Cally hesitates. Then, "Oh, this again? It looked worse than it was. Just a dislocation."

Uh huh.

"Makes sense. I'm not very good at sports, myself, but mostly because I don't really practice and don't have extremely athletic leanings."

"Aww, sports are great! If you don't have the time or the body for it, though, yeah they can be bad."

"Oh I don't dislike them, it's really just a matter of never having really dedicated myself much."

Nod, nod. "I thought, 'I'm going to be a professional athlete' - a soccer star, olympic gymnast, whatever, when I was a little younger. But it's just not going to happen, you know? Unless you're the second coming of Michael Jordan or something."

"Yeah. I aim lower than that—just total world domination."

With a wry smile she asks, "Perhaps you need to attend a realistic goal-setting class?"

"Yes, that sounds like a good idea. When I take over the world I should be able to coach people on how to best achieve their goals."

"This whole taking-over-the-world business seems like it might undermine the ideals of democratic elections a bit, doesn't it?"

"Well, maybe my plan is to become a country's president and be so good at it that everyone else will want me, too!"

"If you're superhuman enough to get elected president of multiple countries, perhaps you deserve world domination. Though I do think it seems a bit unlikely."

Shrug. "Aim for the Moon, because even if you miss, you land in the middle of hard vacuum and are half-cooked-half-frozen... I forgot where I was going with this."

"Do you read sci-fi? I - well, I like sci-fi."

"That sounded a bit more complicated than just liking it."

"We as a species need to put humans on the Moon, and Mars, and in asteroid habitats, and on interstellar voyages, eventually."

"We definitely do, but given that most of our problems with using the space we do currently have on Earth are logistical in nature..."

"Malaria in something-istan is bad, sure, sure. I'm going to worry about nuclear war or gamma ray bursts or something anyway, though."

"Oh no I'm mostly talking about, like, the way we have more food than we need to eradicate hunger but we can't get it places effectively, or just in general how we're very bad at allocating resources sensibly, so trying to build a spacefaring civilization would probably fail terribly."

"The Moon would be as metaphorically far away as America was in the 18th century. So maybe we'd end up with a Lunar Independence War... I see the point, but I'm not actually sure this means we shouldn't colonize places."

"No I don't think we shouldn't I think we need to shape up so that we're not horribly bad at it."

"People are sometimes crazy. Governments often have bad incentives. And governments are big. You'll need a big lever."

"You have an idea of a lever to do it?"

"Not really. Money seems to do the trick, sorta."

"Only sorta, but if money was the only barrier I think this would be a solved problem."

"People being crazy and bad governments."