Maybe not to you, but I've seen the three episodes of "Star Trek Continues" and I thought they were great. Yes, the acting the isn't always the best, but the effort faithfully created the look and feel of the original show and the stories were really good. You might not like it or think it's a good idea, but other people, like me, disagree with you, and are willing to finance the project so that it can continue. Therefore, it is a good idea.

Gee, a television show shouldn't feature its stars performing most of the action? The thing that ticks me off more than anything else about criticism of shows like Star Trek is people who refuse to acknowledge the trade-offs that needed to be made to make a _television show_ 50 years ago. Sure, let's have Ensign Ricky and a team of redshirts we don't care about be the away team because that's more realistic, and no one is interested in watching the show.

Says the Anonymous Coward. Being an Anonymous Coward surrenders your right to share an opinion and have anyone care about it.

Star Trek was fine science fiction, but it was soft science fiction, and the science part of the fiction wasn't often the core of the story, nor what made the show good.

Star Trek had plenty of cool ideas that have become reality, but every one of those ideas existed before Star Trek... it just made them more widely known, so it's a bit of a stretch to say it inspired all those ideas.

Exactly. This experiment is just that, an experiment. If it works, it will show evidence of something predicted by these multiverse theories based on inflation, and provides an interesting and important new data point. If it doesn't it doesn't disprove anything because it's still a guess.

There are so many weird and previously unexpected things that were predicted by theory and only then discovered: variations in orbits due to the curvature of spacetime (predicted by relativity and confirmed by studying the orbit of Mercury), the existence of neutrinos, the cosmic background radiation, a lot of other stuff from the Standard Model that I don't recall because I'm not an expert...

Sure, except the main reason ISIS is a problem now is because of the U.S. We broke it; we bought it.

We well through that option out the window when we precipitously withdrew from Iraq, which goes to the comment below, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

The U.S. has been incompetent and now violence is the only option we have left.

It also depends on how old you are. If you are in your early 20s, this is pretty normal. If you are in your 40s, I'd be very surprised and a little jealous.

Good. I like when things are questioned. I read both Brian Greene and Lee Smolin.

Nonetheless, there are predictions that can be made based on current research, and it makes sense to try them out if there's a reasonable way to do it.

Yeah, except I think most of us agree that genocide is a Bad Thing.

Just today I was typing a message in Thunderbird and it stopped accepting my keyboard input for about 8 seconds while it was busy running an index or whatever it felt like hijacking the UI thread for.

Sounds like Outlook, except for the 8 seconds part. More like 20-30.

Because it's consistent with all the stuff we know now that we didn't know 30 years ago. Look up inflation cosmology.

I don't want our nuclear reactors mediating any kind of reaction using illegal alien neutrons!

I guess you haven't been keeping up with physics lately, but this kind of thing has been seriously discussed for decades, and has gained a lot of momentum in the last 10 years or so. The only thing slowing down the development of the science of alternate universes is inability to make falsifiable predictions. While not finding neutrons we can't account for wouldn't disprove anything, finding them could be the biggest science news since the prediction of and then discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background.

It's a weird world out there and the possibilities of what reality really consists of are getting weirder and weirder and yet more plausible at the same time.