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Well, to be fair, we don't have any real idea of the living conditions on planets in nearby systems that are roughly earth sized. We haven't been able to detect them until the last few years, and most of those are orbiting too close to the sun (because those are the easiest to detect), and getting any kind of real idea of their atmospheres is currently unavailable. There could be several systems with habitable planets within 30 ly, we just don't know yet. We are improving our capacity to detect these every year, so perhaps by the time we have colonized Mars, we should have a few viable extra-solar earthlike planetary candidates to send probes. Still would be another 50-100+ years after sending probes to receive back enough data to justify sending colonists. Hopefully by then our tech has matured enough to make it possible, and the war with Mars has settled down enough.

Nice...I hope he makes an electric version with solar panels. Many places this could be useful are lacking gas stations...and we don't really need a few million more people burning fossil fuels anyway.
*quality solution for many.
*promote

We will all enjoyed the freedom and comfort of fossil fuel since the industrial revolution. At some point, we all have to pay for the gigatons of mess that we're pumping in the air.

The smart money is on clean energy as oil bounces back above $40 per barrel after the global supply glut had it below $30. Coal investment has tanked since oil peaked in 2009 and solar plants and wind plants are often more cost effective over their lifetimes.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/average_crude_oil_spot_price
http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/coal/5-year/

Because I'm broken, so I have free time but no real physical capabilities, and because I don't think most of the world deserves or wants my help.

I did my good here at home, where being a good citizen starts. I grow much of my own food at home using poo, not artificial fertilizers, I make my own electricity (mostly, by solar), and most important of all, I got fixed without having children. That's far more good for the world than 99.99% of people can be expected to do in their lifetimes, so I'm waiting for the rest of you to catch up. ;-)
Besides, I'm of the opinion that it's all over at this point, that global warming is far beyond solvable at this point, not that humans are trying. I firmly believe that land, water, and food shortages are in the near future for most people, so all these little arguments are moot. The animals have less of a chance than man, and man has no chance. The methane is melting, in my eyes that's game over, out of time. It's time to party like it's 1999.

In other good news, bicycling, wind power, and solar power continue to go up in the US and worldwide, while birth rates continue to go down.

This trailer misses the exact thing that No Man's Sky trailers realized - you have to show the transition in scale. If you want to impress, you need to seamlessly transition from surface to orbit to solar system to galaxy. If you don't do that, the celestial objects just look like balls with high res textures and the surface shots look like Bryce 3D renders, but there's nothing to connect them.

Would you be able to mount these to roofs? Both in a residential and commercial/industrial setting? And is there a bigger energy payoff than solar I wonder? Why do I have so many questions?!

There have been some interesting suggestions to solving the methane hydrate issue, but the none are very realistic. The closest thing to a possible plan would be that we introduce particulate, natural or man made, into the atmosphere to partially block the solar heating cycle. That would seal the methane back into the permafrost and give us time to try to reverse the effects of climate change or find another method of neutralizing it.

That is the main issue. We don't have a way to remove the methane safely. Basically the situation is primed, we have a methane bubble that is going to happen at some point, there is no stopping that without removing the methane deposits in a safe fashion.

Hoping the energy is excess solar and not from some non-renewable source...

Still.

*promote

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Aliens with the tech to get here from another solar system would mop us up.

We simply couldn't fight that.

Back in the '70s scientists came up with a space weapon they called THOR, which is essentially a crowbar-sized bit of metal that has guidance fins at the back. Drop that from outer space and the simple energy of it falling creates an immense amount of damage at ground level.

Aliens who could get here from another solar system could simply throw chunks of asteroid at our cities until we capitulated. No space laser is going to stop that. Especially when they'd have space lasers of their OWN to target our space lasers.

This whole thing is pure fantasy. The same kind of diseased minds who believe in God, Ghosts, and Donald Trump's fitness to be President.

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Chernobyl was a big cock-up allright, as was Fukushima, although that seems to have been less severe.

What would you say is the most dangerous form of energy production we have now? What about the safest? Look up "Deaths by terawatt hour", you might be surprised.

Even wind power has killed about 3 times as many people per TWH produced as nuclear, AFAIK mainly due to the amounts of steel and concrete used in constructing the plants, the production of which is relatively dangerous. Coal is on a different planet altogether, killing about 1500 times as many people per TWH as nuclear.

Even if you assume the total deaths from nuclear power production are underreported and underestimated by a factor of 10, that would still only put it on par with solar power in terms of people killed to produce energy.

Now, nuclear isn't a cureall solution to our energy problems. Even if we wanted to, we simply couldn't build enough power plants to cover all our energy needs with nuclear, you've got the storage issue, you've got the issue of plant placement, and in general relying on one technology alone is a bad idea.

Still. Coal. 1500 times as deadly. How many articles and videos have you seen on how scary coal is? What gives?

A matter of scale, distance & speed. (assuming we are talking about electrically driven engines like ion drives or the proposed EM engine.)

If nothing else, the sun gets weaker the further away you get. Out at the edges of the solar system it's almost negligible.

Given that mass directly effects net thrust & fuel range, smaller craft working in the inner solar system may well be better off sticking with solar over a bulky reactor.

Larger and or longer ranged ships should start to favour fusion reactors and such.

Unless of course they manage to miniaturise the fusion apparatus, or perhaps harness quantum effects like matter/anti-matter. etc. etc.

Surface area to volume ratio also starts to shaft solar power the bigger the ship gets too. The panels would have to get exponentially bigger along with the ship/engines.

I couldn't tell you exactly where, but there will be natural tipping points between the practicality of one over the other.

Edit: The calculation would mostly be the ratio of energy produced to mass of the generating apparatus. The point where a fusion reactor (inc it's fuel) can produce more required power per unit of mass than solar cells (and associated gubbins), is the point where it becomes more efficient for most spacecraft.

Though solar still has a clear advantage where indefinite operational duration is a factor. (fusion requires fuel, albeit in small quantities)