Actually though most of the stories say it is the first flower to bloom in space, and Scott Kelly tweeted it as such, it turns out that there have been several flowers grown in space before, most recently in 2012, but the first such was way back in 1982. It does seem to be the first Zinnia to flower in space.

Here is Scott Kelly's tweet

Discussions of the ethics of terraforming often touch on  rights of planets or extraterrestrial lifeforms, or near term utilitarian values. But what about our responsibilities to terraformed worlds, and their long term future? I suggest that we are nowhere near mature enough as a civilization to be responsible parents to a newly terraformed world with a gestation period of millennia and an "adult life" of hundreds of millions of years.

Let's declare Pluto as a dwarf or sub dwarf planet AND a planet! This is about the vexed question of whether Pluto is a planet or not. Yes the International Astronomical Union "settled the question" but I'm not sure their decision is one that will work all the way into the future, for instance if we find Earth or Neptune sized objects beyond Pluto. And it also stretches language in an awkward way to say that Pluto is a dwarf planet but not a planet - and the English word "dwarf" seems to have little to do with the concept of clearing your neighbourhood.

I got many comments on last week's Nibiru article from some very scared people. They needed a lot of reassuring that it was indeed a hoax and not real, and brought up many topics to discuss such as lens flares, hoaxes, double sun videos, rare sun mirages, and the status of the astronomical search for various versions of planet X. Why are astronomers so sure that Nibiru is nonsense?

Science fiction stories often suggest that ETs, and our future selves also, would be expansionist, colonizing the galaxy, taking over worlds, and so forth. It's natural enough, because we are expansionist ourselves. But it's actually quite easy to see that ETs simply can't have expanding populations, at least not for very long. Not if they are anything like us. 

It's a simple calculation which I covered before. If their doubling time is once a century, say (for  ease of calculation) - then in a thousand years, their population multiples by a little over a thousand (two to the power ten). So after two thousand years it has multiplied by a million, by a billion after three thousand years and so on.

Sorry, I accidentally made two copies of this article with different titles. And both have comments, so not sure what to do.

Unless you want to read the comments here, please visit the newer copy, Why ETs Won't Need to Colonize or Expand.