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I what you mean. Maybe one could combine Clarke's space elevator and a magnetic mass accelerator so that one could accelerate a shuttle without the use of onboard engines until it came off the rails already at some velocity. You would have some engineering limits, e.g. crushing passengers would not be permitted.

It’s not just Gaza. The IDF forces now deployed in operation Iron Sword are also engaged in heavy fighting to the north, up near the border with Lebanon along the UN Blue Line 2000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8ol1znjHpE These reports say that IDF special forces neutralised an invasion by militants from Lebanon into the Israeli town of Netu’a in a night action, and subsequently used artillery and air-strikes to take out three major Hezbollah ammunition dumps and HQs at Samoukha, Jabal Al Arab, and Rmaych inside Lebanon.

The last part meant to be rather "never reached the Earth's escape velocity"?

Zap means gravity, methinks.

It’s not hard to find examples of ChatGPT giving wrong math/science answers. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which is, as I said, a language model. ChatGPT is designed to generate answers that sound human. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/over-just-few-months-chatgpt-232905189.html “Over the course of the study researchers found that in March GPT-4 was able to correctly identify that the number 17077 is a prime number 97.6% of the times it was asked. But just three months later, its accuracy plummeted a lowly 2.4%.” https://news.asu.edu/20230221-discoveries-do-math-chatgpt-sometimes-cant-expert-says “Our initial tests on ChatGPT, done in early January, indicate that performance is significantly below the 60% accuracy for state-of-the-art algorithm for math word problem-solvers,” Also “It’s designed around a concept called next word prediction, where for when you ask it something, it’s going to predict what the related words are based on a corpus (text and speech) data.”

This appears to be a local, not global, phenomenon. This article suggests EV insurance prices are trending lower in the US From the OP link: “for petrol and diesel car drivers, the increase is 29%” So part of the increase is a general trend, not because they are EVs. How much of this is because of BREXIT driving up the cost of parts? The point about the lack of data is important, too. Relatively few EVs means a low number of accidents from which to gather reliable statistics. Is any of this opportunistic price gouging?

This seems to rely on the assumption that the universe is contained by time, rather than it containing time, per relativity theory. If so, then yes, the universe is a thing that didn't exist before, and somehow came to be after a countdown reaches zero from a finite or infinitely distant prior moment. Relativity theory says time is just one of 4 dimensions of spacetime, part of the universe, rather than the universe being a temporary object contained by time. This seems to suggest that time itself was created at some moment, and that at prior times, time didn't exist. That seems pretty self contradictory. Depends on how close to Earth-like you want. A rocky planet in the habital zone? Plenty of those. One with an atmosphere we can breathe? No evidence of anything like that. As for if Earth was first among the nearby planets, that seems absurd. There are plenty of older star systems. As for Earth being prior to really distant Earth-like places, per relativity of simultaneity, which one came first is a matter of the convention you choose to compare ages. You talk about defects in time, but give no clue as to what you might mean by that. No. Space is up, a direction perpendicular to north. The analogy is apt. There is no north of the pole, nor is there 'down' beyond about 6500 km. These are examples of dimensions that are bounded by the coordinate system, exactly the way time is bounded at the big bang by a cosmic coordinate system. This seems to suggest some sort of cyclic model, but they've had great trouble finding one that matches empirical evidence