I don't think you actually read the stories. The sensors did not "detect water". They sensed some anomalies in magnetic field and plasma density which defied any obvious explanation at the time (in 1997). These scientists did some modeling and showed that those signatures can be explained by the presence of a water plume. That is certainly interesting and supports the conclusion that Galileo may have passed through or very near a water plume, however it is very different from saying that "the sensors detected water".

Well, as of now they don't know why it worked so well. They think it may have been because they used to much water to dissolve CO2 before injecting the water in. If so, it will need a LOT of water and that doesn't do much for our Venus terraforming project!

I think you have completely misunderstood the scale of time dilation. you really should do the math! Time dilation doesn't matter at all at the orbital speeds of planets that we are talking about, and the gravity wells aren't deep enough either for any realistic configuration of habitable planets (there is a reason "Interstellar" had to put that planet in orbit around a supermassive black hole)

Nope, in this case it really does look like the other "end" is the other party and not WhatsApp's servers. So, unless they are lying about it, it really does seem like user-to-user encryption (and hence, as you point out, no data mining for facebook).

They now have an ad-free package too...

I know what you mean, but saying "For light, dark matter just isn't there" isn't quite right. It isn't there in terms of electromagnetic interaction. The gravity, on the other hand, can't be escaped even by photons. Otherwise you wouldn't have seen the lensing effects that are some of the best evidence for dark matter's existence.

wait, what? How small do you think the earth is! I can only guess that you think 3600 cubic miles is the volume of a cube of side 3600 miles. Usually this is meant to be the volume. so, for example, the volume of a cube of side 15 miles is around that much.

How does you Occam's Razor calculation change when you consider that this is based on chemical analysis of the same suspected flowing water streaks that were observed years ago (and published in Science 4 years ago http://www.sciencemag.org/cont... ). These streaks (called RSLs) have been continuously studied - and results published - since then with everyone being almost sure that the best explanation (Occam's Razor!) has to be flowing water. And yet, the scientists and NASA waited for the final clinching confirmation based on spectroscopy before making this announcement. You think they hastily concocted some story to get funding? You have no idea how these things work!

No, it isn't because those earlier things could've been explained away by other flows (though that may be true). It is because those were only evidence of flowing water in Mars's past. None of those things necessarily suggested flowing water currently. And that's a HUGE difference.

I had never bothered to make this calculation, but always sort of assumed that the Sun would look like a disc from those distances... very small but still with a disc shape easily discernible by naked eye. This made me do the calculation. Turns out that the Sun looks almost exactly the same size from Pluto (at perihelion) as Venus does from Earth (at their closest distance)! However, venus at its closest is bright enough to cast discernible shadows and Sun's absolute brightness is a LOTTTT more than venus. So, yes, you are right. just another star in the sky that is however *much* brighter than anything else. For religions starting on pluto, you can easily bet against anything other than the Sun or Charon being their chief deity.

I think the "one-way" is between you and your server elsewhere on earth's surface, not between you and the satellite. so, the distance for one-way is really a round-trip to the satellite. you sending a package, and then receiving one back will basically take two round trips to the orbit.

I agree that it is a bit confusing. That number seems impossibly large. Perhaps they mean "number of passengers" which means that the same person making 2 return trips might be counted as 4 passengers? It is like saying "New York City's subway serves X million passengers per week", where every single person is probably counted multiple times based on the number of trips they make.

Are you talking about most of those false color images on that page? If so, they are actually not from this mission. Most of them (probably all except the first one) are from MRO's HiRISE camera.

Here is something to boggle your mind. You think your argument is strong with Sun containing 98% of the Solar system's total mass? It is actually something like 99.8%!! to think that stray jupiter-size brown dwarves can weigh anywhere near the total stellar masses that we see betrays complete lack of understanding of the difference of scales involved.

you are assuming that by "metal" they mean iron etc. all the examples that you cite (except H and He) are "metals" by astrophysicists' definition.