Wow, 14/24 that was more difficult than I thought. TBF I haven’t fully reread the Silmarillion since Middle School, but I didn’t expect it to be quite this hard.
They can’t make them non-reflective enough to not interrupt really deep observing. Also, that just shifts the problem around. If they are absorbing in the visible, they will likely have huge amounts of blackbody radiation in IR, sub/millimeter, and radio. You would need to make a satellite out of dark matter to not interrupt astronomy.
Man, I just went to a good seminar today on finding habitable exoplanets that emphasized that we currently need ground based telescopes, because it is still impractical to make 30+ meter telescopes in space and would be very expensive, even if could be done. But progress is just launching a bunch of bullshit into orbit to avoid real investment in infrastructure like fiber and other telecommunication lines.
sci-hub has already been mentioned, but I will say that though it is not piracy, depending on the field, you can find free version “pre-prints” of papers on arxiv.org and socarxiv.org
But imagine the quality of service. Unfortunately, the rice in the back kitchen has been spilled, and no food will be prepared until the staff counts all the grains of rice.
Even the wikipedia article on LGBT rights in Germany, despite being very slanted and anti-communist, admit that West Germany had no national progress in gay rights until after the cold war. Saying the West/West Germany was more progressive and tolerant is just straight up false.