This article (like the discovery it reports) is from July 2011. The NASA press release can be found here: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/universe2011072... and it contains all the actual information in the article.

(And: what a terrible article! On two occasions it simply says the exact same thing twice in succession in almost the same words. And it says this: "NASA’s water discovery should be a reminder that if we have the sophistication to discover galaxies full of water 12 billion light years away, we should be able to save people just an ocean away from drought-induced starvation." ... which makes as much sense as saying that if we have the sophistication to discover enormous black holes at the centres of galaxies, we ought to be able to make our own black holes in the laboratory, or that if we have the sophistication to accelerate protons to 0.999999991c in the LHC, we ought to be able to make cars go at at least 0.9c.)

This would make an awesome premise for a sci-fi book. A plot along the lines of "Humanity must stop This Bad Thing but to do so they need Lots of Water but they have used up all the water so they have to Pull Together in Time of Crisis in order to retrieve all the water while contending with the fact that the water is around a black hole." Maybe throw in some serendipitously discovered alien technology that makes it all possible.

I think that it would make for a truly epic space opera if written by the right author.

Can we predict based on what we see the current status of the "cloud of water". Shouldn't it collapse into stars ?

Or does the blackhole consume the entire cloud of water !

So many questions.

Imagine if life existed within it. They must be wondering if life outside a "cloud of water" is even possible ? A planet ?

I'm not sure I would apply superlatives when talking about a possibly infinite domain.

Then again, it's not that I could claim this is the most pretentious headline produced by an intelligent human either.

Meh... some alien civilization probably used it all on irrigation by now.

...but does the black hole have rights to that water? Answer: NO!

...four years ago. This has been discussed here before?

so would it be safe to assume every planet/moon should have some amount of water? In one form or another. Should it be less of a surprise?

I bet Nestle has already bought it.

Maybe we could bring some to California.

It's amazing how many words he spends saying "this large body of water is really quite large." I mean:

> The official NASA news release describes the amount of water as "140 trillion times all the water in the world’s oceans," which isn’t particularly helpful, except if you think about it like this.

> That one cloud of newly discovered space water vapor could supply 140 trillion planets that are just as wet as Earth is.

Oh, so that's what that means! Gosh!