I don't think we have any reason to suppose that we're the only technological civilization within 300 light years. OTOH, within 4 light year the odds are quite good that there aren't any.

That said, I wouldn't want to guess how far it is to the closest other technological civilization...not without a better estimate of the lifetime of such civilizations. (My guess is that they're typically pretty short, but that it's possible to build enduring ones...but that this requires moving parts of the civilization into space in a self-sustaining manner.)

They might do it for other reasons, however. Say to communicate with a generation ship en-route to a distant star. But it *does* make it a lot more unlikely.

In working societies, it has always been more than just the parents responsibility to watch over the children. This is true even among baboons, must less early hominids. The idea that this was not true is farcial.

What "next generation"? The thing can't be implemented without identifying the current generation.

I'm more suspicious of number evenly divisible by 100.

Do you understand that one way how people find out whether a technique is effective is by trying them it out and seeing what happens?

Can you think of a scenario where having some real-world data on how a spacecraft alters the trajectory of a projectile might be useful?

Do you think remaining ignorant and inexperienced is an effective way to save money?

A better question is, how is that people can be presented with an existence proof of X being not only possible but already accomplished, and still come back with "everybody knows X will never be possible"?

You're right! To create a car which can obtain a significant portion of its energy budget from solar energy, given the limited surface area available to collect it, you'd have to design the entire car around that: make it as aerodynamic and lightweight as possible, while simultaneously maximizing the solar surface area to collect as much energy as possible.

Which... is what they've done.

I enjoy the irony of an AI sockpuppet account that is trained to go out and convince people that AI isn't really a thing.

It's going to be an interesting time for DRAM prices when the AI bubble bursts, the bankrupt AI companies can't honor the terms specified in their DRAM contracts, and the world's entire locked-up supply of DRAM suddenly becomes available on the open market again.

I may have to switch to Falkon.

Welll... they'll protect you privacy, but not your identity. They didn't divulge what the messages said, just who paid the bills.

You may not even have had the data for longer than it takes to reformat the drive. But if you have it, you can return it. This, of course, doesn't prove you didn't keep a copy.

If he was one of the founders, perhaps he had the job of doing the checks.

If Proton Mail were really so "privacy focused", then they should not keep payment data, such as credit card numbers.