> The US Navy has lasers on their ships that could pretty effortlessly shoot down slow fragile drones

Transposing to the current situation, the Belarus/Russians will surely figure out defenses an apply these, but they tie up personnel, generating a cost and a loss of effectiveness on the equipment defended.

This kind of military harassment strategy was used by the WW2 French resistance, and certainly dates deep back into history.

It also creates media noise, attracting attention where the adversary wants to remain discreet. And successfully so in this Russian "AWACS" case

> swallowed

The version I heard was the expanding sun loses mass leaving Earth beyond its grasp.

> swallowed / burned

So its changed again, having become uncertain.

and even that is ignoring options for stellar engineering (assuming our descendants even care)

> 1300 ?!?!

among 40 000 terminals in Ukraine. That's a temporary outage for one terminal in thirty.

The outage was caused by a problem between SpaceX and a British company, and its not even certain that SpaceX knew the terminals were intended for Ukraine.

Regarding the battlefront areas, the big deal is only providing service on territory currently held by Ukraine and taking account of military advances.

> you can see some very early social behaviors.

Here's a more cynical take on this:

As a chick, I'd do the same, hatching just after the first. So the first-hatched would keep any predator busy while I get out of my shell and improve my own chances of survival.

It compares to zebras running close-packed, each improving its individual chances because the lion will catch only one.

Edit: Thinking further, I concede that there could be a big overlap between social behavior and selfish gene survival. For example, the first to hatch could be helping out its siblings by offering itself up to a predator.