Starship Asterisk*

When I see pictures like this I always wonder - I've heard theories linking mass extinctions and/or climate changes to our solar system passing through dust clouds like these, but has anyone ever tried to figure out how much sunlight would actually be blocked out by such an event?

And about those speckles... Honestly, the first thing I thought of was something from the movie 2010, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odessey - the recording of Dave's last words as he approached the monolith.
"It's full of stars!"

In any other location I'd guess I was looking at a typical asteroid but it's circular orbit pretty much rules out being captured after planet formation (unless the rings have a stabilizing influence we're not aware of yet). A piece of one of the other moons, perhaps? Or the remains of something that...

I must concur. Since the 70's I have rankled at the use and marketing of the word "natural" - it is truly meaningless. There is nothing in this universe that is unnatural. Nothing. Atomic power, cloning, even artificial life (when we get there, which I have no doubt we will). We're just se...

About those floating mountains that were never explained... Was that a moose I saw in the jungle?

"Hey, Rocky! I found the upsidasium!"

Disproven to be an authentic and valuable work of arcane science or alchemy, of course. Like Nostradamus or the Dresden Codex - if you can't translate the imagery you can't prove they're meaningless pieces of imagination.

neufer~ I guess fraud would be a more appropriate word. One has only to look at the billions being raked in today by the promoters of superstition and pseudo-science to imagine what could have sold at a time when anything was believable. The fact that it probably passed through many hands before rea...

I vote for the hoax theory. This manuscript was produced at roughly the same time as the Shroud of Turin, Europe was awash in "relics" - pieces of the cross, bones of the saints, etc. - and fervent belief was the order of the day. The complexity is proof of nothing. There are elaborate lay...