Oh, phew, I thought we were going to have to send our emergency clown reserves down from Canada. And then of course we'd all have to sing the song. Yes, THAT song.

In a related study, 75 percent of Americans think our population is too large...about 25 percent too large.

A job market with a...shortage? Guess I've found a place to put my liberal arts degree to good use.

I hate mystery and crime solving type novels, but J.K.R is the master. It was amazing, I couldn't put it down. If you enjoy her writing style, buy it. Totally worth it.

The story in my new novel is set far in the future (11,092 years) and some of the most important conflicts are:

I don't know. The only thing that's holding me back is Wyldstyle's character. So far she comes off as the typical female character who, although smart and tough, lacks any sort of development or growth because having a strong female character is pretty much the stopping point of female characters these days. She only…

Would it be weird for a 48-year-old man to see this movie by himself?

Well... just because intelligent life might be common, it doesn't mean it is pervasive. It could very well be the case that the concept of galactic colonization might be beyond the grasp of all but the most advanced civilizations.... which could be EXTREMELY rare.... 1 a galaxy at best kind of rare.

I simply said that the longer we go without seeing any evidence, the more worrisome it becomes. I'm not writing anything off, just pointing out that if intelligent life is very common, then signs of it should be very common, too. It's possible that we've missed it, are looking the wrong way, intelligent life…

I assume from your references to mega-engineering projects to harness energy from their sun that you might be thinking of something like a Dyson Sphere? Wouldn't a Dyson Sphere then inherently "hide" that star from our view? We wouldn't even know there was a system there, it would look like a deep space from our point…

Well.. I don't buy into that Great Filter arguement. The universe is so unbelievably massive... hell, even galaxies are almost beyond human comprehension.. If complex life happened here, even if it was a rare occurance, it happened everywhere. There's nothing really all that special about us, this planet, the base…

??

Now we only need an answer to this hard question

The synthesis of eukaryotic life is one of the events discussed in Rare Earth as being a very possible filter that keeps complex life from being very common in the universe.

The biologist in me thinks that there's no a priori reason to assume that any biological event could only happen once. The SETI supporter in me…

I sometimes wonder if this is the Great Filter. That life isn't particularly rare, but complex life is a one-in-a-centillion shot, and thus there just aren't any other examples in this galaxy.

"I can see them from my house!"

DON'T self publish. I've read many many self published books. There's a reason publishers aren't interested in publishing your magnum opus. It sucks. It won't sell. It's terrible. You can't write. Your plot isn't original and has already been an episode of The Simpsons, Twilight Zone, Gilligan's Island, and…

She's a bitter fat person who is too lazy to lose the weight and thus shits on someone who bothered to put in the effort.

Seriously? No. Losing weight is a great thing, especially for the person who did it. It takes a lot of hard work and is a significant accomplishment with clearly visible and often awesome results. She looks amazing, stop being a poopyhead.

If this woman is proud of what she did, who are you to tell her not to be?