I think the problem that you’re going to imagine a good analogy for this is that orbital dynamics works in sort of (but not really) an unintuitive way.

An object in an elliptical orbit around earth is moving slowest at its furthest point from the earth. Like a thrown ball that slows when it reaches the top of its trajectory. That object is moving fastest at the point that it’s closest to earth.

So you have this dynamic where if you decelerate it changes your orbit such that you’re increasing the speed you’ll be moving on opposite point of your orbit. E.g. if you decelerate at your slowest (furthest) point, it brings your closest approach point closer to earth and you’ll be moving even faster when you get there.

You can decelerate at your closest approach point but eventually it brings the opposite end of your orbit closer to earth than you are, and then you’ll fall and of course speed up again. There’s no real way around this. You’re going to be moving fast when you approach earth unless you’re doing a lot of very active deceleration.

KSP player here. So, you know, ignore me.

But let’s consider how you’d rendezvous two objects. You’d want your asteroid to have an orbit around the Sun that is very nearly the same orbit as Earth’s. A perigee that just kisses the Earth’s orbital ellipse and an apogee that’s slightly further from the sun. You’d want the asteroid to approach its perigee at the same time as Earth approaches that same point in space. Then they’d have very close to 0 relative velocity, with the asteroid moving slightly faster around the Sun than the Earth. So you just bleed off some of the asteroid’s velocity through whatever magical explanation you want… such that your asteroid has 0 relative velocity with Earth, giving it the exact same orbit as Earth. I.e. from Earth’s perspective it’s just floating there motionless in space.

Problem is that this only works for a rendezvous between two very light objects with very small gravitational effects between them. The Earth is massive enough that the effects from Earth’s gravitation would overtake the Sun’s as the asteroid approaches Earth. Then, yeah, the asteroid becomes a falling rock with a lot of energy so I don’t think any of this works.

Our recipes rarely use weights except for maybe meats. We’ve got a scale in my kitchen but it hasn’t been touched in a while.

The ratios of ingredients matter more than the exact values so for the recipe you’re talking about, it’d be like 2 cups of milk, 1 cup flour, 1/4 cup of oil, 1/8 cup of sugar (or 2 tablespoons, which is a pretty common size so most people probably have a scoop for that).

But having industrial quantities is like most of the argument for using metric! You mean to tell me you’re not converting between kL and mL all the time and reaping the benefits of being able to just slide the decimal over? That’s a shame. I’m not sure that doing your everyday cooking in increments of 125g is all that useful then. The cup is sounding better and better.

We have the same measuring cups I’m sure you use for liquids. They have mL on one side, cups on the other and a scale for sub-sizes. We do have individually-sized scoops which are nice for over-scooping and just sliding your finger across the top to push off the excess and get the amount you need. It’s not strictly necessary though. They come in a set where each smaller scoop fits inside the larger ones in a tight stack that can sit in a drawer.

The infinite granularity is ultimately unnecessary. Recipes don’t call for 0.397 cups. I’m sure you don’t see any that ask for 438 grams. If you do the math on a lot of recipes listed in both metric and imperial, you’ll find that they’re not even using the exact same amounts. The convenience of using standard measures tends to outweigh the flavor difference with plus or minus a percent of ingredient.

You guys have to weigh your flour? We just grab a cup and scoop it and then dump it in the bowl. You’re busting out the scale? You’re not exactly selling me on metric here.

Well then you’ve lost the whole advantage of base 10. You’re buying 2L or 4L containers and dividing them up into 250ml increments, having to do divisions of 8 or 16 like some common imperial peasant, only you’re doing it with numbers that have no real relationship with your daily life. I mean, ultimately it’s all arbitrary anyway. But when someone says use 2 cups, that’s 2 scoops, which seems better to me than having to know that 500ml is 2 scoops.

A useful size to package and sell ingredients in, such that the person following a recipe can halve or double the recipe as needed and still use the entire package with no waste.

Would it help if I told you that it was defined as the volume contained in a cube whose length is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/166219513th of a second? I imagine it wouldn’t. Obviously the litre is superior, it’s a much less arbitrary cube defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/2997924580 seconds.

The whole point of cups is that you can buy an ingredient by the gallon and it’s very likely that you can double or halve the recipe to your heart’s content and eventually use up the entire package with no waste.

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If it makes you feel any better, in the dev diaries they’ve talked about learned lessons from Vic 3, Imperator Rome, and EU4. But yeah, waiting is always the wise move.

The observable universe is constantly expanding as the passage of time allows light to reach us from more and more distant parts of the universe. So it’s less “we don’t know what’s outside” and more like (to a certain extent) “we have to wait and see.” And there’s nothing we’ve seen to indicate that these external regions that are being revealed are anything but more of the same kinds of things in our inner region of the observable universe.

The important thing in the balloon analogy isn’t what the balloon is expanding into, it’s just that every point on the balloon is drifting away from every other point.

One thing to consider, though, is that space may not even be a real physical thing. Maybe location is just a property of things, like mass or electrical charge. It could just be an inherent value that adjusts and influences other things according to the laws of physics. Maybe it’s less that “space is expanding” and just that “the location property of everything is constantly diverging.” There’s no need to worry about what anything is expanding into because our conception of space may just be a mental construct.

I would think you’d have to instantaneously accelerate because incremental acceleration doesn’t work the way we typically think it does at high speeds.

If you’re moving at 99.999% the speed of light relative to Earth, anything close to your speed is going to be moving quite slowly relative to you. When you accelerate some more, the change in speed relative to those close things is much larger than the change in speed you experience relative to Earth (it gets smaller and smaller as you approach light speed). But as far as I understand, there’s no such thing as moving at light speed relative to Earth but not relative to other sub-light speed things. You’d have to instantaneously move at light speed relative to everything (every sub-light speed thing).

It’s still an unsettled question if we even do

Ooh, great one. Here are my picks for each panel:

1. “The Weave”
2. Sharpiegate
3. Vaccine/Covid Denialism
4. Ukraine Blackmail
5. Election Denialism
6. January 6th

Nah but here’s the real staggering part. It should be far easier for universes to form locally conscious beings than it is to form all the pieces necessary to naturally evolve conscious beings. These would mostly be very short-lived arrangements of energy with no hope of surviving but certain arrangements would even have false memories, making them believe that they have existed far longer than they actually have.

They may even have false memories of living on earth.

They may even have false memories of your exact life.

And they would be, by far, more common than any form of actual sustainable life. It is vastly more likely that you have experienced this post as a false memory created inside one of these short-lived consciousnesses than for any of this to be real.