I’ve always enjoyed the fact that Canada has a Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve.

Better Khal Drogo.

Yep, it’s pretty clear that HBO is developing four spec scripts, then greenlighting one they think best. Maybe more, if it’s a miniseries - but not four series.

I enjoyed Iron Fist just as much as Daredevil and Jessica Jones (and I really liked Colleen Wing).

Yeah, Blomkamp’s Alien was the one I was looking forward to. It may or may not have turned out to be good, but I was definitely interested in seeing it.

I remember enjoying Turlough being deliberately unlikeable.

There are only ~10^23 stars in the visible universe, only a few hundred billion in our galaxy. Combinatorial explosions generate far bigger numbers. Given the deafening silence and the number of potential bottlenecks - abiogenesis, photosynthesis, multicellular life, intelligence, tool use - I’m increasingly convinced…

Yeah, that’s one of the frequently suggested solutions to the Fermi Paradox: most intelligent species evolve in an environments that preclude them from ever becoming detectable. Such as aquatic species who can’t use tools.

My Astrophysics lecturers at University some 25 years ago had the same position.

I really enjoyed Isolation. I should play through it again - perhaps on a higher difficulty, although it was hard enough already. I spent a lot of time hiding in lockers....

Better than all of Prometheus in four minutes, but that’s setting the bar very low. Hence the rebranding, I suppose.

Interstellar Orion might reach a few percent of c. Dyson came up with a version that used 300,000 bombs to reach 10,000 kps, so 130 years to Alpha Centauri, and 1200 years to Trappist-1. I think the most optimistic versions, with the best mass ratios and magnetic braking, maxed out around 0.1c, which would take 400…

Dream Fuel is a helluva drug.

If only we’d evolved in a system like this. Neighbouring planets larger than the full moon at closest approach!

Yeah, it’s clickbait muddying the waters. It’s irritating, because the actual data is interesting enough!

They’re probably all tidally locked. It’s conceivable some are in resonances like Mercury.

Yes, I’ve been wondering what the tidal heating would be. I think Io gets about 2W/m^2, so anything approaching that means heavy volcanism. The planets in the habitable zone might be fine, depends on their eccentricities.

Jedha isn’t destroyed in Rogue One, though. The Death Star fires “on one reactor,” causing massive destruction, but not totally unbinding the planet like it later does to Alderaan. Granted, Jedha’s probably not going to be in such good shape afterwards, with all that dust in the atmosphere, but it’s still in one piece.

Supposedly Rapace features very briefly (possibly in flashback); Fassbender plays David and another model called Walter; and yes to all three.

Completely agree. The Nostromo stumbled across an unimaginably ancient horror in a universe that was vast, dark and haunted. One of the most frightening things about Alien was that the Derelict’s pilot was fossilised, yet the eggs - which per the original lifecycle were the transformed remains of the Derelict’s crew…