Giant Saturn Hell Storm

[Tunnelcat]

Cool! A huge storm is now visible in the northern hemisphere of Saturn. Looks almost like someone dropped a blob of a different color paint in one spot and it swirled as it trialed behind.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/newsrel ... e20110706/

They even have the sounds of the storm's numerous lightning strikes recorded. Just wild.

[Foil]

A "blob of paint" with eight times the surface area of Earth...

Wow.

[Tunnelcat]

I know! Think of the scale of this thing! It would swallow the earth whole and tumble it around like a toy. Mind boggling!

[Isaac]

This is proof of global warming.

[Duper]

Almost looks like vulcanism.

[Avder]

Saturn is so ★■◆●ing awesome.

Theres a reason the best day of the week is named after this planet.

[CUDA]

Almost looks like vulcanism.

damn Vulcans!!!! always causing trouble

[Tunnelcat]

The Vulcan's are pissed off because their planet got swallowed into oblivion during that last Star Trek Movie re-imagination of things.

[Isaac]

But does the new movie represent our time line or the alternative timeline? Or a completely different timeline where ships make sounds in space and all aliens speak better English than most Americans?

[Herculosis]

Almost looks like vulcanism.

Hey, I know we used to blame Vulcan for all kinds of stuff "back in the day", but I don't see how he could have anything to do with... wait... nevermind.

[Tunnelcat]

But does the new movie represent our time line or the alternative timeline? Or a completely different timeline where ships make sounds in space and all aliens speak better English than most Americans?

Star Wars has that SAME problem. Ships and weapons that make noise in space and aliens that conveniently speak fluent, unaccented English, oops, I mean "Basic". Although I grant you that Star Trek really falls victim to the aliens-speaking-in-English tick, like it's normal for them. Oh, but then all those movie audiences wouldn't be able to understand Klingon, Vulcan, Romulan, Andorian or other such-forth alien-speak.

As for the timeline change, I haven't read any ST books that have followed the alternate time line from the newest movie. I also kind of thought that the engineering section of that version of the Enterprise looked almost like an industrial chemical factory that should never be run in zero G. Come on, clear plastic pipes and corrugated metal machinery? Corrugated tin! Gaah! Cheesy!

[Isaac]

Ok, but Stargate SG1 is the worst. Teal'c says "We were, as you say, stealthy". And I'm exploding in my seat yelling, "AS YOU say?!?! You mean as "I" say. You're whole planet speaks english!!!"

And why do they need a language specialist when all the aliens, even the goauld, speak english?

On top of that, there's a point where they hear someone on the ship's communicator speaking english, and someone says, "well they sound human". LOL, because all humans in space know english. OMG, in contrast, you can't even order lunch in some places in south texas with out knowing some spanish!

[Avder]

But does the new movie represent our time line or the alternative timeline? Or a completely different timeline where ships make sounds in space and all aliens speak better English than most Americans?

Technically both. Its like a stable time loop. All the stuff of the original series and other series happened, crap got real, all hell broke loose, some people got sent back in time and caused a new branch of spacetime to splinter off from the original timeline. Its like a loop-de-loop on a roller coaster. TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voy are all DURING the loop, Enterprise is before it, and the new movie is just after it.

[Avder]

Star Wars has that SAME problem. Ships and weapons that make noise in space and aliens that conveniently speak fluent, unaccented English, oops, I mean "Basic".

Synthetically generated audio to allow gunners and pilots to be better immersed and involved in the battle by hearing things that they may not be able to see directly at the moment.

And "Basic" is a pan-galactic trade language.

Oh, and the reason all the species in Star Trek seem to be able to speak English is because of how sophisticated their universal translators are. It came up a few times and got explained in a couple episodes of DS9 and Voyager.

[Isaac]

But does the new movie represent our time line or the alternative timeline? Or a completely different timeline where ships make sounds in space and all aliens speak better English than most Americans?

Technically both. Its like a stable time loop. All the stuff of the original series and other series happened, crap got real, all hell broke loose, some people got sent back in time and caused a new branch of spacetime to splinter off from the original timeline. Its like a loop-de-loop on a roller coaster. TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voy are all DURING the loop, Enterprise is before it, and the new movie is just after it.

WOW! Yeah! They could do all those over again! I hope they do that with stargate. They had a time loop/parallel dimension problem like every season.

[Tunnelcat]

Technically both. Its like a stable time loop. All the stuff of the original series and other series happened, crap got real, all hell broke loose, some people got sent back in time and caused a new branch of spacetime to splinter off from the original timeline. Its like a loop-de-loop on a roller coaster. TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voy are all DURING the loop, Enterprise is before it, and the new movie is just after it.

Hummmm, kind of like the temporal causality loop corundum. They did that on STTNG. Yes, if time travel becomes possible, then paradoxes and time loops are possibilities. Doesn't mean I like the story line they came with with the new ST movie. But I did like the new depictions and takes on the original characters they portrayed. More human and interesting. The old ones were too stiff and stodgy.

Synthetically generated audio to allow gunners and pilots to be better immersed and involved in the battle by hearing things that they may not be able to see directly at the moment.

And "Basic" is a pan-galactic trade language.

Oh, and the reason all the species in Star Trek seem to be able to speak English is because of how sophisticated their universal translators are. It came up a few times and got explained in a couple episodes of DS9 and Voyager.

Yes, the universal translator conveniently "fixes" the problem of not having to speak and understand differing alien languages in Sci-Fi movies. Same with the "transporter". They were too cheap to splurge for more special effects and extra ship sets in ST, so they came up with the whole transporter idea. It was created out of a low budget problem, but turned out to be a really novel idea that stuck.

http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question86436.html

"Basic" may be a pan-galactic language, but wouldn't those that speak it do so with an accent flavored by their own language? When I watch a movie, it seems more immersive if the characters speak in an alien language to each other, even if it is fiction and I have to read subtitles to understand them.

[woodchip]

I always was amused how the captain, his first officer, ships chief medical officer and head of security were the ones to go to a planet to check out a dangerous situation. Kinda like admiral Bull Halsey landing on Iwo Jima before the marines did.

[Dakatsu]

A "blob of paint" with eight times the surface area of Earth...

Wow.

The magnitude of the Gas Planets is crazy. Just look at this comparison between Jupiter and Earth!

[Tunnelcat]

I always was amused how the captain, his first officer, ships chief medical officer and head of security were the ones to go to a planet to check out a dangerous situation. Kinda like admiral Bull Halsey landing on Iwo Jima before the marines did.

You just knew the odd guy, who wasn't a regular on the show and was usually wearing the red shirt denoting security, was gonna die in that episode, and Kirk was going to flip out and rag on some alien for it.

Dakatsu, kind of boggles the mind to think of the scale of those planets compared to our little blue marble. We're just a small dot in a huge universe, even within our own solar system.

[Avder]

Now consider the fact that we are mostly empty space. That's right, the atoms comprising your body are barely anything but a big clump of it in the middle with little bitty specs of it flying around wayyyyyyy the hell away from that.

Now consider that any atom in your body and your surroundings heavier than hydrogen was created either in the nuclear fire of a stars core, or the cataclysmic explosion punctuating the death of a very massive star, much larger than our own sun.

The sun may give us the energy we need to live, but if not for the suns dead ancestors we wouldn't even have the heavier elements that we need to actually be us. We would have no oxygen to breathe, no nitrogen which makes up most of our atmosphere, we would have no metals which we use to build so much of our world.

We are all children of the stars themselves.

And that's pretty damn cool.

[Tunnelcat]

In other words, inner space is just like outer space. Great distances between objects, when put into the proper scale that is. The universe is not only stranger than we think, it's stranger than we can possibly imagine (a twist on someone else's quote).

Ah, but there is some beautiful weirdness right here on our own planet.

Lake of frozen bubbles

[VonVulcan]

Almost looks like vulcanism.

Hey, I know we used to blame Vulcan for all kinds of stuff "back in the day", but I don't see how he could have anything to do with... wait... nevermind.

That'll be enough of THAT!