an interplanetary space program, so that money is currently not available. A vote of Tesla shareholders is now being held to see of he can move Tesla from Delaware to Texas. But this is why SpaceX is the most valuable privately held company in the world, because shareholders or bureaucrats would end its mission if given half the chance. I don't believe any other Human would have kept the business in that form, as it makes funding so incredibly difficult. These are some reasons the window is unlikely to remain open for long.

I'm frustrated we have had such appalling decisions against us all this season and last, yet we never try to put pressure on refs this way. It is part of the modern game and it's potentially a way of sowing doubt in the referee's mind and getting that extra 1% that might make the difference between promotion and not. Instead, when Warne does comment on decisions, it's "Sibley made a shocking challenge and it should have been a penalty". Meaning a ref can feel more able to give a decision against us because our own manager has claimed we've got lucky before.

I hope you're right, but I can't help thinking this is...

Oh dear. As I posted originally, unless Warne's target to the players is higher, this sees us in the playoffs as it takes us to 90 points, plus the odd draw. That won't be enough. The season-long form of Portsmouth and Bolton would take them to 96 and 95 points, respectively.

As we near the business end of the season, with 14 games to go, the path to automatics is becoming more distinct: win 11 and we're likely promoted; win 10 and it's very much in the balance; win 9 and it's the playoffs for us. Those 14 games are split 8 home and 6 away: H Stevenage A Barnsley H Charlton H Port Vale A Bristol Rovers H Reading H Bolton A Northampton H Blackpool A Portsmouth A Wycombe H Orient A Cambridge H Carlisle We used up one life last Saturday by only drawing at home to Shrewsbury. If we want automatic promotion, in this mediocre division draws are effectively defeats unless playing Bolton or Portsmouth. For this match we need to step it up in home, as we should be hoping/expecting to win 7 out of the 8 remaining home games, and then 4 out of the 6 remaining away games. It isn't quite "must-win" but it very nearly is. Let's hope the crowd gets behind the lads, and the lads give the crowd strong reason to get behind them. Come on you Rams!

Exactly this. As an example, when Musk paid whatever it was ($45bn?) for Twitter, there was vitriolic condemnation from many Musk haters saying why doesn't he use that $45bn to solve world poverty instead? Yet, curiously, I didn't hear a single one of those critics ask why the people Musk gave the $45bn to, didn't then use it to solve world poverty. The inescapable conclusion has to be that these people are simply more interested in hating on Musk than actually doing anything to solve world poverty.

This is obviously a credible view, and I know others who advocate it. There's a lot of sense in your post. I would say the need to push now is because the window is short. If we don't do this soon, it may well be we never manage it. That's partly because there will never be a good short- or even medium-term economic argument to do it. In the long term it's obviously beneficial, but no governments plan 100-200 years ahead. Then, after all the progress made by science and technology and the massive improvement in the Human condition they have wrought, we've reached a strange moment when many are turning away from that. It's a dangerous time with people openly talking about degrowth, and also actively shutting down scientific enquiry when it's seen as working against contemporary cultural values. But I would also say that the "Given the problems we face on this planet" line is unfair and ridiculous. Given the problems we face on this planet, why don't we give up football/videogames/archaeology/music/television etc to solve them? Why pick on space exploration? Especially when it's through space exploration, for instance studying atmospheres on Venus and Mars, and better measuring our own world, that we're also far better placed to address problems on Earth.

After our lovely win away at Exeter: The key two matches: Bolton 2 Wycombe 1 Portsmouth 3 Cambridge 1 Playoff contenders: Oxford 4 Wigan 2 Shrewsbury 1 Barnsley 1 Stevenage 2 Bristol Rovers 3 Table based on points per game: Portsmouth p33 pts69 ppg2.09 projection96 Bolton p30 pts62 ppg2.07 projection95 DERBY p32 pts63 ppg1.97 projection91 Barnsley p31 pts57 ppg1.84 projection85 P'Boro p31 pts56 ppg1.81 projection83 Oxford p32 pts55 ppg1.72 projection79 Stevenage p31 pts53 ppg1.71 projection79 There is now a clear top 2, and a clear 4-7, and then there's us halfway between the two groups. We'll need several wins in a row to likely close the gap and put us in the mix. For instance, if we win the next four games we move to 2.08 ppg.

Excellent result. Congrats to the manager and players. There is a bit of a top three breakaway - we're still significantly behind when you look at Bolton's games in hand, but if we can catch the other two our goal difference might even end up as a telling factor. Fourteen games to go, at least ten more wins needed. Come on you Rams!

The solar system is just a stepping stone. As more technologies develop, we will go beyond, but you can't run before you can walk. And Mars has all the raw materials to be viable. And as much land mass as all the continents on Earth. And Human nature and Humans ourselves will evolve - who knows what wonders our descendants will become. But we are here alive at the start of it all. The time future Humans and postHumans will look back on and thank us for.

The reasons to go to Mars versus, say, Antarctica, are (at least) threefold. One is that we currently inhabit a closed system, even with Antarctica. And it's widely acknowledged Earth has already exceeded what's called its "carrying capacity", meaning we're already overloaded. Unsustainable over and medium time frame, either we need more raw materials or we opt for degrowth, which means your children having a terrible time of it, and their children way worse. And, as Humans squabble over what's left, they'll probably destroy themselves. Which takes us onto the next point, that by not having all our eggs in one basket, even if something terrible happened to Earth, Humanity, creativity, intelligence and more could go on. Once we build a society away from Earth on Mars, it's far easier to build other off-world colonies. Then, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky once wrote: "Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever" Going to Mars frees us from this cradle of the mind. It gives us a whole new frontier to stimulate dynamism and creativity. It gives us a whole new view of our place in the Universe. Leaving behind the parochial mindset that Earth is somehow special and the only place for Humans, it transforms us with a new mindset, to boldly go and spread complexity, goodness, curiosity, art, science and love out among the stars. Given the potential numbers of Humans and post-Humans who can live after us, going to Mars now is the most ethical thing we can do, as it will lead to the most good being done in the future Universe.

Not a fan of ubiquitous surveillance, but David Brin's The Transparent Society is probably the most hopeful model of the future. https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/transparentsociety1.html

Ship 28 and Booster 10 were stacked together on the Orbital launch mount last night in preparation for the 3rd integrated Flight Test. I'd expect it early in March, but there's still a chance we'll see something this month. Ship 28 is one of the last first-generation Starships. A few others have also been built, but SpaceX has already begun constructing a newer model. At this stage all the ships and boosters are expected to fail at some point in the flight or, if not, they'll be ditched in the sea. It won't be until later in the year until we start seeing these land on their return from orbit.