I'll take a truckload, I need something to insulate my house with.

They worded it poorly, as the seas are methane, which is not oil - on earth it's the prime component of natural gas, so the better term would simply be "hydrocarbons". That said, hydrocarbons do not need life to form - just hydrogen, carbon, and a shortage of any oxidizers that could break them down into the lower energy states of H2O and CO2. Even longer chain hydrocarbons can form naturally - on Titan, that happens in the upper atmosphere by photochemical reactions.

It's important not to overgeneralize Earth to other celestial bodies. For example, you can even have bodies with oxygen atmospheres without life. We see this (to a tiny extent) on Europa, which has an extremely thin oxygen atmosphere from photolysis of water ice. It's quite possible that in other systems there could be an environment that produces a denser O2 atmosphere through a similar process - or through other processes, both known or not yet conceived of.

The universe is a weird place. Think about what a tidally locked rocky planet orbiting close to its parent star would experience. I read about one planet whose night side temperature was expected to be earthlike but with a hot side temperature of thousands of degrees. So think about it for a second, what's going to happen? The hot side is going to constantly boil off, potentially even to plasma, be circulated around to the cold side, and then rain down rock. Rockstorms. Depending on the properties of the rock, the rate of boil-off, the rate of redistribution, and the properties of the atmosphere, it could be anywhere from dust to large chunks, and anything from volcanic-like ash to pele's hair (rock wool) to breccias to gemstones. Lightning would be tremendous, like in some volcanic eruptions. Given the amount of energy at hand, winds in storms could get up to ridiculous intensities. The redistribution of mass is going to cause a continual planetary slump from the cold side to the hot side, so one would expect frequent, super-intense earthquakes and frequent volcanic eruptions. You might get some intense magnetic effects via an exceptionally strong dynamo effect, plus the star's magnetic field itself would be orders of magnitude stronger. Aurora could be intense enough to light the sky on the cold side and power photosynthesis. Aurora could be intense enough to light the sky and power photosynthesis on the cold side. Liquid water would be stable in certain places (if it managed not to be all blown off over geological timescales, that is, the planet would have to be large), but would be thrashed about to biblical extends by the other aforementioned processes. If the magnetic fields are strong enough, flowing saltwater may even be visibly dragged by Lorentz forces and build up charges when constrained. The dissociation of the rock on the hot side would free up oxygen into the atmosphere, which would not be all immediately consumed on the cold side (some oxidation reactions are slow). And on and on. So it's potentially possible to have livable, breathable planet with a soil made from regular rains of rock wool and gemstones, lit by aurorae and in a constantly undergoing one catastrophe after the next.

Oh, so Denmark is going to pull a Putin and cut off whatever sections of Greenland it wants for itself?

Only half of Americans typically turn out to vote in binding presidential elections. 72% of Greenlanders turned out to vote in the *non-binding* referrendum on independence. I'd say that's some pretty serious interest. Even if every last Greenlander who didn't show up didn't want independence, they *still* wouldn't be in majority.

This is false. Greenland's GDP is 2,3 billion USD. The subsidy is under 700M USD. They would lose about a third of their GDP if the subsidy cut off. On the other hand, they would also stop *paying* about that much in taxes to Denmark.

People in Greenland voted overwhelmingly to terms that called for eliminating the subsidy, in exchange for Denmark butting the heck out of their land.

The terms of the vote made pretty clear what the people of Greenland want. It was to terminate Danish subsidy, remove Danish as an official language, take full control of Greenland and Greenlandic waters (even foreign policy), take control of the majority of the mineral royalties, etc. So even they don't end up with, say, a UN seat, it's still pretty hard to say that's not "independence".

And there are Danish politicians who have made clear that they don't think Greenland should be let loose.

Macroscopic analogies help people envision what one's talking about, though. Saying "an electron does its own thing" doesn't really help people conceive just what that "thing" is.

I think the basic macroscopic analogy for particle/wave duality is to just go with the pilot wave theory and have them picture a boat bobbing along on a frictionless lake, where its wake is so powerful and so fast-responding that it steers the boat, and it never dies out - the boat creates the wake but is governed by it. There's even an experiment to visualize it involving bouncing a silicone droplet on a vibrating fluid bath, where you can even roughly reproduce a (non-quantized) version of the double slit experiment - the wake goes through both slits, then steers the droplet on the other side.

Of course, the analogy fails when you add quantum effects like virtual particles, uncertainty, etc....

That's not how international law about exclusive economic zones works, because there's not a convenient pole between every disputed area in the world (and why the pole anyway, what not say the center of the arctic ocean?). One doesn't carve out a brand new approach just for this one dispute. As much as I'm sure Russia would want them too, since they'd get half of the arctic ocean.

They are claimed by big ass oil companies.

Obligatory.

No, sorry, I've been too busy learning about archaeology from reading papers published in the 1800s and reading about how physics works by reading the works of the ancient Greeks.

... honestly think that they can keep Greenland under their thumb for that long? Greenland already doesn't want to be part of Denmark - 75% voted for independence in a nonbinding referrendum in 2008 with a 72% turnout. The wealthier they become and the greater the percentage of the wealth that Denmark siphons away, the more they're going to want it. If Greenland and its EEZ start raking in trillions of dollars annually (which is the sort of mineral wealth up for grabs), how low in the single-digits do you think the popularity of remaining part of Denmark will be? For every trillion of GDP that'd be nearly $17M per capita, at Greenland's current population.

Is Denmark going to force Greenland to stay with them by the gun?

What gets me is that unless they've lived elsewhere, most Americans don't even realize that they're in the banking dark ages. They assume that everyone else still has the same stupid broken kind of system that they manage their money with.

Iceland, but you'll find that other parts of Europe are pretty similar.

I think the problem is just misconceptualized. Think of read-only memory, like say DVDs. They're not *100* read-only. Data is written to them once in an irreversible manner before their operational life begins using an alternative write mechanism, and then during their design life they're read-only. If you apply the same paradigm to write-only memory, it's perfectly reasonable for, say, a datalogger: data is written during the operation of the device, then when the device has completed its task, the memory is retrieved and read in an irreversible manner.

This is just the tiniest fraction of what we can do with our banks over here; I just can't get over how backwards US banks are and how they can't seem to get into the modern world. Not only do we have instant free transfers (and to Americans: the ability to conveniently or easily pay absolutely anyone, anywhere, any time with just a computer or smartphone is a much bigger deal than you're thinking... it's so easy that it's to the point that when people want to collect money for a gift for a coworker, rather than going around asking for cash, they just put the destination account in the email).

The banks are also connected more closely to other major billing systems. For example, there's a page in your bank account to let you add credit to pay-as-you-go phones. Not just your phones, but anyone's in the country, all in one system, so I can fill up a friend's phone or what not.

All our bills come straight into our bank accounts. Not most of them - ALL of them, everything from rent to the gardener. All payable with a single select-and-submit interface (with delay pay options, of course). There's a page for charity listings, too, to make it easier to give - heck, there's even a stock trading section built in and the like.

  All of your documents associated with the bills are automatically filed into your bank account, you just click on the documents section and you can view, say, your wage slips or bills, from many years in the past if you want. Not like you typically need them, everything is automatically submitted through to our taxes - for most people, taxes are just a log-in to the tax site and click through a couple pages, and they're done, it just takes a couple minutes.

Single system (despite competition in the banking industry). Everyone's on it. Everyone uses it. And it works really, really well. To give an example: checks have become so rare that cashiers in banks look at them funny and often have to get their managers to figure out what to do with them ;)