Isn't the whole point of building better that you won't have to constantly worry about energy use? If it's built energy-efficient, you can just... live comfortably in it.

It's the leaky old houses where you have to make trade-offs that degrade your quality of life.. Like not keeping the house at a comfortable temperature because it'll cost too much. Or you put up with stuffy air in the winter because the only way to ventilate is by opening windows. And all those air leaks are growing mold in the walls...

If it's small enough, it could feasibly orbit the center of mass of a planet without interacting too much. If the radius of the event horizon is small enough, it'll "eat" just one atom at a time and not grow in a meaningful way at any timescale that's relevant to us. Any radiation would be absorbed by the surrounding planetary material.

You can calculate the expected lifetime, and it's long enough. But the conditions to create such an object don't exist in the current time. Maybe it was possible in the early times? I'm just a lay person so I wouldn't know :)

Yes, the tricky part I'm referring to is politics, money and time rather than technology. Connecting Egypt to Greece and Morocco to Spain are baby steps toward a system that would involve cooperation between dozens of nations and require much more capacity. For example, those two connectors are roughly equivalent to a single power plant each.

It doesn't take being "super smart" to know these tests don't really measure very much of what we consider intelligence. All IQ tests are biased, and the more you work to reduce the bias, the more limited in scope the test becomes which is itself a bias. Intelligence is a vague concept like consciousness, and the harder you try to measure it the less useful the results.

In my youth, the gold standard was a "culture fair" IQ test that tried to avoid cultural influences by not having problems that require understanding a lot of language, or references to customs or artifacts of a particular culture, etc. So it was all about "solve this visual puzzle as fast as you can". I aced the test because I'm good at solving visual puzzles, and I wanted the prize money from the IQ contest (hey, the computer I bought launched my game dev career!) But that's all the test could tell about me. Ask any reasonable person and they'll tell you "intelligence" is something more than your speed at playing tic-tac-toe. For example, my partner is the smarter one of us as far as I'm concerned (she's got two PhD's, and she learns new languages for fun for f's sake) even if I'm better at Chess. We have never compared IQ scores and likely won't. It'd be like bragging about the high score you got playing Asteroid back in high school.

This is also a good argument for making these drugs free to the end user, and paid for by tax money. It's an investment that would save tax payer money by reducing other public costs.

The area requirement isn't a hard problem unless we need to generate way more electricity than we currently do. Human development, even if we only count urban areas, covers much more of the world than would need to be "covered with solar panels" to power it all. I think this is like a factor of 10 right now. It'll take some effort the standardize everything so "installing solar panels" is just what we used to call roofing, but.. we already have building codes.

The tricky part will be transmitting energy where it's needed at any given time. Storage is handy, sure, but a global transmission grid would be handier. Even just running lines South to North to mitigate the seasonal effects would be far better than trying to store enough power to last through the winter. And the currently poorer, sunnier countries would benefit from being net producers of energy.

Perhaps what makes it funny is that people reading it will all read something different into it, and react without realizing they've been made fools of. :D

We may be a fluke for sure. There are other species on Earth that use tools, but they never felt a need to land on the Moon. We're not the only species with complex social hierarchies, so it's not that either, nor opposable thumbs. Something happened to us in particular that led to "all this". It would make sense that the past near-extinction had something to do with it. The survivors would've had to adapt to changing conditions in creative ways, maybe travel long distances; stuff that requires more complex planning than climbing trees and eating fruit. The other factors had to be in place at the same time of course, so the combination looks unlikely indeed.

However, if we're a fluke then it may be just a coincidence that it took this long for us to emerge. Perhaps if that asteroid wasn't 100% effective, some big-brained dinosaur might've gone only mostly extinct and their descendants would've built moon bases 60 million years ago :) If it's indeed a roll of the dice, you might get the right numbers on the first roll just as likely as any other time. And there are a lot of dice in the universe (if inconveniently far apart).

Science fiction tends to depict alien civilizations as being peer level to ours, for the simple reason that science fiction is usually an allegory of our own culture. A book or movie is not going to engage our imagination if it's not relatable. A true alien civilization, especially one that has survived for a very long time, might be completely incomprehensible to us. The longer lived a civilization, the more likely it is extant at the same time as us and (probably) the less like us in its psychology. We wouldn't necessarily even recognize it.

Personally, I have a hunch that any species that develops spaceflight must have some intellectual curiosity and that would imply any nearby spacefaring civilization would be observing Earth because living worlds are more interesting to look at than non-living ones. But it's questionable whether there'd be any motivation to "contact" us. Our own scientists go to great lengths not to interfere with whatever they're studying. Maybe if they wanted to save the whales... But this is anthropomorphizing again.

There are many plants other than cactus that will survive in LA just fine without artificial irrigation. I mean, there were plants there before white people. It just won't look like the perfect British lawn we all decided to imitate for some odd reason. (Surprise, LA is not in Britain)

I used to play in my youth.. This game often involves apparent reaction times faster than humanly (or machinely?) possible. What you're actually doing is placing the ball to limit the range of possible responses, and reading the opponent's body language to understand what their response will be (hopefully before they do). You move into position for your next shot as the ball is moving away from you, not after the opponent hits the ball. When you get in the flow, it's magical. This is going to be a very different game with a robot arm opponent.

There's a reason why they're building their solar farms in the western part of the country. It's a desert.

We all know it's an angry god taking a nap. I just hope it doesn't get woken up by the 9+ Richter subduction zone megathrust that we're also due for, during an atmospheric omega block that traps 125-degree heat over the region for a month and it all catches on fire.

How is that different from gas burners? All new cars are "connected" in every way they can be, because it makes someone money from semi-forced "subscriptions". Whether it runs on electricity or gas doesn't matter.