"Merger' is a better word than 'collision.' Many people have visions of stars actually colliding, but it's more like clouds merging. In the end, the average distance between stars/water droplets will be somewhat smaller, but few if any will actually meet, or get dangerously close (though a few will be ejected…

You mean 'simulation.' 'Mock-up' refers to something physical, like a visually accurate, but non-functional, full size spacecraft model.

Mike, if it happens because we went on to something better that couldn't or didn't have to use that infrastructure (Does anything still launch from the Mercury-Redstone pad? Thought not...), I can comfortably live with that...

Yep. Copying the other side as closely as you can, also means copying their mistakes...

But what would someone moving along with (that is, in the same frame of reference as) the mirrors observe?

And as it's coming from all directions with near-perfect uniformity, then yeah, it's hard to call it an 'object...'

IIRC, he uses ultraviolet light, focused through a lens made from white dwarf star degenerate matter that fell to (but somehow not through) Earth...

It seems to me that Clarke had a good point. Most Monotheist beliefs have historically had little patience with the idea of no God, or multiple Gods...

I essentially agree with the other answers. You may have proven that you have faith, but that's about all...

Which is why I consider myself an Agnostic. The simple conclusion that the mainstream (and any other ones) religions can't all be right, and it may be that none of them are right...

"There is no GOD !!! "

But, unless there's something I'm not understanding, the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics (which I happen to 'believe' in versus the other interpretations, BTW), still requires all such universes (multiverse?) to use the same set of physical laws as those operating in this one.

'Apollo 5' was an unmanned test of the Lunar Module in Earth orbit:

Larry Niven once said they don't use the term 'black hole' in Russia, because it...already has an understood meaning.

Whatever they call it, I also wonder how they'll reconcile what we know about Mars today with the Burroughs' vision? I mean, most other fantasy of this sort, doesn't involve real places...

John who? Uh, is he related to Jimmy?* To Lynda?

IIRC (it's been several decades since I read it) Robert Silverberg's 'Across A Billion Years' involves a race of beings whose culture involved gradual replacement of functional organic limbs and organs with cybernetic ones...

Some people already have shaky knees. Some of them would like to, ah, relocate that function, too...

I was once told that there are only two things that smell like fish.

But as Lois Griffin learned, we could be looking at this all wrong...