Maybe not, but some are considering, e.g., salt water. Of course that's for "cloud brightening". And irrigation is already causing some areas to experience excessive salt in the agricultural land.

Lots of things in medicine and biology were discovered long before there was and plausible reason. And how many people understand, e.g., alcohol. Often even when you do understand part of it, you don't understand all.

What this needs is a large double-blind experiment. Worry about the explanations later. (And EXPECT the first ones to be wrong.)

It is dangerous. So is deciding the other way. I think this is one of those cases where there isn't any really good answer. I bet the one they settle on is that "approved" researchers will be allowed to get answers.

Well, sort of. I really have trouble with the initial expansion, though. I've been assured that we're not within a black hole, and that makes it hard to understand how we ever escaped the Schwarzschild radius. Also time runs slower when gravity is stronger.

But, yeah, I'm no expert in the field.

"Dark Energy" doesn't qualify as a theory. There are at least a few theories that explain the observations labeled "Dark Energy". None of them are generally accepted. So, no, there's no competing theory that apparently explains the "anisotropic expansion", though I've got a partial one (I'm no expert in the field). My theory is that the matter of the universe isn't distributed equally, so some parts have more intense exposure to gravity than others. (I've encountered claims that it's really pretty evenly distributed, but I keep running into observations like "The Great Attractor" that seem to deny this.) This would account for "anisotropic expansion",

If "novel" means "unexpected", then it did something novel. In a complex system, don't expect anyone to understand all the pieces and how they interact. I'm sure that there was someone who could have told them "Yeah, that's a possible interaction", but he was probably working in SysOps rather than Research.

Not really. "Corporate personhood" is really a separate concept from being a person. It was created by a legal clerk in, I think it was Southern Pacific vs. Santa Clara, but then became accepted legal principle because it was so convenient. Now it has over 100 years of acceptance behind it.

IIUC, it was called an industrial accident. Of course, that was with a really primitive AI over a decade ago.

The guy who pushed the button didn't intend the result.
When laws say "intentionally" they get really fuzzy in complex situations.

I didn't use the word "stealing", and definitely consider it inappropriate in this context. There *is* evidence, perhaps not convincing, that copying and distilling is going on. But that would seem to be legal...except that it might be a TOS violation..but whether the TOS violation is either illegal or done by the folks doing the distilling would be messy to prove.

Sorry, but just because A is guilty of something doesn't mean that B can't have done it to A.
OTOH, it's been ruled that the output of AIs isn't copyrightable, so...

Yeah, they'll be able to get fall-guys. They won't be able to get the decision makers.

Well, the CEO won't be in Australia, so they're going to have to operate through extradition proceedings. Good Luck.

This is an experimental treatment that you wouldn't want. It's probably not going to work. This is not the sort of thing that organizations would invest money in. But it *MIGHT* work. And that's what he's hoping for.

A better choice is one of the GLP-1 drugs. Those have a much better chance of success, and MAY retard aging. We're doing a mass experiment at the population level to find out whether long-term use has any bad effects...but it *is* an experiment. There *may* be very bad long term effects. (There have been a few, inconclusive, signs.)

If you want a treatment you can trust, look for one with a long track record. It may not appear as good as the latest offering, but you'll have a better idea of it's benefits and defects (and there *will* be defects).

The difference is that he can try to do something about it that may help others in a similar circumstance.
I don't even understand cheering for his suffering, but why can't you cheer for his support of medical treatments? Yeah, he may be a lousy person, but that feels, to me, irrelevant.