This being in Texas, I bet they soon find its mate that was on the ark with it.

@ringer81:

@junior_millenium: You're not a Jedi. You're a grocery clerk come to collect the bill you have, mmmMMMM?

@Cotes: Sadly, this is the one I think they are likely to do first. They've already done some dead actor replacements as a necessity, like when an actor dies mid-production. And then there's the old-to-young version, like Jeff Bridges in the new Tron. So it seems like a natural, albeit distasteful, progression.

What, he couldn't make them close like the control room guillotine doors in Star Wars?

Appalling as this idea is, the question that leaps to mind is, Does anybody really care about seeing dead movie stars in a movie? I seriously doubt that most of the prime demographic of moviegoers today can even name, much less care about, the actors of yesteryear.

@I'm Waitin' For Dolemite: Who better for designing structures for people to get all righteously riled up in?

@Graviton1066: Yeah, but it's hard to not imagine similar QA standards across the board, as far as launch services and hardware standards go. Though perhaps when there are humans on board, they *triple* check everything.

That sound you heard was not a rocket exploding, but the collective "GULP!" of Nasa's future astronauts.

I love the metric that the moon is moving away from the earth at about the same rate as the growth of your fingernails.

@PommeDeReinette: In my experience, the knowledge that a cleaning staff will pick up after you often makes people even messier. I honestly wish there was an easy answer to this since I like the idea of "living pods" and semi-communal living. It seems the only practical answer is hard rules and steady enforcement of…

@PommeDeReinette: Well, yeah, that's pretty obvious. But seeing how even adult "professionals" in the USA treat their bathroom and kitchen facilities, I would not look forward to sharing my home facilities with them. People tend to have as many different ideas of what "clean" means as what "god" means.

These micro-eco-bubble-pod homes are a dime a dozen. What do you do about kitchen & bathroom facilities when there are 5000 of them in a village?

NG has a desktop-sized version:

@Strakus: Thanks for the clarity. I guess the word I have a problem with is "deserve". It's a rather philosophical notion. Why do we "deserve" anything? It's a mental construct we use to validate or incriminate, or an attempt to apply meaning or order to random events.

@icelight: I'd say that a NASA announcement about the search for et life by NASA quite rightly has the probability to get people worked up, even more so though the amplification of the blogosphere. It's also quite common for NASA/scientists in general to be very cautious and conservative about announcements, which…

@MsKatherineSpeaks: I like it in a nice Bearnaise sauce, with capers!

NASA is such a tease. They come along every couple years and hold a press conference, get everyone all worked up, then proceed to announce that there's a chance of a possibility that there might have once possibly been - maybe - the constituent building blocks of molecules present in some inorganic amino acids that…

@Strakus: Wow, harsh! Shame you can't see any possible differences between getting out of bed in the morning and living (and dying) through the demise of the human species and/or planet. Pardon me for not believing it would be a holly-jolly apocalypse!

@Delphinus100: But we're one, if not the only, species that has an opinion of *whether* we should survive or not. I agree there's a biological tendency toward survival, but we also have the added blessing/curse of potentially knowing what is happening, and what the outcome will be. A field mouse neither knows nor…