I'm not even sure which of those ideas is less realistic...

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich--yes, richer than a king--
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

--Edwin Arlington Robinson

Personally, I'm more interested in the continued fraction for pi than in the decimal digits (which, after all, are an artifact of our choice to use base 10 for our numerals).

Well, that wasn't quite what I meant about "freaking out". It used to be that whenever the DRM subsystem was mentioned here, there'd be people who flew into a panic about Digital Rights Management being added to Linux. But I see I spoke too soon; as samwiche points out, someone did make that very error several hours after my other comment! Uh, thanks, Slashdot, for not disappointing me?

Nobody's freaking out about the term "DRM" this time! Just goes to show what happens when you carefully define the initialism in the summary...

Let's just hope Saruman doesn't hear about this...

Trivia: that plot device was borrowed from a 1951 short story by Gordon R. Dickson, The Monkey Wrench.

True, but Chiron was quickly thought of as at least cometlike. This paragraph is from Roger B. Culver's Astronomy, published in 1979:

Asteroid or Comet? In November 1977, Charles Kowal of the Hale Observatories discovered an unusual object orbiting the sun with a 50.7-year period along an orbit whose distance from the sun ranges from 1.3 to 2.8 billion km. Thus, the new object, called Chiron, is closer to the sun than Saturn at perihelion and almost as far as Uranus at aphelion. The estimated diameter of Chiron is between 160 and 640 km. Because comets and asteroids are indistinguishable on the basis of appearance at this distance from the sun, it is not clear at this writing whether Chiron should be classified as a comet or an asteroid.

Mid-90s?

Chiron was discovered in 1977.

I had a strange experience with mod points a couple of weeks ago. I had mod points which were supposed to expire on Feb. 26; but when the 27th came, I still had the points and they were still identified as expiring on the 26th! It was another day or two before they actually expired.

Or Professor Challenger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_World_Screamed

As to your point 3: if that were always true, there would be no such thing as an invasive species.

For a citation: https://www.cmog.org/article/does-glass-flow

Wasn't that said by a character in Casablanca, rather than Capone?

Indeed, it was more like 400 BCE when it first became broadly accepted.