We're always looking for more afjordable options for data cooling. As long as they avoid the local pines in their construction. No one wants to be pining for the fjords....

Know it all? I do that at work, tell people to RTFM. Basically, I wrote the manuals. And, I wrote the manuals so I wouldn't have to remember this stuff. What's the option for running the process against a whole customer? I look it up. What's the environment variable that has to be set for the command to run? I look it up. I found it out, and wrote down the information in a shared manual. SO I WOULDN'T HAVE TO REMEMBER someone else's bad scripting habits and inconsistencies.

They can spend a minute searching for it in the document. Or, they can spend an hour trying to get a-hold of me to ask me to spend a minute looking it up for them. Who's time is more valuable? Surely not theirs if they don't keep good notes, don't share them, and spend an hour looking for someone when it takes a minute to answer on their own.

No, I don't know that stuff. That's why I wrote it down. I'M NOT THEIR FUCKING RESEARCH ASSISTANT, their SECRETARY, their PEON, or their FATHER. They are trying to waste my time, like they do their own.

I put up with this from my boss. He can't even keep track of his own email messages some times. Put, I provide them with a smile. If someone is new and they genuinely haven't asked a question before, I answer and show them how to look it up on their own. A $17 dollar an hour contractor who can barely spell computer or read the screen will be shown the door all the quicker once they've used up their dumb questions.

Although I pretty much believe you're trolling, peaceful voyages would be comparable to a biologist from the midwest spending several weeks traveling to spend a year in Antarctica researching a microbe. Eventually, if a civilization develops enough, they will have the resources to satisfy their curiosity. However, it is just as likely they will be scavengers looking for pretty fur and make the resource extinct. In a long enough timeline contact is inevitable and one or the other will happen. Might as well make sure it happens gracefully.

If seti style contacts are established, any actual contact is likely to be through time-capsule type care-packages that take millenia to arrive. Maybe eventually carrying biological samples.

I imagine Stephen Hawking because of his celebrity status and his disability is developing some sort of persecution complex and is likely to view aliens in the same context. Yes, when we deal with enough people there will be a few bad eggs. And, the more people we deal with the more likely we are to encounter the really really bad eggs. But, we can't hide in our houses. The vast majority are good people and will help insulate from the bad. Hiding does nothing to insulate us, only leaves us exposed in a different way.

Survive pressures and temperatures? Where is your vision, you're not thinking like a maniacal spacelord! Did you or did you not take maniacal space-lordery at Uni? Who needs to survive the pressures when you can blow the whole planet up and pick up the interesting pieces. Don't worry, if you limit the explosion most of it reform in it's own gravity well. Or in the case of a gas/liquid giant, find the interesting stuff via RADAR/SONAR type systems and push it out the other side via LASERs :) Ooooo, giant nets! Giant space nets lowered from orbit! THAT'S IT! Or, how about a giant claw lowered from geosynchronous orbit like the Hughes Glomar Explorer. You'll get much of it to the surface....

Carbon shields have been used before, was bad idea with bad consequences. The Windscale research reactors were built with a significant amount of graphite for absorbing neutron radiation. The graphite was great at it. But, the energy would build up and spontaneously release itself as energy, and/or fires. Sure, they had work arounds. But, the workarounds gradually stopped being useful and the entire thing went up in flames eventually. Cleanup has just now really started, after over 50 years. Granted, there might be a safe way to use carbon once and change it out. But geez, carbon dioxied waste is one thing. Nuclear/spontaneously combusting carbon waste is another....

Don't forget, a good diamond is basically one big carbon molecule. A diamond's not only imageable, but you can feel/hold/interact with it.