Like you said, there’s a metric ton of steps involved in the overall process, and our understanding of each of these ‘levels’ of organization varies quite a bit. Closest to my personal expertise is the sub-cellular and cellular level, for which I would refer you books or papers in developmental biology, developmental genetics, and epigenetics. I can give you a couple bloopers to get you excited though:

When it comes to deciding where different organs will form (again, from a sub-cellular level), it essentially starts from a concentration gradient of certain proteins/chemicals inside the zygotic cell. This gradient then determines the level of activation of other proteins, each level then leading to different biochemical cascades which, once more cells have formed from the zygote, determine which organ systems will come from them. Messing around with this concentration gradient can, thus, dramatically affect an organism’s development, leading to, for example, a body with just ‘left’ organs on both halves, just ‘top’ organs on both halves, missing an entire organ system (like circulatory system and heart) and so on.

A more or less similar process occurs to determine the shape of organs. As a simple example, when some animals with regenerative capabilities (like axolotls) lose a limb, they are able to regrow the limb to the exact same length as before. Turns out, each cell on the periphery of their limb has a certain concentration of receptor proteins on its surface, which acts as a molecular ‘signature’ of that cell’s position in the limb. These signatures provide information on how far to grow the limb for regeneration, and some chemicals, lile retinol, can even override these signatures and fool the organism’s body into regrowing the limb from scratch on top of the place of regeneration.

I hope these examples give you an introduction to the mechanisms involved. There’s obviously a lot more involved, so I would again highly recommend textbooks and research papers if you’re interested.

That may be exactly what I need when searching for some highly technical problem lol

Huh I didn’t notice that. That does sound a bit weird :/

It’ll get more complex than that. I’m no expert, but I’m guessing you have to consider the depth of the crust at your location, type of soil and the distance from (and time since) the last closest volcanic eruption, possibly distance from the nearest tectonic boundary, maybe even tidal forces (assuming they have a considerable impact on magma being pushed out, but this may be a bit too far)

I’m not sure what exactly you’re looking for as an answer here. I’ll say that instead of looking for alternatives of science itself, we can list through the central tenets of science and then explore perspectives that counter one or more of those tenets. I’m not sure of the generally accepted list of tenets, so I’ll try coming up with what I think those are:

• observation: to understand the world around you, you need to be able to see/hear/feel it. Without this, you’re basically making up whatever you feel like (one could argue that the scientific method begins with a hypothesis followed by observations to test it, but the hypothesis itself has to be based in reality, which again requires prior observation of reality)
• logical reasoning: once you make observations, you try to make sense of them. You do this by applying logic on your observations. Alternative worldviews would say that this logical reasoning has no inherent advantage over, say, not having it, but those worldviews would be useless themselves because a) as far as we can tell, the world does follow logic; “the world around us doesn’t have to make sense, yet it does”, and b) if we were to still accept alternative worldviews that throw away logic, it would get us nowhere. Theories that disregard logic have no consistency and thus no utility whatsoever. You can say this about most (if not all) religions: one of the arguments I’ve heard a lot against atheism is that science is useless because it’s ‘incomplete’, hence God. But that essentially stops science in its tracks: saying we should throw away science and blindly accept any faith solely because science hasn’t solved everything already actively harms science from making progress, and the religions being presented as the alternatives don’t answer the same questions satisfactorily (or consistently) either.
• skepticism: this may partially overlap with the previous one. A huge part of the scientific method is to not blindly accept whatever is presented as model, or even observation, of the world around us. If an observation is objectively good, it should be possible to make basically the same observation by different people. If a model of reality is objectively good, it should match with the reality regardless of who tries to apply it. An alternative of this, like before, would be blind faith and superstition. Things like ‘miracles’ are not scientific because they cannot be (or at least have not been) repeatedly observed under controlled conditions. God as a model of reality is not scientific because it does not have much predictive power (as far as we can tell based on ‘prophecies’).

There may be more ways an alternative theory could try to counter science, but I think these points should give you an idea.

While I somewhat agree with your point about the upcoming wave of invasive AI, I don’t think adopting a digital hermit lifestyle is the best way through this. Think of it as the wave of PCs and smartphones: did a lot of people get negatively impacted by it? Sure, but did all (or even most) people who completely shunned the technology come out any better? Not necessarily. As this new technology became a central part of society in the past decades, the people who did the best were the ones who actively used it while simultaneously preventing themselves from…idk, developing a sort of mental dependence on it (though the degree to which most have succeeded in doing the latter is variable, the point still stays).

Now, is the upcoming AI wave the same as the smartphone wave? Well, not really. But are our options of tackling it the same? I’d say, basically yes. And that’s my point: it’s better to make use of this technology in ways that are less likely to backfire. Since the premise of your captology argument is that more invasive AI will be better in convincing us to buy products, this is, I’d argue, one of the perfect spots for FOSS alternatives. What if we do end up becoming addicted to some new AI app(s) that we know is (/are) manipulative? Look for alternatives not controlled by a corporation. It’s not the perfect option, but in my opinion it’s certainly better than completely boycotting the technology.

I guess that depends on what you were testing. If you were changing your email ID on one of your social media or other accounts, then it may become a bit of an issue, as compared to just sending yourself an email from your gmail account

4 might be pushing it, it’s still just GDDR7

There’s also https://www.fedi-search.com (haven’t tried it, but it supports various search engines in the backend)

I can think of a few things to point out here:

• water itself does not conduct electricity, it’s the ions present in an aqeous solution that transfer charges. So humidity itself would be pointless in a case where the water droplets don’t have charged ions present inside them.
• even if the droplets do have charged ions present, those ions would still need a way to transfer charges between those droplets through the air. That is only possible if either the air is too hot (basically plasma) or the charge density in the droplets is too high (essentially lightning, albeit a little different).
• another possibility for something like this to happen would be droplets condensing on exposed circuitry. If there happens to be live wires getting exposed through the walls, under the switches, or in an appliance, any droplets that get condensed at those spots would start conducting electricity (dust often has enough salts to allow such contaminated droplets to conduct electricity, but don’t quote me on that). Do note that the atmosphere in the bathroom would still be safe, it’s only the wet regions of the bathroom, like the floor and walls, that may conduct electricity.