... unless they've made a slight math error in their navigation computations.

Names don't necessarily hold back any language. For example, having a name that's exactly the same as a below-average schoolwork grade clearly doesn't prevent you from becoming one of the most prevalent programming languages in computer history.

I liked David Brin's "Tank Farm Dynamo", which featured a space station made from used external tanks. Part of the premise was that ETs were deliberately discarded the way they were, so that they'd burn on reentry and not become space debris. For negligible cost they could be brought the rest of the way to orbit, available for use there.

Every first stage ever made and flown has been simply thrown away after one use. FIrst stages are quite a bit different from whatever is on the top of the stack.

For that matter, "lander on legs" is a different thing on Earth than it is on the moon or Mars.

I will agree that there is a decided anti-NASA attitude around here, though.

Right up there with seeing a perfectly healthy person with two free hands hit the handicapped door opener button, rather than open the door by hand.

Ever read "The House in November", by Keith Laumer? Kind of the same thing, but more story to it. "All You Zombies" was short, sweet, and to the point.

I thought I read that they tested it against cultured human cells in a petri dish, without bad side-effects. That's not whole-animal testing, but it's better than no human testing at all.

The problem is, gold has almost no intrinsic value. Its main usefulness is its scarcity. If you start bringing back large quantities, your "trillions of dollars" are going to disappear in a poof of nothingness.

The Spaniards discovered a similar problem when they appropriated the large amounts of gold easily available in the New World. They soon found themselves in a financial crisis brought on by the plummeting value of gold.

First question... Is such a dust cloud inconsistent with a sun-like star somewhere inside the boundaries?
Second question... If a sun-like star can exist there, is such a dust cloud inconsistent with that star having a planetary system like ours?
Third question... Assuming the first two questions pass, and that there could be an Earth-like planet there with life that could look up into the sky and wonder, what would they see?

In other words, is that dust really still a hard vacuum, just seen from a different perspective, or is it really something denser that would alter the view from within?

But the Earth had an oxygen (potentially biosculpted) atmosphere some 500 million years ago. So if someone there has been able to observe Earth and know something about its atmosphere, they'd know that there might be life here. We would count as "interesting".

I've read more recently that there may be other ways to have significant amounts of free oxygen in a planetary atmosphere besides biological processes. I have no idea how probable those ways are compared to life, how stable they are, how "interesting" they are compared to life, etc.

But for the remote sensing schemes we've used on exoplanets, as well as foreseeable improvements to those schemes, Earth would definitely count as "interesting".