I completely agree with you. People don't believe in god(s) for rational reasons. They believe in god(s) because they find such beliefs comforting, or because their parents convinced them, or because it's socially expected, and so on. Evidence for extraterrestrial life is so far outside people's everyday experience…

The Fabric of Reality is an excellent book. I think it's one of the best popular science books on these subjects that I've read. Deutsch is a good writer: Fabric involves many complex phenomena and concepts, but he explains them as clearly as I've ever seen.

Interesting.

This is very interesting for what it tells us about the Martian interior.

Sure. But it has to apply to EVERYBODY. Nobody is signaling. Nobody's lighting off beacons saying, here we are, is there anybody else? Nobody is spamming the entire universe with Von Neumann probes. It's not just our galaxy that's eerily silent - it's hundreds of billions of galaxies, right across the cosmos.

Sure. You've got a set of various quantum fields, and excitations in those fields are particles. The Dirac fields describe spin 1/2 fermions, and the quanta of those fields are measured as particles like quarks and leptons - so the particular lepton called the electron is the quanta of a particular Dirac spinor field.

Thanks, that makes sense!

Gosh, I don't know... if I think of anything I'll let you know!

It's a cute idea.

It's a representation of relativistic quantum gauge field theory, a way of describing nature in terms of mathematical symmetries.

I think there's a lot of experiments underway which could detect mirror matter, if it exists, usually through something like photon/mirror photon mixing. Or in this case neutron/mirror neutron.

They seem to be talking about mirror matter; that is, a gauge sector the existence of which could restore parity symmetry. Particles in that gauge sector would be very weakly interacting.

I'm afraid you can't have more than one axis of rotation!

"But, again, what is it about the solidity that does this?"

What LostVikings said.

"Why does everyone seem to assume that any intelligent alien life we could discover is automatically vastly superior and more technologically advanced than we are?"

On the contrary, the entire notion that an intelligent program may run on different substrates with indistinguishable behavior relies explicitly on physicalism being true and dualism being false, and it remains the default position without any unnecessary metaphysical assumptions. One may assume that there is…

There's nothing to keep a solid sphere centered on its star, so the slightest perturbation would cause it to drift.

While nuclear power is not 100% safe (because nothing is), we do seem to have different standards for different technologies based on criteria that are not entirely rational.

If it involves physical contact, my plans involve glancing up at a blinding light and being instantly disintegrated as a few tons of iron impact the planet at near the speed of light.