For context, Diamond argues that the collapse occurred around 1600, much earlier than the 19th century slaving raids you mention. The first European contact occurred around 1720, with a 1770 Spanish estimate of 3000 people living on Easter Island. Honestly, it's not an outlandish thought that 887 gigantic statues were crafted by a larger population.
It's funny that lots of folks complain about the game being oversexualized while me and my partner - 120 hours in, in Act 3 now - somehow managed to completely fail triggering any romance subplots despite actually trying to raise approval of all the companions (okay maybe we gave up on Astarion). Not sure if it's a somewhat clunky split-screen handling of approval mechanics or just bad luck.
I was in a museum in Sardinia (was part of Carthage) sometime ago and saw some of the tophets mentioned in the article. The argument from the linked article was repeated on one of the info boards - that the Romans demonized their enemies and lots of our sources on alleged child sacrifice come from them. I am not sure about the Carthagenian sources on the matter, but they did not make it into the argument, so I assume the evidence was either slimmer or newer.
If a woman bears many children throughout her life, you can still have a situation where the first pregnancy occurs much earlier than today's average yet the overall conception average is roughly same as nowadays.
There was little support for joining NATO before Crimea was annexed. Ukraine wanted to join NATO precisely because it realized that it will be devoured piece by piece by its imperialist neighbor unless it does.
Zoomed-in part in the center, "1400 light-years across the centre of the Galaxy." as a linked paper indicates. Milky Way is long, 105700 light years in diameter.
The cost of Ariane 5 rocket is below $200m, which is a rather small fraction of the overall budget of $5-10b. If the main reason for the huge cost is to make it so lightweight, why didn't they go with more capable heavy-lift rockets to cut some R&D costs already? At least, Delta IV Heavy seems to have a significantly larger max. payload [1]. The JWST was still in re-planning phase as of 2005 and Delta IV Heavy was already operational at that point.
Around 5e-14 per year, assuming random impact location, small (i.e. not town-sized) projectiles, and head impact cross-section the size an A4 paper.
You can sleep safely. Waiting for 10^14 years will take a while - by that time, no new stars are born in Milkomeda, and the Sun's white dwarf remnant has cooled down to a point of no longer being visible by naked eye. (edit: of course, it's not reasonable to assume that the 500 impacts / year will be constant till the end of time)
Hitting a random human on Earth, though, is a munch higher likelihood - around 0.04% per year if I did my numbers right.
> It is worth speculating that a remarkable catastrophe, such as the destruction of Tall el-Hammam by a cosmic object, may have generated an oral tradition that, after being passed down through many generations, became the source of the written story of biblical Sodom in Genesis. The description in Genesis of the destruction of an urban center in the Dead Sea area is consistent with having been an eyewitness account of a cosmic airburst, e.g., (i) stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came down from the sky; (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv) a major city was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed; and (vi) area crops were destroyed.
I was playing around with MegaDetector and it's wonderful. Works surprisingly well, although it does have a tendency to classify tree stumps as animals. Wish it would come with some kind of sequence aware background removal feature.
https://www.skao.int/en/explore/big-data