I completely agree with you - Pandora has no defense if humans decide to start dropping things from orbit, and the humans are obviously capable of doing just that.

"Would a relatively small nuke detonated inside a massive ship 20k miles above the planet have a devastating EMP?"

I like it too.

I don't disagree with you at all, but Star Trek was always heavy on the time travel. There were two time travel episodes in the first season of the original series alone, and one of those is considered one of the best episodes Trek ever did - and one of the classic moments of all SF television.

Absolutely spot on!

I agree.

The speed of sound at sea level is 768 mph.

Kittinger's jump was terrifying to contemplate, but I have always been a fan of the delightfully insane Project Moose.

I've sometimes wondered what it would be like if our sun was located, not in the Milky Way itself, but in the Large Magellanic Cloud. From the LMC the Milky Way would be a spectacular object in the night sky. It would be magnitude -2 and span 36 degrees (the width of 70 full moons).

It appears that the three most popular discoveries in Lake Vostok are:

I'll stack all my chips on Model #1.

Shock diamonds.

Here's what PZ Myers thinks.

It's obviously meaningless - that is, it's "not even wrong" in the same way that non-scientific ways of explaining the world often are. They contain words put together in grammatically correct ways, but the words aren't defined, and the whole thing has no actual information content and doesn't map to reality. This is…

The Little Ice Age is quite well known in Britain (for those who have any knowledge of history at all), mainly due to the Thames frost fairs.

The Dead was shot in Burkina Faso, Ghana and other parts of West Africa.

Obviously it would be fascinating, and my instinctive answer is "why the hell not?" Just because a thing can be done, it does not imply a thing must be done, but in this case it is so very tempting.

No, no, and a thousand times no.

I want one too!

Exactly!