Ralph Bolton

It may be said that we already do have "extra senses", but we're just not very tuned into them. Perhaps "foresight" where you can predict events in the next few minutes (eg. "I'll bet X will call me about Y" just before the phone rings). Perhaps some sort of collective thought ("I was just going to say that!"), etc. No scientific basis for any of this, but it's possible we do have those senses, but very undeveloped and so too unreliable to measure. My point being that maybe we're actually already built to gain these senses, if someone magic'ed them onto us.

I wonder if the animal could just have a preference for salt water? Perhaps it's a particularly sweaty animal, so has a constant need to replace salt. Freshwater would be okay in a pinch, but salt water just tastes so much better.

A swapfile is considerably worse than a swap partition - even on an SSD. If you want a demo, try doing something memory intensive on a Raspberry Pi - actual RAM works just fine, but paging in/out to a swapfile is painfully slow in comparison. The odd page isn't really too much of an issue, but continuous swapping in/out will clobber the system so much that it's impossible to do anything meaningful with it.

I have no official information, but "the big guys" all categorise incoming traffic with different likelihood of being "spam" (ie. bots, hackers, etc). When you log on from (say) home, which you've done successfully for years, they'll probably allow you more leeway than if you log on from (say) a slimy Internet cafe which originates more "spammy" traffic than you do at home.

I suspect GDPR may have some part to play in all this too - I don't know the specifics, but if my company publishes a picture of George's number plate, I'm potentially disclosing private information.

I'd also add that UK plugs have to be roughly of the design in your picture. You occasionally see them without insulation on the live and neutral pins, or with insulation on the earth pin, or the sides of the plug sort of cut away to make it smaller (which means small fingers can get behind and touch the conductors) - all of which make it a bad cable (and in fact illegal to sell, although ebay/amazon sellers seem to get away with it quite regularly). I guess you may also get 13A fuses in 3A cables - either as-sold, or if the fuse was carelessly replaced by someone in the past. All bad - avoid!

If it's a super-earth, then it's a big planet, so has high gravity. That means your ship has to be bigger to displace enough water to overcome sinking. Whilst Polynesians and others did some amazing trips in small boats in Earth's history, they'd have had to build much larger boats to do it on a super-earth. That naturally pushes the lower bounds of technology up quite a bit as you now need to make much bigger structures to keep your boat from breaking up.

Mating requires the transfer of, and mixing of some pretty 'intimate' details about the parties doing the mating. We see even relatively close looking strains of animals unable to mate with each other, and on occasion there are humans pairs that just can't mate too. As such, I'd say the "not a chance" summary is likely accurate - unless two species happen to have evolved to the same point right now, but being light years apart for millennia. That sort of assumes they both started evolving at the same time, or else if one is evolving faster, then it may be able to mate today, but not next year.

I love the idea of using several shape-shifters to make it appear that 'godzilla' is in lots of places in quick succession, and supposedly 'untrapable' because whenever it appears to be in a trap it suddenly appears just outside it again.