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Try not to think about a fog that swirls around you quickly before vanishing, leaving you unexpectedly covered in bugs! STOP!

Stromatolites. Amongst the first living organisms on earth circa 3.5 billion years ago and still going today. They were responsible for releasing the oxygen into a toxic (to us) atmousphere and making it breathable for oxygen breathers. https://www.bushheritage.org.au/species/stromatolites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite You may have seen the BBC series The Power of the Planet, presented by Iain Stewart https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gczg5 An interesting reverse (geological not biological) process is the 'rusting of the rocks' https://www.newswise.com/articles/how-rocks-rusted-on-earth-and-turned-red

You mention origami. There was an Institute of Origami in my home town, back in the 70s, but it folded.

+1 to Markus for his patient conversation and explanations to Conscious Energy.

There isn’t really any kind of ‘action’ in the mechanistic sense of the word. It’s just that test particles and their world lines are themselves part of spacetime, so they cannot do anything other than follow its underlying geometry. There’s no duality of any kind. See below analogy for clarity. As I’ve mentioned in my last post, there is information, in the form of the metric which determines the relationship between points. So it isn’t a ‘zero set’. This is true even very far from any sources - even spacetime without gravity has geometric structure that is different from that of Euclidean space. This is (eg) why you can’t accelerate to the speed of light - the fundamental reason for this is geometric, so geometry has real measurable consequences. It’s exactly like the calculus you learned at school - the derivative of a function is defined at a single point, yet gives you information about the slope of the entire function. That’s because what it really does is tell you about the relationship between neighbouring points on the graph of the function - how it changes from point to point. If you’re given just the (local) derivative, plus boundary conditions, you can reconstruct the entire function, even though any one single point of the function is just an (x,y) pair. To give an analogy (!!!) - suppose you have two people starting out on different points along the equator, and flying north simultaneously at a constant altitude. When they start out on the equator, let them be - say - 1000miles apart. What happens? The further north they get, the smaller the distance between them becomes. Eventually they’ll meet at the pole. Why? There is no detectable ‘action’ or force between the two planes. Each plane starts off at 90 degree angle from the equator (so their trajectories are initially parallel), and they always fly straight (there’s never any detectable change in direction from their initial trajectory). Yet they approach one another. That’s because they are both confined to the surface of the Earth, which is a sphere; so they must follow its intrinsic geometry. The metric governing this has real, detectable consequences. There is no detectable information about this at any one point on the Earth’s surface. This is because the geometry concerns relationships between points, so what you do is take measurements of path lengths, areas, or angles. For example, you’ll find that the sum of the angles in a triangle on Earth’s surface is no longer exactly 180 degrees - it’s possible to directly measure this deviation. But you can’t do it at a single point, you need to measure across some distance. That’s because the effects of a non-flat metric are accumulative - mathematically, you integrate components of the metric to obtain path lengths. To put it differently, the metric defines an inner product of tangent vectors, so it’s a local object, but with global effects across the manifold. Similar principles are true for curved spacetime as well. You can measure path lengths through spacetime pretty much directly (Shapiro delay, Pound-Rebka, gravitational wave detectors,...) and find that they differ from what you’d expect in a flat geometry. You can also directly measure angular distortions in the geometry, ie gyroscopic precessions, frame dragging etc. Gravitational light deflection is in effect a demonstration of the angle sum in a large triangle being different from 180 degrees close to a massive body. And so on.

I expect that most people who don't want to pay taxes for taxpayer funded community education still like being part of a community that gets educated - they just want businesses and people other than themselves to pay for it, ie they want to get the benefits without paying for it. Businesses are advantaged by the availability of educated employees - as they benefit from healthy employees. Similarly they also benefit from employees of other companies being well paid, via strong consumer demand - but not want to pay their own well. I suspect the wealthy get more overall benefits from the services governments support through taxes than any other demographic - law and order to protect their wealth, infrastructure to support their business activities, educated workers, healthy workers. Programs that reduce inequality don't only divert money from the successful (deserving) to the unsuccessful (undeserving) they also reduce the risks of crime and social disruptions that, if allowed to grow can lead to riots, terrorism and militant uprisings. Education is a key pathway to sustainably reducing poverty across generations and that not only benefits the individuals and their families directly but benefits their neighbors and businesses and their owners and the State and Nation. I think the illusion that governments are like companies and running them like businesses would do it better is widely promoted and feeds popular opposition to taxpayer funded education and other "social" programs - but governments are not companies; where companies fire unproductive employees and costs are avoided they stay on the government's books whether they are productive or not and those kinds of costs resist being avoided.

An ion lifter as described doesn't work in outer space; you need to ionize air molecules for them to work. But you are correct, it wouldn't be collisions that create the thrust, but the reaction from the motion of the ions you have created.

I am not sure why you say that collisions "create thrust". Such an engine or even a standard rocket creates thrust even in empty space where there are no air molecules to "collide" with.