Without human-assigned meaning, the universe is just swirling clouds of gas.

I agree that it's important to humans. That doesn't mean that it's important- just that humans think so.

Is that shipness inherent in it? Does it cease to be a ship if it's been sunk? What if I convert it into a museum piece? Does it retain its shipness or doesn't it? Are all objects that can float and be propelled by the wind ships? Further, if I take two single hull ships and connect them into a catamaran, do I have…

You aren't very good at reading comprehension, are you? I mean, your gift for invention is amazing, and your ability to take an obvious statement and draw completely unrelated conclusions is top notch.

It's just a variation of the Theseus's ship paradox. And my response to it is the same: neither you nor the ship actually exist. The identity of an object is a constructed thing, Theseus's ship is a ship because we say it's a ship- to the laws of physics, it's just another pile of matter. The same is true of your…

Nathon Fillion and Gina Torres would be awesome as Holden and Naomi. Just throwing that out there.

Hamill has also been the Joker in several very large and very popular video games.

While I don't disagree, allow me to give a (mild) defense of fridging.

Kevin Conroy remains the best Batman ever. And Mark Hamill is the best Joker.

and this time, it's about a mob hitman who's sent back in time to the Middle Ages to rub out the royal family. Yeah

So long as nobody up here gets clever and tries to violate the Benthic Treaty, anyway.

No, that's not what the HGE was for at all.

Quantum mechanics probably changes things. Probably.

Of course, it is a distance measurement, so "next few light-years" is similar in grammatical construction to "next few miles", or "next few kilometers".

But they aren't roughly orbiting the sun.

Simplicity, mostly. We want to keep the list of planets small. Easy to discuss. The reality is that the word "planet" is itself meaningless. There are no planets. The Earth is not a planet. Nor is Jupiter. They're just piles of stuff.

And when we find an object like that, the definition will change, mark my words. My argument wasn't that we won't find any Earth-sized objects that roughly orbit the sun in the next few light-years (we'll find many), my argument is that we won't discover any planets, because we will change the definition of planet to…

That's highly speculative, and just because we find an Earth-sized object doesn't mean that object is actually a planet. If it's mostly water ice, is it a planet? What about methane ice? Or dry ice? If it's got an orbit that takes it about halfway out to Alpha Centauri, and it never gets closer to the sun than 1LY, is…

We may redefine planet again, but not to make in more inclusive. Personally, I don't think we should count terrestrial bodies, like Earth, as planets. They're too small and insignificant.

Well, no- they keep finding dwarf planets, which were created as a specific class of object because these things are too small to neatly fit what we normally consider a planet.