The sun is behind Earth. The "dark" side of Earth is lit by moonglow and photographed with a large f-stop. I'm assuming that the light in the center is a reflection from inside the capsule. It may not have been apparent to the photographer, but a camera with wide-open aperture can pick up stuff that the eye can't see.

"Sure as shit would have been nice to lead off with those actual professional accomplishments"

WTF? This is NASA. Whatever else you think is going on there, those kinds of things are a given. And the information trivially available.

A man walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Hey, you just missed it!" The man sez, "Naw", and waves his phone, which has the same image of the big stack on fire as the bar's 72".

That was fun. Perhaps my favorite line:

"This mix (superior insight + ultimate futility) is common in people who've burned out on online activism or forums like Slashdot."

I like it. Hard to get it on the marquee, perhaps. Mine was a more prosaic "The Floyd Project". Welcome to the machine.

Interesting. Mythologized an eon later, "Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat, the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.

—Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (c.1800 BCE)"

Those address the first application of spoken language to writing. Just to confuse matters a bit more, "The first writing can be dated back to the Neolithic era, with clay tablets being used to keep track of livestock and commodities." (per the wiki. I'll have to look more into this, I don't know if I've seen anything about it.) I have read that Egyptian hieroglyphics were originated for accounting. (Allegedly for beer, but I read about this in a "history of beer" article, so YMMV.)

I wish we had Feynman's insights around now. Besides the science of the small, here's what he had to say in '04 about what we have come to call AI today:

"Everybody who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to
the conclusion that the possibilities of computers are very interesting---if they could be made to be more
complicated by several orders of magnitude. If they had millions of times as many elements, they could make
judgments. They would have time to calculate what is the best way to make the calculation that they are about
to make. They could select the method of analysis which, from their experience, is better than the one that we
would give to them. And in many other ways, they would have new qualitative features"

Zeek teh Cockroach: "Must have something to do with those disgusting Scarabs."

The gift that keeps on giving. I was idly wondering why we have Bronze age, Iron age, etc., but no Clay age, then realized every age is a Clay age.

Thought a little more and wondered when pottery was first created, and found China was doing it around 18000BC, and we've been labeling the different potteries over time and space. So in a way we do have different "Clay Ages", but it's delineated in the descriptions of the technology and styles of the main product of the clay used by different civilizations.

"I love the smell of iron oxide in the morning!"

I wasn't aware of the background for this. I appreciated Lt. Lisa's epilog.

And, as we know, the people who go in end up being a spectrum of those beliefs. Your post and the previous post delineate the range well.

Bonus, this is case law now and carries more weight in arguments.

Good point. I wonder if someone was playing a reverse Uno card. This sets case law for this kind of thing, whereas a summary judgement can be argued.