The main thing Supergirl gets right is casting Melissa Benoist, who is fantastic in the role. Everything else feels a bit lacklustre so far but I’m enjoying it enough to give it a chance.

I thought the second chip was going to wait in reserve for some time, but they already used it in The Woman Who Lived. On the guy who was about to be executed, to close the portal.

I have not seen any of this yet (may catch it when it hits UK Netflix) but by the sound of it the series has inherited a few problems. Namely, Hiro. He was a great character when he first appeared, but the writers clearly had no idea what to do with someone so massively overpowered. The same goes for the power-sponge…

Dammit!

Indeed, it’s hardly original and has been used lots of times. It’s a major storyline in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars, and central to the plot of his previous novel Icehenge - where people live for centuries but remember only for decades. And many others.

Alan Guth published a paper a few years ago concerning some implications of eternal inflation, one of the more unexpected being that it is extraordinarily unlikely that this universe contains any civilisations more advanced than us. (Because every second the number of universes that exist is multipled by a factor of…

If we’re talking about continuations - and the new Star Wars, X Files series and Twin Peaks series are all continuations, not reboots - then I always wanted to see more of The Lost Room.

The relevant numbers are in the linked paper if you’re interested.

MESSENGER spent four years in Mercury orbit without its solar panels melting. The mass of Mercury is more than sufficient to build a shell at that distance.

I think those are the Knights that say “Ni!”

The required mass for a Dyson shell totally enclosing our own Sun is less than the planet Mercury.

We know dark matter is not baryonic. It’s possible stuff in the hidden sector(s) can form complex structures, but it’s non-baryonic stuff that was never part of the visible universe. We know it's not Dyson swarms and Matrioshka brains, in other words.

Because all energy ends up as heat.

Because energy is useful. A Dyson sphere is just lots of solar collectors in solar orbit.

We do know dark matter can’t be baryonic, though. And there are constraints on objects like MACHOs from the number of observed microlensing events.

Yes, that would be very interesting!

No, I don’t particularly like panspermia either because there’s no evidence for it.

The speed of light is the same in all reference frames. So you will observe exactly what you would if the ship is stationary - because it is, even if someone in another reference frame sees it travelling at almost the speed of light.

That’s my first thought, too. If life appeared almost immediately on Earth, the obvious conclusion is that it’s easy and should emerge almost immediately wherever suitable conditions prevail.

Indeed! This discovery and others like it makes the Fermi Paradox so much worse. It’s quite perplexing.