Ideology vetos reality, news at 11.

A lot of people behave pretty ghastly when it comes to money.

That was my first thought too. (Assuming the article is correct - all kinds of stuff gets published that doesn't hold up in the longer run.)

Remember that time is also big. Suppose that there have been 1000 interstellar civilizations in our galaxy during the past 5 billion years, and that each one lasted a million years before collapsing. How many would be active right now?

Frankly, I don't consider it a paradox at all. We've explored approximately 0% of our galaxy and found nothing. That doesn't tell us much.

Doesn't he know he's supposed to play the fiddle while he destroys his country?

No, who's Meta?

I'm skeptical about that second part.

As for trolls, I wonder if some anti-vax propaganda is being pushed by hostile foreign powers as a way of hurting us.

It's just a story about Meta and AI.

Oh, nevermind.

For extremists of all flavors, violence is always preferable to the voting booth.

The stock price was inflated to start with, due to speculation. Elon was just taking advantage of the situation. "Oh, you want to buy a tiny fraction of my company at way more than it's worth? Sure. I can use an infusion of liquidity." What's bonkers is that if you sell 1% of your company for $20 billion, the talking heads then pretend the whole company is worth two trillion. Who would actually buy SpaceX for two trillion dollars if Elon wanted to sell it? But they call him a trillionaire. He's only worth the net present (discounted) value of all future earnings of his companies. Yes, that's a lot of money, but look at how much these companies make and do the math.

Surely they're not going to cut off the data centers just so ordinary people can have electricity?

Well, yes. But the politicians say the scientists are wrong.

Who are you going to believe? Geeky nerd types, or the people who actually run the real world?

Yeah, it's going to be hard to establish a plausible positive ROI for interstellar travel. I think even public funding for probes will be problematic, since it will take years just to get flyby photos. Probably the first flyby will be funded by some rich guy.

If the Feds want to protect children from sex, why don't thy start by telling the DoJ to prosecute the Epstein bros instead of protecting them?

Born yesterday, I presume?

We should pass around a hat for all those rich people who didn't richer as fast as they expected to.