Giant Freakin Robot

It’s Halloween, finally. The one day of the year people will finally stop staring at me funny for spending all day in the graveyard. I’m taking a break from all the tomb wandering to offer up a list of suggestions for how to invoke the dark lord of science into your Wednesday EEKvening. When science fiction is mixed with spooky scares, the results are more often than not worse than dreadful. Luckily, there are blood diamonds in the rough, and I present a variety of them to you in Double-Feature form, since things always work better in pairs, like blondes and machetes. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I welcome all suggestions that weren’t included. Nothing makes me happier than finding out about a movie that slipped past me. Except for, you know, spending all day in this graveyard…You know what? I’m just going to drop this whole character thing. Let’s get to the list.

(Just so we’re clear, I’m assuming Prometheus got everyone rewatching Alien already this year, so it’s not on the list.)

If an asteroid is barreling towards the Earth, Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, and their team of oil-drilling roughnecks won’t be able to save us from imminent doom…but a bunch of paintball pellets could. Yes, the same paintball pellets you’d play with during a game of capture the flag could be the only thing between extinction and survival.

In his winning 2012 Move an Asteroid Technical Paper Competition strategy, MIT graduate student Sung Wook Paek suggested that a spacecraft could launch two rounds of pellets full of white paint powder at an in-motion asteroid before it collides with the Earth. The whitewashed meteor would be thrown off its trajectory and would glide gingerly away. But not before the white paint would reflect the Sun’s light, thus propelling it further into space.

The United Nations’ Space Generation Advisory Council sponsored this competition, so we could actually see this technique in use one day. Paek also adds the amount of paint that would be used to accomplish this mission for Earth’s survival would be approximately five tons of white paint to cover an asteroid 900 feet wide.

Looking for an excuse to revisit Ron Moore’s acclaimed Battlestar Galactica reboot? Maybe our call-to-arms about the languishing Blood and Chrome spinoff has you longing for the good old days of Adama and President Roslin and Number Six and Gaius Baltar. Sure, it’s been off the air and out of the pop cultural consciousness for a few years, but it’s still sitting there on your DVD shelf or Netflix, just waiting for you to return to the Colonial fleet for another voyage. And if you need a little extra encouragement to rewatch the series, you’d better sit down, because these pics from a new charity calendar featuring BSG actresses Tricia Helfer and Katee Sackhoff may leave you feeling weak in the knees.

In the wake of all of this Star Wars hullabaloo and excitement, here’s a bit of a kick in the groin to bring sci-fi fans back to Earth. NBC’s post-apocalyptic drama Revolution is going away, a least for a little while.