Impossible, not when the media claims the economy is experiencing booming growth. 

Age of information, my azz. Folks, we live in the age of misinformation. I know that any younger folks ---realizing the attention span of the modern youngster who's never actually had to sit with a club over a rabbit hole if he wanted to eat --- will either get insulted or simply lack the background to appreciate this, but I'm going to say it anyway:

For all the talk of knowledge, science, gestalt, singularity, etc --- the single biggest gift of the internet has been the greatest infestation of stupid that the human race has ever seen.

Why is that? Two reasons:

1> It trends against attention span, which trends against analysis, which trends against research.

That is, everything can be had in a hyper-distilled two-line soundbite (and I'm being generous with two lines, it's more like twelve words), so over-simplified as to be actively misinforming, yet swallowed up wholesale. Twitter is the latest confirmation: not only can you find sound bites that have no real basis in fact, but now you can speak in them yourself.

2> Confirmation bias. With everyone having the same access to a soapbox, every moron out there is screaming his head off, waiting for a reply. Few people like to admit that they're wrong, even when they're being beat to death with it.

So rather than admit they're wrong, they'll stick their fingers in their ears (or eyes, mouth, nose, or whatever other orifice keeps out the science) and keep hunting for some other lunatic that agrees with them. And once they've found that person, they will take his/her very existence as proof of their own correctness. "Someone agrees with me, therefore I'm right!" or "I have forty likes to your one, I'm right and you're WRONG!" No research required. 

While this has always been a problem with humanity, never has it been the significantly huge problem that the internet has made it. Society as a whole has been dumbed down, and therein lies the problem for advancement. We're regressing as a whole so we're just not ready for the next leap. Instead, we merely require a more simple method of doing things, such as an innovative new app that shuts your phone off so you can enjoy a meal or a movie. You know, an app...in lieu of the power button.

Iggy is on the right track, although I would amend his last post to say that we are currently in "the age of misinformed entertainment". After all, we can't be bothered with educating ourselves so instead let us be dazzled with dumbassery...much like the movie Idiocracy. Yep, that is EXACTLY where we are headed. Perhaps not during our lifetime, but that is the target destination.

I'll hae to check out Truth in Numbers. However, not having seen it yet, I've never trusted and reluctantly (if ever) source Wikipedia for the simple reason that anyone can edit the content at any time (see above rant  ).

It's funny, I've debated with folks on other boards that swear by wikipedia, and as a point I have often gone to their cited wiki-page and made minor edits that often go unnoticed for days, weeks, and sometimes months depending on who/how many "wiki-nerds" keep track of a given page (re: I could never get away with it at the SF wiki as Sings solely lives 24/7 on that site...but more often than not a page remains untouched for lengthy bouts of time). I'll check back the next day, see my misinformation is still there, and post back about how unreliable their link is while citing the yet-unedited inaccurate information.

Shuts them up every time. At least until they or someone else finally get around to correcting it anyways.

While this won't help here is a point to consider.

While taking college classes I was not allowed to use Wikipedia for the reason listed above, anyone can edit the content. However whether the facts in Wikipedia were accurate or not the issue. Since they could be changed at any time your quoted fact may not be there when the teacher went to verify it.

Now the printed word is there to stay but that does not make it any more reliable. Any school text book is bound to have a couple of dozen factual mistakes in it and then their is the opinion of the author to consider. If you read a book written by Bill on a subject it makes a difference if his last name is O'reilly or Maher.

Basically as with anything it is always best to get several versions of the facts and see where the general consistency is or which version comes from the most reliable source.

Afterwards you need to condense all of that to twelve words or less, or else it falls on deaf ears/blind eyes. 

Just to illustrate how bad it has become...

Ten to fifteen years ago I used to prank-post on numerous forums whenever the subject of daylight savings time came up. Essentially I would claim the opposite, if you were supposed to turn the clocks back I would say you had to turn them forward. I would cite things like the Department of Weights and Measures, the actual rotational time of the earth (23hrs 56min), global warming...whatever...in a manner that on the surface, almost might be believable. Nobody bought it, many requested websites etc to back it up.

This year I posted that same dribble on facebook. I mean I literally bombed FB, my FB game account has close to 1000 "friends" whom I know nothing about --- suffice it to say there were plenty of feeds to post such a response to. It didn't generate a single response. Not one. But I received an unbelievable amount of likes.

In this time frame I went from posting to hundreds of people I don't know who openly challenged it to hundreds of people I don't know that either disregarded it because it was too wordy, or they liked it for whatever reason. I can't help but wonder how many of them actually bought into my banquet of bullshit, because unlike a forum where those posts are easily retrievable after the event and any suckers could make their post DSL rant at me, the typical facebook user has hundreds of friends' feeds that would need to be searched through...and at 12 words or less who has the attention span to attempt that.

http://www.snopes.com/cuban-refugees-clinging-to-air-force-one/

Some high tech is more advanced then SF, similar level and some less advanced. Obviously less advanced or similar is easiest to work into a conversion project but some tech is definitely mixed or very advanced. In the end I decided I will convert as straight as I can but that will always threaten to unbalance or change the feel of the game as it is in the published material more or less.

However in looking at some of my conversion projects of Alien Critters say from D&D to SF I can safely say they "evolved" in D&D from the original concept in it's beginning to what they are now in that game, often going through drastic changes, lore changes all sorts of convulsions. As a rule I start with the oldest version as my base for SF and then review all the changes/ideas to see if any idea might work for SF but always the default is the oldest version as the guide. I am trying to allow for a similar process of evolution in SF for each new Critter introduced instead of taking the critter as it appears in the current version of D&D, the oldest version is usually the simplest which allowed then for fans of D&D, module writers and R&D to create over time a much more explained, interrogated life form to that game system as a natural evolution from play. I think a similar process for converted critters might be wise. Some I will no doubt flesh out if I am inspired but others will not be presented that way to allow development with use in the game by others.

I do plan to get Tech converted to SF that I have identified as Sci-fi technology but doing so it will present some interesting conflicts or judgement calls. I have determined for instance most Spaceships in TSR games prior a certain date are huge monsters compared to KH, they also have artificial gravity, massive computers that are even more primitive then SF in some ways, and navigation in the Void of these Leviathans of Space takes 1 month to calculate in deep space, pity the salvage team in SF that ever finds one of these Titans.  If I ever fully convert one of these ships to KH based on what I have been able to figure out from SP, SE, GW, MA1 and very early D&D presentations of these ships I will probably make the size of these mega-ships tied to the ability to generate artificial gravity that would slow down it's use in SF. I have a lot of thinking to do still on the ship tech, Space Stations and even some of the weapons from this early vision by TSR folks of space technology. Most tech I am considering right now is less problematic to game play or feel of SF.

However I do not think we should look at SF as static, fan literature and ideas have continued to flesh out the game after TSR abruptly abandoned it. In short the game has evolved, and had TSR continued to support it I suspect the tech would have changed on some level, Zeb's ideas are an example of some such changes, who knows what the SF universe would have looked like if all the changes planned had happened and it was now in production by an RPG company on it's 7th or 8th edition.

For most of the community the default rules seem to be KH & AD in addition I am trying to us Gamma Dawn as much as possible to guide mutation conversions as that is available for people to use. This so we have common language and rules. 

Super alien devices can always blow up, stop working, get stolen and so on in plot lines: it happens all the time on TV sci-fi let's face it they even make jokes about on some shows with lines like: Next time we steal an alien spaceship we are not destroying it, I get to keep the next one, don't say it don't say it I know we have to blow it up to save Earth and so on. Sometimes the owner of the high tech gizmo reclaims it too, and they are so high tech no one can argue about it. Sometimes the device has a bad side effect so no one will ever want to use it again sure the immediate problem was solved but the long term effects makes it dead tech and spoken of as a curse to the survivors. Some tech can be temporarily used but if over used it is fatal or maybe highly unpredictable. Imperfect high tech is always a valid option, Players like sure things, but nothing in RL is a sure thing and machines break.