Like What is life? What is consciousness? What is intelligence?

Most audiovisual technology of the past 50 years has been advanced by porn. VCRs, video compression, cheap cameras, 3D, you name it. There was a need for cheap development of moving images so capitalism found a way.

Capitalism usually finds a way. The philosophical answer to "what is consciousness" and "what is intelligence" is a question that can be discussed but from a pragmatic standpoint, the discussion is "can I take it or do I have to negotiate." Which, obviously, has a different answer when you're incommunicado with the bleeding-hearts of your nation.

But it also drives a more pragmatic question that generally gets obliterated in all the philosophy: what is the economic case for space exploration? What need is being driven by launching billion-dollar probes at Mars? You can make one: NASA gives us prestige in the face of other nations that allows us leverage in international discussion. It also allows us to publicly try out new technologies that can be used for other (often less public) uses. By sending billion-dollar probes to Mars we are reminding the rest of the planet that we're number one.

But this whole "asteroid mining" thing. Or "terraforming Mars." I mean... we have a dire need to terraform EARTH to the point where our CO2 levels are closer to habitable and not only is it going to be a lot less work to take our atmosphere from 400ppm to 250, we're already here. Culturally, this is what brought the Apollo program to a screaming halt: the USSR gave up, we lost in Vietnam and the country lost their appetite for giant extraplanetary boondoggles so inside five years we'd gone from 2001 to Rollerball and Logan's Run.

SETI is so laughably un-useful that it's not even worth modeling. Planck's Law predates broadcasting yet we've had this romantic notion of little green men watching I Love Lucy since the dawn of television. SETI was entirely focused on the hydrogen band because obviously we broadcast everything everywhere all the time and it's the only place that isn't swamped and then lo and behold the minute we develop tight-beam communication we're looking for that now. The Drake Equation is bullshit and always has been because Frank Drake wanted time on a radiotelescope and the Navy wanted a justification. So Frank came up with seven stacked bullshit factors and said "look, coefficients" and the Navy said "great I just need something to put on the form."

Hey, am_Unition I got one! Give me the energy requirements for a tightbeam visual signal from, say, Alpha Centauri B. I wanna be able to read morse code at night. We've got logarithmic energy density so I'm going to need to up the brightness an order of magnitude. Presume 100% efficiency of the laser/maser/whatever- how much energy is my tightbeam communication across a puny 4.3 light years going to consume? Bonus points if you give me a number for both red and blue wavelengths.