Fair enough, but I automatically wince whenever I see “X Nobel Prize winning-Ys endorse/reject Z”, because as often as not, it’s nonsense…

Ironic, considering how right leaning most farmers are…

Removed by mod

When life gives you lemons, make orange juice and then kneecap life while it’s distracted trying to figure out how the hell you did it

And also protest!

I personally think we’re on the slope of enlightenment - quantum computing no longer attracts as much hype as it used to, but in the background, there’s a lot of interesting developments that genuinely might be very important.

This makes so much sense to me - Iran joining in would give an invitation to USA, EU, etc. to join in with Israel, and take away focus from Israel’s war crimes and genocide to instead focus on the new bad guy.

Even worse, it forms a reservoir of disease that the most vulnerable of the population, those who have not/cannot be vaccinated, will suffer tremendously from.

Look, I understand your point. And to be fair, they genuinely are reading new ground with reusable rockets. But not only are competitors catching up, cost overruns and time delays do matter in the context of NASA, considering how their budgets keeps getting negatively affected and the Artemis project is suffering setbacks. They don’t have the scope to tolerate what’s happening.

I’m referring to the rockets intended for travelling to the moon and beyond (primarily the Starship), which has already failed thrice, has innumerable issues and massive cost overruns.

Considering SpaceX’s track record… I’m very eager for Elon and his other billionaire buddies to get on a rocket headed for Mars.

I don’t think it counts as stealing- syncretism is present in virtually every faith that has contact with another faith, modern and ancient.

I dunno, most people are probably going to remember his decisions on Gaza much more strongly.

But the inverse also applies - there’s not much stopping wizards from portkeying/apparating into the Oval Office or the pentagon and magibombing them, or Avada-ing key targets. Wizards are probably the worst kind of guerrilla fighters - ones unchecked by range. And as far as food is concerned, food multiplication is a thing. I personally believe that in the long term, the way muggles would win would be through subverting wizards, not by pure overwhelming force.

But they were able to setup the core of their commercial and governance infrastructure in the middle of London, with no particular notice from muggles - not to mention, we know that the government already knows about wizards (MoM liaises with the PM). So there must be a quid pro quo already in place, with the government tolerating and aiding in the existence of a semi-independent polity in their heartlands in return for unspecified benefits, probably defence against foreign wizards.

True enough, the capabilities of Magic haven’t been explored enough canonically to disprove that - but if the government learned of Magic, the first thing they’d do is subvert some wizards to their side, who might be able to counteract them - in many ways, it’s a battle of statecraft as it is of actual power.

I personally think it depends on exactly what the limits of Magic are - it could be anything from Muggles eradicating Wizards, to the opposite, all very plausibly. To me, it comes down to the power of modern surveillance vs. the power of notice-me-not + space-expansion + anti-detection spells. Plus there’s a whole bunch of other powerful spells and devices (time turners, for example), but the muggles have a while fuckton of gold and other valuables to recruit these capabilities to their side as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism

This should give you a bunch of sources- I learned of this from Dr. Bart Ehrman myself.

Not necessarily- most Zionists are Christians- they have the belief that the apocalypse will be declared by the antichrist at the Temple, so they want Israel to take control of Palestine, demolish the Al Aqsa mosque and rebuild the Temple.

Honestly? A major breakthrough in fusion, or to a lesser extent, any other clean energy. We’ve decarbonised a decent chunk of the world’s energy profile, but there’s a strong financial incentive that politicians are vulnerable to protecting oil and gas, slowing down further decarbonisation. Batteries and supercapacitors also could do the trick.