Why?

Well, I don't work with this aspect of the mission, only with one of the data indexing and visualization solutions. This is just the first data release, not all data acquired by the satellite was included in this data release, some are still to be processed. Besides, Gaia is orbiting the Sun, not Earth so each parallax measurement of a star is 6 months apart and to increase the precision several measurements must be taken (so I was told, I am a software engineer, not an astrophysicist).

Actually counting and identifying the stars it the "easy part". But it takes time and several observations of each star to get information about the variable attributes, like proper motion, flux variations, etc. Most of the stars used don't have a reliable measurement of parallax and/or distance, only about 2 million stars have parallax measurements (most of them derived from the Tycho2 catalog from Hipparcos mission). The goal is to have all the attributes (or most of them) for all the stars, reaching one petabyte of data.

No, that's 1.1 billion, the article is correct. (Source: I work at the team that produced the density map that illustrate the article)

It's 2015. Er, I mean... 2016.

And it seems to be your Esperanto. "Sambuko" is Esperanto for "elderberry".

The river Temarc, in winter.

Sokath! His eyes uncovered!

Best Star Trek episode EVER!

Via patrino estas hamstro kaj via patro odoris sambuko.

(This is Esperanto, by the way)

I prefer a O'Neill Cylinder... but a rotating space station would be a good start. Baby steps!

We would probably want some gravity, actually. We are used to it. I enjoy it most when it's around 9.8 m/s^2.

And the teacher, principal and police fell for it in a scary way.

Why not a North Korean flag instead? I got plenty of results for it. Iran's flag as well.