"Any option is on the table. Products that can't be made safe can be banned." It's not possible to make knives safe! They have sharp edges, and people are cutting themselves all the time. We need to ban them! Right now! What are you waiting for?

... how did they fit two people in the MRI machine cavity for that 1999 study?

How so? Did it give you an actual answer?

There is a story titled "The 64-Square Madhouse" by Fritz Leiber, written in 1962, which is about a computer being admitted to a grandmaster chess competition. In the story, one of the human players (named Angler, a pun on Bobby Fischer's name) manages to beat the computer by getting it to play a particular gambit from a book of published openings. He exploits the fact that the opening book has a typo in the particular opening that he chose, that the programmers blindly copied into the computer's programming. One the computer makes the bad move, he is able to defeat it.

It's the only way to be sure,

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” - Richard Feynman

... is the first thing that sprang to mind when I saw this story. You can't close your eyes or look away.

I responded elsewhere that my first computer was a Tandy Color Computer, but that's the first computer that I owned. The first one I used was also a Univac 1108, which I got access to the summer after I graduated from high school, 1971. It was at the University of Wisconsin - Parkside, and was part of a Fortran programming class that they offered. I also remember that besides the assignments, the first program I wrote on my own was for Conway's Life.

I too had this approximate migration path, except I jumped from CoCo II to Amiga 1000, then 2000, and finally to various PCs running DOS/Windows. The CoCo I started with 4K of RAM and got upgraded to 64K, floppy drives, etc.

There is a much earlier telling of this science fiction story, in a fairly sophisticated setting: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0...

One thing that this discussion doesn't seem to mention much is the impact on caring for aging parents when there is only one child. I have known people who were only children who had to care for their parents, and it was a significant burden compared to those who had brothers and/or sisters with which they could share the effort. And then there is the matter of childless couples who have no one to care for them when they get older. Hopefully they'll have lots of money saved up from never having to raise kids, to pay for their nursing homes / assisted living.

I realize that psilocybin is not considered to be addictive, but it still seems to me that using one mind altering substance to control the use of another has possible problems.

I wish I had mod points to spend on your post. I too have recently watched Sabine's video, and her explanation greatly helped me understand the state of fusion research, and has made me question whether there will be a working and viable fusion reactor in my lifetime.

Daylight Saving Time Causes Cancer

Somehow, I think transparent aluminum will work better for a whale aquarium than for a lunar colony.