Then I guess I'm just more optimistic about what we can learn and do than you are. Nature is far from perfect.

Ha! What in the world suggests to you that we're an optimal solution? Evolution only makes an organism fit enough to reproduce and rear the next generation. Things that cause problems rarely, or create health in old age are poorly selected for. If we're optimized for anything, it would be as tribal hunter-gatherers, not modern civilization. Science is not magic. I am confident that we can do better, if we choose to do so.

Me? Absolutely not. I'm a software engineer, not a biochemist. That doesn't mean that nobody can. We've mapped the genome, now the job is figuring out what everything does, including all of the interactions. Once we know that (which is a truly massive task that has only just begun), we can start looking at what we can change to make things work better. It might require changing many things at once in order to separate, for example, two biological pathways that are currently connected, where correcting an issue in one creates an issue in the other. And the result might be people that are no longer genetically compatible with unmodified humans. I'll let someone else tackle the sociological effects of that, but it's almost certainly possible to make those sort of changes once we understand our biology well enough.

No not like "non-coding DNA is junk". You can have a fully functional example of spaghetti code where every bit of it is doing something vital to the code being functional, but doing it in a way that is much more complicated than necessary.

Yeah, but we can do better than random modifications if we have a solid understanding of ourselves. Huge challenge though, as our biology is a huge example of spaghetti code. Right now, changing one gene can have a complex cascade of unintended consequences. Some level of interdependency is probably necessary, but it's likely that a lot of it isn't, it just ended up that way randomly. It will really be the golden age of DNA modification if we figure out enough that we can start unraveling those interdependencies and clean up our genetics.

I assume you are either deep pocketed, or are talking about a used fire truck that a department wants to get rid of. Even a small, unequiped fire truck is going to be over 100k.

Momentum is a form of energy.

If you aren't correcting for errors in data collection then your conclusions will be wrong. When you're dealing with measurements made over decades, the only way to deal with errors in data collection of those past measurements is to apply corrections. You cant co back and take new measurements. Also, it's not as though they're just saying, "this doesn't agree with my opinion, I'll just change all the measurements by this much". They're looking at unexpected discrepancies and trying to determine why they exist. For example, recently researchers noticed ocean temperature measurements collected by buoys read consistently lower than measurements collected by ships. The buoys are reading accurately, and the ships appear to be reading high. (not surprising, given that ships have engines that release heat) Before the pause, most of our ocean temperature measurements were made via ships. At the beginning of the "pause" we were moving away from ships and toward primarily buoy based measurements. This created an artificial drop in the average temperature that was due to changes in measurement, not changes in the actual temperature. If this is corrected for (adjust the measurements made by ships down a specific amount determined by the typical difference between ships and buoys) then the global warming pause completely disappears. The researchers didn't set out to make it disappear, it just came out of the data.

They will clean themselves up. Low earth orbit has a very small amount of atmosphere, but enough to slow the satellites over time and cause them to re-enter. Most likely they would burn up pretty much completely, though a few pieces might reach the ground.

Instruments on ocean buoys for some reason are reading a lower temperature than research ships. Many buoys were deployed during the time period of the "pause", which pushed down the average temperature reading as compared to past measurements. They've now taken this disparity into account and the "pause" disappears. They were looking for an explanation for the "pause" and found it to be an error in the way the data was collected, so they corrected for the error.

This is not anything like that sort of geothermal.

Matter and energy are equivalent. Regardless, it's a moot point as the article states that electrons are being emitted by the graphene, and it is these electrons which are suggested to be the source of the thrust.

Actually, after RTFA, it appears that they confirmed a flow of electrons away from the graphene. That would imply that momentum is being conserved.

Or, it just means that we found a way to convert energy to momentum directly. No free lunch as you'd still have to supply energy to convert into momentum.

The tube couldn't travel at c, only very close to c. If you were in the tube, and propelled yourself within the tube by whatever means, you wouldn't notice anything particularly odd. To you, it might take 5 minutes to traverse the length of the tube. But to an outside observer, it would take **FAR** longer. Say, a thousand years, for the same action (the closer to c, the longer it it would take from the viewpoint of an outside observer). The faster you tried to move in the tube, the more time dilation you would experience.