E-'geniuses' and Kepler-22b

Warning: Nerd rage alert.

Thanks to the "brilliance" of the Internet, I've had to make a lot of personal rules. The first one: Avoid the YouTube comments section, as much as possible. And honestly, my life has been much better since I created that one. So many times I'll click on an interesting article, scroll down a bit, and find myself viewing a few posts "correcting" someone or the article, incorrectly. And unfortunately, this rule needs updating to involve other sites I used to love.

This entire Kepler-22b fiasco has recently tipped my scales. From reading a bunch of idiotic gravity jokes to people proclaiming interstellar travel "impossible" because it would take hundreds of thousands of years traveling, at 1000 MPH!, to arrive at these distant, celestial bodies ... yeah, I'm not making this shit up.

I don't know what the hell they teach kids in school, today. We learned Netwonian physics in mine, and this includes his laws of motion. Our current space shuttles go at least 17,500 MPH to reach Earth orbit!  Now, once they are in space, they don't have to deal with with the constant frictional forces of Earth. This isn't Nascar.

Time is not nearly as important to the people on the ship, either. You know, even if you didn't pay attention in high school science, there are plenty episodes of Nova and other science programs that break down the time dilation phenomena into conceptual, understandable ways. But we learned about Einstein's general theory of relativity as early as junior high.

The faster you travel, the faster time moves for you. Basically, if you even got near half the speed of light velocities, either by slow sustained propulsion methods (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/fs21grc.html) or from a gravitational slingshot effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist), those hundreds of thousands of years would be cut exponentially for you, the traveler.

Sure, the clock moves normally for everyone on Earth — so there is no going back to your current time period, but the problem isn't propulsion: It's building a craft that can withstand a battery of space objects and cosmic rays while sustaining air, food, and creating a gravitational effect that mimics Earth: Right now they are experimenting with rotational forces as a gravitational supplement.

It's poser pedantry at its most pathetic. And if its not that, it's the horrible puns. It takes a certain type of wit to create good puns that aren't moronic; a wit that you probably don't have. All you're doing is clogging up the Internet's arteries with a bunch of sarcastic flub. /Rant