I was thinking about things like mayflies... Would it count as old age or starvation/exhaustion/exposure depending on what the reason the adult lifespan is so short?

Other than the physics (chemical storage vs. electric-field storage) one huge difference is they have different charge-vs-voltage curves.

The voltage across a capacitor is proportional to how much charge has flowed through it (it's the integral of the current). This simple mathematical relationship is vital for all sorts of analogue circuitry (and all circuitry is analogue eventually).

A battery, on the other hand, has a relatively constant voltage for most of its lifetime. A common 1.5v alkaline cell will only gradually droop to 1v or so before suddenly dropping off. NiMH batteries are very flat around 1.2v for most of their discharge. The voltage is determined by their chemistry, and is strongly affected by all sorts of real-world stuff like temperature and diffusion rates. For rechargeable batteries the relationship between state-of-charge and terminal voltage can be quite complex.

Of course real-world capacitors do have a lot of non-ideal behavior, like leakage, ESR, dielectric absorption, and microphonics, but even with all that they're a lot closer to a simple "voltage × capacitance = summed charge" relationship than a battery is.

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It's likely humans have been helping each other give birth since we were human.

Like the other comments say, we *think* most bugs die to predation rather than old age, but we (zoologists/ entomologists) really have no idea.

Its incredibly difficult to tell because its basically impossible to track individual bugs in the wild. Most of what we know about the lifespan of animals in the wild comes from mark-recapture experiments, where a large number of animals are captured, marked with something like a leg band or other tag, and then some amount of time later another survey is conducted to see how many tagged animals are re-collected. This works really well for populations of vertebrates and gives us a pretty good estimation of how long animals live, based on the dates on the tags or other long term records. However, as far as I know, its virtually impossible to actually do this with insects (right now, at least). Dobzhansky tried a couple times with wild fruit fly populations but never got anything conclusive, and that's the most well known attempt I know of.

In regards to lifespan, it can be highly variable, and depends on how you define lifespan. Most insects typically live actively for a couple days to a couple years, but some insects can be alive for much longer. Insects can enter a state of hibernation called diapause where they remain in stasis for years at a time, like cicadas which famously hibernate for 17 years. Depending on how you define lifespan, there are insects that are technically alive for decades, but they spend the vast majority of it in diapause in their cocoons and are only active adults for a couple days/weeks/months at most.

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And even if you could somehow build a solid ring (perhaps by making it out of scrith :P) it wouldn't remain in a stable "orbit" of Saturn.

This is a wonderful, simple explanation of machine learning, which is about 98% of what passes for AI.

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I haven't encountered the same reality in the herpetological circles I'm part of. Most researchers continue to use reptilia and reptile as terms, either including avian reptiles or excluding them with the understanding that they are technically a part of this group. You will find many herpetologists use reptile in the same context that sauropsid would be employed, but don't bother being extremely technically correct, given that everyone understands the intent.

u/noshowtho If you understand how a phased array can steer its output, then you are well on your way.

With a dish setup, all the energy for "pings" originates from a relatively concentrated point (which sometimes IS a small phased array) sitting at the focal point of the dish. You probably know that this is why dish systems have some sort of tripod or mechanical arm sitting out front, to hold the transmitter at that point. The transmitter "lights up" the dish, and the dish in turn focuses the emitted energy into a beam (with a major lobe). It's just like a flashlight, where the bulb throws off energy that is reflected and focused by the reflector behind it. Just like a flashlight, a dish antenna is aimed at targets by physically moving the dish around, although these days most dishes have a limited ability to do digital steering.

When the return signal (energy reflected off the target) comes back, the dish, being large, captures some of that energy and focuses it back on the focal point, onto a receiver sitting there. So the job of the dish is to take very low level energy arriving across a relatively large area and focus it down onto a specific point where the sensor sits. At this point it's operating a little like a telescope.

Unlike dish systems that transmit and receive energy from a concentrated point, phased arrays spread the transmit power out over many transmit modules arranged across a flat array. In the dish, the total power level out is the power of the one transmitter. In a phased array, the power out is the sum of the power of all the transmit modules.

For transmit, the phased array mimics the function of a dish by controlling the timing (phase) of the energy leaving each transmit module. This opens up all sorts of possibilities for creating different sorts of "pings" and avoids a lot of mechanical steering, as the array can be aimed digitally by controlling the energy coming from transmit modules individually.

Finally to your question. The return signal coming back to that flat phased array surface is again low level and spread across the entire array surface. But now, instead of a dish "multiplying" the intensity by focusing the energy like a telescope, the phased array simply sums the energy received at each receive module across the array surface. And since the returning wave front is captured at many point across the array, the post processing options are many times greater than that of a dish system.

The "better than" part of your question is significant. Better depends on what one is doing with the antenna system in the first place. Dish systems are relatively cheap, can be relatively simple, and depending on the scenario can outperform even really good phased arrays. But the electronic beam steering, beam forming capabilities, and post processing options for phased arrays make their expense and complexity worth it for many applications.

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Hard to tell, but arthropods are high on a lot of lunch menus so one would think predation cuts max lifespan short ( which is actually the case with most prey species since predators typically target the less fit meaning the old and the very young). It also depends if you count only the adult stage. Certain families, like mayflies have extremely short adult lifespans (days, its literally mate, spawn and die), so one could assume that more die if “old” age than through predation

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Right now, with the current engineering capabilities of humanity, we could get a probe to relativistic speeds fairly easily (in the sense of how many fundamental engineering problems would we need to solve).

If economics aren't a factor, i.e. humanity decides that its collective goal is to make a probe go brrrr as fast as possible towards a black hole, and everyone is working towards that goal (money is no object) then it's actually not that hard. We can send a probe up with a small mass and a huge surface area light-sail, then build high-power laser arrays all over the earth en-masse to point at it.

I haven't done the math, but you could get something up to at least 10% the speed of light this way, probably even 50%.

The bigger problem is a) if we want to send something that has enough mass to actually contain the necessary functionality to transmit back to us from that far, then it becomes much harder to achieve any relativistic speed, and b) it will probably destroy itself after colliding with a dust particle.

And of course thats on top of the fact we'd need to figure out how to power it, we wouldn't see results for 4500 years minimum, and the second it hits that event horizon its gone from our reality forever anyway.

Others covered chemical vs field storage, but there's also differences in practical useage. Capacitors work better for shorter term, rapid cycles, and large fast energy discharges. They can also correct power quality in a way batteries can't.

Batteries work better for long term storage, shallower discharge, and sustained energy conversion over a long time.

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We’ve only had our current birth interventions for a few generations. That’s not enough generations to make an evolutionary change.

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