I understand the need to focus on individual characters for a story, but the idea that only two astronomers possess the knowledge that a comet is on an impact trajectory... well, “strains credulity” is an understatement. The sky is right there.

Amazed by the Stout Scarab every time I see it.  Just a beautiful piece of automaking.

I have said that before. IO9 is dead and we are crawling over it’s desiccated remains.

That is a great breakdown on context and why it is important.

Man’s gotta eat I guess , and thanks to the herbs being in charge working here means lots clickbaiting hot takes and ‘gotchas’ like this , rather than being allowed to write actual engaging content anymore sadly ..

It’s like visiting the grave of a beloved friend to try remembering the good times. 

A-fucking-men.

Frankly this isn’t even the first time this and related sites have published hit pieces based on, at best, tenuous info. What a disgrace.

So 6 years ago we think he:

I was just having this conversation with a friend. He’s got a beach house where there isn’t a viable broadband option, and his family also has a tree-farm way up in the Cascade Mountains where they only have satellite internet that is expensive and sucks. He has the ability to work from home more or less whenever he…

Should have punished them and made them use kinja.

more plausible explanation is that its a long “generational” alien spacecraft that didn’t reach its destination and suffered hits that produced the debries around it. On one side are the crew compartments on another dead engines, connected by service tube...
Explains density and metallicity. 

Get a grip. A ton of small farm owners have to own planes. In Russian, small planes, no matter if they’re actually cropdusters or not, are literally called kukuruzniki, which basically means corn planes. Pretty sure that a majority of small plane owners use it out of necessity, not just for fun like your friend.

Almost no one can afford a new certified aircraft. They typically start around $300,000 and up.  Forcing them to use diesel or mogas would increase the price significantly. 

I’d love to see a Super Cub converted to a PT-6! The engine mounting would cost more than the plane, not to mention the price of the engine alone would be about 3x the price of the plane.....

because plane owners are among the moneyed crowd

You are forgetting that people in rural communities depend on STOL aircraft, and the operators can’t afford to update their aircraft to Turboprop. All the best STOL aircraft are older designs like the DC3...

‘plane owners are among the moneyed crowd”
Complete and utter bullshit. We’ve had to fight that idiotic myth since the 1903s.
Visit a local public GA airport, talk to pilots and owners then get back to us.
Once last point, where the hell do you think newly minted commercial pilots moving the airlines come from?
If you say…

You can’t economically upgrade these aircraft to a new type of engine. You can’t just swap any engine into a certificated aircraft. You can only do an engine swap if you get a supplemental type certificate from the FAA. This would cost millions of dollars for each variant of each type of aircraft.