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case in point: the first thing I thought of when reading TFA, was the bloodthirsty license agreement which was written around 1985.

It's my understanding it's going to be based on Star Trek The Lost Gay Episode.

The standard evolutionary model says that Earth had a bunch of Primordial Soup that cooked for hundreds of millions of years until some of it did stuff that was interesting enough to photosynthesize, which started radically changing the chemistry of the planet's atmosphere and the Soup until more of it started doing more interesting stuff and eventually it was interesting enough that we can declare that "It's Alive!" The probability that stars will have planets, and that they'll have the right conditions to let this happen (temperature, available atomic mixtures, gravity, etc.) are pretty low, and people who like to speculate about how heavily populated the universe is and when we'll find aliens come up with estimates like Drake's Equation to try to guess how rare we are.

Interplanetary Panspermia suggests that not only did Earth have to have the right mixture of chemicals and temperature/pressure conditions in the Primordial Soup for all this to happen, but that Mars or maybe Venus also had to have a (presumably different) batch of soup cooking that had either become Alive or else pretty close, and something had to cause a Big Splash to get some Martian Soup mixed in with the Earth Soup at a time that both of them were in the right conditions. If the Earth had been running too far ahead or behind in time, or the Big Splash hadn't happened at the right time or hadn't been big enough, then the Martians would have been told No Soup For You, Next Billion Years , Earth wouldn't have been alive, and Mars would have done the Cosmic Wimpout without us evolving to see it today. Drake's Equation looks much more dodgy under those assumptions. If that's what it takes for life to evolve, I don't expect any space aliens to show up any time soon.

Interplanetary Panspermia doesn't really solve any problems about how life could have evolved, though I suppose it *could* have happened, but it seems much less likely than Earth's Primordial Soup doing the job on its own. Interstellar Panspermia seems much much less likely to me, for reasons I noted above. There's a huge amount of stellar evolution that had to happen just to get the right elements into the Solar System, since some of them only get formed inside supernovae or similar stars. Friendly Space Aliens deliberately seeding the place begs the question of how *they* evolved, but strikes me as no less likely than Interstellar Panspermia happening by accident. You'd think they'd have also left a message, but maybe they were just shooting stuff out at likely stars on spec, hoping that something would work even if they weren't around four billion years later when we were ready to Phone Home, or maybe they really *are* hanging around on the Dark Side of the Moon working on the next chapter of their cookbook before they drop in for a visit.

What a Maroon!

Based on some of the things he's done I think thats more complete lack of an embarassment gene rather than lack of fear.

Bah! The man's a demigod! A mere whisper from his mouth will induce joyful tears even amongst angels, lest they be cast away for heresy! Listen and cry, you ingrate:

The exuberance of a manwhore

Now excuse me, I'll go sit in the corner and whimper some more...

Here is Shatner's monologue from the Just for Laughs festival in 2000. It is a parody of a famous Canadian beer commercial.

Whatever

Yes I am. And so is William Shatner!

Sadly incomplete without a wav link (From a nice page of stuff.)

http://www.frogstar.com/pics/pics.comp/y_m_frogsta r_micros2.jpg

Hallelujah

Download this ring-tone sound if you want to be sure you never confuse your ring-tone with someone else's again.

That should have been "Mr. Tambourine Maaaaannnnn!!!"

(For those who don't get the joke, go here and listen to Shatner's "Mr. Tambourine Man". As a bonus, download the "Seven" video after listening to MTM.)

all they really need are the machines that go PING