Iran isn’t directly mentioned. Vague terms like “the North” appear, and historically many American evangelicals have identified the USSR with it, because that was the geopolitical bogeyman of the day. I’ve had older evangelicals insist to me that Russia borders Israel as a result.

Iran’s more plausible than Russia, but if we pretend for a moment it’s not all some desert guy’s mushroom trip it could just as easily be Turkey.

Yes. People seem to think the bends always happens on exposure to weird pressures, but it just doesn’t. I guess they’re understandably imagining it’s the same as hot or cold.

(though no idea about the effects on the human body from such a sudden change)

Well, enough delta p is entirely capable of squishing an entire person through a thumb-sized hole, and while there’s no hole here I image there’d still be some sort of shock wave, and the air already in your lungs returning to normal volume suddenly would be uncomfortable. Don’t go too deep the first time, definitely ease into it.

Interestingly just 1 atm is fairly harmless. The first time someone got caught in a vacuum chamber they weren’t sure what they’d find, but the guy just got up and said his ears hurt.

Wouldn’t that mean opening an evacuated tube should produce a flash of radiation, and supersonic planes should absolutely glow? I’m skeptical.

There’s a few questions here. At the atomic level, quantum mechanics comes into play, and instant change basically breaks it, so you’d expect it to be slightly gradual somehow.

That might do it, if they really land on top of each other. OP said it was air molecules colliding with each other in the shock, though.

Everyone who’s little-r rich claims to be middle/working class, and every private jet guy claims to have grown up middle/working class. I once had an expat from a poor country tell me average people back home have servants, which is mathematically impossible.

You see, they worked for and earned their money fair and square, unlike some other, slightly richer people. And then there’s some that just straight up buy into “meritocracy”, and think the African children are lazy.

A chunk of file cabinet where my knee was falls to the floor. I fall to the ground, twisting my hip joint quite uncomfortably, possibly enough to pull something. I can’t actually tell if my leg would be totally trapped, or if I could at least slide it out. If it’s caught it’s going to be a shitty wait for rescue.

I assume it’s a switcharoo scenario. Otherwise where does the air in my new location go?

I mean, no. That’s not enough energy to cause nuclear stuff. This guy tried sciencing, which I still respect in the context of a goofy scenario, I guess.

Okay, yeah, I’m familiar with the argument. I’m not alone in being unconvinced, though. There’s a lot of exoplanets, including rocky ones around very old stars. Honestly, I felt assuming just a billion years of potential alien arrival was conservative.

There is also probability that milkyway had an active center in early days that kept things nice and sterile.

Fairly unrelated to this discussion, but I’ll link it because it’s cool: there’s a detectable echo of radiation from our galaxy being more active just a couple centuries ago, at least momentarily.

I don’t know enough about the radiation one of those galaxies produce to comment on whether it could be sterilising. A thick enough atmosphere can block pretty much anything, though.

Yeah, I can cherry-pick morons off the internet too. That was an approximate “nobody”, there are of course some voices at the fringe. I mostly agree with OP, I just thought that one bit was an odd take.

As for the rest, terrorist is a meaningless word for non-state actors we don’t like. Hamas is not bad because they’re terrorists, but because they’re theocrats that want to eliminate the neighboring ethnic group. They are not alone.

Source? Like, sure, there probably wasn’t enough heavy elements in the first few billion, but it only takes one planet to grow aliens, and aliens could colonise the whole galaxy in just a few million years, so you have to constrain things pretty tightly for us to be early at however many billion years in we are (the exact count is uncertain these days).

Agreed, but why not attach it to the side of town they’re on, or at least give them a normal, full road like all the others if your going to bother the rail traffic?

I’m guessing it was a driveway originally, and crossed the tracks way back when that was no big deal, and became a public road later somehow. It’s still cursed.

but Hamas has the better media presence

They’re officially declared a terrorist organisation in many places, and nobody argues with it (not unreasonably, but nobody’s going after the settlers for the same). They might be pulling forward a bit right now, but historically the Israeli lobby has been no joke in the West.

I mean, democracy is an ideology too. If you want to see a place with no ideology, think of somewhere with openly corrupt mafia-like rule. I’d point the finger more at tribalism.

The one caveat is that the sides are not equal. The Israelis have the resources to set up a 2-state solution unilaterally if they wanted, while the Palestinians are in an active famine right now. They’re just not willing to bear the economic and security costs of that, so the cycle continues.

There’s other lesser fuckery in different breeds, like shepherds having back legs that are too short. If we had been given breeding privileges as a species, we’d have definitely lost them.

Look for dogs that look like dogs, if you have a choice.

Yeah, but we have like a billion years of “observation time” minimum, since there’s every reason to think one of the alien species will be expansionistic. They’re not here yet, blurry photos aside.

For now, anyway.

This one road in my town, that’s only one lane somehow, and has it’s own crossing across a busy railway line to reach a total of 3 houses.