Well, bear in mind that thermodynamics is a statistical theory, it's about the aggregate behaviour of systems. Quantum fluctuations like that just sort of average out. Conservation of Energy isn't even a firm rule in our universe, since time translation isn't an exact symmetry (the universe was different in the past). But on local scales and reasonably short times it might as well be true. :)

g isn't a measure of thrust, it's a measure of acceleration, which depends on the thrust and the mass of the object. A laser that generates negligible acceleration on itself can accelerate a grain of dust at several times g; it's just not a useful measure here.

The Realtime series was my first introduction to Vinge's work, and will always hold a special place for me. Sadly gets overlooked a lot when people talk about his work.

IIRC the big problem with Dark Energy isn't that it exists, but that there's so darn little of it. There's no reason it shouldn't either be 0 or huge, but instead it's just almost 0 and that's bewildering.

Yeah, the problem with GW solutions involving reducing insolation at the surface is that... stuff needs that sunlight, like photosynthetic organisms, and the water cycle..

I mean... we already know one type of dark matter exists, they're called neutrinos. Unfortunately they don't fit the bill for the dark matter everyone's fretting about, but "particles that don't interact electromagnetically" are definitely a thing. Why should we assume we've necessarily found the entire particle zoo, given that we know the Standard Model isn't complete?

Such small black holes are usually theorized to be primordial, ie. having formed in the extremely dense early moments after the Big Bang. Several things can limit the rate at which a black hole can grow; one of the most important is the Eddington luminosity, where the energy released as matter falls into the black hole is so intense that it pushes the surrounding matter away.

I never have mod points when I need them.

Now we can have full-on artificial people and not have to bother with those pesky rights.

I mean, you could, but your submarine would look like some freaky deep sea life with kilometers of photomultipliers dangling from it, and the bandwidth would be terrible...

Yeah but if you just delete the embarrassing/incriminating recordings, then you just look even more suspicious. If you blow away three years of stuff in an "accident" then it's great cover for any little bits in there you didn't want seen.

Yeah, my first (and probably entirely unfair) reaction to reading this was "how much did the sugar cartel pay for this?" XD

I mean, as long as you ignore galactic rotation curves, and gravitational lensing of galaxy clusters, and the properties of the cosmic microwave background, and the large scale structure of the universe, and the Bullet Cluster, and dark matter dominated galaxies like FAST J0139+4328, there's definitely no evidence for dark matter. Not a speck.

It's like these folks have never heard of rain shadow.

Double it and add 30. So a metric shit ton is 32 epic shit tons.