I agree it would only be a surprise first strike. But if any container ship was potentially hiding a few of these, think of the chaos it would cause in supply chains.

And how is that any different than a nuclear arsenal? It's an attack weapon that's most highly useful in first strike situations. But your enemy probably has a bunch too and they're hard to find and wipe out in a first strike. So the only way to win is not to play.

This is an interestingly less expensive deterrent for middle powers to buy (or develop themselves) who don't want to invest in a nuclear program to keep the larger countries at bay. I actually see this as a positive because it offers an alternative to nuclear proliferation. With current technology, a barrage of missiles like this can't be intercepted cost effectively, and you can hide them relatively easily. It has a chance to maintain a peaceful status quo, and perhaps avoid the looming WW3.

To give you a more practical example of the range, pretty much all of the continental US would be within 800 miles of the northern and southern US land borders. Not that Canada or Mexico would actually follow a program to develop these, as the US, Canada, and Mexico are still quite close allies, but my points is that the cost would easily be within the capabilities of those countries, and the range is pretty huge. Even container ships parked off the western and eastern coasts could reach well over 2/3 of the US landmass.

I have no idea what gateway was meant to be for.

I suppose you could argue that it was kind of like how the original Apollo worked. The capsule that brings you back to Earth for re-entry stays in lunar orbit and you just descend in the lander and go back up to lunar orbit. Plus you can maintain a much larger living environment at the gateway station. But it certainly made the whole thing seem like a Rube Goldberg affair. Assuming Starship gets the bugs worked out, then you should be able to do the whole mission with a single re-usable ship, assuming you launch it to low Earth orbit empty of fuel and then send up multiple other Starship flights to refuel it before it goes to the Moon.

Or chloromidians? Was there any mention of chlorine on it?

In the absence of chlorine, would flouromidians form? Would flouromidian-based life have any unusual properties?

Or whatever it is that tricorders detect?

Or souls? Did it make a detour through our solar system to pick up a few souls for later use?

Remember, it takes a long time for projects to make their way through the entertainment machine. The stuff that's coming out now was greenlit years ago. I don't think they're going around handing the keys to the kingdom over to a group of directors and writers whose main credentials is that they're "young and diverse." That was proven not to work, and they will now be mandating an adult in the room.

Never would have believed it was a fake.

Maybe they're looking for the heat signature of crypto mining.

People are already being entertained buy the unending revelations from the Epstein files.

And shocked, though not particularly awed.

Interestingly, in one of the Gnostic Gospels, Jesus is quoted as saying when he departed that he had to go visit "sheep of other folds, that you know not of".

(paraphrasing from memory)

So Heppner is an idiot. Typing that shit into Claude is rather dumb.

Most of it is aliens flying around in stealth spaceships. We can't spot them, except that they haven't figured out a way to hide their mass.

So galaxies with more DM are more technologically developed than the others. In this all-DM galaxy they must have used up almost everything else to build ships.

No, it's just some of that "darkness on the face of the deep" left over from Creation.

God didn't need all of that "waste and void" to shape into what He wanted for our universe, so He left bits of it in its natural form here and there.

Some of us think basing our beliefs on evidence is a good thing.

Unlike tradition and revelation, where new evidence is something to be ignored or explained away.

Because they don't want to.

Perhaps all their imagination is all used up on other things, like people who suffer the ill effects of 5G from nearby cell towers that haven't even been activated.