Deep geological time isn't very relevant to human civilisations. The Fall Of Civilisations podcast has great long deep dives into what does threaten them, and the score is about 50:50 between climate change and Outside Context Problems.
Nuclear power stations have very slow demand response. That used to be done by gas peakers and hydro; in a decarbonised world that changes to battery peakers and hydro.
The carbon industry wants delay on decarbonisation. New nuclear projects are poster children for delay, because the industry has been mostly incompetent at shipping and lacks urgency.
It's a technology demonstrator, and one of the technologies it is demonstrating is "survive the night". Does the heating, panel and charge management all work as expected? Repeat! Then fly once the daily charge-state is understood.
The landing propellant comes from very small header tanks (to reduce slosh), and those tank sizes constrain how long they can run a landing burn. Future iterations may end up with a bigger header: these are still early prototypes.
Yes. The wacky back-seat epidemiology is new with the many vaccine candidates. Most people won't get an actual choice, they'll be offered what their healthcare provider offers and they can take it or leave it.
The UK has very simple ballots, though: one bit of paper, one pile to count. America has a whole raft of issues voted at the same time, which complicates counting sufficiently that machines are more attractive.
A year after the Curiosity rover, they were out of stock and being resold at a handy markup on ebay. Hopefully the 2020 rover will get a model too so I can get it in time. I'd advise not to sleep on this.