I was an arrow-poison frog for a while but everyone kept licking me to get high. :(

Yeah, it’s hard to beat the Culture for positive first contact outcomes.

Ugh, the emo content of that single still image. :P

You underestimate peoples’ ability to deny reality.

that our northern neighbor’s

LOL, local RCMP have already finished investigating (that was quick) and have determined no criminal offense was committed.

Could always post it on /r/whatisthisthing; their hivemind is disturbingly good at identifying obscure widgets. XD

I was gonna say, “someone at Marvel’s obviously been reading Worm.” XD

If it bleeds, it leads, baby.

Well, I can’t really claim any credit for it.  Pretty sure I picked it up from sci-fi debates forums. XD

Yeah, I’m not liking Star Trek falling victim to the apparently inevitable grimderp smear-everything-with-grey-ification that’s so popular in the past decade or so.  Can’t we have just one bit of optimistic futurism left?

The problem I have with the idea of aliens being here on Earth is...why? They’ve got super-science enough to overcome the colossal difficulty of getting here unobserved, yet their somehow just bad enough at stealth once they’re here to keep giving us these vague-enough-to-deny sneak peeks at their presence?

It’s not expected to be quite that dense, I don’t think.  Someplace between 0.7-10g/cm^3, from what I’ve been able to google.  Still handily beaten out by stuff like osmium.

It could be a rock in a trash bag.

Well, slow-moving stuff, assuming it’s subject to other interactions, usually clumps together due to those interactions plus gravity. Slow-moving stuff that isn’t subject to other interactions, eg. dark matter, the cosmological neutrino background, etc., floats around everywhere (neutrinos) and/or kind of clumps…

Bear in mind that it doesn’t have constant density throughout. The core regions are under enormous gravitational pressure and are quite dense, while the outer layers expand and become very diffuse. Our own Sun will likely balloon up to ~200 times its current size at the end of its life, which would give it an overall…

The processes that lead to the red giant stage cause the core of the star to heat up, and initiates new fusion in a shell around the core.  This hugely inflates the outer envelope of the star; their overall density is much lower than it was.

On an average day you swallow roughly 1.5 liters of nasal mucous.

If we could properly assess risk, I don’t think we’d ever drive a car again.