It’s just how closed timelike curves work in general relativity. There are solutions in general relativity which permit travelling into your own past, but they do not permit changing the past.

There is no “entry point,” and there’s no past without Cole in it.

It’s not depressing at all - at least, it’s not supposed to be. It’s supposed to be poignant, perhaps, and sad for the Overlords, but not depressing. The last human generation transcends physical reality and joins a Stapledonian cosmic consciousness, which is the ultimate evolutionary path of all intelligent species -…

That would still be dark matter, but it would be baryonic dark matter.

You’re playing Battleships on a 1000 x 1000 grid.

The two aren’t remotely related, though. The holographic principle is respectable theoretical physics - and of course most pop sci articles on the holographic principle are hopelessly misleading - whereas the “simulation hypothesis” is an amusing philosophical game. They have nothing in common.

As I understand, there’s a three dimensional description of a region, and a corresponding two dimensional description on the boundary - in the case of the whole universe, that boundary being the cosmic horizon. Hence, holographic principle, and those descriptions are equivalent. It’s related to the Bekenstein Bound -…

I haven’t read any think pieces on it, I’m afraid, so I don’t know which you’re referring to. Subjects like EPR and Bell’s Theorem were standard requirements during 2nd year Undergrad Physics. Nobody thinks you can use stuff like this for “faster than light communication.”

You can’t transmit information using measurement of entangled states. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a spacelike interval or not - it’s not just that you can’t transmit information faster than light, you can’t transmit information at all! The results of measurement on entangled pairs are obviously correlated,…

It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid. Fuel and materials make up an insignificant fraction of launch costs. (A launch vehicle like the Falcon 9, fuel is around 0.3%, materials are about 2%). So any fuel savings gained by launching a given mass from the Moon are utterly trivial, especially considering you still have…

I was marvelling at his asbestos fingers. Zippos get really, really hot if you do that....

Actually, it’s not that hard - when we were 17 and a friend’s keys went AWOL at an inconvenient moment, in under half an hour we’d entered and hot-wired his Ford Escort with zero practice. Would’ve been even easier if we didn’t care about damaging it.

That was the only part of this episode I didn’t like. I was yelling “SHOOT HIM IN THE HEAD!” at the screen.

The synopsis I read (Radio Times?) for Hell Bent says the Doctor is at a diner in Nevada. The diner in The Impossible Astronaut was in Utah.

It’s the lamps that give me pause. It’s strange to include something like that if you expect the audience to accept what they see at face value. So while Clara may very well be dead, there are far too many “outs” to be entirely sure.

I enjoyed it a lot. It was a memorable end for Clara, who has long since become my favourite all-time companion. Romana, Sarah Jane, Leela, the rather underused Nyssa, Amy, but Clara’s my favourite. A fitting end.

Well, shit! A few years ago, io9 was a damn good site, and somewhat unique. First it got fucked over by constantly changing comment systems and shoddy redesigns, then the o’deck effectively vanished... being absorbed into a Gizmodo subsite is the nail in the coffin.

Going by the films they have FTL (“hyperdrive”) but it takes an appreciable amount of time to travel between systems, so they use suspended animation (“hypersleep”) too.

I read “The Gunslinger” when it first came out and liked it a lot. Weird, atmospheric post-apocalyptic world, with hints of an interesting history and more strangeness behind the scenes - and a great vision at the end, when it turns out they live in the Microverse!

Why? If you watch the “making of” video, you’ll see the amount of work Emirates and Dubai’s Civil Aviation Authority put into choreography, training, safety, storyboarding and filming the sequence.