The soul of the recently deceased can be contained using high voltages. Care should, however, be taken with grounding, to avoid accidental soul transfer.

Life will almost certainly be fairly common, given the right conditions. On earth, it seems to have appeared not long after conditions made it possible. We either won the lottery on the first week, or the odds aren’t actually that bad.

The problem is, we can’t detect life right now. We can only see potential communicating civilisations. These are a lot rarer. We currently know of 1, humanity. That will change in the next few years. We have telescopes being designed/built capable of detecting the gasses in the atmosphere of an earth sized planet. While we won’t recognise all life types this way, a lot will show up in abnormal gasses, e.g. free oxygen. This should help bound the possibilities a lot.

“You (complete) pillock!” is an often used insult for someone who’s just done something idiotic or stupid.

I can definitely see dicksplash being used as an insult down the pub.

Fuckletoes is in a weird dead zone. It’s far too poncey for working class use, but far too crass for the toffs.

The rest I’ve heard used before.

Even more so, the moon is slowly moving away from the earth. A couple of million years ago, it would have completely covered the sun. In a couple of million years, it will not fully cover the disc.

A million years is a long time for humanity, but a blink on the timescale of moons and stars. We didn’t just luck out with the moon’s large size, but also with the timing of our evolution.

I don’t think there is a single filter. My personal gut feeling however is that the jump to “specialised generalists” would be a major hurdle.

Early human civilizations are very prone to collapsing. A few bad years of rain, or an unexpected change of temperature would effectively destroy them. Making the jump from nomadic tribal to a civilisation capable of supporting the specialists needed for technology is apparently extremely fragile.

Earth also has an interesting curiosity. Our moon is extremely large, compared to earth. It also acts as a gyroscopic stabiliser. This keeps the earth from wobbling on its axis. Such a wobble would be devastating for a civilisation making the jump to technological. Even on earth, we are in a period of abnormal stability.

I suspect a good number of civilizations bottleneck at this jump. They might be capable of making the shift, but get knocked back down each time it starts to happen.

And that’s why it’s currently a problem. There’s not enough buyers, and not enough capability to switch supply in and out.

Without the price incentives to build large scale storage, it hasn’t been done. The problem is that there is a delay between needing the storage, and it actually being built at scale.

Interestingly, light can’t be frozen, it’s speed is constant for all observers. Instead it gets redshifted. The end result is effectively the same, since it ends up out of the visible spectrum.

Grids need to be carefully balanced. If the cost is approaching, or lower than 0 then that means the grid is actually in a critical state. A lot of generators cannot be switched off (or at least not quickly). If more power goes into the grid than is used, then it can destabilise the whole grid and cause a blackout.

The solution to the problem is actually 2 fold. We need more sinks, and a smarter grid.

More sinks is mostly in the form of storage. They buy power when it’s cheap, and sell it when the cost spikes. It also extends to other heavy uses. Traditionally, aluminium smelting helps a lot with this. It uses huge amounts of electricity, and and switch on and off rapidly.

We also need a smarter grid. We need homes that know what the grid needs. E.g. electric cars than can actually as local buffers, or air conditioning that times it’s draw to help balance the grid.

I have a relative who has an unfortunate condition that causes internal bleeding. They’ve had enough blood transfusions that their antibodies are completely haywire.

Multiple times, doctors have not listened to their protests, and given them O-. They turn an impressive shade of yellow (among other, more serious, issues).

Last I heard, there were 2 compatible donors known, 1 in a different country. Thankfully, you can store blood longer term. It’s just not cost efficient to do in bulk. They have their own little stockpile of blood at their local hospital (mostly self donated).

That method is still mostly recommended, though mostly for younger children/babies. The Heimlich maneuver is difficult to perform on a small body. You either over squeeze, and cause harm, or are too tentative, and so not helping.

With babies, you hold them lying on your forearm, facing downwards, and slap (open handed) hard. I’ve only seen it used once, but it worked perfectly then.

The best bet is to let your local aviation authority know. They are generally the ones with the actual powers, as well as the knowledge to apply them.

At least in the UK, the laws cover anything that leaves the ground under an open sky. There are exceptions for RC toys and drones, but they have limits. One of the limits is you cannot fly within a certain distance of anyone or anything not under your control.

Basically, most places require your permission to fly over, or near to your land. If they are overflying, they are breaking the rules.

It’s worth noting, depending on the size of the system, it can be difficult to judge distances. The ones I work with are large. We regularly have officials insisting we are massively out of our flight area. GPS logs show that it was well within the entire time.

The left is far less monolithic than the right. It was a sub-subset of the left, a percentage of feminists were/are anti male. Unfortunately, they were not called out for this, and so got very loud about it. This coloured the message from general left leaning sources.

Growing up, there was a lot of “men are bad/evil” and that we needed to make it up to women. A lot of this pressure came from left leaning sources.

Thankfully, I managed to avoid getting drawn into the right leaning backlash to this.

Training, lots of training. It also applies to you as well!

I think our dog got past 2 years old before we had eaten more pork chops than he had stolen.

He’ll still swipe my daughter’s dinner, if it’s left unattended. At least he will no longer steal it while she’s sat in front of it.

There’s a story, though I’m not 100% sure on how true it was. Queen victoria did a royal visit to the new lab overseen by Michael Faraday. She asked him what use this new “electricity” was? His response was along the lines of "mam, we’re not completely sure, that’s why we are researching it.

As for actual uses. It could give us the theoretical key to room temperature super conductors. It could give us a foundation for exotic space drives. It could help crack new forms of fusion reaction.

Ultimately, it’s a foundational block. What gets built on there is hard to predict. By comparison, GPS is not an obvious extension of relativity. However, without an understanding of relativity, GPS would basically be useless. It would drift km/day

The limiting factor is the bend. The subatomic particles want to go in a straight line. A magnetic field is used to bend the beam around into a circle. The faster the particles are moving however, the more energy is needed to bend them. A larger circle has less bend. This lets you get your particles faster.

Since E^2 = M^2 C^4 + P^2 C^2 (the full form is E=MC^2 ). If you can force the particle to stop rapidly, then you can force the energy from momentum into mass. This is done by hitting 2 beams into each other. The faster the beams, the more energy is available to convert to mass.

Most of the time, this creates a lot of mundane particles. However, ever so often it creates something interesting. They rapidly decay into mundane particles, but the shower they create tells us a lot about them. The catch is that all the energy needs to be present at once. You can’t use more particles, you need to make them move faster.

As for why. The more particles we have to study, the more we can figure out about the underlying rules. We have a number of theories. They all agree at lower energy levels, but disagree at higher energy levels. By knowing which is correct, we can pry deeper into the workings of reality.

They generally stop being toddlers when they come out of nappies, and can walk properly.

A 5 year old is over 25% of the way to being an adult!

Nothing is destined, the past is fixed, the present is happening, but the future is still ours to define.

Don’t get me wrong, it fucking hard to even start clawing your way out. Even worse, you won’t see any benefits at first. Even just taking the first steps seem terrifying and hopeless.

I’ve been in that hole, I still have that voice in the back of my head. There are 2 ways out, only 1 offers the possibility of happy moments.

I personally decided (eventually) to say fuck it, and plough forward till I made it or it killed me. I had to go way past where I thought my limits were. But the voice was wrong, I was (and am) far more capable than it told me.

If you want some advice on mental control techniques, I’ve a few that might help. I’d be happy to share if you want.

That’s your choice. Just don’t expect others to change your life for you.

And if it helps. I went through that cycle more than a few times. Put effort in, get nothing back then give up, and slip further. Even now, it’s a constant battle. I know where I will end up if I falter however, so I keep my foundations strong, even when the depression tells me it’s not worth the effort. Those anchors make it possible to pull myself back out of that pit of despair.

Oh, and yes the initial climb out is exhausting, rewardless and terrifying. I fully understand why you don’t want to try again. I’m just saying that the climb isn’t infinite, and there’s firm footing further up.

It sounds like you have depression messing with your mind. I empathize a lot, since I’ve been in that place.

The thing I will say is that most of the problems looming over you are paper tigers. They have far less substance than your mind is telling you they have.

Unfortunately, the lesson I learnt was that no-one will actually help you. People will make a lot of nice noises, and will even accommodate you, but they won’t help. That needs to come from you. Don’t get me wrong, it’s terrifying, but it’s like neo taking the red pill. It’s not that he’s not scared, but that he knows the other option is not where he wants to be.

Up until now, I’ve just been making nice noises, so onwards to some practical advice.

Appearance.

You mentioned you are a bit of a lock in. Often you can get your appearance slip, don’t let it. It can be as simple as keeping personal hygiene sorted, and wearing “smart” clothes when you go out. They don’t need to be expensive, just look nice. For men, a button up shirt and some chinos can make a huge difference to how others react to you.

Socialising

As painful as it is, social skills are a necessary tool of life. They also go rusty VERY quickly. This leads to a feedback loop that leaves socialising as a terrifying idea. Your goal should be to have a short conversation with a “stranger” every day. This could be as simple as asking a cashier how their day is going, or asking for directions from someone out and about.

At this point you’re probably mentally whimpering “I can’t do THAT!”. You actually can, and most people will actually respond positively. The part of your mind saying you can’t is the problematic part. Recognise that it is trying to help, but that its advice is bullshit.

Anchoring

The above is the most basic stuff you should be aiming for. The most important thing however is to establish mental anchors. Think of them like the bolts climbers use for their ropes. Reaching them is hard, but once they are embedded, recovering from a fall gets a lot easier. You also preferably want several anchors. Sometimes they fail, it happens. If you only have one, that can cause problems, but if you have several, repairing the lost one becomes a minor annoyance.

A good anchor is a commitment you can lean on and say “that’s a positive thing for me” even when you really don’t feel it. Groups, or periodic events work best. Meet-up is a good resource for finding things and ideas. Some more ideas below.

Gym - a regular fitness regime does wonders for your mind. It also gives organic opportunities to talk to people.

Sports - often cheaper than the gym, find a regular sport meetup and go along. Don’t worry about being completely rubbish at the start. Most people respect effort, and you will see the payoffs quite quickly.

Martial arts - similar to the above, but a bit more formalised.

Dungeons and dragons - one of the classic “weirdos unite!” socialising methods. If you’re polite, and followed the hygiene advice earlier, you’ll find most groups extremely accepting.

Makerspaces - if you’re engineering/creative then these make excellent opportunities to socialise. I actually ended up establishing one. It turned out I wasn’t the only weirdo in the area who wanted somewhere to socialise on our terms.

The pub - a classic, but often doesn’t fit a lot of people’s mindset.

Cinema groups - cinema has gotten a bit expensive now, but once you have a job again they can be a good social event. You get to hang out with a group for a while, without needing to talk much. Once the film is over, you have an automatic topic of conversation.

I’ll leave things there. Just remember, that voice in your head means well, but is lying to you. The looming monsters are paper thin, but only you can punch through them.