This person was a russia correspondent for the WSJ for years, and lives in Russia to do that work.

This was not some spy sent to infiltrate Russian military facilities.

This was a journalist writing news the exact same way they have been for the better part of a decade.

The idea that the arrest of a journalist for doing journalism is the fault of the journalist and not the authoritarian dictatorship is absurd.

The great oxidation event likely also triggered a massive planet wide extinction event, since oxygen is so reactive.

I think there's a pretty good argument that an oxidation event is one of the hard steps that could comprise the Great Filter.

Tastes change constantly. Sometimes as a response to some change in your life, but just as often completely arbitrarily.

Sometimes you simply no longer get anything meaningful from a genre or subject matter, and sometimes it is pure random chance that you are in the right headspace to read a particular book at that moment to have it leave a meaningful impact on you.

We are not even remotely static. A book I can find exasperating to read one day could be enthralling the next day simply because something completely unrelated got me excited about some little aspect of it.

I would hesitate to say that we necessarily 'grow out' of certain types of books, because I don't think it's a linear path of immature -> mature, it's a spectrum of many different axis and between the random noise of our day to day interests and influences, and our larger life experiences changing us, we are never quite at the same exact coordinates twice.

When the US Air Force examined the concept in 2003, they concluded that conventional bombs and missiles of a similar weight were more effective, cost efficient, and practical solutions in basically all circumstances.

The whole "rods from god" idea is pretty silly and impractical.

The force of the rod is purely gravitational potential.

But to put the rod in orbit, you expended far more energy fighting gravity, then you get back from dropping the rod.

So why not just use the rocket that delivered the rods as the weapon instead of the rods? It's got more kinetic energy and can be guided, and it doesn't have the drawbacks of being strapped to a highly visible satellite that every hobbyist with a telescope can track at all times.

Not to mention it can carry things, like, y'know, a warhead, which will deliver much more force to a target for less weight, meaning you can dedicate that freed-up weight to making a more maneuverable, longer range, precision guided weapon to deliver that force even more accurately.

Which is exactly what we already do today. That's a missile.

There are some interesting models based on the formation speeds of stars and planets and how long they remain habitable, as to how prevalent life might be at the different stages of the universe.

They suggest that the peak of habitable worlds that have existed long enough for life to exist and evolve to an intelligent stage (given certain assumptions about the difficulty of that) is actually some billion years in the future, and that humanity could be relatively early on the bellcurve of the distribution for life. Not extremely early, but well before the theorized majority of opportunities for intelligent life.

It involves assuming that earth life is typical, or at least no an extreme outlier in terms of requirements and timeline to evolve, because it's the sole datapoint we have, and assuming humanity is special or unique would be a form of anthropocentrism.

What's more likely?

Disney comitting a massive amount of gross violations of FCC regulations by running a secret and undisclosed astroturfing campaign and that every redditor and hobby site is secretly either a fake bot or in cahoots and being paid off to post positively about the show?

Or people talking about Andor because it's a surprisingly great show in an IP that has gotten a whole lot of trash recently?

Reddit imagines that astroturfing to be WAY more common than it is, and vastly overestimate the value of reddit threads to advertisers.

When we're talking ad campaigns designed to draw tens or hundreds of millions of eyes, no one is going to expend any degree of effort to break the law for the grand prize of... some reddit threads with a few dozen comments.