Andromeda

We appreciate the thoughtful essay, "Thinking Clearly About Space," concerning the future of space exploration. Blaming "scapegoating" and "too much hustle" for the absence of progress is good as far as it goes. But the real failure can be found elsewhere.

1. Lack of dilithium crystals

The percentage of the U.N.'s annual budget dedicated to the location and mining of dilithium crystals is less than 1%. This is a recipe for failure. The U.N.'s irrelevance has been proven once again.

2. Lack of robots

There should be at least one robot per household, like on the Jetsons. This is not including the robot armies. So where are all the robots?

3. Lazy, stupid robots

The robots we have mostly just sit around waiting to vacuum something. They have completely non-human personalities, scoring "William Hurt" or less on standard Turing Tests.

4. Faster Than Light Travel

Whether it be the warp drive, the hyperdrive, or worm technology, it's clear somebody has completely dropped the ball on this one. Is anyone even working on it, or are we just waiting for the robots to take over and invent something?

5. Time Travel

This is the easiest one of all. We already know how to do it, it's just that we're stuck going one direction at that boring old speed of one day per day. If more flexible time travel were accomplished, it would solve all the other failings: we could just hop ahead in time and get all the other technology we need from the future. But, based on what we've seen so far, no one -- not even in the future -- has yet figured this out.

The problem is the boring focus on incrementalism, to the great detriment of a single breakthrough which would make everything possible. And who is to blame? The scientists, the robots and the U.N.