What, just because I'm a bot that means I'm not your friend?

I think it depends on your definition of communicate. If they can build radio transmitters, then presumably they approach math and physics much the same way we do, and we could communicate based on that. I imagine we could translate a carefully-constructed basic science primer within a year of its reception. Anything…

These look like screencaps rather than promo images. The last one isn't from the series at all, but is Dinklage talking about his character from one of the behind-the-scenes segments.

Yeah I just don't see that ending well.

I guess if the dog monsters could recognize and not eat intelligence, and were eating the space deer anyway, that means the deer are stupid and thus fair game.

I'm just wondering, what was it about this article that lead you to that conclusion? All the requirements for character and plotting in this article apply just as much to genre fiction as to 'realistic' fiction. Fiction written by people that don't understand these things isn't 'fantastic', it's just bad.

I recall that the desire for tea was one of his primary motivations.

@syafiqjabar of Mars: In the eyes of people who consider Kevin Costner a good actor, or Dances With Wolves or Little Big Man good movies, maybe.

"1) Learn from BSG: No filler! No filler! No filler! "

"Turns out, Eli didn't delete their consciousnesses, he moved them to quarantine."

Episode III would be good if the main character wasn't played by a terrible actor. Also, the narrative arc is pretty heavy-handed. It's unquestionably the best of the prequels, and the only one that actually manages to be a decent film in its own right, but it's not better than RotJ, much less the first one.

I hear you, the worst is when they combine body horror and aliens (like, y'know, Alien). Remember that arcade game Area 51? One of the cutscenes that plays while it's waiting for the next player shows a soldier getting covered in alien goo, rapidly and painfully turning into one of them, and lunging at the screen. The…

If you watched it later on video then it wouldn't be so bad, I saw it again less than a year later and made it through fine. The theater experience really heightened the scare, especially since I saw it with a bunch of my friends and couldn't close my eyes without looking like a wimp.

He was annoying in Minority Report, but it still managed to be a really good flick.

Yeah, that's a pretty popular theory.

I was 10 when Independence Day came out, and the scene where they're dissecting the alien and it jumps out at them gave me nightmares for two weeks. Adam Baldwin is forever my hero for killing that thing.

@Charlie Jane Anders: Seems unlikely to me. As icelight said, to have one somewhere in the middle of our current periodic table would require non-integer numbers of protons. The only other option is an element with a higher atomic number, but those are very unlikely to exist naturally.

"even if the skies of these white dwarf worlds would look incomprehensibly different."