Organic material buried in a landfill tends to decompose. Dry wood, like the frame of a house, can last a long time. But bury it with household trash like food scraps and there is enough water to cause it to break down.

Which foresters? There are ten million private forest owners in the US, not to mention government land. The best I can do is get together with some local people and protect a part of it.

Alas, I live in the US state of Georgia, so they won't listen. The most I can do is inform them of a fugitive working in the US Capitol under an assumed name.

For me personally, I went to work on the Space Station project the following year. Space systems is my career, but Shuttle technology carrying people was too flawed. That was borne out by the second Shuttle accident, and I fear for crew flying on the SLS rocket, which is still Shuttle tech (in some cases literally reused old Shuttle parts).

Small world department. I was working for Boeing's space systems division at the time, and we had a two-stage solid rocket in the cargo bay that flight. It was intended to send a NASA communications satellite to high orbit.

People in our division knew the astronauts, because we trained them how to deploy the upper stage with the satellite from the cargo bay. Until they found our rocket intact on the ocean floor, we didn't know if the accident was our fault, because it was 27,000 pounds of rocket fuel. Man that was a tense couple of weeks.

America has a center-right party and a far right party. We don't have any major left or liberal party.

Clearcutting is not good forestry practice. You want to do selective cutting, so enough trees remain to hold the soil in place and allow natural regeneration from the remaining trees. You can plant some new seedlings if you want to alter the species mix.

Then you need to turn the harvested trees into durable wood products, not cheap particleboard crap that end up in a landfill in a few years. You want to store the carbon.

Depending on the soil types and species, you may need to fertilize to maintain forest production. Removing harvested logs removes nutrients.

Source: used to own a tree farm.

As I suspected, this idea is from architects, who come up with nice looking but impractical designs. It is left up to us engineers to make something practical that works.

The author's photography details has "color correction", so this isn't the original colors. This photo has no correction, just straight the way the camera took it.

The Rosette Nebula is part of a giant molecular cloud, about 5000 light years away. Hot young stars are exciting the molecules in the cloud, causing them to emit light, somewhat like neon lights in stores have the gas excited by electricity.

Red is typically from ionized hydrogen, the most common element in the Universe. The middle part of this hydrogen discharge tube shows the natural glowing color. Other colors come from other elements.

The worry is since that array isn't latched, it may cause problems when they use the rocket engines.

The Family Dollar in my town is literally across the street from the small-chain supermarket. But they carry items like clothing that the supermarket doesn't. Meanwhile, the big chain stores like Kroger and Walmart are 4 miles away. I almost never shop at Family Dollar.

"The Galileo atmospheric entry probe was based on the design of the large probe of the Pioneer Venus multi-probe.

It was released July 13, 1995, when the main Galileo spacecraft was still about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) from Jupiter.

The probe hit the atmosphere at 6.5 degrees north latitude and 4.4 degrees west longitude at 22:04:44 UT Dec. 7, 1995.

The probe returned valuable data for 58 minutes as it plunged into the Jovian cauldron. It endured a maximum deceleration of 228 g’s about a minute after entry when temperatures scaled up to 28,832 degrees Fahrenheit (16,000 degrees Celsius).

The probe’s transmitter failed 61.4 minutes after entry when the spacecraft was about 112 miles (180 kilometers) below its entry ceiling, evidently due to the enormous pressure (22.7 atmospheres).

Data, originally transmitted to the main spacecraft and later transmitted back to Earth, indicated an intense radiation belt about 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) above Jupiter’s clouds, few organic compounds, and winds as high as about half a mile per second (640 meters per second).

The entry probe also found less lightning, less water vapor, and half the helium than had been expected in the upper atmosphere"

From https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/galileo-probe/in-depth/

> Also, if they found some sort of self duplicating hybrid bacteria

A biofuel company already tried that, but were unable to make it competitive.

Silicon panels, which are like 96% of the market, use the whole solar spectrum, from near infra-red to near UV. But they are not completely opaque, some light gets through the cells. For open field solar farms, there are spaces between the rows of panels.

Here's a big solar greenhouse. Here's a little one from ten years ago

Sheep are commonly used with solar farms. They keep down the undergrowth, don't damage the panels, and like having shade and rain protection.

You've watched The Matrix too many times. Using humans as batteries is an energy-losing proposition.

They simply can't. The best that can be done is about 6% for photosynthetic bacteria, who don't need to waste energy making cell walls, roots, and other defining features of plants. Genetically modified bacteria have been made that emit ethanol and diesel molecules, but that only becomes competitive at about $100/barrel for petroleum. Prices haven't been high enough for long enough to get that industry off the ground, and attempts to make the process cheaper have stalled.

The wikipedia article has a breakdown of the efficiency losses. Please go look at it.

Plants should be used to grow things they are good at, like lumber and food. There are plenty of rooftops and parking lots that can do solar without using any more land, and agrisolar can share land with plants. Trying to make electricity at low efficiency with plants is a waste of space that can be put to better uses.

Plants are only about 2% efficient in converting sunlight to usable energy. Solar panels are now commercially available at 22% efficiency.

Most plants don't use sunlight over 10% of the daily peak intensity. So it is quite feasible to do "agrisolar", where panels take most of the sunlight first, and plants below use the rest. This can be either outdoors or in greenhouses with solar roofs.

There is yet another idea based on string theory. It proposes that the universe has more than 4 dimensions, but the additional ones are "rolled up" to quantum size. It would be possible that different sets of four out of ten dimensions exist, with different ones rolled up. These universes would be "perpendicular" to ours and thus unobservable.

Nothing. The Big Bang explains features of the "observable universe", like the cosmic background radiation and the original elemental abundances. It says nothing about what what is beyond our range of observation.

If there were an already existing universe within our range of observation, we would expect to see stars older than the ones we see. The age of the ones we see max out at a bit after the Big Bang.

There are way more theories than experiments, because theory only needs a blackboard, or a pad and pencil, while experiments cost real money. Science makes progress when experiments invalidate theories until there can be only one.

Not hard when they put a big bull's eye on their buildings.

Adapter that screws into the tripod mount and clamps any available rigid item, like astronaut hand-holds (blue)