I'm always up for excessive nerdery! If I had thought your comment was purely a joke I probably wouldn't have gone into the details, but even if I had caught that your second paragraph was a thinly-veiled Han Solo reference, it did sound like you were making a semi-serious point about the dangers of space travel with…

If we're talking fantasy why would a black or asian character be any more likely to be awkward/clumsy/one-dimensional than a white one? The reason minority characters in more realistic fiction sometimes end up being one-dimensional tokens is because you have white writers trying to write for a character that comes…

Micrometeorites large enough to do damage are very rare in deep space—we've sent many interplanetary probes through the asteroid belt, even through Saturn's rings, with no apparent damage. They would be much rarer in the interstellar space between stars. Charged particles are present, but they are mainly a danger to…

It's not clear what your criticism is—are you bothered by the substance of what was said, or just by the superficial question of how it was phrased? "Science" is about ideas, it shouldn't matter much whether you phrase them in a formal and stuffy manner or a more colloquial, even "cutesy" way. If you want to say "this…

Not if the movie allows for rewriting history...I heard somewhere that they're using the the not-entirely-logical "Back to the Future/Frequency" style of time travel, so if younger Brucie gets injured older Brucie will suddenly get a scar (and so presumably if older Brucie was carrying a photo, the photo could change…

I dunno, "fireproof" seems like an OK layman's term for "heat-shielded" (unlike with the use of "intergalactic" as a substitute for "interstellar", which is just dumb). And yes, the whole thing would presumably be heat-shielded, but from our present-day perspective I suppose being able to heat-shield a large…

Why do you say that? Space is mostly empty, I would think descending through an atmosphere would be more likely to cause structural damage (and thus necessitate more "proofing") than whizzing through deep space.

Any ship that descends through the atmosphere has to be protected against the intense heat of reentry, that's probably why they refer to it as fireproof, just to indicate that it won't be damaged when the whole ship is surrounded by a sheath of hot plasma.

An interstellar ship designed for atmospheric reentry, don't forget.

I guess the weird idea here is that most planets would go through a "dinosaur" phase of evolution regardless of the chirality of the amino acids, and it was just luck that on our planet that phase was ended by a meteor strike. If this was the idea, of course it's very silly, there's no reason to think that the…

Microgravity is easily solved by using the centrifugal force in a ring-shaped prison to create artificial gravity.

Actually that's not the hockey stick, the "hockey stick" graph was in temperature rather than CO2 concentrations. I've noticed that even among "climate skeptics", the ones who have a halfway decent knowledge of the scientific issues never really try to deny that CO2 levels have risen by an amount not seen in many…

It's a bit of a stretch to conflate being anti-science with being a "luddite" (anti-technology), but I suppose you could say that people who have a knee-jerk opposition to the use of computer models to aid in understanding and predicting complex systems like Earth's climate are being luddites of a very particular…

This is a strawman, people who worry about climate change aren't saying the Earth's climate should never change over its multibillion year history, they're worrying about an imminent disaster FOR HUMAN CIVILIZATION that might be avertable if we stopped dumping so much CO2 into the air (for some discussion of how…

This is a whole youtube genre apparently.

turtle orgasm face huh?

Didn't work too well for me, maybe I should have viewed the video fullscreen? This is the best one of these I've seen: [neave.com]

Cyriaque Lamar, meet "Cyriak" (or are you the same person???)

Ah, silly me, when I first saw the picture I imagined the two kids were children of princesses rather than princesses themselves, then when I responded to CommodoreRake I just forgot about them.

Yeah, and alternatively if their age is supposed to be the same as the years since their movie, some characters like Tiana from The Princess and the Frog would have to be little kids. Ah well, just nitpicking I suppose.