@mykie: I don't think black holes would matter that much in balance. It's true that they trap light, but this is just one of the many ways that a photon from a distant star would fail to reach Earth. It could scatter off of interstellar dust. It could facilitate a chemical reaction in an interstellar gas cloud. …

@artum: Some things are more certain than others, but one of the great things about science is that it leaves the door open to revision as new observations refute old ideas.

@artum: I think I know of some triceratops who would beg to differ.

@spudhed: I'm not convinced. Sure, we're clever. We adapt. But even populations in industrial economies would be devastated. The reason is that we use a *lot* of land and resources for food. Take away the sun for a year and heat lamps just won't cut it. Our species would survive, somehow, but there would be a…

@Howard J. Barnett: Thanks for the extra information and detail. I believe this correlates well with what I said.

@mrantimatter: It was most definitely Lavos... because we have our own version of the Mammon Machine going on right now in the Gulf of Mexico.

@Krakenstein: The Yellowstone caldera has exploded before, and while it was a major catastrophe in North America, it wasn't even a major extinction event. The Siberian volcano model involves vulcanism orders of magnitude greater and occurring over a very long time.

@syafiqjabar of Mars: Adaptation happens all the time. In times of distress, adaptation is more rapid. It's not necessarily "fair", though. Some very cool critters and plants died out in the Permian-Triassic event, including some incredibly successful ones like trilobites. Who knows what sort of species we would…

@SirFenwick: Yeah, and those stars? How do they work? We can't actually go there to find out! We can't even *see* into them. It's all a theory, and it'll never be proven.

@Irrafixable: It's probably false. Something as large as a brown dwarf would impact the observed motion of the sun. Binary systems rotate about their mutual center of mass.

@Muskrat 42: Maybe, depending on what you do, but the problem is that the pair of particles are no longer entangled after making an observation.

@Muskrat 42: If one can make multiple observations of entangled particles, then many things are possible, but one cannot.

@Fernando Jorge: We could agree in advance that I will send a message after some period of time. There would be no way to verify that either of us kept up our commitment, though. Even if we did, the results would be meaningless. The measurements of particles is random.

I'm not comfortable with the article saying that the information was transmitted faster than light. It was not.

@beans01: Well, The Daily Show is an Emmy magnate.