@brentbent)dense as a neutron star and bright as a super nova(: Haha, beat me to it. Wait, why am I laughing? I don't want to be raw material in Economy 2.0. :(

@bokscutter: [www.shewee.com] of course!

@FrankenPC: Mass Relays, of course.

Er... there might be a bit of a typo there. A density of 1050 kg per cubic meter is... just about identical to that of water at standard pressure and temperature.

It would be awful nice to see an actual fight scene with bladed weapons that actually involved... fighting... instead of cutting away to artistic flashes of light any time anything interesting is happening...

@beefmalone: Nice strawman kids. Careful, those are flammable.

@JudasAsparagus: In regards to 2, light can be made to orbit if spacetime is warped enough. Black holes and neutron stars possess a 'photon sphere', which is the distance from the center of the object where photons are forced into orbits; for non-rotating black holes, it's 1.5 times the Schwarzchild radius.

I suppose I should point out that the title photograph on this article isn't the quasar gravitational lens the article is discussing, though an image of it does appear in the video.

@nutnics: Photons have no rest mass, ie. if a photon were to stand still, it would be massless. Of course, photons can never stand still.

@walkingagh: I'm not sure that's correct in terms of superconductors. I believe the levitation occurs because superconductors are 'perfectly diamagnetic', meaning they expel all magnetic fields. It's this effect that causes magnets to levitate above them (or vice versa).

@chumleyex: Reality has a well-known boring bias. :(

@jinchoung: Well, the problem with that idea is that, if a region is out of causal contact, it cannot influence us in any way; if it could, it would still be in causal contact. :) There are very probably regions that are out of contact now (due to inflation) that -were- in contact in the deep past, and would have…

@Heliophage: I always liked to put it something like: the direction that points toward the center of the universe is the past. :)

@Gein07: Time gets weird around black holes, remember. From an outside point of view, time stops at the event horizon...

@jinchoung: Well, under currently accepted theory, there is no physical 'center of the universe' (or, equally valid, everywhere is the center of the universe); it's distantly akin to asking where the center of the surface of the Earth is. As for the observable universe, all observers are at their own 'center', as our…

@algomeysa: Yeah, a dead body in vacuum would mummify relatively rapidly; freeze-dried without the freeze. :)

Somehow that mask thing reminds me of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, though I doubt the one in this film turns people into gay super-vampires. < <

Carl Zimmer's book Parasite Rex goes into a bit of detail on this sort of arrangement. Having read it, I've come to suppose that all life on this planet is basically comprised of a bunch of parasites either warring or cooperating with each other. It's eerie and kind of neat. :)

@PeteRR: Exactly. Orion was initially designed as a surface-launch system, scarily enough. Probably not the sort of launch you'd have people gathering around to watch, a la the Shuttle. :)

That's so weird, I have a copy of that exact comic stuffed in the corner of a closet someplace. I haven't thought of it in yeeeeeaaaaars. :)