I was looking for this comment and I’m glad someone got this one in promptly.

I was thinking Sabotage. Turn that scene from Star Trek Beyond into a reality.

How difficult asbestos remediation can be depends a lot on the situation. Regardless of the situation people working near or on asbestos require respirators, bunny suits, many vacuums, and more to handle asbestos safely. Not the best conditions to work in but definitely not the worst.

Where the work is being done says a lot about how difficult it’ll be. As an example take a single detached house, asbestos remediation wouldn’t be too difficult. The residents can leave the home so there’s less concern about inadvertently exposing the public. It gets a lot more difficult when the work is being done in say a train terminal for example. The terminal cannot be closed for a month so work must be done alongside the public. Now a whole system needs to be put it place. It becomes a lot easier to just leave the asbestos alone, as long as it’s not turned into a dust it’s not dangerous.

Unfortunately there’s a bit of pressure to osbficate the core idea of a publication in academia. While the ideal academics try to hold themselves to is to freely exchange information, for researchers who are paid to study very neiche topics there’s an insensitive to put some resistance into others entering their field. There is only so much funding and one more team means more competition. So some researchers who find themselves in that position will intentionally complicate their published work as a way to create a disincentive to others from crowding their field. It sucks but the reality is that funding and money come before the faithful pursuit of knowledge.

Also, some people just suck at writing.

Asbestos definitely causes inflammation when tissues are exposed to it, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone lick asbestos. One exposure wouldn’t do much. That said I’m pretty sure the act of picking asbestos up and bringing it to your face and breathing it in would be the most dangerous part of that.

Star Trek Voyager

I don’t know enough to answer that, sorry.

So scientists are not entirely certain about the heat death of the universe. The heat death is the most reasonable prediction given what we know but there could be a force acting across the universe that may very slowly reverse the expansion of the universe that we have yet to discover and cause a big crunch over a ridiculously large amount of time. The fact is predictions that far in the future aren’t really very useful.

While there can definitely be some legitimate discussion and ambiguity over which culture/country gets to inherit Mayan artifacts, for example, saying that the British, for example, should inherit it is a very weak argument. It’s not like the entirety of an extinct societies people just dropped dead. Some survived and after some time rebuilt new societies. Using Mayan artifacts as an example, Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras have a better claim to them then the British. It’s not propaganda or useless to say that items of cultural heritage should be returned.

So how about this what about-ism, if you live in the United States, the British took cultural artifacts from your lands too and aren’t giving them back right this moment. Where did you think all those native American artifacts in British museums came from? They didn’t make them and it’s not like North America was spared from British plundering. Might be nice to get that stuff back.

There is no moral grounds for stealing cultural artifacts. Even if it means the culture that rightfully possesses it wants to destroy it. That choice is entirely that cultures decision to make. Even if we disagree. It’s one thing to clutch your own pearls but so much worse to do that to someone else’s.

Technically 1 out of 1 people who undergo that procedure die, eventually. Same is true for people who elect not to have the procedure done, eventually.