Atmospheric methane is responsible for about a quarter of the current level of unnatural warming we are experiencing, which the impact of climate change forward by several years to decades compared to the timeline we'd be on with just CO2 emissions. So this is a very important part of the mess we are in right now, especially if methane emissions continue to rise.

Here's a few:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cThB1zfynHQ
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snwqUpQ6oSE
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs

OK, go watch Mick West's videos on youtube and get back to me. The evidence really is not there, at all, it's universally a lack of rigor that is being filled in by a bias toward extraordinary interpretations.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence is very much lacking.

Tic-tacs have not been observed moving "beyond the capacity of modern engineering". Many, many tic-tacs have been tracked to being planes.

And yes, you point out the problem here. Air traffic is highly controlled, and planes are tracked. But the vast, vast majority of "UFO research" does not even bother trying to identify whether or not a "tic-tac observation" is in fact simply another plane. There is a substantial lack of due diligence in the whole affair. It very much is little better than "looks weird, must be aliens". And then on top of that is bad math, just as you've described, which leads people further down the rabbit hole.

Here's the punchline. If there was legitimate strong evidence for "unidentified aerial phenomena" that represented proof of vehicles operating beyond the capacity of modern engineering or our understanding of physics then that evidence could be published in peer reviewed journals. But it's not, and the major reason that it's not is because universally this "research" represents folks not doing their homework. If you are sloppy and you're not doing your due diligence then of course it is easy to come up with outlandish numbers and an absence of conventional explanations. If you don't bother doing the leg work to track down conventional explanations then they won't bother to get in the way of your extraordinary claims, but that doesn't make those claims justified.

This is the problem, almost no one is doing the work rigorously, and when it does get done and something that UFO enthusiasts have been pushing as "unexplainable" is explained the result is that there is no publicity for that explanation. Even more crucially the UFO enthusiast community does not use that as an opportunity to revisit their assumptions and the level of rigor they need to put into such investigations, instead they just sweep it under the rug and say "well, what about THESE observations?!?!" with another pile of videos that have received the same half-assed level of "investigation" and show nothing new or interesting.

"Tic-tacs" are the perfect example here because you would think that after the first handful of "we think this thing that looks like a tic-tac is an alien spaceship" videos were shown to be just regular jet aircraft viewed at great distance (often identifying the exact plane being viewed) that people would then start understanding that when you see something that looks like a "tic-tac" in the sky it is probably just another plane because that's what planes look like. Instead it has not caused that level of rethinking because UFO enthusiasts generally lack any hint of introspection or ability to follow logic.

Highly trained pilots are still subject to the same cognitive biases that most folks are. The important thing is whether or not the claims are evaluated rigorously and scientifically. And every single time that the due diligence is put into these claims the result is that the "UFO" is identified as very likely something else such as a balloon or another plane.

This alone is a problem because it completely inverts the burden of proof. The burden should be that the very first step is to put in the rigorous work to identify anything it might be that is a mundane explanation, and only then to put together a strong case of positive evidence that there is something odd and unexplainable going on. However, that's not the way these things have been going. Instead the typically pattern is a half-assed investigation at the level of "I dunno, it looks weird" followed by jumping to the conclusion that something that "looks weird" must be an alien spaceship or a classified spy plane or something. And so instead it falls to a small group of amateurs to actually put in the work and then they'll come back and say "oh yeah, this is actually a video of another plane, and here's the exact plane it was", which is an unreasonable level of burden for them, but that's the sorry state things are in because so many people are so biased toward wanting to believe these things are alien spacecraft.

Tic-tacs are planes, obviously, I don't know why it's even a question. When you view a large plane from afar you tend to see only the fuselage while the rudder is typically much less visible and the wings are often so dark they blend into the background at most viewing angles, the result is a "tic-tac". This is because the fuselage is a cylinder so there is almost always a portion of the cylinder which is at the right angle relative to the Sun to appear bright, while the wings and rudder are most visible only at specific angles relative to the Sun and specific viewing angles. There are countless examples of "tic-tac UFO" videos that have been identified to not just be planes but where the exact flight and plane has been identified.

Lucy is orbiting the Sun and will perform several gravity assists at Earth in order to get to higher orbits where it can perform flybys of Trojan asteroids in Jupiter's L4/L5 Lagrange points. With two gravity assists, one this year and one in 2024, it'll be able to visit the L4 point where it will visit 4 asteroids in the L4 "camp" in 2027 and 2028. It'll return to Earth for another gravity assist in 2030 before visiting the L5 "camp" in 2033.

Several outer solar system probes have used inner planet gravity assists. Galileo used one assist at Venus and two at Earth to make it to Jupiter while Cassini used two Venus flybys, one Earth flyby, and one Jupiter flyby to get to Saturn.

There is, but it's a very hard problem, nobody has cracked it yet.

The dust on Mars is very clingy because of static, it's also very abrasive so you can't just use simple wipers or brushes without ruining the solar panels.

If there was an easy, effective way of handling the problem they'd have implemented. As would China with their rover/lander, as would the ESA with their rover design (which hasn't flown yet).

At least for India there's very little argument to be made other than the fact that space exploration and building space technologies is a net benefit to the country. Even in strict financial terms it's beneficial.

However, it's also worth pointing out that when the US went to the Moon with the Apollo program it had extensive racial and sectarian strife, it had extreme poverty, and it was still a developing country. Something like 1 in 5 US households did not have complete indoor plumbing, and many did not have electricity. The argument that one must have everything "at home" completely sorted out before reaching the stars is one that can quite easily be turned against the history of US space exploration.