A Freesat decoder box costs about £50. Buy one, have it shipped to Denmark, hook it up, done. It's not encrypted, you don't need a subscription, what's the problem?

I doubt it. Quite a lot of Americans have superstitious objections to this kind of thing. Mark of the beast and all that.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

1) Plug in to USB
2) Choose 'PC Suite Mode' (I haven't bothered installing anything of the sort, but it's that or 'Mass Storage Mode')
3) From the network manager on the computer, select the mobile network (it recognises the network provider and knows the standard login details out of the box)
4) Done.

This isn't just a smartphone thing though. My last phone was a K850i, an old-style Sony Ericsson camera-phone. It was even easier with that one; the computer didn't need to know network login details, the phone handled that and just appeared to the computer as a regular wired network device. You can get that kind of handset for a song these days.

At my last upgrade, they tried to tell me how great iPhones are. If they make something as trivial as this into a problem, then I'm glad I kept well away. I just assumed that this kind of functionality was a given, I didn't even consider it. Dodged a bullet there, then.

That's just it, you see. The basic answer to 'is there life after death' is 'no, except for the bacteria and the worms'. That answer comes from the most conservative definitions of 'life' and 'death'.

The other possible answers - yes, by means of cryogenics, or brain uploading, or alien intervention, or instantaneous transfer to parallel universe - follow from different assumptions; either that some incredible technology will some day be invented that can save you from the failure of your body, or that fantastic benevolent super-entities exist which will do that favour for you.

So the question becomes two: 'Will scientists ever develop a way to copy brains into new cloned or robot bodies?' and 'Does there exist some hyper-advanced entity which is in the habit of copying human brains into some secure location at the point of death?' To which my answers would be 'maybe, I certainly hope so but it will be difficult to do', and 'what, seriously?' I don't know, maybe you have some reason to think that second one is likely? I mean, you say these questions torment you, so you must think there's some substantial probability of it... I can't prove it doesn't happen, but I can't prove that grave robbers from outer space didn't reanimate the corpse of someone who didn't look much like Bela Lugosi and use it to menace a small town back in the fifties either. Doesn't mean I lose much sleep over the matter.

It would seem that, in your mind, plausibility is equal to provable certainty.

Ah, is that what you're after? Provable certainty? This isn't mathematics, I'm afraid. Science doesn't get you provable certainty; only plausibility and high degrees of probability. It's possible that we're totally wrong about the chemical processes we call 'life', that 'life' is something different and the cessation of those chemical processes we call 'death' doesn't actually destroy that 'life'. It's also possible that we're totally wrong about magnetism; perhaps compasses point north because invisible leprechauns pull on them. It's even possible that the entire Universe came into existence fully formed just yesterday, with falsified 13.7 billion year history, complete with false memories in all of our brains. Or that the whole damn thing's a computer simulation.

Totally undetectable hyper-advanced superbeings copying brains at the point of death into a parallel universe, well, I can't prove they don't exist. But I don't take the notion particularly seriously, and my uncertainty doesn't exactly torment me. Anybody can construct a question so as to be unanswerable; you just define your terms so that no evidence will ever be available, and you have an unfalsifiable claim. That doesn't make the question important, though. Certainly doesn't make it worth losing sleep over.

You asked other questions, though, which _are_ subject to observations. Is there justice in the world? I said yes, sometimes. It's a rather woolly concept, but have you never observed something you would call 'justice' to be done? I've read of many cases in which great injustice has been done, but also many in which justice was indeed done. Here's another reason why I ask for your definitions; is your concept of justice so incredibly stringent that you have never observed it to be done? Now that's something I can agree would torment me too. But if you have ever, even once, seen justice done, then there's your answer: yes, rare though it might be, there is justice in the world.

Or, as you later redefined the question: 'why IS THERE suffering?' - well, go out and find an example of suffering, and study it. Everybody who is suffering is suffering for their own particular reasons, and there are many reasons. That you expect a single answer to a question like that is just one more unexamined, unstated assumption that you make, and which gets in the way of your ever answering your questions.

Examine your definitions of terms, and examine your implicit assumptions. You'll generally find that questions like these decompose into practical questions - like how the 'suffering' question becomes a study of economics and sociology and medical science - or they become like the 'totally undetectable parallel universe' one, untestable by definition and therefore futile to worry about. Then maybe you can stop being tormented.

Well, the answers I gave were based on fairly conservative definitions of terms; I tried to make as few extra assumptions as I could beyond the most basic interpretation. So, 'life' is a chemical process we observe in certain structures on Earth. 'Death' is the end of that process. 'Good' and 'evil' I didn't explore, but since the question was about 'ultimately' I just explained the best estimate available for the ultimate fate of the Universe, and left the decision about whether entropy was 'good' or 'evil' to you. That sort of thing. Of course if you want to go into greater detail then we'll really need to establish just what our definitions are; otherwise my results may be valid, but would be describing completely different concepts to the ones you are asking about!

They're your questions, not mine. I could come up with answers based on my own interpretation of your terms, but then they might not be answers to your questions any more. That's why I need your definitions.

it's all just a bunch of playing tricks with semantics to avoid having to answer my question. You keep going off on irrelevant tangents such as what does 'life' mean, is good/evil the same thing as entropy, or why did I ask why must there be so much suffering, etc? Who cares about the word 'must'? It's clear what I meant. So fine, let's change it to "Why is there so much suffering?" and move on.

And in that case, you get an answer that discusses how diseases work and spread and cause trouble, and that examines the various causes of natural disasters, and that delves into sociology and history to consider the causes of violent conflicts, and psychology to describe the origins of personal upsets, and so on, and so on. This is an important question, but I don't see how it's a Great Unanswerable. It's obvious why there's so much suffering; the real question you ought to be asking is 'what can we do to reduce it?'

For example, is there life after death? It's absolutely clear what I mean by that, without getting all tangled up in definitions and talking about prions and chemical processes in our cells, etc. If some guy walks up to you on the street and asks you that question, you know immediately what he means, and if you start getting all anal about definitions instead of just answering the question, you're just dodging it. But just to humor your obviously feigned confusion about what the question means, first of all the question is almost invariably phrased in a human context, and secondly, it virtually always means, "After I die, will my consciousness continue in some way?"

No constraints about the manner in which it could happen? Well, there's cryogenics if you're optimistic about the future. Or I suppose there's the possibility of brain uploading, though that raises thorny problems about identity. Or some fantastically advanced aliens might swoop down and seize your brain and reimplement its neural network in a robot body. You might even spontaneously come back into existence as a quantum-mechanical Boltzmann brain at some point in the unimaginably distant future.

But I think your question might more fully be stated as 'Is there a wholly undetectable parallel universe to which my entire mental state will somehow be copied at the moment my brain function ceases, preserving unique identity, and in which that mental state will continue to operate indefinitely thereafter, not subject to any form of degeneration or decay?' Is that a fair statement of your question? If so... this is a question that torments you? Seriously? If someone were to come up to you today and ask you that question, quite separately from the cultural and superstitious context in which you may have grown up, would you really consider it an important question? Or would you wonder what in the world he'd been smoking?

You see, there are so many different interpretations of the terms in these questions of yours. I'm sure I've misinterpreted something of your meaning again; that's why I ask for your own definitions, stated clearly and unambiguously, so that we can then work on an answer - and maybe, by clearing up some of these sources of your torment, we can reduce the amount of suffering in the world a little.

Because you're the one asking the questions. We can give you answers, but they'll necessarily be based on what we think are reasonable assumptions of what your terms mean. Quite a few of us have given broadly similar answers already, but you seem to have a problem with them; perhaps your definitions of terms are different?

Oh, wait...

You show me the proofs, and I'll be happy to go along with your definitions, assuming you haven't merely selectively chosen your definitions to make the questions easy to answer, thus diluting your answers down to meaningless tautologies.

Ah. Then you do have a problem with definitions. For instance, define 'life'... well, life is a process which absorbs energy and materials from its environment, and uses them to make more life. To exclude things like fire, which we do not consider life, we also require that the new life thus made be more like the parent life than like the average, randomly chosen bit of life out of the general population. There are special cases like worker bees, or creatures rendered sterile by disease or accident or age yet still alive, but in general reproduction with heredity is central to the concept of life as distinct from other forms of chemistry. That's why I gave the answer 'to make more life'. If you have different definitions of what you mean by 'life' you may, of course, reach different conclusions about its purpose. But if you're finding it hard to reach a conclusion, and the process is tormenting you, then maybe you should closely examine your definition of 'life'? Perhaps the problem's there?

Mind you, even the biologists' definition of 'life' is troublesome. Are viruses alive? Prions? It's a topic of quite some debate.

Similarly with your other questions. Will good ultimately triumph over evil? Well, best current understanding of the Universe is that its ultimate fate is a heat death; if you define 'good' to mean entropy and 'evil' to mean potential energy, then the answer's yes; otherwise, it depends what you mean by 'good' and 'evil' in a universe where even the stars will soon die and grow cold and we face a future of uncounted trillions of years dominated by neutrino radiation, dark matter and black holes (the possibility of a Big Rip permitting.) I'm not sure 'good' and 'evil' as conventionally defined really apply to a dead Universe. Perhaps you're asking if good will triumph in the meantime? I'm sure it will, sometimes. And I expect evil will have victories of its own. That will depend on individual circumstances; and which side in any given conflict you call 'good' or 'evil' will depend on your own political views.

Or, is there life after death? Well, again, depends what you mean. Myself, I would say 'the permanent end of life' is a good definition of 'death'. My death of course means a bonanza of life for putrefying bacteria, and for the worms, so yes, there is life after death, but not for me. You may disagree; but if you think that your life may continue after your death, then I would say you have a very, very strange definition of either 'life', 'death', or both.

Or, why must there be so much suffering? That question assumes that as a matter of fact, there must be so much suffering. There doesn't have to be. Exterminate all life on earth and afterwards there will be no suffering. I'm sure there are ways of eliminating suffering while also keeping everyone alive, though they'd be more difficult to achieve. If you ask 'why IS THERE so much suffering', then we could discuss many different causes, poverty, disease, violence, all manner of different things; but I'm sure you're already quite familiar with those. You seem to be coming to this question with the expectation that for some reason there should be no suffering; I don't see why you would think that.

I think you're probably making these questions unnecessarily difficult. And if as you say they are tormenting you, then that's a problem. The answers I gave weren't in jest, I was quite serious and I'm sure the others who tried to help you meant it sincerely as well. You've probably got some strange definitions of your basic concepts, and you may well have some unexamined implicit assumptions in your questions which are leading you into trouble as you try to answer them. So I agree with the previous poster: you should sit down and think carefully about what you mean by those terms, 'justice', 'good', 'evil', 'purpose', 'life', 'death', 'truth', 'suffering'. Then you'll be better able to address those questions of yours.

As an agnostic, I am used to having my religious friends and family members say that I'm just taking the easy way out. To them, no God means no responsibility, no sense of duty, no moral quandaries, no church on Sunday, etc, etc. However, as I'm sure many agnostics can tell you, being an agnostic is anything but easy. All of those Big Unanswerable Questions weigh heavily on you - much more so than for religious people who've found all of those questions conveniently answered by their religion of choice. Meanwhile, I've spent nearly my entire life being constantly tormented by those questions.

Let me help you, then.

Yes: to make more life. Sometimes, in answer to an unambiguous well-posed question. Yes, unless you are the last living thing in the universe, in which case no, but either way it's someone else's life not yours. No, assuming 'lost' means they're dead; otherwise maybe. Sometimes, depending on how things turn out in each particular case. Entropy will ultimately triumph over energy; that may not be the same thing. There doesn't have to be so much suffering, there just is.

Does that help? Or is the real problem that you already know or suspect the answers to those big questions, and don't like what that implies?

Let's call the centre of the Earth a fixed point. Then if it's not the same time of day as you were born on, you're probably a few thousand miles from your birthplace because of rotation.

Now let's call the Sun a fixed point. Then if it's not currently your birthday, you're anything up to 186 million miles away from your birthplace because of the orbit.

Now let's call the centre of the Galaxy a fixed point. Then your birthplace is a long, long way away.

Oh, and the Galaxy is doing a bit over a million miles an hour towards the Great Attractor.

Two buttons? How do you paste, or open a link into a new tab?

BISMILLAH!

No. "Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed."

"Roger, Tranquillity, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again. Thanks a lot."

Transcript

Assuming no exotic physics - no warp, no inertialess space drive, you fly around using recoil from throwing mass out the back at high speed - then the best we can probably hope for is a fusion rocket. It would have to accelerate to an immense speed to catch Voyager. Then brake to match velocities, actually recover the probe, come to a complete stop and accelerate back to Earth, stop again, and deliver cargo.

Every stage takes fuel. You can't play orbital tricks out in interstellar space where there's no gas giant handy to pull a loop around. It all has to be done by the engines. So, work it out. (a) Fuel to bring Voyager to a halt in low Earth orbit, from deep space cruising speed. (b) Fuel to get Voyager, plus the fuel from part (a), from its current drift in the wrong direction to deep space cruising speed towards Earth. (c) Fuel to brake the mission spacecraft plus all the fuel from parts (a) and (b) from deep space cruising speed to Voyager drifting speed. (d) Fuel to accelerate the mission spacecraft, plus all the fuel from parts (a), (b), and (c), from Earth orbit to interstellar cruising speed.

Add the fuel from parts (a), (b), (c) and (d) together. That's what it'll take. That'll be one BIG rocket. Far bigger than an interstellar probe, which only has to get to deep space cruising speed _once_. Ramscoops might help; but I doubt we'll spend long enough at high enough speeds. A sail plus launching laser would probably be essential, since that cuts out needing to carry the fuel for part (d). Antimatter fuel would be ideal, but getting antimatter in bulk requires new physics, while fusion rockets just require new engineering.

It would be a wonderful mission, and it would bring home an incredible historic treasure. But I suspect that a fusion-rocket civilisation would have better uses for such vast resources. There are neighbouring star systems to be mapped; ice moons and asteroids and Plutinos to be settled and mined; and there are enough relics of the earliest spacefarers to be found, nearer at hand, preserved in vacuum under diamond domes on the Moon at Tranquillity and at the Ocean of Storms and at Fra Mauro and all the rest, where the tourists go to gaze at the fearfully primitive equipment with which their forefathers braved the final frontier, and at the footprints they left for eternity.

Collecting Voyager will, I think, be the task of some far-future civilisation which laughs at Newton's third law. If they can remember where it is. Or what it was to be human. If they've forgotten, maybe the Interstellar Record will remind them what their evolutionary predecessors were and how they once saw the cosmos.

It's not distance. It's time. You're thinking in hundreds or thousands of years, and that's simply absurd. After leaving the Solar System, these probes will be lost in an inconceivably large expanse of space. Voyager 1 is due a close approach to the red dwarf star AC+79 3888 in about 40,000 years - where 'close approach' means a distance of 1.6 light years. And that's mostly because that star's moving towards the Sun, rather than Voyager moving towards it. Voyager 2 has no such close encounter planned, though it will come within a few lightyears of Sirius in about 300,000 years.

For comparison: 40,000 years ago the last Neanderthals were wandering Spain. 300,000 years ago... well, there's evidence of the use of fire.

And that's the timescale for a close approach to a star of the order of a lightyear. To actually be found, unless someone out there has godlike sensor technology (in which case there's no point trying to hide anyway), they'd have to come a lot closer in than that. Millions of years? Billions? These probes are small, and in a few decades their transmitters will fall silent and their radioactive cores die and their metal structures cool to the ambient temperature of deep space. They'll be hard to spot.

Don't think of this as a message. Think of it as a time capsule. By the time they're found, if they ever are found, then whatever is living on Earth won't be H. sapiens any more. If there even is an Earth by then, or a Sun. The record doesn't say 'Here we are' - it says, 'Here we were'.