Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

This seems pertinent, if we're discussing thought experiments between engineers and fans of philosophy...

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/385 

I read a short story ages back about a super fighter plane transported somehow to WW One.  It turned out to be nearly useless.

I have pondered how useful I would be if transported to say 1500 AD.  Not very.

Yeah, makes sense... The plane itself is useless if you don't have a fueling/arming/maintenance infrastructure.

My brother was a USMC pilot (now commercial with United). When he graduated flight school, he wanted transport planes as his first choice, helicopters as his second, and fighters as his third. Transport is the choice gig--because it gets people into a direct pipeline to the airlines when you get out of the service. But fighters were of no interest to him. Obviously the fact that he's tall enough he might severely injure/destroy his legs in an ejection doesn't help. But the bigger thing is that he'd heard from people who'd done it that a fighter jet gig is basically 2-3 hours of briefing, 45-60 minutes of flying, and 2-3 hours of debriefing. That's just plain not fun!

So he ended up with helicopters, before eventually getting into a fixed-wing flight instructor gig that gave him the necessary hours to get the United job when he retired from the Corps. 

I could probably be pretty useful in 1500 AD. I'm pretty big, so I'd be good at the sort of manual labor that dominated life back then lol!

Good point... I could make beer ;-) 

Another one... What are folks' thoughts on Radical Life Extension?

This is, of course, the idea that we solve the medical problem of "aging." We as a species generally grow for only about half of our lifespan, and the second half is mostly crap just starting to break down and fail. What if it doesn't have to fail? What if we can be 25 years old [physically] forever, or at least turn average human lifespans into the 150-200 year range instead of ~80, with productive bodies for most of those years?

I don't think we'll have significant progress on this in the next decade. But research in finding ways to conquer aging are ongoing.

If this is just a really tough engineering problem, rather than something insoluble, it will happen eventually. The question is when, and how close are we?

I don't think much will come of it unless it includes a substantial part of our lives being in weightlessness.  80 years of earth's gravity is a sonofabitch.

We also sleep almost a third of our lives.  What if we didn't need to?

Weightlessness also causes some serious side effects that are not completely understood even now.  If they don't exercise on the ISS a LOT, they really deteriorate badly.

Even so, they deteriorate in a few months and can't walk when they come down.