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There are lots of misconceptions people have about space travel or at least, the reality of it.Viktor Toth has already mentioned the biggest obstacle that people fail to grasp but, I feel it’s worth underlining again:1. Distances:No matter how hard anyone tries to explain just how unfathomably vast space is – at least to someone with only a fleeting interest in space travel -, they will never get close to conveying just how insurmountable those distances are.We went to the moon in the late 60’s and even now, almost 50 years later, it still represents a humongous challenge and dangerous undertaking. The moon at 250k miles or so is a cock stride away in spatial terms. A 3-day trip that doesn’t even represent a hop from a hop, skip and a jump. It’s nothing and yet it is still so far as to be unreachable without serious effort and expenditure.Mars, which is next on the agenda is again not even considered a hop, but this time it is a 6-month trip to get there - at least! Not only that, should we successfully get astronauts there, we’d have to keep them alive there for 18 months before returning because we’d have to wait for Mars and the Earth to align to provide the shortest distance back again. So we’re talking a minimum of 3 years to get to Mars and back and that’s without the costs incurred, the elements to be considered, the technology necessary and the dangers presented to the people.For anything further than Mars – forget it. I mean seriously, just forget it. Everything else is simply too far with current technology. Until we either discover new propulsion methods to vastly shorten travel times or, build a ship capable of withstanding the dangers of space whilst allowing successive generations of astronauts to be self-sufficient as a colony on board - we have no chance and the depressing thing here is that this is applicable to within the Solar System – not the stars!This is a very good illustration of distance in the solar system: If the Moon Were Only 1 PixelInterstellar travel – between stars - is a fantasy of science fiction. On current tech, a trip to our nearest star is on the order of 80,000 years! EIGHTY THOUSAND YEARS!! Just let that sink in and then try and come up with a way of how you’d achieve this journey? Even if we had a eureka moment and came up with something that could propel us at relativistic speeds – 10% or so - it would still take decades to get to our nearest neighbouring star. That’s far too long!Warp drives are theoretically possible but are, to all intents and purposes – impossible due to the ridiculous (in fact it’s not even ridiculous, it’s simply impossible) energy requirements, so they’re not even worth considering. Relativistic travel might at some point in our future be doable but, it won’t be anytime soon and it won’t be anywhere near the substantial speeds necessary to make space travel to the more distant planets worthwhile. In fact, I seriously doubt the human race will ever leave the Solar System never mind reach the stars. The technology necessary is simply not there and whilst physics certainly allows for methods to cut down travel times dramatically, it won’t cut them down anywhere near enough to make it worthwhile.Which brings me onto 2.2. Hyper-sleep:Whoever first coined this phrase or imagined this as a potential saviour for astronauts travelling light years must be belly laughing every time he sees it used in a film. Hyper-sleep is the go-to method for filmmakers when they need to transport astronauts from one side of the galaxy to the other. The reality however is far removed from the fantasy but, I suspect the fact it isn’t complete nonsense is the reason many people actually think it exists!Even the fairly credible Interstellar fucked this one up but in fairness to Nolan, he really had no other option of getting the astronauts to Saturn. He had to fall back on the old tried and tested formula used in just about every Sci-Fi flick ever made.The whole idea beggars belief though and using Saturn as an example, it means our astronauts must board a ship in orbit and then go to sleep for 3-4 years! That’s the time it takes to get there. So 4 years of inactivity would mean catastrophic muscle atrophy likely leading to serious ailment if not death. It’s already been confirmed that zero gravity on the ISS seriously weakens muscle and bone structure to such an extent that even 2 hours exercise a day is not enough to overcome it! So how on earth would we combat the symptoms of hyper-sleep for 3-4 years? Cryogenics doesn’t work and whilst we can medically drop a person’s body temperature to induce a coma or forced deep sleep for periods of time, it has to be acutely regulated and monitored. You wouldn’t be able to do this unattended and certainly not for 3-4 years.Great in Sci-Fi but in reality, the technology simply doesn’t exist and I seriously doubt it ever will.3. Energy Requirements:Or fuel to you and me. Wherever we go, we’re going need fuel – and lots of it. Whether it is solar energy (we’ll need a star in the vicinity), nuclear energy, fusion or exotic matter or whatever – we’re going to need fuel and a veritable tonne of the stuff for good measure. Not only are we going to need it for accelerating, we’re going to need it for course correction and most importantly - slowing down. In fact, we’ll probably need more to slow down than to accelerate.The faster we want to go, the more we’re going to need and in the event of fuelling a hypothetical Alcubierre drive, we’re going to need the sultry and exotic mistress that is anti-matter.Current estimates having it ranging anywhere from $25billion a gram to $60trillion a gram to produce, so NASA, SpaceX or whoever, is going to need a loan of epic proportions. Why? Because they’re going to need a few hundred Kilos - at least - to make this impossibility drive surf the spatial waves, and thus far, we can’t make more than a milligram. Added to that, anti-matter is extremely dangerous. If it comes into contact with regular matter, it annihilates – energetically and utterly. So it has to be kept in check with magnets and we’re not talking fridge magnets here - we’re talking off the chart electromagnetic fields to hold the charged anti-protons and then a superconducting magnetic field in order to contain anti-hydrogen which is created.Due to the amount we’d need, we couldn’t make it on earth lest we destroy the planet! It would have to be cultivated and contained out in space and irrespective of the fact we can’t do it, just getting the necessary gear out there to build it would present an almost insurmountable obstacle.Whichever way we go and with whatever propulsion method, it’s almost (but not quite) a non-starter.4. Psychology and Safety:It’s all well and good trotting out the technological limitations of why we can’t do it and the obvious dangers to astronauts attempting it, such as, radiation, food and water, collisions and illnesses etc. – but what if we could? What if we had the ability to send people on a 20 year round trip to one of the moons in the solar system? How would astronauts acclimatise or react on such a long voyage, cooped up and in close proximity with other people they may or may not like outside of a professional capacity?No matter how carefully considered or stringent NASA’s (or any space agencies) selection process is for their astronauts, you can never legislate for someone going loco when placed in long periods of isolation. And millions and no doubt billions of miles from home in the middle of a vacuum with only colleagues for company would be the epitome of isolation.Contentious issues would be amplified. Tempers would rise and division in the ranks could manifest, and this being reality, there would be nowhere to go to get away from each other. The merest hint of madness in one or another person could and in all probability would, prove fatal to all on board. For evidence of this, we only have to look to our history when episodes of this nature have occurred on land or sea. Situations whereby a group of individuals have been thrown together by predicament or circumstance, cut off from civilisation to fend for themselves. Lord of Flies mentality to be sure and while that might sound like whimsical exaggeration, it happens and if it did, it would present an extremely dangerous situation to be in whilst adrift in the vacuum of space.Of course there are lots of other examples and concerns that people rarely consider with space travel, but for me, they are the four that immediately spring to mind.

EDIT: I have expanded my initial Quora response to the following, which I have also reproduced on Medium:Is majoring in liberal arts a mistake for students?Critical Thinking and the Scientific Process First — Humanities LaterIf luck favors the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur is credited with saying, we’re in danger of becoming a very unlucky nation. Little of the material taught in Liberal Arts programs today is relevant to the future.Consider all the science and economics that has been updated, the shifting theories of psychology, the programming languages and political theories that have been developed, and even how many planets our solar system has. Much, like literature and history, should be evaluated against updated, relevant priorities in the 21st century.I feel that liberal arts education in the United States is a minor evolution of 18th century European education. The world needs something more than that. Non-professional undergraduate education needs a new system that teaches students how to learn and judge using the scientific process on issues relating to science, society, and business.Though Jane Austen and Shakespeare might be important, they are far less important than many other things that are more relevant to make an intelligent, continuously learning citizen, and a more adaptable human being in our increasingly more complex, diverse and dynamic world.I would coin a new term, “the liberal sciences,” as this basic education, the test for which would be quite simple: at the end of an undergraduate education, is a student roughly able to understand and discuss the Economist, end-to-end, every week. This modern, non-professional education would meet the original “Greek life purpose” of a liberal arts education, updated for today’s world.The most important things for a general, non-professional or vocational education are critical thinking and problem-solving skills, familiarity with logic and the scientific process, and the ability to use these in forming opinions, discourse, and in making decisions. Other general skills that are also important include — but are not limited to — interpersonal skills and communication skills .So what is wrong with today’s typical liberal arts degree?Neither the old definition of liberal arts nor the current implementation of it is the best use of four years of somebody’s education (if it is to be non-professional). The hardest (and most lucrative) problems to solve are non-technical problems. In my opinion, getting a STEM degree gives you the tools to think about those problems more effectively than a liberal arts degree today; though it is far from a complete way of thinking, and a liberal science degree will do this in an even more complete form.Some of you will point to very successful people who’ve gone to Yale and done well, but you don’t understand statistics. A lot of successful people have started out as liberal arts majors. A lot haven’t. If you’re very driven and intelligent or lucky, you’ll probably be successful in life, even with today’s liberal arts degree. Then again, if you’re that driven and intelligent, you could probably find success with any degree, or even no degree. Apple’s Steve Jobs and Joi Ito (Director of the MIT media lab) are both college dropouts. Joi is a largely self-taught computer scientist, disc jockey, nightclub entrepreneur and technology investor. The top 20% of people in any cohort will do well independent of what curriculum their education follows, or if they had any education at all. If we want to maximize the potential of the other 80%, then we need a new Liberal Sciences curriculum.Yale just decided that Computer Science was important and I like to ask, “if you live in France, shouldn’t you learn French? If you live in the computer world, shouldn’t you learn Computer Science?” What should be the second required language in schools today if we live in a computer world? And if you live in a technology world what must you understand? Traditional education is far behind and the old world tenured professors at our universities with their parochial views and interests will keep dragging them back. My disagreement is not with the goals of a liberal arts education but its implementation and evolution (or lack thereof) from 18th century European education and its purpose. There is too little emphasis on teaching critical thinking skills in schools, even though that was the original goal of such education. Many adults have little understanding of important science and technology issues or, more importantly, how to approach them, which leaves them open to poor decision-making on matters that will affect both their families and society in general.Connections matter and many Ivy League colleges are worth it just to be an alumnus. There are people with the view that liberal arts broadened their vision and gave them great conversational topics. There are those who argue that the humanities are there to teach us what to do with knowledge. As one observer commented: “They should get lawyers to think whether an unjust law is still law. An engineer could contemplate whether Artificial Intelligence is morally good. An architect could pause to think on the merit of building a house fit for purpose. A doctor could be taught whether and how to justify using scarce medical resources for the benefit of one patient and not another. This is the role of humanities — a supplement to STEM and the professions.”In my view creativity, humanism, and ethics are very hard to teach, whereas worldliness and many other skills supposedly taught through the liberal arts are more easily self-taught in a continuously updating fashion if one has a good quantitative, logical and scientific process-oriented base education.The argument goes that a scientific/engineering education lacks enough training in critical thinking skills, creativity, inspiration, innovation and holistic thinking . On the contrary, I argue that the scientific and logical basis of a better liberal sciences education would allow some or all of this — and in a more consistent way. The argument that being logical makes one a linear problem solver and ill prepared for professions that require truly creative problem solving has no merit in my view. The old version of the Liberal Arts curriculum was reasonable in a world of the far less complex 18th century Euro-centric world and an elitist education focused on thinking and leisure. Since the 20th century, despite it’s goals, it has evolved as the “easier curriculum” to get through college and may now be the single biggest reason students pursue it.I do not believe that today’s typical liberal arts degree turns you into a more complete thinker; rather, I believe they limit the dimensionality of your thinking since you have less familiarity with mathematical models (to me it’s the dimensionality of thinking that I find deficient in many people without a rigorous education), and worse statistical understanding of anecdotes and data (which liberal arts was supposedly good at preparing students for but is actually highly deficient at). People in the humanities fields are told that they get taught analytical skills, including how to digest large volumes of information, but I find that by and large such education is poor at imparting these skills. Maybe, that was the intent but the reality is very far from this idealization (again, excluding the top 20%).There is a failing in many college programs that are not pragmatic enough to align and relate liberal arts program to the life of a working adult. From finance to media to management and administration jobs, necessary skills like strategic-thinking, finding trends, and big-picture problem-solving have all evolved in my view to need the more quantitative preparation than today’s degrees provide.Such skills, supposedly the purview of liberal arts education, are best learnt through more quantitative methods today. Many vocational programs from engineering to medicine also need these same skills and need to evolve and broaden to add to their training. But if I could only have one of a liberal arts or an engineering/science education, I’d pick the engineering even if I never intended to work as an engineer and did not know what career I wanted to pursue.I have in fact almost never worked as an engineer but deal exclusively with risk, evolution of capability, innovation, people evaluation, creativity and vision formulation. That is not to say that goal setting, design, and creativity are not important or even critical. In fact these need to be added to most professional and vocational degrees, which are also deficient for today’s practical careers.More and more fields are becoming very quantitative, and it’s becoming harder and harder to go from majoring in English or history to having optionality on various future careers and being an intelligent citizen in a democracy. Math, statistics and science are hard, and school is a great time to learn those areas, whereas many of the liberal arts courses can be pursued after college on the base of a broad education. But without training in the scientific process, logic and critical thinking, discourse and understanding are both made far more difficult.A good illustrative example of the problems of today’s liberal arts education can be found in the writing of well-known author, Malcolm Gladwell, a history major and a one-time writer for The New Yorker. Gladwell famously argued that stories were more important that accuracy or validity without even realizing it. The New Republic called the final chapter of Gladwell’sOutliers, “impervious to all forms of critical thinking” and said that Gladwell believes “a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule.” Referencing a Gladwell reporting mistake in which Gladwell refers to “eigenvalue” as “Igon Value,” Harvard professor and author Steven Pinker criticizes his lack of expertise: “I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.” Unfortunately too many in today’s media are similarly “uneducated” in their interpretation of experts. Storytelling and quotes become a misleading factor instead of being an aid to communicating the accurate facts more easily. His assertions around “10,000 hours” may or may not be true but his arguments for it carry very little weight with me because of the quality of his thinking.Though one example of Malcolm Gladwell does not prove the invalidity of arguments for a Liberal Arts degree, I find this kind of erroneous thinking (anecdotally) true of many humanities and liberal arts graduates. In fact I see the inconsistencies that Gladwell failed to understand (giving him the benefit of the doubt that these were unintentional) in the writings of many authors of articles in supposedly elite publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Again this is not a statistically valid conclusion but the impression across hundreds or thousands of examples of one person. When I do occasionally read articles from these publications, I make a sport of judging the quality of thinking of the writers as I read, based on false arguments, unsupported conclusions, confusion of story telling with factual assertions, mistaking quotes from interviews as facts, misinterpreting statistics, etc. Similar lack of cogent thinking leads to bad decisions, uninformed rhetoric, and lack of critical thinking around topics like nuclear power and GMOs.Unfortunately in an increasingly complex world, all these topics skills that many liberal arts majors even at elite universities fail to muster. The topic of risk and risk assessment from simple personal financial planning to societal topics like income inequality is so poorly understood and considered by most liberal arts majors as to make me pessimistic. I am not arguing that engineering or STEM education is good at these topics but rather that this is not its intent of STEM or professional education. The intent of Liberal Arts education is what Steven Pinker called a “building a self” and I would add “for the technological and dynamically evolving 21st century”.Learning new areas as career paths and interests evolve becomes harder. Traditional European liberal arts education was for the few and the elite. Is that still the goal today? People spend years and a small fortune or lifelong indebtedness to obtain it and employability should be a criterion in addition to an educations’ contribution to intelligent citizenry.Wikipedia defines “the liberal arts as those subjects or skills that in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free person to know in order to take an active part in civic life, something that (for Ancient Greece) included participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and most importantly, military service. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric were the core liberal arts, while arithmetic, geometry, the theory of music, and astronomy also played a (somewhat lesser) part in education.” Today’s ideal list, not anchored in “classical antiquity”would be more expansive and more prioritized in my view.Idealists and those who perceive liberal arts education today as meeting these goals are wrong not in it’s intent but in assessing how well it does this function (and that is an assertion/opinion). I agree that we need a more humanistic education but it is hard to agree or disagree with the current curriculum without defining what humanistic means. Does it really teach critical thinking, logic or the scientific process, things every citizen should know in order to participate in society? Does it allow for intelligent discourse or decision-making across a diverse set of beliefs, situations, preferences, and assumptions?Should we teach our students what we already know, or prepare them to discover more? Memorizing the Gettysburg address is admirable but ultimately worthless; understanding history is interesting, even useful, but not as relevant as topics from the Economist. A student who can apply the scientific process or employ critical thinking skills to solve a big problem has the potential to change the world (or at minimum get a better-paying job). They can actually debate a topic like #blacklivesmatter, income inequality or Climate Change without being subject to “Trumpism” or emotion and biases-based distortions. No wonder half the college graduates who fill jobs as some studies indicate, actually fill jobs that don’t need a college degree! Their degree is not relevant to adding value to an employer (though that is not the only purpose of a degree).Further, even if an ideal curriculum can be stitched together, most liberal arts majors infrequently do it. If the goal is not professional education then it must be general education, which requires many more must-have requirements for me to consider a university degree respectable. Of course others are entitled to their own opinion, though the right answer is testable if one agrees that the goals of such an education are intelligent citizenry and/or employability.For now I am mostly leaving aside matters related to professional, vocational or technical curriculum. I’m also ignoring the not irrelevant and pragmatic issues of education affordability and the burden of student debt, which would argue for a more employment-enabling type of education. The failure I am referring to are two-fold: (1) the failure of curriculums to keep up with the changing needs of modern society and (2) liberal arts becoming the “easy curriculum” for those who shy away from the more demanding majors and prefer an easier, often (but not always) more socially-oriented college life. Ease, not value, or interest instead of value become key criteria in designing a curriculum for many students today. And for those of you who think this is not true, I am asserting based on my experience this is true for the majority of today’s students, but not for every liberal arts student.Not every course is for every student but the criteria need to match the needs of the student and not their indulgences, taking interests and capability into account. “Pursue your passion” even if it increases the probability of getting you into unemployment or homelessness later is advice I have seldom agreed with (yes there are occasions this is warranted, especially for the top or the bottom 20% of students). More on passions later but I’m not saying passions are unimportant. What I am saying is with today’s implementation of a liberal arts curriculum, even at elite universities like Stanford and Yale, I find that many liberal arts majors (excluding roughly the top 20% of students) lack the ability to rigorously defend ideas, make compelling, persuasive arguments, or discourse logically.Steven Pinker — in addition to refuting Gladwell — has a brilliant, clarion opinion on what education ought to be, writing in The New Republic, “It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.”Though I agree, I am not sure this curriculum is more important than the ideas below. Based on the skills defined below any gaps in the above education can be filled in by students post graduation.So what should non-professional elite education entail?If we had enough time in school, I would suggest we do everything. Sadly that is not realistic, so we need a prioritized list of basic requirements because every subject we do cover excludes some other subject given the fixed time we have available. We must decide what is better taught during the limited teaching time we have, and what subjects are easier learnt during personal time or as post-education or graduate pursuits.In the new Liberal Science curriculum I propose, students would master:1. The fundamental tools of learning and analysis, primarily critical thinking, the scientific process or methodology, and approaches to problem solving and diversity.2. Knowledge of a few generally applicable topics and knowledge of the basics such as logic, mathematics, and statistics to judge and model conceptually almost anything one might run into over the next few decades.3. The skills to “dig deep” into their areas of interest in order to understand how these tools can be applied to one domain and to be equipped to change domains every so often4. Preparation for jobs in a competitive and evolving global economy or preparation for uncertainty about one’s future direction, interest, or areas where opportunities will exist.5. Preparation to continuously evolve and stay current as informed and intelligent citizens of a democracyCritical subject matter should include economics, statistics, mathematics, logic and systems modeling, psychology, computer programming, and current (not historical) cultural evolution (Why rap? Why ISIS? Why suicide bombers? Why the Kardasians and Trump? Why environmentalism and what matters and what does not? And of course the question, are the answers to these questions expert opinions or have some other validity?).Furthermore, certain humanities disciplines such as literature and history should become optional subjects, in much the same way that physics is today (and, of course, I advocate mandatory basic physics study along with the other sciences). And one needs the ability to think through many, if not most, of the social issues we face (which the softer liberal arts subjects ill-prepare one for in my view).Imagine a required course each semester where every student is asked to analyze and debate topics from every issue of a broad publication such as The Economist or Technology Review. And imagine a core curriculum that teaches the core skills to have the discussions above. Such a curriculum would not only provide a platform for understanding in a more relevant context how the physical, political, cultural and technical worlds function, but would also impart instincts for interpreting the world, and prepare students to become active participants in the economy.It would be essential to understand psychology because human behavior and human interaction are important and will continue to be so. I’d like people who are immune to the fallacies and agendas of the media, politicians, advertisers, and marketers because these professions have learned to hack the human brain’s biases (a good description of which are described in Dan Kannehman’s Thinking Fast & Slow and in Dan Gardner’s The Science of Fear). I’d like to teach people how to understand history but not to spend time getting the knowledge of history, which can be done after graduation.I’d like people to read a New York Times article and understand what is an assumption, what’s an assertion by the writer, what are facts, and what are opinions, and maybe even find the biases and contradictions inherent in many articles. We are far beyond the days of the media simply reporting news, shown by the different versions of the “news” that liberal and conservative newspapers in the US report, all as different “truths” of the same event. Learning to parse this media is critical. I’d like people to understand what is statistically valid and what is not. What is a bias or the color of the writer’s point of view.Students should learn the scientific method, and most importantly how to apply its mental model to the world. The scientific method requires that hypotheses be tested in controlled conditions; this can diminish the effects of randomness and, often, personal bias. This is very valuable in a world where too many students fall victim to confirmation biases (people observe what they expect to observe), appeal to new and surprising things, and narrative fallacies (once a narrative has been built, it’s individual elements are more accepted). There are many, many types of human biases defined in psychology that people fall victim to. Failure to understand mathematical models and statistics makes it substantially more difficult to understand critical questions in daily life, from social sciences to science and technology, political issues, health claims and much more.I’d also suggest tackling several general and currently relevant topic areas such as genetics, computer science, systems modeling, econometrics, linguistics modeling, traditional and behavioral economics, and genomics/bioinformatics (not an exhaustive list) which are quickly becoming critical issues for everyday decisions from personal medical decisions to understanding minimum pay, economics of taxes and inequality, immigration, or climate change. E.O. Wilson argues in his book “The Meaning of Human Existence” that it is hard to understand social behavior without understanding multi-level selection theory and the mathematical optimization that nature performed through years of evolutionary iterations. I am not arguing that every educated person should be able to build such a model but rather that they should be able to “think” such a model qualitatively.Not only do these topics expose students to a lot of useful and current information, theories, and algorithms, they may in fact become platforms to teach the scientific process — a process that applies to (and is desperately needed for) logical discourse as much as it applies to science. The scientific process critically needs to be applied to all the issues we discuss socially in order to have intelligent dialog. Even if the specific information becomes irrelevant within a decade (who knows where technology will head next; hugely important cultural phenomena and technologies like Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone didn’t exist before 2004, after all), it’s incredibly useful to understand the current frontiers of science and technology as building blocks for the future.It’s not that history or Kafka are not important, but rather it is even more critical to understand if we change the assumptions, environmental conditions and rules that applied to historical events, that would alter the conclusions we draw from historical events today. Every time a student takes one subject they exclude the possibility of taking something else. I find it ironic that those who rely on “history repeating itself” often fail to understand the assumptions that might cause “this time” to be different. The experts we rely on for predictions have about the same accuracy as dart-throwing monkeys according to at least one very exhaustive study by Prof Phil Tetlock. So it is important to understand how to rely on “more likely to be right” experts, as defined in the book Superforecasters. We make a lot of judgments in everyday life and we should be prepared to make them intelligently.Students can use this broad knowledge base to build mental models that will aid them in both further studies and vocations. Charlie Munger, the famous investor from Berkshire Hathaway, speaks about mental models and what he calls “elementary, worldly wisdom.” Munger believes a person can combine models from a wide range of disciplines (economics, mathematics, physics, biology, history, and psychology, among others) into something that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. I have to agree that this cross-disciplinary thinking is becoming an essential skill in today’s increasingly complex world.“The models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department,” Munger explains. “That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines… These models generally fall into two categories: (1) ones that help us simulate time (and predict the future) and better understand how the world works (e.g. understanding a useful idea from like autocatalysis), and (2) ones that help us better understand how our mental processes lead us astray (e.g., availability bias).” I would add that they provide the “common truth” in discussions where the well educated discussants disagree.After grasping the fundamental tools of learning and some broad topical exposure, it’s valuable to “dig deep” in one or two topic areas of interest. For this, I prefer some subject in science or engineering rather than literature or history (bear with me before you have an emotional reaction; I’ll explain in a minute). Obviously, it’s best if students are passionate about a specific topic, but it’s not critical as the passion may develop as they dig in (some students will have passions, but many won’t have any at all). The real value for digging deep is to learn how to dig in; it serves a person for the duration of their life: in school, work, and leisure. As Thomas Huxley said, “learn something about everything and everything about something,” though his saying that does not make it true. Too often, students don’t learn that a quote is not a fact.If students choose options from traditional liberal-education subjects, they should be taught in the context of the critical tools mentioned above. If students want jobs, they should be taught skills where future jobs will exist. If we want them as intelligent citizens, we need to have them understand critical thinking, statistics, economics, how to interpret technology and science developments, and how global game theory applies to local interests. Traditional majors like international relations and political science are passé as base skills and can easily be acquired once a student has the basic tools of understanding. And they and many other traditional liberal arts subjects like history or art will be well served in graduate level work. I want to repeat that this is not to claim those “other subjects” are not valuable. I think they are very appropriate for graduate level study.Back to history and literature for a moment — these are great to wrestle with once a student has learned to think critically. My contention is not that these subjects are unimportant, but rather that they are not basic or broad enough “tools for developing learning skills” as they were in the 1800s, because the set of skills needed today has changed. Furthermore, they are topics easily learned by someone trained in the basic disciplines of thinking and learning that I’ve defined above. This isn’t as easy the other way around. A scientist can more easily become a philosopher or writer than a writer or philosopher can become a scientist.If subjects like history and literature are focused on too early, it is easy for someone not to learn to think for themselves and not to question assumptions, conclusions, and expert philosophies. This can do a lot of damage.Separating the aspirational claims by universities from the reality of today’s typical liberal arts education I tend to agree with the views of William Deresiewicz. He was an English professor at Yale from 1998–2008 and recently published the book “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.” Deresiewicz writes on the current state of liberal arts, “At least the classes at elite schools are academically rigorous, demanding on their own terms, no? Not necessarily. In the sciences, usually; in other disciplines, not so much. There are exceptions, of course, but professors and students have largely entered into what one observer called a ‘nonaggression pact.’” Easy is often the reason students pick liberal arts subjects today.Lots of things are important but what are the most important goals of an education?To repeat, school is a place where every student should have the opportunity to become a potential participant in whatever they might want to tackle in the future, with an appropriate focus not only on what they want to pursue but also, pragmatically, what they will need to do to be productively employed or productive and thinking member of society. By embracing thinking and learning skills, and adding a dash of irreverence and confidence that comes from being able to tackle new arenas (creative writing as a vocational skill, not a liberal arts education, may have a role here, but Macbeth does not make my priority list; we can agree to disagree but if we discourse I want to understand the assumptions that cause us to disagree, something many students are unable to do), hopefully they will be lucky enough to help shape the next few decades or at least be intelligent voters in a democracy and productive participants in their jobs .With the right critical lens, history, philosophy, and literature can help creativity and breadth by opening the mind to new perspectives and ideas. Still, learning about them is secondary to learning the tools of learning except possibly the right approach to philosophy education. Again I want to remind you that none of this applies to the top 20% of students who learn all these skills independent of their education or major. Passions like music or literature (leaving aside the top few students who clearly excel at music or literature) and its history may be best left to self-pursuit, while exploring the structure and theory of music or literature may be a way to teach the right kind of thinking about music and literature!For some small subset of the student body, pursuing passions and developing skills in subjects such as music or sports can be valuable, and I am a fan of schools like Juilliard, but in my view this must be in addition to a required general education especially for the “other 80%”. It’s the lack of balance in general education which I am suggesting needs to be addressed (including for engineering, science and technology subjects’ students. Setting music and sports aside, with the critical thinking tools and exposure to the up-and-coming areas mentioned above, students should be positioned to discover their first passion and begin to understand themselves, or at the least be able to keep up with the changes to come, get (and maintain) productive jobs, and be intelligent citizens.At the very least they should be able to evaluate how much confidence to place in a New York Times study of 11 patients on a new cancer treatment from Mexico or a health supplement from China and to assess the study’s statistical validity and whether the treatment’s economics make sense. And they should understand the relationship between taxes, spending, balanced budgets, and growth better than they understand 15th century English history in preparation for “civic life” to quote the original purpose of a liberal arts education. And if they are to study language or music, Dan Levitin’s book “This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession” should be first reading or its equivalent in linguistics. It can teach you about a human obsession but also teach you how to build a mathematical model in your head and why and how Indian music is different than Latin music. In fact, these should be required for all education, not just liberal arts education, along with the other books mentioned above.The role of passion and emotion in life is best epitomized by a quote (unknown source) I once saw that says the most important things in life are best decided by the heart and not logic. For the rest we need logic and consistency. The “what” may be emotion and passion based but the “how” often (yes, sometimes the journey is the reward) needs a different approach that intelligent citizens should possess and education should teach.I am sure I have missed some points of view, so I look forward to starting a valuable dialogue on this important topic.

No.Not unless we decide to demand it.I think we misunderstand the whole “checks and balances” thing at our peril. I hear it now from people on the left or outside observers looking in, hoping that these mysterious “checks and balances” will protect us from Trump. I heard this a lot from prospective Trump voters, that these “checks and balances” things would kick in and curb the worst of his excesses (I feel like at least 7/10ths of being a Trump voter was explaining how he didn’t really mean the terrible things he was saying or wouldn’t actually be able to do the terrible things he was promising to do).Here is the truth of it:There is absolutely nothing that President Trump can’t do.No convention he can’t plow through, no statute he can’t ignore, no dissent he can’t thumb his nose at, no custom he can’t cannonball, no perceived “limitation” he can’t just walk right through like a pane of glass.UNLESS we choose to hold him accountable.See, checks and balances are not like some automated process. There’s no buzzer that goes “bzzzzt” and Xs out a signing statement he produces if it goes beyond constitutional limits. We don’t have Timecops. There’s no like Krypton High Council that all of Trump’s decisions have to go through before they’re enacted.“Dude, you can’t tweet that - the fuck’s the matter with you, are you high?”I am a huge proponent of constitutionalism. Our system of government is beautifully designed in the way that it plays three distinct functions of government against each other so no single one could become too powerful. It has been a genius of social engineering, and while many bemoan that it makes taking action difficult, that’s a feature, not a bug. Those collective machinations are what we refer to as “checks and balances” - not like a crowbar behind a pane of glass we can smash in case of emergency, but rather the aggregate actions of our representatives and others who serve in government. MOST of the time, those actions, taken together, do a reasonably good job of keeping things on track.But here is the deep dark secret of ANY system of government.Ultimately, a law is only worth the paper it is printed on. Hell, the constitution is just some old-ass pieces of parchment kicking around behind glass at the National Archives. These are just things, just words on a page.It is not the law ITSELF that matters - rather, it is the collective decision of society to adhere to that law and to punish those who break it. It is not the law itself that sets boundaries - it is the demonstrable and actionable will of those in a position to uphold and/or defend it.And at any point we - we citizens and our elected representatives - can just kind of decide, you know, not to.As it pertains to the powers of the President of the United States of America, this system has worked reasonably well for many many years, but over time it has more and more drifted towards a, let’s say “loose” interpretation of what’s legal or not - “well, it says I can only do this, but I really want to do that, so maybe if I just explain how that is kind of like this, I can do it.” Nevertheless, enough people in enough positions of power had enough of an interest in asserting their own power that the worst excesses were kept in check most of the time, some big exceptions aside.But in recent years, the trend towards the executive being “the decider” has accelerated greatly. George W. Bush in particular was responsible for perhaps one of the biggest usurpations of authority by a president since FDR, and that trend was certainly not rolled back but was only further normalized and added to by Barack Obama (Dear conservatives: yes, Bush was worse. Dear liberals: yes, Obama was bad). And, one thing that both presidents discovered, was that if you basically asserted something, and nobody had the balls to call you on it, you could make something legal or not, constitutional or not, just by force of will and gumption, no matter what those pieces of paper say.We think of this as only being applicable in the case of coups or revolution - where literally everybody who matters in society wakes up one day and basically decides “Hrm, that whole law thing is stupid, we’re not going to do that anymore, we’re going to toss that shit out and do it our way now.” It’s not like the piece of paper changed - everybody just kind of decided the piece of paper doesn’t matter anymore. But that same process happens more gradually too, as a sort of slow atrophy of the rule of law until it’s weak enough that you can just start, you know, violating it without consequence.Torture is a great example. There is basically absolutely no way that torture is legal. It is hard to overstate how ILLEGAL it is according to basically every body of law we have and ascribe to. This was not and never really has been a “grey area.” For America, by the letter of the law, a guy in the military or law enforcement using physical torture to try and extract information or confession is illegal as fuck.And yet, a small cabal of civilians in the Oval Office just kind of started saying one day “Well…you know what, we think it should be legal. So…yeah. We’re just gonna go ahead and operate on that assumption from now on.”And, guess what, they did! They didn’t prove that it was legal in court. They didn’t get Congress to write a law saying it was legal. It wasn't put to a vote. They basically just started doing it, and every time someone called them on it they replied with what amounted to “nuh uh.”And it worked! At every step when checks and balances ought to have kicked in, there was simply not a strong enough collective will to adhere to the letter of the law and enforce it to overcome the inertia of executive action. Torture is still presumably illegal, but if you engage in it at the behest of the president and with some internally reasoned legal argument for its use, you can just kind of do it and also, as Obama shamefully normalized, you won’t suffer any consequences from doing it. It's illegal, but we can do it, nobody will stop us from doing it, and we can get away with it. So, it becomes…well, sort of legal!Bush proved that, in matters pertaining to war, foreign policy, and civil liberties, basically the president can do whatever the hell he wants and, usually, it will overwhelm the will of the people normally tasked with reigning him in. Obama proved (and Bush did too) that in matters pertaining to the national economy, immigration, civil rights, and more, you can basically do the same. In both cases, the Supreme Court of the United States and most of the higher courts were WILDLY deferential to presidential authority (despite conservative caricatures of all these “activist” judges I keep hearing about), loathe to carte blanche overturn major national initiatives. And in both cases, Congress could never quite get its shit together enough to act - and that’s even assuming the supermajority disagreed enough to want to act, which most of the time, let's be honest, they didn’t.And we, as voters and as citizens, tend to let them get away with it because the end goal often seems like a good idea and that goodness of the ends often outweighs the “technicalities” in the means. Who doesn’t want to stop terrorists or fix the economy, bro?!And it is into this new milieu of executive authority that Donald Trump steps.In some cases, the lack of checks and balances is literally that - it just simply never occurred to us to write down a law about such and such a thing. Financial transparency for an incoming president, for instance. We just kind of assumed that candidates for president would keep doing that, and if they didn't they'd be hounded off the stage. But there's no statute making them, just convention. In other cases, it’s stuff that we know is illegal - like say receiving money from foreign governments when you’re the goddamn President of the United States of America for instance - but…well, who is going to show up and serve Trump papers on that? Who is going to initiate that action, and who has to approve it, and then who is going to enforce it?Checks and balances are not self-executing. They require people enforcing them.And, when you're asking “can checks and balances stop this?”, often the answer may well be “yes” but the next question is always “ok, so who's going to do it?” And, after that “who’s going to make them? What if they don't?”This is, by the way, not a Republican or a Democratic issue. BOTH parties - and here I mean the voters as much as the representatives - have been TERRIBLE at slowly letting a political culture based on a rule of law corrode and dissolve. Because each time the pendulum swings, those same powers a partisan hated when the other guy was using it, well it’s now awesome when it’s our guy. We have, as a culture, mostly seemed to have drifted to the idea that the ends usually DO justify the means, and that we should only seek to enforce rules when they trip up the other guy. So we just spend our time bitching about the ends, and the restrictions on the means atrophy and decay. And, ultimately, when we need them most, we find them brittle and frail, and the people we would most need to step in an utilize them are no longer much interested in doing so, and face no real consequences when they don't.The recent Supreme Court fights is another great example. Many liberals want Obama to fiat his appointee on his way out the door. Many Republicans wanted “their” team to stonewall indefinitely. But those same Republicans will scream like six year olds if the Democrats stonewall a Trump appointee and declare it an incredibly anti-democratic example of sure loserism. And were Trump to play hardball and recess appointment his nominee Democrats will go apeshit. Both sides, at nearly every single swing of the pendulum, forget the most basic rule of authority expansion - it is almost always one directional. It's not like the next guy gives it back.Ultimately, the power we demand for our political allies is the power that our political enemies will inherit.And both George W. Bush and Barack Obama - and more importantly their supporters - spent a lot of time demanding they had this or that authority, and that checks and balances did not or should not apply to them, and that they would vote for or against their representatives accordingly. And of course it’s not just those two - this is a trend that goes back a long way - but it has certainly accelerated more and more exponentially in recent years.And it is into this new milieu of executive authority that Donald Trump steps.And unless WE demand that our representatives in all branches of government respect the rule of law or face the consequences - and fucking mean it - there’s no real mechanism for that to happen, no incentive for those representatives to stick out their necks.Unless we begin to view checks and balances as an actual important feature of government and not just a partisan tool - and the law as something that needs to be respected and strictly adhered to whether you agree with it or not or whether it inconveniences your political agenda or not, I don’t see any particular reason why they would.Wouldn't the checks and balances of the US government stop most of Donald Trump’s acts?Theoretically, yes.In practice?It depends.Do we want them to or not? Nobody is going to on their own, so long as the incentives are stacked in such a way where doing nothing is less painful for those in power than doing something.The power is ours - but we have to have the will and wherewithal to use it.Will we?We shall see.