The scale factor only diverges (goes to infinity in finite time) for values of w less than -1, which (while not entirely ruled out by observation) seems considered pretty unlikely due to theoretical problems alone.

Isn't the 22 billion year figure purely for a hypothetical value of w equal to exactly -1.5?

This is the safe version of The Parrot. Probably best not to look at it for too long though. Ten seconds tops. Actually, better make that five....

BLIT by David Langford?

It's enormously frustrating, isn't it. It's going to be 2030 before it arrives.

I'm very much guessing, and I'm not at all confident!

I'm betting that Jon's dead... but that he gets better.

Yes, quite.

"I can't imagine anyone being able to remain sane after a few hundred years."

Penrose is an extraordinarily intelligent human being who's done a great deal of exemplary work. I once sat through a lecture he gave on twistors, and about 40 minutes in I'm fairly sure I felt some my synapses melt.

Depends on the mass of the white dwarf - they blow when they accumulate enough hydrogen on the surface. Higher mass white dwarfs require less hydrogen to accumulate before it fuses, so they go off more regularly. So most are centuries/millennia, but there are a few which nova every decade or two.

The ones I know certainly are. They just wouldn't tell the congregation.

Larry Niven. World of Ptaavs.

It's really worth watching. My Movie Night group went through a long '50s Science Fiction phase, which included When Worlds Collide (and Forbidden Planet, The Island Earth, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, It Came from Outer Space, etc etc).

Yes, I assumed it was something like you say. Not Saturn, in any case.

I really liked that movie. Although what actually happens is totally unclear!

I don't think anyone is talking about actually returning precious metals to Earth in the immediate future.

Well yes, I seem to remember there is a theoretical population of extremely small captured objects if you extend the distribution, but aren't they very small? I don't think they get much bigger than a couple of thousand kilograms, which would make finding one very hard, and most of them are just gravel. I could be…

"And on October 17, 2011, after 371 days of computing, Shigeru Kondo finished calculating Pi to 10 trillion decimal places."

There aren't any asteroids in near Earth orbit.