It depends on the cost of these things. If each robot is a gazillion dollars then yes, you're right, they'll only be used in the first world. If the price is intermediate then they may well be mounted in military helicopters and mobile facilities to do battlefield surgery beyond the capability of the corpsmen. If they are cheap (comparatively) then they will be widely deployed, never mind the network and security issues, in the Third World. In Peru, which I am most familiar with, the top surgeons tend to prefer to live in Lima or Arequipa, and if you need their services you need to travel there. Most other Third World countries are much the same. If I lived in Machu Picchu and needed heart surgery I would need to travel to Cusco, and then to Lima, three days of travel before I could even be examined. If I can go to Cusco and be examined and treated I would dramatically reduce the travel and expense necessary while still receiving decent care. Even more likely is that advanced medical students will be called in to perform large numbers of basic medical services, like dental treatment and cataract removal, in the smaller towns while still under the supervision of their instructors.

The old saying of, "Never automatically credit to malevolence when stupidity or ignorance is is equally likely." If you can disable or misdirect the tool on purpose, it's likely that it can also be done by accident. In its day having your web site SlashDotted could be more destructive than an organized DOS attack, more than one web server was brought to its knees by being linked to in a SlashDot thread.

The most irritating thing to me is that the people who believe her dreck will continue to believe it even after her and every other huckster selling miracle cures are shown to be charlatans. There is a large overlap between her fans and the anti-vaxxers.

And nothing of value was lost . . .

Emily Lakdawalla's blog has quite a bit of good information about what's going on. With pretty pictures.

More problematic than jets coming from the comet (which are pretty diffuse and low speed in reality) is that twice passing comet particles have come close enough to be mistaken for the stars that the spacecraft use to orient themselves. Since it's moving past so fast the spacecraft assumes that something is wrong and puts everything in Safe mode.

Well, if the Electric Universe guys had been correct about even a single prediction or observation since Velikovsky and company came up with it it might be easier to accept. For now it's just quackery, of the same level of science as homeopathy or phrenology.

OK, here is the 'relevant answer', condensed. Plants slow erosion in the short (hundreds/thousands of years) term, but accelerate it in the long (millions of years) term.
 
Eventually the vast majority of organic material that isn't recycled back into the ecosystem will end up in the benthic depths, deposited on the abyssal plains (and apparently processed exceedingly slowly by a recently discovered class of archea). That's why coal deposits (mostly the remains of swamplands that never eroded downstream) are valuable.

Go up to the mountains some time, I take it you never have before. Look at any tree tearing a boulder out of the hillside. That tree will die, its pieces will wash down the mountain, and once the roots have decayed the rock will follow. That's why the Adirondacks are little bumps today rather than the towering peaks that they once were. The deep jungle, bogs and swamps are pretty much the only place where your "plant's decaying body, (after it dies), will decompose over top of the rock" scenario would hold true. Anywhere with any noticeable slope will erode, even in the Great Plains the glacial rocks are being broken up and washing down the Mississippi today.

Who cares what might happen 40 million years after . . .

Apparently you don't really grasp the time scales involved here. Continents grow and shrink over the course of hundreds of millions of years, not a few tens of millions. India skitters across the lithosphere, floating on the (comparatively) light water-containing mantle material that has been subducted under it, and slams into India, pushing up the Himalayas. Plants climb the mountainside, breaking up the rock, which washes down the Ganges and Mekong, creating enormous deltas. After a few hundreds of millions of years southern Asia is now much larger than it had been. This is the sort of time scale they're talking about.

By the way, the sun will never "explode, blowing apart our planet", it's much too small to go supernova. It will eventually expand into a red giant, probably engulfing Earth within its corona and vaporizing it.

Magical market approaches only work when there is some possibility of an actual market existing. Water supply is a natural monopoly, there is no real way to have more than one source available to a residence unless you're willing to tear up the streets and run several thousand miles of pipes. Any sort of "market-based" approach to water supply in California are likely to replicate the Aguas de Tunari privatization fiasco, where the water company executives had to run for their lives because of the (justifiably) irate customer base was coming.

On the other hand, my grandfather used to ship peaches from Traverse City to Georgia for their Peach Festival, for much the same reason (plus his quality was a lot higher).

The amount of water subducted into the mantle makes a big difference in what is "brought up from below". Water-containing rock melts at a much lower temperature than unaltered rock, is lighter, is less viscous, and would "float" above the heavier original mantle material. The volcanoes above the subduction zones are much more active because of the rock's water content than they would be otherwise. The less-viscous mantle material means that the smaller plates above it, like India, move around more easily than the larger, more stationary plates like Asia, causing uplift events like the Himalayas, Andes and Rockies.

What does that have to do with the parent post? An oxygen-rich atmosphere is hardly necessary for oceans.

Insightful? What idiots marked this insightful? Plants may prevent erosion short-term, even on an archeological time scale, but on a geologic time scale they accelerate erosion because they break up rocks so efficiently. Make big ones into small ones, and even if the roots hold it in place for 10,000 years that smaller rock is going to start heading for the ocean.

The other moons are also comparatively large and fairly close, adding more tidal flexing.

The first space probes were not supposed to carry cameras because it was thought that there would be little useful data returned from the visuals. Fortunately boosters and transmitters had sufficient extra capacity to add cameras, and the project scientists were quickly shown to be wrong.