Eh, there's plenty of the free variety present. (In a few thousand years these will be viewed as 'ritual gatherings for the combined worship of communal totems and intermixture of isolated genetic groupings'. And they wouldn't be wrong, really...)

It needed an ending with the cat landing, safely and flawlessly, on all fours...then walking off like nothing happened.

Benjamin Sisko would like a word with you.

The Master Chief is Keyser Soze.

Calling shenanigans. Either the comment was a joke, or the pilot takes place parallel to the events of Avengers and it's a brief cameo.

Ezekiel gets quoted a lot among UFOlogists too. It's one of the threads that unifies legends of angels/faeries/aliens as one phenomenon, though whether you take the positive thread (they exist, it's one set of beings in all cases) or negative (as per Sagan, it's hallucination or delusions all created by the same…

Good luck with that. It's been 23 years and I'm STILL waiting to find out what God wants with a starship...

The Anatolian Avenger?

Word is he played very well on the road.

I could totally get behind "Jedi for Jesus". The LOL factor alone would be enormous.

Hold on there. Admittedly it's been a while since I had a refresher in planetology, but wasn't one of the lead explanations for why Venus went haywire is that—geologically speaking—it effectively turned itself inside-out with a series of megavolcanic eruptions (or something like that)? If so, carbon is far from the…

Well that, and the definition of 'optimal' may not always be, well, optimal...

There's several things going on here...genetic diversity and the tendency towards tyranny in any authoritarian regime is one, but even the genetic diversity thing can be a metaphor for what happens when you try to create any kind of a 'one size fits all' society. I'd have to read the book to see what else lurks…

Well, 'prove' in the sense that they can say 'given x assumptions, y can be shown to hold in all cases'. It's all about the givens.

Or that there are only 32,767 galactic clusters in the universe. Memory limitations, don'cha know.

The supreme irony is, the marketing tagline for M&Ms of that time?

The one good thing about Wiki: The better articles cite references.

You're a bit behind the times. A new means of deriving stem cells from normal adult cells was announced four years ago that eliminates that hazard after the transformation; a year after that, they had a method that avoided any genetic changes whatsoever. Wiki's got a summary; I'm not even going to try to summarize…

...are you thinking what I'm thinking?

I wouldn't rely on Defender as my sole line of defense, but the Emperor Norton's time has come and gone. There's lots of perfectly good alternatives out there without lining Symantec's pockets any further.