For most fruits, the nutrition in the fruit is the plant's way of either providing their own seeds with resources in order for it to grow successfully - in which case the fruit will usually be protected from being eaten by other critters with toxic chemicals (like capsaicin), spines, or hard shells.

For other fruits, the sugar and other nutrients in the fruit are a bribe to other critters to get them to eat the seeds and poop them out somewhere else - a quick and easy way for a plant to both increase their dispersal range and get some free fertilizer.

So it's not so much a "trick" as much as it can be a transaction of mutual benefit to both species.

Humans have of course, hijacked both of these pathways for our own benefits. For one, we bizarrely actually enjoy being the victim of some of the chemical defenses that plants have derived. Many of our recreational activities and favourite cuisines revolve around selectively breeding some of the plants to produce even more of the defense chemicals!

We also breed them to produce fruit that is even bigger and sweeter, so we can get even more sugary bribes. Then we get upset when squirrels, birds and bugs try to take advantage of the same thing.

When he asks if you could do a better job, what he is asking is if we have no laws because they are as you say "a farce", what is your preferable and more equitable system that would replace the function of laws and regulations in our modern society?

I'm surprised they didn't cover this form of rhetoric in your many philosophy and law degrees.

I am extraordinarily skeptical that the temperature will actually decrease if all of the components are already at 0 C.

Which part isn't true?

But if the ice and the water are all at 0⁰ C, then they're going to stay at 0⁰ C no matter how much salt you pour in.

The only way the water goes below 0⁰ C is if the ice starts below zero.

So you're saying salt has the magical ability to violate conservation of energy?

Salt doesn't actually make the water colder. It just lowers the temperature at which a phase change happens.

Not really. Our entire biology and fossil history fits with the diversity of life in Earth.

As multicellular, deuterostome, bilateral, chordate vertebrates, osteichthyans, sarcoptergyians, tetrapods, synapsids, mammals, eutherians, primates, cercopithicoids, hominoids and hominids we have an entire branching and interlinked family history with all of the other life that shares our planet.

For any of that to make sense, that shared history would also have to be extraterrestrial, making the introduction billions of years ago at the very beginning of cellular life, and as such just adds more questions without actually answering anything.

Assuming you could figure out where you were on the map. That might not be as easy as it would seem. Getting a reasonable approximation to latitude wouldn't be that difficult, but beyond that there's not going to be any landmarks to tell you which continent you are on.

If it's in the Cenozoic or even parts of the Mesozoic you might get some biogeographic information from flora and fauna, but that's going to be sparser, and require some pretty specialized knowledge the further back you go. Those flora and fauna might even be your only real clue as to which time period you are in.

Ok, admittedly escape velocity will be a little different. In my examples above the escape velocity on the iron planet will be 1.7 times higher than on Earth, and on the water planet it will only be about 20% that of Earth's escape velocity, but it's close enough that for say, a fiction based on the Star Wars universe it will be much closer than anything actually used in the series.

And the strength of that field is determined by your distance from the center of that mass.

Y'all are making this far more complicated than it needs to be. For pretty much all important considerations, the only number you need to know is a planet's surface gravity. This will govern such things as the escape velocity, and anything actually relevant to living or adventuring on that planet, like how far you can throw a grenade, how high you can jump, or how many puppies you can carry.

My formula will give you a close enough measure of that surface gravity for any planet.

Edit: changed "calculation" to "formula", which is a more accurate description

Not actually just the mass. The distance between the center of mass to your center of mass has an effect as well. Therefore a dense planet will have a different surface gravity than a planet of the same mass that is built of lower density material.

If you know the diameter of the planet, and its average density it's fairly simple to calculate its surface gravity.

Take the planet's diameter (in miles), multiply by the average density (in g/cm3 or kg/l), and multiply that by 0.0000229

This will give you the surface gravity in G (where Earth's gravity = 1)

Earth has a diameter of about 8000 miles and density of 5.5. Thus, 1 G.

A planet the same size, but made of solid iron (density of 7.9) comes to 1.45 G

An Earth sized planet made entirely of water comes to 0.18 G

If they were afraid of Nimoy being attached looking too gimmicky, wouldn't having him play the villain make that much worse?