>as far as fanatic legions of super soldiers go, the space marine crusaders leave the freemen yihadists in the dirt.

Maybe in a "Vs battle" sense.

As actual characters, the Fremen are far more interesting, both individual and as a group.

Like you said, 40k is shallow and dumb. I love it (I own both the ebooks and physical copies of the entire Gaunt, Eisonhorn, Heresy series, and a ton of other odds and ends, 100+ books)

But even though I love it, it's also dumb. really dumb. Pro-Wrestling-in-space dumb.

Don't give up.

Remember that listening is a skill. It's something you have to actively do, have to practice, have to get better at by doing it.

Listening is not a passive thing that just happens. You must choose to do it.

Choose. Practice. Do it more. if you can't remember anything about a chapter in an audiobook, rewind back to the beginning of the chapter and make yourself listen to it again.

It's a skill. Skill requires practice and effort. That's all this is, no cause to give up

There's classical, definitely. I also enjoy putting one of of many "focus/study" playlists on Spotify or other services, usually it'll be some instrumental minimalist beats that are just enough to drown out distracting noises, but not enough to distract from reading.

People enjoy them. Nobody is forcing you to read them. Nobody forcing you to complain and whine like a little baby about them, either.

Pretty much agreed on all fronts.

A lot of classic "Big Idea" sci-fi was like this, terrible as a book and as a work of fiction. Awful pacing, wooden characters, mouthpiece characters spouting exposition dialogue that no real person would ever say outside of an academic lecture.

Their value lay in the provocative ideas they explored and how the tried to look at the impact of social and technological change on humanity.

Of course, now we know that psychohistory is complete BS, history is not deterministic: Uncertainty and chaos reign.

But nonetheless, Foundation remains important because it is such a formative SF work, and had such a vast influence on the next century of SF that followed it.

2 pages is better than zero pages.

For simulations gameplay? Elite: Dangerous

For actual Adventure, narrative, a compelling story set in space? The Outer Worlds.

>We don’t know this for certain that there are any parts of the universe expanding faster than the speed of light.

The statement he made does not require the universe to be expanding faster than light. Just expanding faster than the rate of acceleration that the gravitational influence of distant objects would have.

We know this it to be true, objectively, because we can measure and observe the relativistic red-shift of distance galaxies as they move away from us at various fractions of the speed of light.

Yes. Gravity's range is infinite.

Past a certain distance, of course, the degree of gravitational influence becomes so small that the rate of universal expansion is greater than it.