Keep in mind all major governments are sucking up that encrypted communication with the knowledge that one day the encryption keys will leak or the encryption can be broken or brute forced. If you’re a political dissident in China for example I wouldn’t count on that encrypted data to be encrypted forever.

Does the cosmic background radiation have a different velocity relative to the earth in different directions, or as far as we can tell we can consider all of the CMB in every direction to be identically “stationary”.

Only from an outsiders perspective would you freeze. From an outsiders perspective a black hole can be thought of as “a region of space where nothing has ever happened”. From your perspective you would just fall straight through the event horizon like nothing was there until you were killed by gravitational forces or impacted whatever exists at the center of the black hole.

Our company operates both ways, depending on the year (or quarter). Sometimes every department must return $X million to the company. Sometimes we get to December and rush to sign a new contract by the end of the year to “use up” the budget.

Awesome! Thanks for the answer

I’ve searched before but never found an answer, maybe you know. Could you be close enough to merging black holes to feel/be killed by the gravitational waves without already having been killed by the black hole or its accretion disk?

There is no scientific evidence for anything occurring in any living creature besides plain old chemical reactions. Memories, consciousness, free will, all a result of an outrageously complex blob of cells sending signals to each other.

The concept of a soul is a religious one, and therefore doesn’t “need” science to confirm or deny its existence.

Remember the CCP has a tenuous grasp on power. The things you mentioned, other than one child which has been relaxed, don’t impact the population as a whole. Mandates that impact the average citizen have to be carefully considered as to whether they will cause discontent or not. Witness the 180 on lockdowns once the population had enough of that shit.

Best analogy I’ve heard is to imagine our universe was flat and existed on the surface of a balloon. As the balloon expands all 2 dimensional creatures living on the balloon see other galaxies moving away from them. But what is it expanding into? Nothing. Their universe is made of a flat ball of expanding rubber. It’s not expanding into more rubber. There is absolutely nothing that exists within the laws of nature in that 2 dimensional universe that can possibly describe what it is expanding into. In fact it’s really only expanding in time. The balloon was smaller in the past and will be larger in the future. But it isn’t expanding into anything.

Now imagine three dimensions of space and one of time expanding (if you have a better imagination than me) in the same way that balloon expands. It’s not expanding into anything, it is everything and everything is expanding. Also as far as we can tell our universe does not curve into itself like a balloon. Or if it does it must be at least 23 trillion light years in diameter based on the accuracy of our measurements.

As far as we know absolutely no information could have been preserved from “before” the Big Bang to afterwards. Therefore there will never be a testable theory. We could hypothetically discover in the future the existence of additional universes and may then develop a theory of how ours occurred and if something existed before it. But we’ll likely never know even in that scenario whether our universe was the first or if it came into existence at the same time as those hypothetical additional universes.

For all intents and purposes nothing existed before the Big Bang including time.

Quite frankly the pilot is not the most expensive thing on that aircraft. A 737 burns $2100/hour of fuel at cruise, more during takeoff. Total operating cost of a 737 might average $4000-8000/hour factoring in all costs. And you want to save $400 by not having a crew?

Also the average payout for an aviation death is like $5-10million. So you’re talking about something like $1 billion in wrongful death liability alone per aircraft. Your insurance carrier isn’t going to be happy about that decision to save $400/h in crew costs. So whatever those premiums go up by has to be less than the $400 you’re saving.

It’s unknown whether cellular life came before viruses or if cellular life evolved from viruses.

Why/how is that? How can more particles = less energy?

Oh he’ll definitely crack down on the CCP. It’s not like he has any business interests in China /s

A sense of anxiety/dread/fear that you’re not as good at something as you are, and that any moment it’s all going to come crashing down. For example fear your boss will see you’re a moron and your work sucks, even though there’s no evidence that’s the case. And in fact there’s evidence to the contrary; you’ve been at your job for years, you have good reviews, you’ve been promoted. Fear that everyone in the conference room will see through you and know that you’re a fraud, that you don’t really know what you’re talking about, that you don’t deserve to be there. Even though you’ve given successful presentations dozens of times.

Also it should be noted that occasionally feeling this way is perfectly normal.

You’ve identified why spaceships don’t use propellers or jet engines…there’s no air. Propellers and jet engines push air so they only work in an atmosphere.

So instead you have to push off something. The most common way is to create a controlled explosion and shoot the expanding gases out a nozzle. Smaller releases of gas can be used to make smaller changes, like to point slightly to the left or right, or to start or stop rotation.

Once moving there’s no air to create drag so once you’re going as fast as you want to go you turn your engine off and just coast along. You’ll still be affected by gravity, so you have to account for that. And there is a small amount of gas even in mostly empty space.

For interstellar travel there’s a different proposed solution to the problem. You see in order to use exploding gases to accelerate you fast enough to make traveling to another star achievable within the lifetime of the astronauts you’d have to use a lot of fuel, and fuel is heavy, and takes even more fuel to carry into space. Instead you can deploy a large sail and catch the wind coming off of the sun or fired from a laser on earth, similar to how a sailboat catches the wind. That can get you going to 10% light speed. You’d reach the nearest star in just about 40 years! We’re still a little ways off from being able to construct a sail thin and light enough while still being strong. But we’ll get there soon.

Yeah adjusted for inflation the cost is more in the low tens of millions.