Probably shouldn't have tried to take it through the airport then.

What do you call Socrates?

Certainly Old school...

I didn't realize it was a single loop. I watched it four times waiting for him to stick it.

It's not glass compared to air that's the issue so much as compared to water or ice. The air is the environment in this situation so if the system is in a glass container the heat transfer to the air will be negligible compared to the surface area of the water and ice (which again depends on the shape of the container greatly). If it's a thin metal container then water remaining will probably win in most configurations simply because it will act as a convective exchange surface. Realistically, radiation is going to be a meager source of heat loss, even hot water radiators to heat houses only supply about 5% of their heat contribution through actual radiation, and that's at higher temperatures.

There is no right answer without knowing more about the system. All the previous answers hit on most of the salient details. One of the biggest factors will probably be surface area exposed to air. If the container is a poor conductor (e.g. glass) then the water filling the container might reduce that surface area and slow the system. If it's a metal container that would be less of a factor. Another factor to take into account is evaporation which will remove heat from the system, but how big a factor this will be depends on the temperature and humidity of the air. The ice can sublimate as well, but this is a much slower process than evaporation and I don't believe it's exothermic, but I could be wrong.

You are essentially correct. Both of these are resultant of increasing entropy. Though neither is directly responsible for the other, they are both reasonable effects of the process of informational encoding. When entropy hits an effective maximum time will become meaningless and space will lose relational cohesion.

One of the biggest challenges isn't the technology, but getting it into space. Even though there have only been a handful of launch failures, by percentage it is the most dangerous form of travel (besides shark surfing, of course). Putting enough fissile material on a rocket and launching it into space has a pretty high chance of dispersion. Granted, the actual danger of that dispersion, particularly done from an isolated location, is lower than most people would expect, but public fears concerning nuclear energy, and especially critical mass nuclear, creates a political barrier that will likely never be overcome.

If we were ever to get nuclear-powered spaceships, the material will have to be mined and refined off-planet, and there are a lot of steps before we get close to that.

This will be the second greatest challenge of the next century, after climate change. Many of the problems we face now are already a result of this trend and the next twenty years will be the most telling. At the moment, systems like democracy function because human labor still has value, though that value is already deteriorating. Whether or not this advent will be a catastrophe will come down to what decisions we make now as a society as it will set the trajectory for generations to come.

I've read quite a few books and articles on this subject (and even started writing one of my own until I discovered someone had already done a better job), but haven't seen anything that looks like a believable definite prediction. The biggest x factor is unfortunately our current political schism and the relative calcification of public policy. It might change, but our current path is leading to massive unemployment with no safety net to protect those disenfranchised. Presumably some policy will need to be put in place to prevent millions from starving in the streets, but whether that is a functional system that gives real quality of life or merely subsistence living for millions beholden to public assistance remains to be seen.

The most common usurpation was probably from dominance. If you prayed to a god or a pantheon to protect you and your civilization was overrun, it would be a pretty tangible argument for whatever belief system your conquerors brought.