Oh, yeah, those scientists are SO stupid... sheesh.

Just because our planet is a certain distance away from the sun and supports life, doesn't mean that every planet has to be in the exact same place in other systems to support life.

Stars are classified as to size, spectral class, etc. The "goldilocks zone" is different for every star and guess what? THEY KNOW THAT, fool. They are perfectly capable of discerning how far away from any star a planet must be to have water in all three stages.

Also, there is no way that all life in the universe is going to be carbon, there are going to be silicon beings out there, and who knows, maybe even things more exotic!

You need to read more science and less sci-fi.

silicon has several drawbacks as an alternative to carbon. Silicon, unlike carbon, lacks the ability to form chemical bonds with diverse types of atoms as is necessary for the chemical versatility required for metabolism. Elements creating organic functional groups with carbon include hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, and metals such as iron, magnesium, and zinc. Silicon, on the other hand, interacts with very few other types of atoms.[6] Moreover, where it does interact with other atoms, silicon creates molecules that have been described as "monotonous compared with the combinatorial universe of organic macromolecules".[6] This is because silicon atoms are much bigger, having a larger mass and atomic radius, and so have difficulty forming double bonds (the double bonded carbon is part of the carbonyl group, a fundamental motif of bio-organic chemistry).

We don't know that we're not the only planet with any kind of life whatever. It's unlikely that this rock is the only place with life, but not impossible. We just don't know.

For me, first it's price; I'm not going to carry a fragile, easily lost item I can't easily afford to replace. Second is features (being waterproof is the killer feature for me on my phone, I've lost two phones from water). But it has to fit comfortably in my pocket, so screen size is important to me -- if it's too big, I don't want it.

The microwave oven took 15 years to go from proof of concept to an affordable counter appliance. and another 10 years for decent ideas on how to use it practically.

It didn't take that long. My parents were using our microwave to reheat coffee since the day they brought it home. (30 years later, that's still its #1 use.)

Wrong. The microwave oven was invented in 1945, thirty five years before they were affordable. Citation

People who are prone to the real suicide are much more quiet about it than some drama queens who are shouting "I'm going to kill myself!" several times a day.

That's a dangerous misconception. Often, but not always, a person may show certain symptoms or behaviors before a suicide attempt, including:... "Talking about death or suicide, or even saying that they want to hurt themselves".

Always take suicide attempts and threats seriously. About one-third of people who try to commit suicide will try again within 1 year. About 10% of people who threaten or try to commit suicide will eventually kill themselves.

The person needs mental health care right away. Do not dismiss the person as just trying to get attention.

That's funny, because I've often wished that dead tree books were keyword searchable.

Nonfiction books have this thing in the back called an "index" that lists the words in the book and what pages they're on. For fiction, word search is useless. If you want to find where you were last time you were reading there's this thing you slip between the pages called a "bookmark".

For browsing for ebooks you haven't found yet, there are ebook index sites and web search engines.

How is a search engine going to find a book you've never heard of by an author whose name you don't know? If you find something on an index site, how do you know it's worth paying for?

I swear, you kids today...

Ah yes, I remember when I used to spend whole days at libraries, way back in the 20th century, before the World Wide Web existed.

And they'll still be there in the 22nd century.

Seriously, we have these things called computers, and books are on them now, including works of fiction for your reading pleasure.

And for almost anything written in my six decade lifetime you'll either have to pay to read them or pirate the content. Yeah, I'm reading "A Tale of Two Cities" on mt phone, but if you want to read "All the Lives He Led" (boring book, quit halfway through) you're either going to have to pay, go to TPB (if you can find it there) or visit your public library, which is how I know Pohl's last book wasn't worth paying to read. You can download it for free in 73 years.

Without free Internet access, libraries today would be nothing more than useless repositories of books that no one wants to read.

Well, it is true that 97% of the population doesn't want to read at all, but unlike you I'm not part of the aliterate 97%. To misquote Twain, an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate.

I heard the same nonsense about manufacturing in space 40 years ago. Impossible alloys! Precious pure medicines! Yeah, right. Grow up you loons, you're being had.

40 years ago cell phones were sci-fi fantasies. Flat screens were sci-fi fantasies. Recording TV shows in your living room was a fantasy. Playing a record album (not a cassette) in you car was my schizophrenic friend's fantasy (I told him he was nuts. He was, but we have CDs in cars now). There were no treatments for schizophrenia, now many schizophrenics lead normal, productive lives from new medicines. You car had no air bag, ABS, fuel injection, electronic ignition. If you took a photo you couldn't see it for a week unless you had a Polaroid or your own darkroom. There was no internet.

You not only have no imagination, you've not been paying attention.

If having different manufacturers use the same OS is a problem, how did DOS/Windows maintain market share? AMD vs Intel, different sound card manufacturers, different video card manufacturers, different BIOSes and motherboards. A far worse deal than with a phone. Same thing, new platform: Apple vs Microsoft, Apple vs Android, same thing.

Traveling to such a satellite orbiting a gas giant would still present problems. Anything getting from or to it alive would be a real bitch, because the radiation belt of the gas giant still must be crossed first.

One word: Cabbage.

Mightn't a primary of 5x Jovian mass radiate a significant amount of IR on its own?

It's in the galactic bulge, wouldn't any planet or moon around any star in that part of the galaxy have horrible radiation?

Also, how far is MOA-2011-BLG-293Lb from Trantor?

Most of the westerns I have seen have no trouble getting the science right.

Not much science in a western (well, there's "Wild Wild West" which was a really stupid show) but look at the ones from before 1960. NO BLOOD! All the physics except the bullets are real.

Nor, for that matter, do romantic comedies or crime dramas.

Oh, FFS. You never saw a Dirty Harry movie? Being shot with a .44 magnum will NOT lift you off the ground and throw you through a window. Don't get me started on the Die Hard movies, they're all full of impossibilities.

You got me there. I think the individual mandate was such a horrible trampling on the Constitution that I foresee it being used as precedence for all sorts of nasty future laws. I'm all for public healthcare, but not being forced to make a private purchase.

Agreed. ACA was a gift to the insurance companies, who are the single reason US health care is so expensive.

But parts of it are still pretty funky and everyone still wants to sell you his sister for 30 baht.

When I was there, prostitution was a respected profession seen as offering a needed service. Their culture and mores were completely different from ours.

The third world can't pull itself up by it's own bootstraps, or won't? What made the US an immediate 'first world' nation?

The US was blessed with fantastic amounts of resources. Coal, wood, gold, silver, you need any kind of raw material we have it. Most of the US is prime farmland with great soil and a great climate.

And we did have help. The French helped (we'd have lost the revolution without them), hell if it hadn't been for friendly natives a whole lot more of the earlier settlers would have died. We had all sorts of raw materials that the Europeans needed. And we really weren't developed until after WWI when Europe was pretty much trashed and didn't become a superpower until all of Europe was trashed in WWII.

Look at what countries are in the third world. Not the middle east, they have oil. Look at Africa, not much there except diamonds and rare animals, and DeBeers sewed up the diamonds and the animals have been hunted to extinction ind their habitats destroyed.

If your country has no natural resources, it will remain third world until someone wants to exploit your natives.

I don't have a side, I vote for the candidate (usually 3rd party if there's one on the ballot), not any party. And it isn't "Republicans" holding the economy hostage, it's a small Republican offshoot that I see as batshit insane.