Ice Volcanoes on Ceres May Provide Replicators Means of Spreading

Extraterrestrial replicators (be they naturally-evolved, or von Neumann probes or the mutant descendants thereof) are at least as likely to be based on organic chemistry as on clanking iron-age technology, as is often imagined. Material returned from comet Wild-2 showed that it was actually an extraterrestrial comet, and had amino acids on it. Other investigations have shown the presence of nucleobases (the components of DNA and RNA.)

Even Arrhenius-style "panspermia" spread by passive diffusion on astronomical timescales is not implausible, as our Oort Cloud has mixed with close-passing stars' clouds on the order of once every 0.1 MA (and we should assume this happens to other stars as well.) However, for passively spreading replicators, higher-gravity bodies like planets or large moons are dead ends because they have no means of escaping the gravity well.



Water geysers on Enceladus, from space.com
This is why comets and wet carbonaceous asteroids are the best places to look, and why the Hayabusa-2 probe on Ryugu is so important. Same for the Dawn probe. Europa and even Enceladus may be a tough sell as passively escapable gravity wells, but now we see evidence of active water volcanoes on Ceres through its life span.

Sometimes You Need a Little Puerile Humor

And sometimes you need a lot, so please watch this awesome video by Infant Annihilator, for their #1 hit Decapitation Fornication.

A Tiny Fraction of the Things Wrong With Star Wars

I always think those "Everything wrong with X science fiction or superhero movie" videos are the saddest things in the world. If it was a hit movie, clearly no one cares, and yet here's some overgrown seventh-grader shouting into the virtual void about why people shouldn't like it.

Here's my contribution to the genre.

All Star Wars movies: "We have superintelligent androids yet they seem mostly to occasionally translate and calculate numbers. Should we let them do any dangerous tasks requiring split-second decisions like, I don’t know, piloting ships? No, we’ll still use humans for that." (Idea for later movies when people finally start getting tired of it: a Star Wars cryptohistory that shows what was happening the whole time, where in fact this is all post-Singularity, and the reason that events fit human cultural and psychological tropes so closely without making much sense if you think about it for more than two seconds - "sword and sorcery in space" - is that the AIs actually set it all up as a big Disneyland for us and/or to study us, and watch from the background. Kind of like the Matrix but real. Or a reverse Westworld. You're welcome, Disney.) Also, technology is just static and never advances (granted, a problem of all far-future science fiction; even for movies set in the here-and-now that want to have any shelf-life, which therefore avoid showing phones and computers and bizarrely end up discounting the role of technology in modern life.)



Above: Darth Vader's House, built by Frank Lloyd Wright, called "Fallinglava." Wright was clearly phoning it in on this one and no one had the heart to tell Vader it was largely derivative of another structure. Vader also rejected bids from William Pereira (who designed the command post in the original Conquest of the Planet of the Apes) and Eero Saarinen (who did Superman's house.)

Also all Star Wars movies: Sith apprentices only succeed by killing their masters, even if they’ve turned kinda good like Vader and Kylo Ren. So how about, just be a Sith, and DON’T TAKE A FUCKING APPRENTICE. IT WOULDN’T BE A JEDI WHO FINALLY BECOMES SO INTENT ON NOT TRAINING SOMEONE ELSE!

Revenge of the Sith: "We have antigravity and cybernetic limbs and faster than light spaceships, but man we just can’t get a handle on tissue regeneration to help people grow skin back. So now left-in-the-toaster-too-long Anakin will just have to walk around wearing a weird suit and 1950s respirator the rest of his life, along with needing frequent moisturizer bath treatments."

Rogue One: "Hey we have energy weapons and all this other technology yet we’re somehow amazed that after years of technology someone built a laser with roughly the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Amazing!"

The Last Jedi: "Turns out ramming an enemy ship at light speed is massively effective! And yet somehow no one ever thought to built light speed space torpedoes, and even after they see it, no one exclaims ‘What an amazing innovation, we should build light speed torpedoes from now on!"