The physic variant of your mama is so fat jokes ?:)

Galaxies depend upon “genetics”? Mendelian genetics maybe, at a stretch. Molecular genetics? Hardly. Poor analogy.

Not everything has to be good or bad. I think it was the most poetic of the bunch.

The corollary being of course, “I like my (men/women) like I like my galaxies: ____”
e.g.:
- “I like my women like I like my galaxies: Hot and attractive.”
“I like my men like I like my galaxies: massive.”

I totally was thinking about Soylent Green too, but couldn’t get past the fact that galaxies are merely _like_ people, they aren’t actually people. I guess Soylent Yellow would work, since it’s like Soylent Green, which is people.

Julianne wrote “Great people are like galaxies. Their hearts are big black holes pulling everything in.”

In his classic 1918 book Eminent Victorians
Lytton Strachey included hilariously barbed biographical vignettes of several famous people of the preceding century.

Although British Prime Minister William E Gladstone wasn’t one of the subjects, he crops up several times, and in one of the accounts (General Gordon I think) there is a wonderfully vivid and prescient description of Gladstone’s devious mind, which is compared to a swirling cloud of incandescent gas, layer after layer, with a black hole at it’s centre. It goes on for several lines and really could have been lifted directly from one of today’s popular astronomy books!

A critic called A N Wilson recently wrote an interesting book of the same name, which is more impartial and goes some way to salvaging reputations so subtly and influentially savaged by Strachey.

Galaxies are like people, they’re mostly empty space!

The quote about the “normal” properties of galaxies and people comes from Virginia Trimble in 1986 at the two-week “Nearly Normal Galaxies” workshop in Santa Cruz, which was led by Sandy Faber. I had thought that the title was somewhat ignorant, as at the time there was a tremendous explosion in what we were learning about galaxies, and what ever we had thought “normal” was was based on old and poorly informed ideas. It was clear that Virginia was having none of this, and she started off a session that she was chairing with the words, “Normal is somebody you don’t know very well.” or something very close to this. I was delighted by this very direct expression of what I was feeling, and have used it many many times in the 22 years since then…

I’ve got more, these ones not as good:

Galaxies are like moderns, drifting away from each other faster and faster.

Galaxies are like honors students, if they weren’t always moving they would collapse.

Galaxies are like great stripteasers — they know how not to reveal all the way in order to titillate and sustain the desires of those who want to know and see all the way.