Got it, TIL. Thanks for the clarification

But hypersonic is a thing. Specifically it is a speed more than 5x the speed of sound, and Earth's escape velocity is ~10x that.

I guess you mean the buzzword usage, which is appropriate. Kind of like saying your menu is "vegetarian", evoking imagery of salads and vegetable dishes, when all you serve is various forms of cheese pizza

Here's my take on an ELI5 answer

Imagine you're travelling to some destination. A straight line is the shortest path. However, traditional computing requires tracing the path with Right/Left directions. Quantum computing provided a way to estimate a turn much like degrees on a compass. This is because of the superposition of states (not relevant to this explanation).

When measured, these will "collapse" (as-is the term for describing wave-form probabilities resolving to concrete values) into the Left/Right directions we're familiar with, but it will have arrived at the destination/solution with fewer total turns.

Sometimes this isn't a better solution. If you have a straight line path already, then you don't need to use Quantum Computing for it (they are generally slower at resolving simple problems). If you have a path that is all Left/Right turns, then Quantum Computing will likely save you no time (number crunching is often better performed on Traditional Computers).

Hope this helps

Launched in 1998, and expected to be de-orbited in 2031. If it hasn't happened yet, it's unlikely to, given it is in the last trimester of its existence. Could it be booted up for one last hurrah? Sure, but generally a project like the ISS would be front-loaded for functionality so that the remaining service period could provide a maximum return on investment. At this point, any enhancements beyond maintenance would likely be viewed as a loss.

Then again, I'm not an expert, or even that much of a hobbyist. I'm just a guy who looked up some dates on Google.

Sure, incest has quite the storied history. It's fairly well-documented, especially in places of nobility and cultures of "pure blood". That said, incest has been taboo since humans have had laws, really.

There's a well-known behavior among humans called the mere-exposure effect, whereby you become attracted to people you spend a lot of time with. Generally the first thing that triggers a new romantic relationship is time spent together, and conversely a common trigger for breakup/divorce is lack of quality time together. Now, extrapolate that to family, and you have a problem in which you have a high chance of becoming romantically involved with your progeny, caregiver, or sibling. Luckily, humans have a pheromone/mechanism (not sure exactly, read about it once and I dread the search to find it again) that short-circuits that behavior and generally causes you to view immediate family as non-mating partners. Obviously this isn't perfect either, because there are plenty of stories about familial rape, but it's part of why the practice isn't universal. On the contrary, the occurrence is low enough that we might consider the ones who partake to be aberrations.

As always with humans, it's complicated. There's a mix of primitive, biological urges, as well as societal pressures to keep healthy gene pools flourishing, but it doesn't stop people from being tempted or indulging in behaviors others might seem unsavory.

I don't think porn sites are pushing it. It's one of those emergent content problems. From my perspective, in the early days of the step-fantasy and incest genre, it was usually more about providing a believable backdrop for the scenario. Once that authentic-amateur aesthetic became popular, the rest of the industry caught on, and now every video can slap a "Step-<relation>" tag to increase clicks. What's more, it makes it easy to define relations of the two or more actors without having to spend time in dialog.

Step-Mom immediately tells you there is an age difference of older woman. If it's straight porn, you know younger guy. Gay porn, it's a younger woman. Same thing with the babysitter trope, older guy screws younger girl (because babysitter characters are almost always jailbait-looking actresses).