There is a photo on the page that shows the horizon from a landed position, that’s the one he’s referring to.
It links to, and is displayed, here; with no indication that it’s an artist’s take on what it would look like. It seems to be D. Mitchell’s stitching work from this Venera-13 clear-filter panoramic transmission with added perspective from the color-filter panoramic transmissions.
The possible reasons are all pretty bland; gravitational lensing, nebular refracting, or they weren’t stars at all but rather asteroids (with a vector of motion in-line to that of the LoS of the observation).
It’s not like these stars had ever been catalogued before the first plate, so its not like these objects were long-standing unchanging phenomena that suddenly disappeared. These are hour-long transients of which there have been hundreds recorded.
I think the argument you are making makes sense. Harm reduction and rehabilitation is the way, not this dumb prison system we have.
I believe you mistake an aspect of his argument. I don’t believe he meant to insinuate that prison and harm reduction are mutually exclusive, rather he says that the question is whether prison is punishment or harm reduction. If there’s no free will there’s no reason to punish, but there’s certainly reason to reduce the possibility of harm, and jailing an individual that is causing harm (and will continue to do so) is one way of doing that.
As someone else in this thread put it, if we could jail hurricanes to prevent them from doing harm, we would.
Different outcomes at an individual level supports the idea that individual humans are not exact copies existing in the exact same environment. If on the other hand different outcomes does support free will then the fact that electrons put through the same process (influences) can end up with different spin-states means that electrons have free will.
I don’t think you’ve quite understood ‘/s’. The author was not serious with his post and indicated this fact with ‘/s’. By definition it is sarcasm as that’s what the author defined it as.