What's so bad about declaring war on Botswana and wherever Bjork is from? I reckon we could take them. Maybe not both at once, but certainly one after the other.

A global pandemic with a high mortality rate would also do the trick. For a while.

"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"

@go-falcons: Yes, the absence of hard-science leftists seems strange. If you looked at today's SF writers, I suspect you'd find a bigger intersection between believers in hard science and fans of left-wing authors.

@Thorkel: Unless I'm reading it wrong, it's not anyone's opinion on the politics of the authors. It's a map of the politics of people who liked those authors. In other words, it shows that Heinlein, for example, appealed to people with strongly right-wing views.

@0035: HPL advocated the devouring of the bourgeoisie, and common ownership of the means of destruction. Shoggoths were allegorical figures representing the proletariat, and in his house at R'lyeh Cthulhu was actually dreaming of the First Workers' International.

In the forthcoming "Total Remake", Douglas Quaid, an ordinary man, is haunted by memories that are not his own. Quaid begins to have the strange sensation that he has already seen all the new summer movies before. A chance encounter reveals the terrifying truth: he _has_ seen all the films before ... because every…

Personally, I welcome our new single-celled bacterial overlords ...

OK, we've gone from detecting planets around other stars to speculating about their surface features? At this rate, I give it about five years before the twenty closest exoplanets are all on Google Maps.

I woke up this morning and I said "Martha, you know what's wrong with this country? We just don't have enough remakes of classic movies, that's what. Our movie theaters are full of all this trendy new stuff, all these high-falutin' original ideas. How are we supposed to know what to watch when they keep coming up with…

@Xyberfaust: Or, given that the humans apparently represent Americans, and the Na'vi are textbook "noble savages", the humans can deal with the Na'vi the same way that we've always dealt with less-advanced people who have something we want. Coming soon: "Avatar II: Handing out the smallpox blankets".

"Captain's log, stardate 3423.12: the Earth-like planet we were planning to visit turns out to have been a stuck pixel in one of the detectors. After the last seventeen all turned out to be false alarms, I shouldn't have let myself get all optimistic, but I went ahead and ironed my away shirt anyway, so I could look…

I think the platypus is proof that God has a quirky sense of humor.

@MacGyver1138: If we reject AvP (which could have given the Weyland-Yutani Corp. considerable familiarity with the critters), there's still evidence for prior contact even in "Alien". Ash reveals that he was directed by Special Order 937 to "investigate a life form, possibly hostile, and bring it back for…

Now if I can just convince my employers that number five falls under the heading of "business casual" ...

Now that '-pocalypse' has been approved for general use as a productive suffix indicating a catastrophe, I look forward to the imminent announcement of the 'hippopocalypse', in which humanity will be wiped out by herds of rampaging hippopotami.

Can't sleep, clowns will eat my synapses ... Wait, what?

The tendency of sick bees to "wander off" shouldn't surprise anyone. Natural selection will favor those strains where sick individuals remove themselves from the hive, rather than hanging around to infect the rest. Bee populations where the default behavior was for sick bees to stay home and die in the nest probably…

@The Curse of Millhaven: If I remember correctly, even Zubrin doesn't suggest that a terraformed Mars would hold onto an atmosphere with Earth-equivalent pressure. So it'll never be a shirtsleeve environment, but you might get it to retain enough of an atmosphere for plants (for some value of plants) to grow.

Now try imagining a universe with three spatial dimensions ... one of which is unidirectional, like time.