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That's one aspect I was curious about... if the variants have to compete with each other in the same ecological niche. I would think there's enough unvaccinated people in the world that there would still be room for a new Delta infection. But does the presence of the newer, more contagious variants prevent it?

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There's a whole Einsteinian General Relativity answer here that I'll let other people give. But your question does remind me of a Newtonian idea. Basically after the speed of light was discovered but before Einstein came along, people asked your exact question: "What if a star is so dense that it's escape velocity exceeds the speed of light?" The answer is Dark Stars (AKA Newtonian Black Holes). To be clear, these objects don't exist in the real world, but they are fun to think about.

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I was under the impression that Omicron and later were better at evading immunity and that nothing worked in a lasting fashion against them - everything wanes fairly quickly.

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Are the current strains way less contagious? I lead a life that should make it really easy for me to contract the virus but I still haven’t caught it. I test myself whenever I slightly suspect I may be infected.

do all neutron stars collapse into a black hole?

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According to GR no, once inside the event horizon the singularity is no longer a point in space, it is a point in time. It is unavoidable, just like “next Wednesday” is unavoidable. The matter that composed the neutron star must collapse and encounter the singularity at some point in its future.

More speculative theories offer other solutions. String Theory, for example, proposes “Fuzz Balls”, so called because the event horizon would be “fuzzy” at the smallest scales. The interior of the BH would be a degenerate matter composed of the fundamental strings, not empty space. Obviously very speculative.

We need a theory of Quantum Gravity to better understand the interior of a BH.

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but this ends up being problematic in cases where I need to use a lot of heavy antibiotics, or c diff, a lot of diarrhea, etc.

It's a bit like asking if the wooly mammoth could come back.

Delta has for practical purposes "gone extinct", out competed by other, more successful variants.

At this point, it may only exist in a lab setting, where it could in theory be resurrected. It's only chance to persist really is with a little human help because more competitive strains are still out there on the landscape.

>Now that the appendix's usefulness has been discovered, isn't it dangerous to deliberately remove it?

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No. People who have their appendix removed typically have no problems. The current thinking that the appendix harbors beneficial bacteria is primarily relevant in cases where the rest of the beneficial bacteria in the intestines are mostly lost for some reason. If they are not, then having an appendix does not appear to make much difference.

We really don't know much about serotype specific waning immunity, it's likely we'll have robust long term immunity from the earlier variants like alpha and delta.

The whole issue of "re-infections" is that new serotypes keep emerging not that people keep getting reinfected with the same variant.

If anyone is interested in infectious disease news: r/ID_News

The gravity exerted on astronauts in the ISS is about 90% of what it exerts to a human at sea level. Being in orbit, the ISS and the astronauts in it are always falling.

Your question isn’t about the lack of gravity, rather it is asking about how the digestive system works in freefall.

Fair enough.

What are the impacts to one's health living without an appendix, though?

Anything inside the event horizon must reach the singularity in finite proper time (that is, time from its own point of view). However, events inside the horizon can never be in the (causal) past of an outside observer, so there is never a time at which an outside observer could say objectively that the neutron star is no longer there. Maybe that's what the claim was?

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I watched something that posited that the neuron star still exists in the black hole. I know the math goes to singularity but is it not possible the mass is still there?