We dont know.
We dont even know the chances. We have two variables that we know

1. We exist.
2. We know of no other life beyond Earth.
   Beyond this everything is suppositions and guesses. We may be a 1 in 100 trillion fluke.
   We may be in a Universe teaming with life we cannot see.
   Every other answer to this is loaded with assumptions, many of them assumptions in fields the assumer does not understand.
   The answer to your question is that it is a deep question, a deep one that requires huge amounts of science to be done on.
   The only solution will be for us to roll up our sleeves and work hard across many fields.

Orbit is a speed not a height. The atmosphere puts a lower bound on where that speed can be "orbital" as you loose too much speed and even burn up low enough.

They are taking the average GDP adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity over 5 years. The problem is I am not sure PPP works for total GDP, it is meant to reflect the differences in consumer income i.e. how far a consumers wages will go. So someone in the US on say $50 000 may only be able to buy the same amount of goods as someone in country x who is on $40 000 because consumer prices are lower.

But it relies on a basket of consumer goods, so I really don't think it works scaling to GDP as a large part of GDP calculations are not in a sample consumer basket and if you exclude things like property (which is insanely expensive in China) you can end up with wild distortions.

It is a legitimate area of research. But its is very much not accepted science. That is to say its ok to dive deep into the maths of how the Big Bang got going (inflation) and work with things like the Inflaton Field and perhaps there might be parts of String Theory where this stuff is part of the research. But its not like the Big Bang as in something that is widely accepted.

The multiverse idea is highly speculative. And we still do not understand whether the laws of physics as we observe them are the only way a Universe can be organised. So there is no scientific answer to your question but the multiverse theories such as the Inflaton Field would not likely end up with our laws of physics. The concept of space and time is rooted in our Universe, the Universe as far as we know. So there would not be 4 dimensions for us in other "multiverses"

>Russia, North Korea

North Korea is the most basket case country in the world Its emissions per capita are minimal.

Russia has seen its CO2 emissions collapse along with its post Soviet economy.

China has a whole host of issues that will be beyond the scope of this topic, but they will also be massively impacted by climate change. Way more than any western country not called Australia. (Though while Florida is not a country its another that is in for a very tough time)

Russia does collect significant money from carbon credits.

This would not be all that great for verification in the west where we can easily just sit outside a factory with actual instruments. Its design is more for wider biosphere monitoring as sinks and sources are a huge huge variable in climate predictions. In terms of gross national emissions we can kind of work out out for measuring "air masses" and existing monitoring facilities.

I am really not sure anyone is burning enough coal or making enough cement to be climate relevant and not being obvious to anyone who cares.

I am not really all that blow away by the tone of the article. The biosphere is where most of the big research from this will be done.

Its a newer version of existing ESA satellites.

https://earth.esa.int/eogateway/missions/ghgsat

I am not sure this really conveys that this is simply an upgrade to an existing program.

>Assuming you drifted long enough to get away from the sun, would it look like our night sky, with hundreds, thousands of shiny dots everywhere you looked?

And could we see galaxies, nebulas and other space phenomena or are they too far apart, too big or in a spectrum we can't perceive?

Dont really need to get away from the Sun. Once you are in shadow you do not recieve reflected back glare from dust in the air like happens on Earth. You will be in pretty dark space.

You can see Andromeda, a huge galaxy a couple of hundred light years away. And the Mangellic Clouds, satellite galaxies of our own. So you can see a couple of galaxies.

I dont think you can see nebula with the naked eye. They tend to be gas clouds that only resolve with telescopes.

No. The red dwarfs will live for a trillion years. So in the deep deep future, there may be red dwarfs that form in the dead shell of galaxies that some future life could use as an energy source to an unimaginably long time.

But those will come to an end. And over the very longest of time frames the acceleration of dark energy will likely make any kind of structure impossible.

This is very simplified to aid understanding rather than be a comprehensive answer.

The Sun is about brighter than a full Moon from Pluto. But hypothetically our Sun would appear as a super bright star from within the Solar System. Comets and the other planets would not be visible to human eyes. Though its slow 248 year movement across the sky would make it not fit in as a constellation.

But as you push deeper out while still part of the solar system that movement would become less and less obvious.

This is theoretical and does not answer your question directly but from a theoretical planet in the outer solarsystem then yes the Sun would be part of constellation to any civilisation only lasting a couple of hundred years.

>If one final black hole swallows all other black holes and is so big it absorbs all the light ever/energy becomes so big it implodes on itself could that cause a 2nd Big Bang starting our universe all over again,

There was an old theory called the Big Bounce that the Universe would collapse into a massive black hole and become another Big Bang.

But the discovery the expansion of the Universe was accelerating through Dark Energy and now we expect the Universe to continue separating at ever faster rates.

Futurology is like an unironic wallstreetbets for tech nerds.

The best depiction of futuristic space travel would be something like The Expanse that shows a drive that allows huge acceleration for long periods. The problem is there is no real mechanism for it in theory yet. The best theoretical drives we can envisage is something like Project Daedalus that used a steady pulse of small nuclear explosions. The most realistic non rocket system would be nuclear.

So we do not have a physical theory as to how to travel like light Sci fi shows.

But its like asking people who travelled in carriages about what flying would be like. They might come up with winged horses rather than the simple idea like a turbine jet engine.

To be honest we have know about these for decades. Its not really a big break through, just more akin to a routine observation with a high precision instrument.

2 years late not that, SPAC world went splat.

Most of the stuff in lower orbit is government research satellites and dead stages (by mass).

Commercial is generally higher geostationary orbits.

"The wealthy" you mean SpaceX are relatively new and are able to self deorbit.

There is some commercial activity in the lower orbits that has not deorbited, old Iridium and so on.

This is not really crowdfunding its investment funding.

Good luck to them but I am not really clear on the business model.

If you are a CDU or SDP voter in Germany (for example) you can only guess at how much manifesto you get implemented and what gets negotiated away in coalition. Some countries (hello Belgium), forming a government is a major issue.

It think the political culture of the voting public is far more important than the voting system. I think the increasing intransigence and unrealistic nonsense is more to do with where modern politics is in the US and UK than the voting system.

Labour and the Conservative parties (as well as the Lib Dems) are defacto coalition blocs. They are parties that caucus under one umbrella, its even in their names, the Conservative and Unionist Party is at the almagamation of the old Scottish Unionist party and the English Conservative Party, the Lib Dems from the Liberal and Social Democratic parties while Labour still have numerous Labour Coop members who sit in parliament including former Prime Minister Brown who was not technically Labour.

Change the voting system and you will have 4 or 5 new parties.

Though you will have the same electorate.

Deep space orbit. Something like Halleys Comet. Though "not contacting Earth" would be very difficult out to the nearest star as radiowaves can always phone home.

Your need it powered by fission or fusion.

> The advent of the Big Bang theory stemmed from Hubble work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann_equations

But Cosmology as a philosophy goes back to Aristotle and thinking about it led to ideas like Oblers Paradox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox

This was a step towards it being a scientific question. It is a process from abstract musings to solid physics.

>but not only that, isn’t the idea completely unfalsifiable?

Yes. But while not a fan of the theory, that is a normal place for an abstract theory to start. Science often emerges from philosophical questions that becomes a framework for thinking about a problem and working at the edges. Think of the origin of the Universe. Today the Big Bang is pretty well understood but it started as being a very abstract set of philosophical musings that was only narrowed in on from multiple angles and with lots and lots of unfalsifiable speculation.

Youd have thought reddit was bigger in Germany. Perhaps fewer with more enthusiasm.

>4% of the gdp though. So compared to the percent of gdp, it's a lot less than other countries.

3.3%ish. And most of the west relies on US logistics and intelligence.

Even as a European I would be happy for the US to spend less and the Europeans to build out more logistics capability. The UK is the only country with a reasonable airlift capacity. French operations in west Africa partially depend on that and the US.