>You seem to have more emotions than reasons.

No, I'm a pragmatist. You have Americans asking "I thought we were allies!?" - we are - until the US decides to break off that relationship. So Europe as a collective has to behave in such a way that our interests are insulated from the whims and vagaries of the US.

It's like living with a dog. The dog can be really friendly with you and help you with stuff and defend you - but it can still turn around and bite you.
Europe is also fully aware of the US's propensity for trying to dominate a field. The US doesn't mind junior partners, but friction arises when they face up against equals. As I mentioned elsewhere on this thread, this is why the US slammed the door on Britain after they finished the Manhattan Project. America wanted to be the only one with the bomb.

So I wouldn't say it is at all "lead by emotion" to treat the US with an appropriate amount of caution.

>we are literally allies

Until America decides we aren't, and then we're all in the shit.The US typically is friendly with us until we get in the way of their business interests or show any kind of deviation from US foreign policy.

And, no offence, you guys have a bit of a identity crisis every election cycle, declare us military freeloaders and randomly slap us with tariffs because supposedly we're a threat to American industry. And then the next election cycle you are all "I wanna be friends!" again.

Edit: sure, downvote if you want, but this is why we can't fully trust you guys.
We like you a hell of a lot more than the alternatives, but we're also aware that the US's interests don't always align with ours, and when they don't, we can't rely on you.

They helped significantly in your war of Independence

Under planetology terms, yes.

>we have 4 gas giants in our solar system

Actually only 2, Jupiter and Saturn. Neptune and Uranus are classified as Ice giants because their atmosphere contains a large amount of materials such as water, ammonia and methane (any substances heavier than helium and hydrogen but lighter than metals and metalloids are considered ices in Planetary science).

There are 4 giant planets, but only 2 are gas giants.

edited. I am tired, so my memory for orbital radii gets kinda crap. I should have checked.

>Earth does not have enough gravity to retain helium

Nor hydrogen, which is lighter still. Your mechanism is problematic, as the Earth is both 2/3rds the distance from the sun as Mars is (and so has 2 times the UV intensity) but it also has a relatively consistent quantity of water over the last two billion years despite being glared at by those same rays.

A more likely driver of ocean loss on Mars is pressure-driven boil off. With no magnetosphere to protect it, the atmosphere gets stripped away by solar winds, causing the oceans to evaporate at an increasing rate.

The one issue I have with this hypothesis of deep oceans that have evaporated away is the apparent lack of surface evaporite deposits. Where's the salt flats?Just look at anywhere on Earth where there has been an endorheic basin - The Utah salt flats, Lake Karum in Ethiopia, Salar de Arizaro in Argentina, etc. Even under the Mediterranean sea there are layers of salt 3 kilometres thick from the era of the Messianic salt crisis. The absence of evaporite deposits just doesn't add up.

My Almanac says the chances are very good

A large part of the time is that people don't realise that the money spent on civil aerospace R&D is comparitively tiny to what most developed countries spend on welfare.
They hear "-illion" and think that it is being printed from an ATM, shoved under a fairing and fired into space.

It would be visible, or rather, its effects would be.
It might not be as noticeable as, say, a comet in the night sky, but an approaching black hole would resemble a moving distortion in the background behind it due to gravitational lensing.

And the moment it moves through anything with signifcant mass (e.g. a gas cloud), it'd show up as that gas gets pulled into an accretion disk and starts emitting light when the gravitational shear forces superheat it.

To my knowledge that's actually quite a small one. The smallest detected so far is around 3 solar masses, so 12 is not all a "monster".

There's so many. The calculator departments alone could fill rafts of phonebooks.
Fortunately there's a wake up going on where these historical figures are now being recognised for what they did, but sadly we can't get them all (in the sense that many were never recognised for their achievements or they were coopted by a male coworker).

Annoyingly, the answer you will get is "it depends".
It depends on the nozzle design, grain density, grain profile (because more surface area determines burn rate).

Sugar rockets supposedly have a specific impulse of 115 to 130 seconds, so if you have an estimate for your mass flow (you can get a very rough average by dividing propellant mass by burn time), you can calculate your theoretical average thrust.

Oh I don't pretend to understand quantum theory or the full standard model. I'm down with general and special relativity, but quantum physics is just bizarre. Supposedly Feynman said "I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics".

I know enough to know when to tap out and let better intellects do the heavy lifting.

>Physics without calc

Tricky ask, calculus theory underlies so much physics that it is practically indispensable.

Even the simple English wiki reads like it's having a hard time properly explaining the concept of a Higgs field

No Andy, I never said it was an existential threat, you assumed that.
I said it was a problem for space infrastructure, I never said it was a direct threat to humanity.

Ah, Paranoid Andy! I had no idea you had switched to a new account. Didn't recognize you there for a moment, do you still have enough tinfoil for the rest of the year? Your mum still asks us to check in on you sometimes, make sure you are getting the ready-meals she sends.

Not really a doomsday. More like a "This is fucking inconvenient for our scientific advancement".

> Just give up more of your freedoms

Unless you are regularly launching rockets into orbit, I'm really not sure what freedoms you are giving up?

>give up your modern conveniences

actually this is more about protecting our modern conveniences

>ostracize more of your countrymen

Is there a pro-space littering faction? I had no idea.

I'm sorry to say, but life and civilization as a whole is an endless chain of identifying problems and resolving them. It's just that humanity has now achieved such capabilities and responsibilities that the scale and scope of the problems we face are far larger than we have faced historically.

Space junk is a serious problem because it poses a threat to all of our orbit-borne hardware. Weather satellites, telecommunications, mapping, Earth monitoring, space stations, etc, all at risk from space detritus.

And no, humanity could live on happily with full on kessler syndrome going on over our heads - it would just stymie our species ability to be a spacefaring civilization for centuries.

No, Newton's 3rd law - every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
The force acting on one object is equal to the force acting on ther other - now the relative motion of each object will be different, as a lighter mass will accelerate more than the larger mass, but the product of an objects mass and acceleration will be equal to the other's.

In short: Small mass has big acceleration, Huge mass has tiny acceleration. Both have same force acting on them.