It would have helped if they hadn’t played games with time. They skipped over the first death, then went back to it, had visions of past scenes that hadn’t happened, and had visions of future scenes that couldn’t happen. All this playing around served to distance me from the story. A relentless progression would have…

Seems strange to blame the site for satisfying demand for spoilers. The problem, if they is one, is surely with the fans for reading spoilerific articles. And really, that’s up to them. I’m anti-spoiler myself, but as long as the knowledge isn’t forced on anyone who doesn’t want it, I’m fine with other people knowing…

Asylum had promise but it turned out to be them throwing random stuff at a wall to see what stuck. In the end, not much did. They had Nazis, aliens, serial killers, nuns, angels, evil doctors and probably other stuff I forget, and it didn’t form a coherent whole. Other seasons weren’t as messy, but none of them really…

With six months of warning... really? It’s one of the things I wondered about with Seveneves, too, where they had two years warning. What proportion of society would continue doing their job how close to the end. Whether $100 billion would actually be worth anything when the people you are paying it to will not have a…

The upside is the orbiter part of the mission is going well, and from the lander they got vast amounts of telemetry which will help with future landings.

Isn’t he more likely to be killed by US actors? That’s who he’s embarassing. How would Putin prevent that?

Thanks. As far as I can tell, those dates refer to one specific pair of images they use as an example to illustrate their process.

Oh, OK. The dose should be tolerable, but nothing in space is really safe.

It also reminded me of Harper’s Island. That’s about a girl whose father went nuts and killed her mother and a bunch of other people before the cops shot him. Now she has to return to the place where it happened because her friend is getting married there. It’s a TV show, a slasher spread over 13 episodes. Pretty…

I agree about extra-solar. If I were such a billionaire I’d concern myself with plantary disasters, not solar ones. I think it’s plausible that Mars could be prepared as a refuge for my children, if not for myself.

You seem to be thinking about the past cold war, rather than about future threats. Which may be more than mere war. We might have religious fanatics trying to bring about the end of days, for example. And their tools may be biological or nanotechnological rather than nuclear. A large asteroid strike could also be…

The Moon has worse radiation than Mars because it doesn’t have an atmosphere. The surface is Mars is only about as bad as low Earth orbit for radiation.

As I understand it, they only detect splotches in areas where they have an overlapping before and after photo. That will be a tiny fraction of the Moon’s surface. The total rate over the entire surface will be several orders of magnitude higher.

That’s partly because the power company did a better job of covering. The story that Barb had merely run away from home had some credibility with most. She was old enough to be allowed that agency.

You have good taste. They are all good, within their genre, except for the last one. The only good part of the last one was its opening sequence which recapitulates the ending of the previous one.

SpaceX aren’t standing still, though. If we’re talking about New Glenn, then we also have to talk about the Interplanetary Transport System.

SpaceX has launched and landed the same rocket 8 times. It was called “Grasshopper” and this happened back in 2012. The flights were short, and definitely sub-orbital, but they established that vertical landing was viable. They stopped doing those sub-orbital flights because they stopped learning much from them.…

Rather than stand down, he could promise that if elected President he would immediately declare himself “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”, as per your 25th Amendment. Then the VP becomes acting P. With a such a promise on record, Republicans could vote for Trump knowing that Pearce would…

Agreed. We don’t know if human embryos can even develop properly in low gravity. On the other hand, it may be qualitatively better than micro-gravity. We need to get there to find out. Centrifuges can be built on the Mars surface, probably easier than in orbit.

Thanks for that. I’m the opposite. I go to io9 first, and then look at the other sites later maybe. Gizmodo is low priority for me because so much of its content is stuff I’ve already seen on io9. I have wondered whether I would miss anything if I read gizmodo first. It sounds like I would.