I’m pretty sure their concern is their own birth rate dropping, actually. Have you seen the demographics graph for Russia? They’re facing a complete collapse of their working-age population in a decade or two

No, it would have been detected by various systems pretty much immediately. Those systems are military though, and probably wouldn’t tell the general public about the movement of military satellites

It’s also conceivable that it was detected in that orbit but not recognised, so it was treated as a mystery object

They will have some kind of pressure relief valve, to let steam out and prevent an explosion. They only become dangerous if that valve isn’t working (assuming that whatever keeps the lid on is intact and still strong).

Look for damage around the seal between the pot and the lid, and look for damage to the clamp or latch which holds the lid down against that seal.

Then look at the valve. It’ll probably be a heavy object (such as a lump of metal) which sits on top of a hole of some sort, or it could possibly be something spring loaded. Either way, check that it moves freely.

After that the only additional thing you could do is a pressure test, where you basically deliberately overpressurise it and see if it explodes, but if you had the means to do that safely then you wouldn’t be asking for advice here so I don’t recommend it.

Their point still works though, just reword it for less unnecessary baggage if you prefer.

Do you press the button which saves some random human somewhere in the world, or the button which saves some random cow? I’m pretty sure most people choose the human

I’ll bet they deploy a bunch of starlink satellites basically as soon as they’re able, if only for PR (and probably internal morale) reasons

The biggest problem is that the magnets will “quench”, which is what happens when a superconducting electromagnet suddenly stops being superconducting.

There’s a lot of energy stored in that magnet, and when it quenches the energy all turns to heat in a very short time. Any remaining helium will flash boil, turning into an explosive expansion of gas, and the thermal shock will seriously damage the machine

Because it’s feedback on how effective their targeting has been when confronted with whatever electronic warfare and misdirection Israel was using to defend themselves.

That sort of information might let the attacker make adjustments to be more accurate next time

They probably can do that, but a lot of the connections Ukraine are using will have been donated by third parties, rather than directly purchased by the Ukrainians. How do they tell the difference between those, and someone claiming to be doing that then shipping the dishes to Russia?

It is guaranteed, actually. US law imposes requirements on telecoms providers to support wire taps

You don’t need a force to prevent collapse if there’s no drag force to slow things down. It would actually be almost impossible for a cloud of dark matter to collapse since any individual particle has momentum and no way to slow down, so they’ll all be in some sort of mutual orbit

No, basically. They would love to be able to do that, but it’s approximately impossible for the generative systems they’re using at the moment

You’re mistaken. Dark matter, whatever it is, isn’t affected by anything except gravity. It interacts with gravity just like “normal” matter.

The evidence is also significantly better than you’re describing

By that logic, you should object to cheese being labelled as “cheddar” cheese, because that’s a place too and you’ve almost certainly never seen cheese which came from there.

It’s a stupid rule

People down voting you for bringing up Kessler syndrome were correct to do so. It’s a complete non-issue for starlink-sized objects at that altitude.

Light pollution is a more reasonable objection, and the effects on the upper atmosphere of all those satellites burning up would be as well, but not Kessler syndrome

Then you’d be defeating the careful planning which went into making sure the satellites don’t become a long term problem, by raising them out of the orbits which decay in just a few years and into orbits which never decay.

I have at least a little sympathy for SpaceX’s position that the regulations are unfit for purpose if they need a modification to their licence to use a different fuel tank, that seems totally immaterial to the flight

For an emergency ascent, they’d probably have dropped more than two. They also probably wouldn’t have taken the time to type a message to the surface if it were going wrong that quickly.

It seems more likely to me that they were controlling their rare of descent. I’d expect them to lose a little buoyancy as the vessel compresses, so it seems reasonable that they’d drop the occasional weight as they descend.

Actually, I suspect he’s implying that nobody’s trying to assassinate Harris because all the democracy-hating assassins are on her side, or she’s the one setting them up, or something to that effect.

It’s still the sort of slander which in a reasonable world he’d be called on, but that seems unlikely

It’s unlikely to cause anything to outright fail, but it will certainly be creating bottlenecks and inefficiencies

Hey now, some of us have standards.

We have shitty python scripts