At what point does this principle start forcing people to needlessly reinvent the wheel, figuratively if not literally? I'm not convinced this is a good thing, at all, but I guess we're going to find out...

They're already on the 'vat meat' idea. I suspect that's going to impact the equation to some extent, maybe not in the near future, but certainly within a few decades.

Make that Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain. Man had a way of making science scary. (I do not consider that entirely a bad thing. An unbalanced view of science—good or bad—is an open invitation to disaster.)

All this is contingent, of course, on the price of photovoltaic cells dropping — which they probably will in time.

Have to pirate? Emphatically not. Sick of subsidizing this sort of idiocy at hopped-up prices for increasingly flashy but hollow quasi-content? Now you're somewhere.

Though admittedly, being supreme ruler of the richest nation in that part of the world at the time couldn't have hurt...

Paging Mr. Chick, please pick up the blue courtesy phone...

Worse...it's the shippers that are writing the blasted things now...

Wait, so a thing is true until we observe it, so then it's false? How would we even know if we can't de facto observe it?

7 stars each year, all stars have planets, .2 habitable planets per system...

That 'can't use it to transmit information' thing always seemed odd to me. The only way that could be true is if the particles became 'untangled' when you attempt to do so—if you have a confirmable physical property and an established protocol, you have a communication system. Saying the physical property ceases to…

Shippers. Gah.

Understand—Transition isn't something the human mind was ever conditioned to deal with. There's a reason the original colony probes were nanostacks with genetic matrices, that they built artificial birthing complexes and grew the first colonists in vitro, in situ, and it certainly wasn't because Earth couldn't spare…

Truth. I've seen more bad Tuesdays than Mondays.

NO CAPES!

My answer: somewhere else.

...oh, I don't know, acknowledged that long, grabbable hair is a liability in combat?

Having solved all other problems...

All those motes came together to create boobies and ice cream. You may be a speck among specks, but at least there's room for you to be a happy speck. And that's something.

So, 'Gotham Shore' is right out, then?