I think you're talking about neoliberals there. That's the one movement derived from liberalism that I'm aware of being highly overlapping with conservative people who want to dictate how other people should live.

Now why would you feel that way about people favourable to constitutional changes and legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy? Are you a slave owner, an absolute monarchist, or a theocrat?

DuckDuckCover?

Canned air and the Joule-Thomson effect to the rescue? :D

I thought virtually all Republicans were bananas?

It's also probably in part due to reduction of infectious disease epidemics, again through sanitation (no more cholera and plague). Also, antiseptic birth, or how that thing is called - which I'm not sure if it counts as "sanitation" as such, but again, a similar principle. And food security, perhaps? That's the only major non-hygiene-related factor that I can come up with. Famines were a regular occurrence in pre-modern times, after all.

Considering an unsteady hand, perhaps you shouldn't be thinking about it in terms of a quadratic relationship but rather in terms of a linear one? Hint: draw the geometry of the light spot passing over the eye in both cases.

It's significantly diverging primarily because of the laws of physics. Even "perfect" optics wouldn't help because you can't simultaneously have a small aperture and a low-divergence beam. And I'm acutely aware that increasing its divergence only exacerbates the problem, that's why I concluded some time ago that it's a dumb thing to do.

If they were closer to Mars, for example (dug into Phobos?), they'd be able to make real time control decisions for the martian roving vehicles, vastly improving their utilization. Speed of light is horrible for efficient operation of such devices. Some progressive Martian mission designs anticipate this scenario.

So could powerful flashlights and astronomical telescopes, considering that you could put them together and use the telescope in reverse.

Fortunately, thanks to the laws of physics, such a laser would have to have an aperture of at least 10 to 20 cm, but probably much more, and thus would be very conspicuous.

Of course they do. Without a lens, a laser diode's beam would so divergent as to be unusable for most applications.

They already have it.

Except for thinking...

No, but they could enable them with their cheap technology. Think of how cheaper the MSL rover could be if if were launched by a Falcon Heavy. All that weight-shedding typical for aerospace can't possibly be cheap. But we won't have any chance to substantially get rid of it until we get cheaper launches. (New Horizons probably could have been much more heavyweight, too, if FH had been available at that time.)