There's a significant concern that Alpha or Delta could be hiding out in an animal reservoir, for example white tail deer.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2215067120

Anything that emerged would be quite distant from the earlier variants, having evolved in animals for years. But if it still has a human compatible spike protein, that would be bad. Omicron's spike changed drastically in isolated evolution; it wasn't competing against other circulating viruses. Omicron proved very fit.

The primarily barrier to zoonotic disease is that they aren't efficient at going after human receptors. Something that was adapted to humans first is potentially dangerous.

Polar bear could be hurt enough fighting a grizzly to not want to.

The problem is polar bears aren't afraid of anything. They have no evolutionary pressure on fear besides more formidable polar bears.

We don't "know know" because the infections are so rare and the virus is so dangerous. This is not a virus where one would do human challenge tests.

We do know what a successful flu vaccine match looks like though, and in animal tests (like the one linked) it shows what we want to see.

Tons, no. We don't know what the antigens of a future pandemic strain would be.

The USA does try to keep an updated stockpile of H5N1 vaccine, at least enough for doctors, first responders and the armed forces.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28554058/

Question: They say that

"In the CALERIE Trial, the %CR achieved by participants in the treatment group varied, with most participants achieving doses below the prescribed 25% (mean = 11.9)"

This seems to indicate this is not being achieved by a standardized diet. They're hitting varied reductions and most are off by 200+ calories. Wouldn't that raise some confounding issues? If the cut is hard to achieve, the fastest ways to do it are dropping junk food and calorie heavy drinks.

If Alpha had evolved gradually the UK or Denmark would have seen it with their massive surveillance programs. No one's reported an Alpha-in-progress.

Alpha had far more than the expected number of mutations and was materially different in behavior. Fortunately it didn't matter for vaccine targeting.

Confidence in how it would behave in humans was too high.

It was mostly stable. The problem is that it also seems likely the virus can chronically infect people with a compromised immune system, producing evolution that wouldn't occur going from host to host. That's very likely how Alpha and Omicron came out of nowhere.

Original Omicron isn't competitive evolution gradually picking up changes to evade immunity to the others. It was isolated from the rest of the pandemic and then appeared with a very different spike.

Makes sense because the universal mitigation measures used on SARS-CoV-2 impair all respiratory viruses. Everything from masks to absolute bans on going to work / school / day care with respiratory illness.

The others aren't as contagious so while the pandemic is extremely hard to drive transmission down below 1, the others are temporarily removed.

The first page of the tax code says that all income is taxable. The rest of the tax code is explaining what is not.

There is no exemption for illegal business, or illegal business practices. So you owe tax.

There's no material number of people besides newly old enough children who are getting their first sequence anymore. This is boosted vs. unboosted vaccine.

So you take a system that is 20-40% efficient, set it to 100% efficient and then say it might work. That's useful.

Pneumonic plague can indeed be spread person to person by coughing.

The forms of legitimacy broadly are:

1. I have a lot of popular support
2. I have a lot of thugs with weapons and fear factor
3. I have divine authority.

2 is extremely flimsy and 3, once no longer taken seriously, is just 2. And 3 is no longer taken seriously today, worldwide.

So if popular legitimacy is needed, counting votes is a good way to do it.

Continuity / memory transfer is entirely speculative, as is the idea one could make a "wiped" clone. A realistic clone is just a time-shifted identical twin.

Treating aging doesn't violate any fundamental rules so it should be possible. It's just very complex with multiple different mechanisms.

Known limits are the laws of physics. There's a lot of fantastical sci-fi technology that violates core rules and will never happen.

'Harder" being the operative word.

Truly high G - rivaling or exceeding rocket launch - isn't going to happen in space. Transfer orbit trajectories are defined and a truly unbound, straight line transit can accomplish the same total velocity with less violence.

The ship would also need an engine that could do this, and the fuel to burn, and I think at that point you're left with using Orion nukes.

Everything we see is in the past. Betelgeuse could have gone supernova 300 years ago and we won't see it for another 342 years.

FTL has nothing to do with this besides breaking physics /causality and therefore causing paradoxes.

This gets incredibly complicated very quickly as the more variables you add the more inherent error is introduced in the values of those. Major weather forecasting is normally done with ensembles that use a wide variety of conditions to develop a range.

Trying to predict discreet events would both require implausible access to information such as human thoughts and picking the correct one of a more or less unlimited set. The war in Ukraine for example is a result of several unknown, specific decisions made at different times, possibly on different continents. It plausibly has inspiration going back to unrelated events in the 2011 protest wave.

Which is the opposite of what is usually seen in people who exercise frequently. Differences:

1. Much heavier than average weight for height. Only speed positions are similar to other athletes.

2. Violent contact sports.

With modern information flow it seems that the greatest impacts, short of hard lockdown, are people reacting to the disease. Big hits to activity in 2020 tended to both be independent of most policy and preceded the orders.

E.g.

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-021-10676-1

Domestic US Air travel for example dropped more than 70% but this was never officially restricted.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198220301883

Meanwhile, social distancing advisories and stuff like 50% capacity - especially without requiring effective masks - are also probably too confusing and definitely too weak to stop something like COVID.

It's very easy to fry a space installation if you're already willing to fight a nuclear war.

An anti-aging drug line would be incredibly lucrative. Of course Pfizer et al fund this kind of research.

And Russian figures being Russian figures, all of this is understatement.

Effective sterilizing vaccine that can be given to contacts and contacts of contacts, is effective.

An electromagnetic storm does its damage by inducing current. This is primarily damaging to long lines and their transformers.