DeLacue

That's to be expected; imagine the asteroid is projecting a cone in front of it that represents where we think it might go. Then take a cross section of the cone at the point where it meets earth. You can get a rough estimate for the odds of a hit based on how much area of that cross section the earth takes up. As observations and data come in our predictions get more accurate and the cone gets narrower. The circle of where it might be as it gets close to earth shrinks but earth doesn't so a higher percentage of the circle is covering earth hence the odds go up. But earth is not in the center of the circle so it'll shrink to the point where part of earth isn't covered by the circle which will cause the odds to suddenly start dropping as the circle shrinks past earth. This will be the case with every object that we spot that is going to be a near miss. The odds will climb up and then drop down.

I know most people hanging out in a space community probably don't need that explanation. But I've seen too many people elsewhere who seem to view the changing odds as a sign of unreliability and uncertainty.

Yes, I am ignoring the US military; because it is irrelevant. It's like arguing that a man's car can't be stolen because he's a heavyweight boxing champion. How many bases do you need to build before the US is immune to sabotage and subversion? How much money do you need to spend on guns before disinformation campaigns don't work? It is not as simple as one country being weaker than another. Different countries have different capabilities depending on what they have focused on. Russia has been building it's disinformation pipeline for a long time and has always been very good at exploiting corruption. The US is not very good at defending itself from those kinds of attacks as experts have been warning for frickin decades. This is not a video game where election interference is only targetable on nations in your level range and national strength can neatly be condensed into a single number and compared.

Or have I misunderstood your argument and your arguing that Putin has nothing to force Trump to obey him? Yet still in that argument the US military and the assassinations are still irrelevant. Trump is Putin's puppet not because Putin is a master manipulator dangling some blackmail over Trump's head. Putin's an unhinged, cowardly nutjob who spends most of his time hiding in a bunker marinating in the propaganda he himself commissioned. No, it's because Trump is a moron who accepts simple answers and lashes out at anyone who tells him he's wrong. Trump is a stupid man smart enough to know he's an idiot but terrified people will realise he's an idiot. He is a weak man desperate to be recognised as a strong one. So when someone who he views as a strong man dangles the potential for their approval in front of him he wags his tail like a good little dog. The former Australian PM talked about how Trump looked at Putin with awe to the degree that it was creepy. That is why Putin worked so hard to get him elected, why Trump spends so long on phone calls with Putin and why the military might of the US has no bearing on whether or not Trump will do as Putin tells him to. Trump is also very, very willing to accept bribes in whatever form they take and shown no limits to what he is willing to sell out for those bribes.

Or are easily manipulated narcissists. Trump before running for office in the first place laundered money for Russian oligarchs and an extensive and prolonged Russian based disinformation is the main reason he has the cult he does. Also key point: everything Trump has done indicates he is a coward. It doesn't matter how strong a coward is

I am a big proponent of free speech and the merits of free access to information.

Or at least I was. I've always known that bad actors with control over your information input can do an awful lot of damage. I used to think free and open access was the best choice. But seeing how a few companies captured the entire social media environment and have swollen to near-total monopolies and then how those same companies have shown themselves to be bad actors with malicious intent I have changed my opinion. Banning them would help slow down the flow of info sewage into the EU and encourage more competing companies to form. We need that since the EU can't break up American companies. So if new companies were ever to be competitive we need to remove the giants from the pool and commit to breaking up any that get too big.

This is sadly not a surprise. Any carbon capture project that doesn't involve trees is guaranteed to be a money sink and little else. Any process that pulls carbon out of the air is going to be an energy intensive one. Which means that many carbon capture projects are carbon positive. Often by a significant margin. Most of them are pushed by the oil companies since it's something they can point to as helping the environment but it increases power usage and their profits. So it's the option they want everyone to go with. And they'd prefer if we ignore the option that uses self replicating structures with built in solar panels that have spent the last billion years becoming hyper efficient at this exact task.

The thing is they've actually made a mistake charging him with terrorism. It is surprisingly narrowly defined so even without a sympathetic jury he might get a not guilty verdict for it and it weakens the whole case against him. But most of all by including it they've made all his intentions and politics central issues to the case. All the evidence and his statements about this will have to go into the public record. If he had pleaded guilty that wouldn't happen nor would there be a chance for jury annulment. Pleading not guilty is simply the smarter option to take.

Project sundial was a cold war American project to build a bomb so big it wouldn't matter where it was detonated It was a true doomsday weapon

There is alot of things the government does for you that most people likely have never thought about. Take invasive species for instance; There are huge efforts to contain and eradicate a variety of invasive species. You've probably never heard about these efforts. But they are needed to maintain and protect both farmland and the ecology of the United States. If those efforts are defunded and those species are allowed to run rampant it'll be almost impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.

I'd love be as optimistic as you but unless Trump changes his mind the US will get a brainwormed fanatical anti-vaccier in charge of deciding which vaccines are safe to use. Even if the states don't cooperate with trump's agenda there are so many long standing federal institutions which till now you've never needed to think about that are about to get wrecked.

Multiple regulatory bodies are going to get disbanded. The EPA is unlikely to survive, whole departments of the FDA are about to get gutted. Anything involving industrial safety is going to get its funding cut. Unconstitutional crackdowns on free and independent media is almost certain. Large scale damage to the functions of many government institutions can be expected. Massive economic damage due to reckless deregulation ( that's even before they start putting tariffs on everything and wind up in multiple simultaneous trade wars). Funding for education and infrastructure maintenance will be reduced to allow tax cuts for the already wealthy. Massive loss of global influence and a massive gain in influence by hostile autocratic nations is also something you can expect.

I could go on and on but even if you were to assume they weren't serious about project 2025 (if you haven't read that you should) it's real bad.

Space is big. It's so big that our tiny ape brains have a hard time conceiving of how big it is. The sun is actually (despite it's size) a relatively small target and is very very far away. Now the more delta-V you burn to slow the trash down the smaller its orbit around the sun will be. But that orbit starts enormous. So to get that purple line near the sun you do need to slow down almost the whole way, just to get it close.

The removal of view counts could empower fringe content. Even the most gullible are far less likely to take a video of an extremist nut job seriously when they have 100 views. Part of how radicalisation works is by convincing people that the radical ideology is far more mainstream than it actually is. It's already easy to inflate view counts but removing them entirely makes it much much simpler for crazies to sell the idea that their ideas are popular.