Where have you lived? I've never had a landlord ask for last month's rent up front, but I don't know the norms in all 50 states.

You're tired of the number?

They do trap air. You tape them to the frame, so there's an air layer between the window pane and the plastic.

It sounds like you're describing something that you'd stick directly to the glass. That's another option, but AFAIK it helps less than the air-trap type of plastic sheeting.

Hydroponics? Starter pack of bacteria to condition the soil on the new world? Maybe there's already soil there that would be suitable with some prep work? We can't actually get a close enough look to say whether any given exoplanet is a lifeless rock or not. Any such colony ship would surely be preceded by a survey probe, so the robots would draw water from the environment.

And yes, I know they don't send literal cans of soup into orbit. I'm sure you can forgive a convenient turn of phrase even if it wouldn't be part of a technical specification for NASA.

Slow communication is still interaction. If I write a letter and send it to my mother via snail mail, does her response not count as 'interacting'? That seems like a silly way to twist the meaning of the word. That being said, communication with a 20-ish-year latency (now thinking of places like Wolf 359 or Ross 128) would be a different model than what we have now.

Actually, that raises another practical issue. How do you send a coherent signal over such great distances? Directional radio antenna? Laser comms? The power levels and precision needed to make a direct transmission work might not be feasible. OTOH, you could launch relay probes at regular intervals to simplify the problem, so it wouldn't be insurmountable.

There's definitely the risk that an "early" colony vessel would be completely obsolete by time it arrived. I read a story a while back where humanity sent a diplomatic mission to an alien homeworld via a coldsleep ship. While they were having tea with the alien emperor, Earth's first FTL ship arrived! Definitely the kind of stuff that would make some aerospace engineers despair.

> no humans on earth would ever ... interact

> text message exchange would take 9 earth years

These contradict each other.

> decades worth of food, etc.

The OP proposed sending frozen embryos and a seed bank. Who's eating the 20+ year supply of Campbell's chicken soup?

> Earth humans have nothing to gain

Self-fulfilling prophecy? If you can't imagine that you have anything to gain by exploration, you won't become an explorer.

Finally, I'll repeat my question from my earlier comment: What distinction were you trying to make between 'fiction' and 'science fiction'? I'm still not sure what you meant by that.

> more like fiction than science fiction

What's the distinction you're trying to make here? My first reactions are "All science fiction is fiction" and "the OP's plot certainly qualifies as science fiction". So...I think I'm missing your point.

As to new physics, I'm 50/50 on that. On one hand, I think it's physically possible to send a probe to a neighboring star system. Something between a nuclear thermal rocket, xenon thrusters, and a solar sail could probably do the trick.

If you have the propulsion to get a probe to another star, you can certainly pack some frozen embryos and seed banks. The robots we have make that part plausible, and uploading minds into computers has been around for a bit.

OTOH, even if all of the pieces here are technically possible, I doubt that our culture would be willing to sink in the investment required. If the payoff time is 500 years, who's going to make that sacrifice now? We could be facing a civilization collapse in a fraction of that time.

You know how fireworks flash different colors? We put different things in the fireworks to make different colors. Aluminum burns white, barium burns green, etc.

The same thing is true in stars. We basically look at the light coming from a star, count up the mixture of colors we see, do some complicated math, and that gives us an estimate of what it's doing.

If you want more detail than my crude eli5 can give you, read up on spectroscopy.

Whatever you do, don't stain in your basement. I used to live in a duplex, and the neighbors decided to stain some furniture in February. I nearly passed out from the stench!

Caused problems in the bedroom. It turns out there IS such a thing as lasting too long :\

There are lots of different antidepressants. Read the comments on this thread. Sertraline doesn't work for everyone, and that's the point of the study, to better forecast which meds will work for which patients.

I had the opposite experience. It was VERY effective at helping with my depression, but oh God, the side effects were awful.

Tapering off it was as easy as starting it for me.