Gentlemen, Ladies and those otherwise addressed - we know you've been waiting for a good thing, and the survey results are finally ready!
The answers were collected from you all during August 2020 with 1428 unique replies. That's a participation of 0.5% of all subscribers! That's really not too bad, when you keep in mind how popular these kind of surveys are. But we here at /peloton want to show you that this is all about presenting the information in the subreddit to cater better to our audience!
Updated after a few hours to include some ~~more historical data~~ the final edit that for some reason wasn't copied properly

Year	2013	2014	2015	2016	2018 Mar	2018 Aug	2019	2020
Results	2013-06-12	2014-06-25	2015-08-07	2016-11-17	2018-03-06	2018-08-20	2019-07-22	2020-10-12
Replies	351	598	1395	892	630	928	986	1428

Without further ado, let's get cracking on the response

You and Cycling

1. Where do you live?

Country	2015	2016	2018 Mar	2018 Aug	2019	2020
USA	32%	28.3%	22.84%	25.32%	20.23%	24.59%
UK	18.6%	17.6%	14.70%	20.13%	15.48%	14.80%
Netherlands	6.4%	9.4%	11.50%	11.58%	10.01%	11.01%
Germany	3.73%	3.4%	4.95%	6.39%	7.84%	6.65%
Denmark	3.9%	3.6%	4.31%	3.79%	7.64%	5.79%
Belgium	3.8%	2.7%	8.15%	3.57%	5.78%	5.36%
France	2.01%	1.08%	2.88%	2.27%	5.26%	3.50%
Canada	4.9%	7%	6.39%	4.22%	4.95%	4.50%
Australia	5.2%	4.7%	3.83%	4.00%	4.33%	3.93%
Slovenia		0.73%	0.32%	1.30%	1.14%	2.14%
Norway	2.58%	1.8%	1.60%	1.95%	2.58%	1.86%
Sweden	1.08%	1.09%	1.44%	1.41%	1.75%	1.43%
Ireland	1.00%	1.09%	1.44%	1.19%	0.72%	1.36%
Portugal	1.65%	1.8%	2.40%	1.52%	1.34%	1.14%
Italy		1.45%	1.44%	0.65%	1.03%	1.07%

Largely the same picture as ever, with the US leading the way, the UK in second and then a sliding scale of Europeans countries. Slovenia continues to pick its way up the pile for obvious reasons!
World Map to demonstrate

2. What's your age?

	u17	17-19	20-25	26-30	31-35	36-40	41-50	51+	Total
2015	2.22%	12.04%	41.51%	24.66%	10.68%	4.87%	2.94%	1.08%	1395
2016	1.5%	8.9%	40.8%	24%	12%	5.4%	5.2%	2%	887
2018 Mar	1%	7.1%	33.5%	27.4%	16.2%	7%	5.7%	2.1%	617
2018 Aug	1.7%	9%	33.9%	26.4%	15.5%	7%	5%	1.5%	905
2019	1.5%	6.6%	33.2%	27.5%	16.4%	7.1%	5.8%	2%	972
2020	1.3%	6.8%	31.7%	28%	16.6%	7.2%	5%	2.5%	1420

Pretty much the same as last year, with the usual reddit demographics of majority 20 somethings dominating.

3. What's your gender?

	'13	'14	'15	'16	'18 (1)	'18 (2)	'19	'20
Male	97.2%	97%	94.9%	93.4%	93.3%	93.6%	95.1%	94.9%
Female	2.8%	2.7%	4.8%	5.3%	5.3%	5.4%	3.7%	4.8%
Other	-	0.33%	0.29%	0.78%	0.76%	-	-
Non-Binary	-	-	-	-	0.64%	0.99%	1.2%	0.4%

More normality here for reddit.

4. How much of the men's season do you watch/follow?

Type	March '18 (%)	August '18 (%)	2019 (%)	2020 (%)
Grand Tours	84.7	92.0	90.2	87.3
Monuments	79.1	74.9	79	75.9
WT Stage races	67.4	62.4	70.5	71.7
WT One day races	73.3	59.8	62.3	60.7
Non WT Stage races	32.6	16.7	17.4	25
Non WT One day races	34.8	13.7	17.4	20.7
Literally everything I can consume	35.9	18.1	21.1	27.1

Whilst GT following may be down (somehow), all the lower level stuff is up, which makes sense considering how desperate we have been for any racing during the season shutdown.

5. Do you maintain an interest in women's professional road racing?

Do you maintain an interest in women's professional road racing?	'19	'20
Yes	49.8	49.2
No	50.2	50.8

Still very much a half/half interest in women's cycling on the subreddit.

6. How much of the women's season do you follow?

The following is true for the half of you that follows womens cycling.

How Much	%
Just the biggest televised events	63.15%
Most of the live televised/delayed coverage stuff	29.08%
All televised racing	5.09%
Down to .Pro & beyond	2.69%

7. How long have you been watching cycling?

How Long	%
Under a year	2,95%
1-3 years	19,50%
4-6 years	19,85%
7-9 years	14,10%
10-12 years	13,81%
13-15 years	7,15%
15-20 years	10,73%
20-25 years	6,17%
25 years +	5,75%

Simplified the years a little this time, but whilst we have a fair number of newbies, most people have picked the sport up since around 2013/14.

Sporting Favourites

8. Do you have like/dislike feelings about WT teams?

Once more, 14.4% of people really don't have feelings on the subject.
Of those that do:

	AG2R	Astana	Bahrain	Bora	CCC	Cofidis	Quick-Step	EF	FDJ
Like	352	213	127	770	156	116	847	724	423
Meh	775	620	773	415	889	896	310	448	700
Dislike	52	356	263	31	112	141	71	37	53
Karma	300	-143	-70	739	44	-25	776	677	370

	Israel	Lotto	Michelton	Movistar	NTT	Ineos	Jumbo	Sunweb	Trek	UAE
Like	135	364	517	231	101	304	925	279	383	118
Meh	740	764	626	646	931	414	282	805	765	734
Dislike	302	40	52	326	121	562	53	97	42	331
Karma	-167	324	465	-95	-20	-258	872	182	341	-213

So, the most popular team this year is Jumbo-Visma, followed by Quick-Step & Bora-hansgrohe. Least popular are Ineos & UAE.
As per usual, no one cares about NTT & CCC, with nearly 81% of users rating NTT as meh. Pretty damning stuff.
Lastly, we have the usual historical comparison of how teams have fared over time, normalised to respondents to that question on the survey.
Things to note then, firstly that the Astana redemption arc is over, seeing them back in the negative, maybe Fulgsangs spring issues helped aid that? The petrodollar teams of UAE & Bahrain are stubbornly negative too, with Israel keeping up the Katusha negative streak. Meanwhile, at the top end, EF & Jumbo go from strength to strength, whilst some others like Sunweb are sliding over time - their transfer policies no doubt helping that.

10. Do you ride a bike regularly?

Answer	2018^Mar	2018^Aug	2019	2020
For fun	61.5%	63.4%	59.9%	62.9%
For fitness	59.3%	59.6%	54.8%	59.8%
For commuting	46%	46%	45.6%	40%
For racing	20.6%	20.6%	15.9%	17.7%
No, I don't	14.2%	12.9%	14.8%	13.6%

Still a fairly small group of racers out of all of us

11. Out of the sports you practice, is cycling your favourite?

Yes	No
58,29%	41,71%

A new addition to the survey prompted by a good point last time, just over half of us rate cycling as the favourite sport we actually do.

12. What other sports do you follow?

Sport	#
Association Football / Soccer	50.78%
Formula 1	35.81%
American Football	26.27%
Basketball	22.46%
Track & Field	17.58%
Esports (yes, this includes DotA)	17.30%
Rugby	14.27%
Skiing	14.12%
Ice Hockey	13.63%
Baseball	12.15%
Motorsports (Not including F1)	10.59%
Cricket	10.52%
Tennis	9.53%
Chess	8.97%
Triathlon	8.69%
Biathlon	8.12%
Snooker	7.06%
Golf	6.92%
Swimming	6.85%
Ski Jumping	6.78%
Climbing	5.72%
Martial Arts	5.65%
Handball	5.44%
Darts	5.01%
Speed Skating	5.01%

Football always tops the charts, and Formula 1 continues to rank extremely highly among our userbase. Those who have a little following below 5% include Sailing, Fencing, Surfing, Boxing & Ultra-Running.
Other cycling disciplines

Sport	#
Cyclocross	22.10%
Track Cycling	14.34%
MTB	8.97%
BMX	1.20%

13. Out of the sports you follow, is cycling your favourite sport?

Yes	No
61.79%	38,21%

Good. Makes sense if you hang out here.

Subreddit stats

14. How often do you participate in a /Peloton Race Thread whilst watching a race?

	2015	2016	2018^Mar	2018^Aug	2019	2020
I always participate in Race Threads during races	2.8%	2%	2.2%	4%	2.5%	3%
I follow Race Threads during races	41.7%	36.7%	38.1%	42.1%	42.5%	38.9%
I often participate in Race Threads during races	16.8%	19%	16.5%	18.9%	15.2%	13%
I rarely/never participate in Race Threads during races	38.7%	41.3%	43.1%	35%	39.8%	45.1%

Slightly less invested than before, reverting back to an older trade.

15. How do you watch Races?

Method	2018^Mar	2018^Aug	2019	2020
Pirate Streams	62%	46.5%	50.2%	47.9%
Free Local TV	55.7%	64.5%	59.6%	53.9%
Desperately scrabbling for Youtube highlights	37.9%	30.2%	28.2%	24.9%
Paid Streaming services	32.3%	35.4%	38.3%	46.3%

Year on year, paid streaming services go up - the increasing availability of live content legally continues to improve, and so do the numbers on the survey.

16. Where else do you follow races live (in addition to watching them)?

Type	2018^Mar	2018^Aug	2019	2020
/Peloton race threads	86.2%	83.4%	80.2%	76.9%
Twitter	30.5%	34.7%	33.3%	38.3%
PCS Liveticker	-	-	30.2%	32%
Official tracker (if available)				24%
The Cyclingnews liveticker	26%	23.5%	21.5%	18.9%
Sporza (site/ticker)	1.89%	9.5%	10.8%	10.8%
NOS Liveblog	-	6.8%	7%	9.2%
Steephill	0.52%	13.5%	10.2%	8.2%
/Peloton discord	6.5%	5.4%	7.5%	7.2%
Other cycling forums	15.1%	8.1%	7.6%	7%
feltet.dk	-	2.2%	5.4%	5.2%
Facebook	3.8%	5.4%	4%	4.2%
BBC Ticker	-	3.5%	2.1%	4.1%
DirectVelo	-	1.3%	1.6%	1.8%
Non Cycling Forums	-	1.3%	1.2%	1.2%
/cyc/	-	1.3%	1%	0.6%
/peloton IRC	~0	0.8%	0.4%	0.5%

The PCS liveticker continues to have a strong following, whilst the cyclingnews ticker slowly slides into less usage over time.

17. Do you use /Peloton mostly in classic reddit or redesign when on the desktop?

Type	2018 Aug	2019	2020
Classic	75.1%	67.2%	46.2%
Redesign	24.9%	32.8%	53.8%

Time to abandon ship. The end has come.

18. With what version of reddit do you browse the sub?

Version	2019	2020
Official App	17.9	31.1
Desktop Classic	37.8	25.8
3rd Party App	18.3	17.2
Mobile Web	12.4	14.7
Desktop Redesign	13.7	11.2

Phone browsing is very much in vogue.

19. How did you find the sub?

How	%
Through other forms of reddit, f.e. /bicycling	48.33%
Too long - can't remember	38.65%
Google search	9,11%
My friend told me	2,28%
I wanted to talk about my exercise bike	0.78%
Twitter	0.5%
Lantern Rouge Youtube	0.28%

Other bits and bobs

20. Did you think back in March we would see any more racing this year?

Yes	No
52,81%	47,19%

Despite the threat, we have seen racing again

21. Will we manage to fulfill the rest of the UCI calendar without further Covid-19 issues postponing more races?

Yes	No
25.3%	74.7%

Sorry to you 25%, Amstel, Roubaix & a bunch of other races have falled foul of COVID-19 related cancellations.

22. When did you become aware of Alexander Foliforov?

When	%
Before the 2016 Giro	3,25%
22nd May, 2016	15,55%
On /pelotonmemes in 2020	21,13%
Who?	60,07%

If you didn't know of the man, watching him demolish the Giro field in 2016 on the stage 15 ITT should help to gain understanding

23. Who will win the 2020 Tour de France?

Rider	%
Roglic	52,12%
Bernal	16,57%
Pinot	9,24%
Dumoulin	7,9%
N.Quintana	2,82%
Pogacar	1,41%
Richie Porte	0,35%

We can safely say that most of us were wrong about this one.
That's not a lot of confidence in Richie Porte either, the man who was to finish on the third spot of the podium. Alexander Foliforov (0,23%) had just a tiny number of votes less, and that man wasn't even in the race.

24. What for you was the defining cycling moment of the previous decade?

We had a lot of brilliant suggestions, but these were the clear five favourites when we tabulated the results.

2018 Giro - Chris Froome Solo Attack
2016 TDF - Chris Froome Running up Ventoux
2019 TDF - Landslides, First Columbian Winner, Pinot's bitter abandon - This was one race for the ages
2016 Paris-Roubaix - Mostly known for Tom Boonen losing. Also, some guy called Mat won.
2019 AGR - MvdP with his incredible catch-up for the win.

Honorable mentions go to the Giro 2018, which had Tom Dumoulin winning, and of almost identical fascination to many of you - Tom Dumoulin going on someones porta-potty in the middle of the stage.
Little bit of recency bias perhaps, but that's better than ignoring that this was for the last decade and firmly insisting Tom Boonens 2005 WC win was the biggest thing. Special shoutout to almost all the Danes present in /peloton who voted for Mads Pedersens WC win last year. It's an understandable reaction.

25. Any suggestions for the Survey?

New Questions

Could you add a section on rider popularity, same as for the teams?
Ask how people became interested in cycling
Ask how people watch cycling (e.g. TV Channels/Streaming etc.)
If you could be an animal for one day, which one would it be?
Would you wear a facemask while watching a cycling race live?
Which race do you look forward to see the most every year?
Favourite riders of your own country?
How many bikes do you own?

We promise to feature one of these suggestions in the next survey
Suggestions

Always have a “no” or “not interested” option

We will try to implement this. But it will also skew results.
About the Survey

More questions about womens cycling would be nice.

Less questions about womens cycling

The subscribers are torn on Women's cycling, nearly a 50/50 split there as the survey showed - The moderators at /peloton are firmly in the "more cycling is better" basket, and we will continue to get as good coverage of womens cycling as possible.

Ask about pelotoncycles membership crossover.

Are you trying to give the moderators PTSD? Because this is how you give the moderators PTSD.

26. Any suggestions for the sub?

More stationary fitness bike related content

ALSJFLKAJSLDKJAØLSJKD:M:CSAM)=#/()=#=/")¤=/)! - Your moderator seems to be out of function. Please stand by while we find you a new moderator

Beginner guides

The Weekly threads are great for these types of questions, where several people can contribute and build up once it is understood which information is relevant.

Allow limited doping talk in result threads.

Our experience is that "limited" will never be so, if we're going to moderate it fairly. Moderating is not a popularity contest, but believe it or not, we're actually trying to be as fair as possible. and for that, we need rules that are not subjective. Unless you have a stationary exercise bike.

Written original content is always great - recaps, old race reviews or interesting rider bios, etc.

More non-race threads

Podcast discussion?

Try and do some AMAs with pro cyclists, coaches, trainers, etc

All of these are good suggestions, but remember that all of you can also contribute - The mods are sometimes stretched thin, specially in the middle of hectic race schedules. It's easier if one of you has a way to contact a rider or a person of interest and can facilitate the initial communication.

Standardize major event thread titles for better search.

We've worked on this! The Official Standard is now as follows: [Race Thread] 202x Race Name – Stage X (Class)

A wiki that explains how races work. Roles of diff riders/support staff. History of racing.

This sounds as a nice community project for the after-season, and hopefully many of you subscribers can contribute.

Tidy up the sidebar!

Come with suggestions on how to tidy it up!

Don't assume everyone reading is a man, "thanks, bro". But that goes for all of Reddit. I know you can't fix that.

We have chastised all the mods. They are now perfectly trained in gender-neutral pronouns. Be well, fellow being.

Have a buy you a beer link for the mods for all the work you do.

If we can implement this for hard liquor, you know we will.

Remove the spoiler rule during grand tours. It kills the hype.

The spoiler rule is one that is discussed frequently - in general - some users absolutely hate it, but a majority love it. Perhaps we'll include a question in the next survey to see how this divide is exactly.

Lose the spoiler tag when it is for serious things; Lambrecht death, Jakobsen fall.

We actually do - whenever there is a matter of life or death, we think public information is more important than a spoiler rule. But at the same time, we try to collect all the different posts into one main thread, so to keep things focused and letting very speculative posts meet with hard evidence from other sources.

Less downvoting of opinions that differ from the fashionable consensus.

This is a tough ask of the internet. While we can agree that voting should be done accordingly to what insights they bring, not subjective opinions, it is very hard to turn that type of thinking around. We can ask of you, our subscribers, that you please think twice about hitting that downvote button, and only do so because of you think a post is factually incorrect, not because it differs with your own subjective opinion.
That's the primary analysis of the survey! Feel free to contribute with how you experience things here!

Subreddit Demographic Survey 2020 : The Results

2020 Childfree Subreddit Survey

1. Introduction

Once a year, this subreddit hosts a survey in order to get to know the community a little bit and in order to answer questions that are frequently asked here. Earlier this summer, several thousand of you participated in the 2020 Subreddit Demographic Survey. Only those participants who meet our wiki definition of being childfree's results were recorded and analysed.
Of these people, multiple areas of your life were reviewed. They are separated as follows:

Child Status
General Demographics
Education Level
Career and Finances
Location
Religion and Spirituality
Sexual and Romantic Life
Childhood and Family Life
Sterilisation
Childfreedom
State of the Subreddit

2. Methodology

Our sample is redditors who saw that we had a survey currently active and were willing to complete the survey. A stickied post was used to advertise the survey to members.

3. Results

The raw data may be found via this link.
7305 people participated in the survey from July 2020 to October 2020. People who did not meet our wiki definition of being childfree were excluded from the survey. The results of 5134 responders, or 70.29% of those surveyed, were collated and analysed below. Percentages are derived from the respondents per question.

General Demographics

Age group

Age group	Participants	Percentage
18 or younger	309	6.02%
19 to 24	1388	27.05%
25 to 29	1435	27.96%
30 to 34	1089	21.22%
35 to 39	502	9.78%
40 to 44	223	4.35%
45 to 49	81	1.58%
50 to 54	58	1.13%
55 to 59	25	0.49%
60 to 64	13	0.25%
65 to 69	7	0.14%
70 to 74	2	0.04%

82.25% of the sub is under the age of 35.

Gender and Gender Identity

Age group	Participants #	Percentage
Agender	62	1.21%
Female	3747	73.04%
Male	1148	22.38%
Non-binary	173	3.37%

Sexual Orientation

Sexual Orientation	Participants #	Percentage
Asexual	379	7.39%
Bisexual	1177	22.93%
Heterosexual	2833	55.20%
Homosexual	264	5.14%
It's fluid	152	2.96%
Other	85	1.66%
Pansexual	242	4.72%

Birth Location

Because the list contains over 120 countries, we'll show the top 20 countries:

Country of birth	Participants #	Percentage
United States	2775	57.47%
United Kingdom	367	7.60%
Canada	346	7.17%
Australia	173	3.58%
Germany	105	2.17%
Netherlands	67	1.39%
India	63	1.30%
Poland	57	1.18%
France	47	0.97%
New Zealand	42	0.87%
Mexico	40	0.83%
Brazil	40	0.83%
Sweden	38	0.79%
Finland	31	0.64%
South Africa	30	0.62%
Denmark	28	0.58%
China	27	0.56%
Ireland	27	0.56%
Phillipines	24	0.50%
Russia	23	0.48%

90.08% of the participants were born in these countries.
These participants would describe their current city, town or neighborhood as:

Region	Participants #	Percentage
Rural	705	13.76
Suburban	2661	51.95
Urban	1756	34.28

Ethnicity

Ethnicity	Participants #	Percentage
African Descent/Black	157	3.07%
American Indian or Alaskan Native	18	0.35%
Arabic/Middle Eastern/Near Eastern	34	0.66%
Bi/Multiracial	300	5.86%
Caucasian/White	3946	77.09%
East Asian	105	2.05%
Hispanic/Latinx	271	5.29%
Indian/South Asian	116	2.27%
Indigenous Australian/Torres Straight IslandeMaori	8	0.16%
Jewish (the ethnicity, not religion)	50	0.98%
Other	32	0.63%
Pacific IslandeMelanesian	4	0.08%
South-East Asian	78	1.52%

Education

Highest Current Level of Education

Highest Current Level of Education	Participants #	Percentage
Associate's degree	233	4.55%
Bachelor's degree	1846	36.05%
Did not complete elementary school	2	0.04%
Did not complete high school	135	2.64%
Doctorate degree	121	2.36%
Graduated high school / GED	559	10.92%
Master's degree	714	13.95%
Post Doctorate	19	0.37%
Professional degree	107	2.09%
Some college / university	1170	22.85%
Trade / Technical / Vocational training	214	4.18%

Degree (Major)	Participants #	Percentage
Architecture	23	0.45%
Arts and Humanities	794	15.54%
Business and Economics	422	8.26%
Computer Science	498	9.75%
Education	166	3.25%
Engineering Technology	329	6.44%
I don't have a degree or a major	1028	20.12%
Law	124	2.43%
Life Sciences	295	5.77%
Medicine and Allied Health	352	6.89%
Other	450	8.81%
Physical Sciences	199	3.89%
Social Sciences	430	8.41%

Career and Finances

The top 10 industries our participants are working in are:

Industry	Participants #	Percentage
Information Technology	317	6.68%
Health Care	311	6.56%
Education - Teaching	209	4.41%
Engineering	203	4.28%
Retail	182	3.84%
Government	172	3.63%
Admin & Clerical	154	3.25%
Restaurant - Food Service	148	3.12%
Customer Service	129	2.72%
Design	127	2.68%

Note that "other", "I'm a student", "currently unemployed" and "I'm out of the work force for health or other reasons" have been disregarded for this part of the evaluation.
Out of the 3729 participants active in the workforce, the majority (1824 or 48.91%) work between 40-50 hours per week with 997 or 26.74% working 30-40 hours weekly. 6.62% work 50 hours or more per week, and 17.73% less than 30 hours.
513 or 10.13% are engaged in managerial responsibilities (ranging from Jr. to Sr. Management).
On a scale of 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest), the overwhelming majority (3340 or 70%) indicated that career plays a very important role in their lives, attributing a score of 7 and higher.
1065 participants decided not to disclose their income brackets. The remaining 4,849 are distributed as follows:

Income	Participants #	Percentage
$0 to $14,999	851	21.37%
$15,000 to $29,999	644	16.17%
$30,000 to $59,999	1331	33.42%
$60,000 to $89,999	673	16.90%
$90,000 to $119,999	253	6.35%
$120,000 to $149,999	114	2.86%
$150,000 to $179,999	51	1.28%
$180,000 to $209,999	25	0.63%
$210,000 to $239,999	9	0.23%
$240,000 to $269,999	10	0.25%
$270,000 to $299,999	7	0.18%
$300,000 or more	15	0.38%

87.85% earn under $90,000 USD a year.
65.82% of our childfree participants do not have a concrete retirement plan (savings, living will).

Religion and Spirituality

Faith Originally Raised In

There were more than 50 options of faith, so we aimed to show the top 10 most chosen beliefs.

Faith	Participants #	Percentage
Catholicism	1573	30.76%
None (≠ Atheism. Literally, no notion of spirituality or religion in the upbringing)	958	18.73%
Protestantism	920	17.99%
Other	431	8.43%
Atheism	318	6.22%
Agnosticism	254	4.97%
Anglicanism	186	3.64%
Judaism	77	1.51%
Hinduism	75	1.47%
Islam	71	1.39%

This top 10 amounts to 95.01% of the total participants.

Current Faith

There were more than 50 options of faith, so we aimed to show the top 10 most chosen beliefs:

Faith	Participants #	Percentage
Atheism	1849	36.23%
None (≠ Atheism. Literally, no notion of spirituality or religion currently)	1344	26.33%
Agnosticism	789	15.46%
Other	204	4.00%
Protestantism	159	3.12%
Paganism	131	2.57%
Spiritualism	101	1.98%
Catholicism	96	1.88%
Satanism	92	1.80%
Wicca	66	1.29%

This top 10 amounts to 94.65% of the participants.

Level of Current Religious Practice

Level	Participants #	Percentage
Wholly seculanon religious	3733	73.73%
Identify with religion, but don't practice strictly	557	11.00%
Lapsed/not serious/in name only	393	7.76%
Observant at home only	199	3.93%
Observant at home. Church/Temple/Mosque/etc. attendance	125	2.47%
Strictly observant, Church/Temple/Mosque/etc. attendance, religious practice/prayeworship impacting daily life	56	1.11%

Effect of Faith over Childfreedom

Figure 1

Effect of Childfreedom over Faith

Figure 2

Romantic and Sexual Life

Current Dating Situation

Status	Participants #	Percentage
Divorced	46	0.90%
Engaged	207	4.04%
Long term relationship, living together	1031	20.10%
Long term relationship, not living with together	512	9.98%
Married	1230	23.98%
Other	71	1.38%
Separated	18	0.35%
Short term relationship	107	2.09%
Single and dating around, but not looking for anything serious	213	4.15%
Single and dating around, looking for something serious	365	7.12%
Single and not looking	1324	25.81%
Widowed	5	0.10%

Childfree Partner

Is your partner childfree? If your partner wants children and/or has children of their own and/or are unsure about their position, please consider them "not childfree" for this question.

Partner	Participants #	Percentage
I don't have a partner	1922	37.56%
I have more than one partner and none are childfree	3	0.06%
I have more than one partner and some are childfree	35	0.68%
I have more than one partner and they are all childfree	50	0.98
No	474	9.26%
Yes	2633	51.46%

Dating a Single Parent

Would the childfree participants be willing to date a single parent?

Answer	Participants #	Percentage
No, I'm not interested in single parents and their ties to parenting life	4610	90.13%
Yes, but only if it's a short term arrangement of some sort	162	3.17%
Yes, whether for long term or short term, but with some conditions (must not have child custody, no kid talk, etc.), as long as I like them and long as we're compatible	199	3.89%
Yes, whether for long term or short term, with no conditions, as long as I like them and as long as we are compatible	144	2.82%

Childhood and Family Life

On a scale from 1 (very unhappy) to 10 (very happy), how would you rate your childhood?
Figure 3
Of the 5125 childfree people who responded to the question, 67.06% have a pet or are heavily involved in the care of someone else's pet.

Sterilisation

Sterilisation Status

Sterilisation Status	Participants #	Percentage
No, I am not sterilised and, for medical, practical or other reasons, I do not need to be	869	16.96%
No. However, I've been approved for the procedure and I'm waiting for the date to arrive	86	1.68%
No. I am not sterilised and don't want to be	634	12.37%
No. I want to be sterilised but I have started looking for a doctorequested the procedure	594	11.59%
No. I want to be sterilised but I haven't started looking for a doctorequested the procedure yet	2317	45.21%
Yes. I am sterilised	625	12.20%

Age when starting doctor shopping or addressing issue with doctor. Percentages exclude those who do not want to be sterilised and who have not discussed sterilisation with their doctor.

Age group	Participants #	Percentage
18 or younger	207	12.62%
19 to 24	588	35.85%
25 to 29	510	31.10%
30 to 34	242	14.76%
35 to 39	77	4.70%
40 to 44	9	0.55%
45 to 49	5	0.30%
50 to 54	1	0.06%
55 or older	1	0.06%

Age at the time of sterilisation. Percentages exclude those who have not and do not want to be sterilised.

Age group	Participants #	Percentage
18 or younger	5	0.79%
19 to 24	123	19.34%
25 to 29	241	37.89%
30 to 34	168	26.42%
35 to 39	74	11.64%
40 to 44	19	2.99%
45 to 49	1	0.16%
50 to 54	2	0.31%
55 or older	3	0.47%

Elapsed time between requesting procedure and undergoing procedure. Percentages exclude those who have not and do not want to be sterilised.

Time	Participants #	Percentage
Less than 3 months	330	50.46%
Between 3 and 6 months	111	16.97%
Between 6 and 9 months	33	5.05%
Between 9 and 12 months	20	3.06%
Between 12 and 18 months	22	3.36%
Between 18 and 24 months	15	2.29%
Between 24 and 30 months	6	0.92%
Between 30 and 36 months	2	0.31%
Between 3 and 5 years	40	6.12%
Between 5 and 7 years	25	3.82%
More than 7 years	50	7.65%

How many doctors refused at first, before finding one who would accept?

Doctor #	Participants #	Percentage
None. The first doctor I asked said yes	604	71.73%
One. The second doctor I asked said yes	93	11.05%
Two. The third doctor I asked said yes	54	6.41%
Three. The fourth doctor I asked said yes	29	3.44%
Four. The fifth doctor I asked said yes	12	1.43%
Five. The sixth doctor I asked said yes	8	0.95%
Six. The seventh doctor I asked said yes	10	1.19%
Seven. The eighth doctor I asked said yes	4	0.48%
Eight. The ninth doctor I asked said yes	2	0.24%
I asked more than 10 doctors before finding one who said yes	26	3.09%

Childfreedom

Primary Reason to Not Have Children

Reason	Participants #	Percentage
Aversion towards children ("I don't like children")	1455	28.36%
Childhood trauma	135	2.63%
Current state of the world	110	2.14%
Environmental (including overpopulation)	158	3.08%
Eugenics ("I have 'bad genes'")	57	1.11%
Financial	175	3.41%
I already raised somebody else who isn't my child	83	1.62%
Lack of interest towards parenthood ("I don't want to raise children")	2293	44.69%
Maybe interested for parenthood, but not suited for parenthood	48	0.94%
Medical ("I have a condition that makes conceiving/bearing/birthing children difficult, dangerous or lethal")	65	1.27%
Other	68	1.33%
Philosophical / Moral (e.g. antinatalism)	193	3.76%
Tokophobia (aversion/fear of pregnancy and/or chidlbirth)	291	5.67%

95.50% of childfree people are pro-choice, however only 55.93% of childfree people support financial abortion.

Dislike Towards Children

Figure 4

Working With Children

Work	Participants #	Percentage
I'm a student and my future job/career will heavily makes me interact with children on a daily basis	67	1.30%
I'm retired, but I used to have a job that heavily makes me interact with children on a daily basis	6	0.12%
I'm unemployed, but I used to have a job that heavily makes me interact with children on a daily basis	112	2.19%
No, I do not have a job that makes me heavily interact with children on a daily basis	4493	87.81%
Other	148	2.89%
Yes, I do have a job that heavily makes me interact with children on a daily basis	291	5.69%

4. Discussion

Child Status

This section solely existed to sift the childfree from the fencesitters and the non childfree in order to get answers only from the childfree. Childfree, as it is defined in the subreddit, is "I do not have children nor want to have them in any capacity (biological, adopted, fostered, step- or other) at any point in the future." 70.29% of participants actually identify as childfree, slightly up from the 2019 survey, where 68.5% of participants identified as childfree. This is suprising in reflection of the overall reputation of the subreddit across reddit, where the subreddit is often described as an "echo chamber".

General Demographics

The demographics remain largely consistent with the 2019 survey. However, the 2019 survey collected demographic responses from all participants in the survey, removing those who did not identify as childfree when querying subreddit specific questions, while the 2020 survey only collected responses from people who identified as childfree. This must be considered when comparing results.
82.25% of the participants are under 35, compared with 85% of the subreddit in the 2019 survey. A slight downward trend is noted compared over the last two years suggesting the userbase may be getting older on average. 73.04% of the subreddit identify as female, compared with 71.54% in the 2019 survey. Again, when compared with the 2019 survey, this suggests a slight increase in the number of members who identify as female. This is in contrast to the overall membership of Reddit, estimated at 74% male according to Reddit's Wikipedia page [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#Users_and_moderators]. The ratio of members who identify as heterosexual remained consistent, from 54.89% in the 2019 survey to 55.20% in the 2020 survey.
Ethnicity wise, 77% of members identified as primarily Caucasian, consistent with the 2019 results. While the ethnicities noted to be missing in the 2019 survey have been included in the 2020 survey, some users noted the difficulty of responding when fitting multiple ethnicities, and this will be addressed in the 2021 survey.

Education level

As it did in the 2019 survey, this section highlights the stereotype of childfree people as being well educated. 2.64% of participants did not complete high school, which is a slight decrease from the 2019 survey, where 4% of participants did not graduate high school. However, 6.02% of participants are under 18, compared with 8.22% in the 2019 survey. 55% of participants have a bachelors degree or higher, while an additional 23% have completed "some college or university".
At the 2020 survey, the highest percentage of responses under the: What is your degree/major? question fell under "I don't have a degree or a major" (20.12%). Arts and Humanities, and Computer Science have overtaken Health Sciences and Engineering as the two most popular majors. However, the list of majors was pared down to general fields of study rather than highly specific degree majors to account for the significant diversity in majors studied by the childfree community, which may account for the different results.

Career and Finances

The highest percentage of participants at 21.61% listed themselves as trained professionals.
One of the stereotypes of the childfree is of wealth. However this is not demonstrated in the survey results. 70.95% of participants earn under $60,000 USD per annum, while 87.85% earn under $90,000 per annum. 21.37% are earning under $15,000 per annum. 1065 participants, or 21.10% chose not to disclose this information. It is possible that this may have skewed the results if a significant proportion of these people were our high income earners, but impossible to explore.
A majority of our participants work between 30 and 50 hours per week (75.65%) which is slightly increased from the 2019 survey, where 71.2% of participants worked between 30 and 50 hours per week.

Location

The location responses are largely similar to the 2019 survey with a majority of participants living in a suburban and urban area. 86.24% of participants in the 2020 survey live in urban and suburban regions, with 86.7% of participants living in urban and suburban regions in the 2019 survey. There is likely a multifactorial reason for this, encompassing the younger, educated skew of participants and the easier access to universities and employment, and the fact that a majority of the population worldwide localises to urban centres. There may be an element of increased progressive social viewpoints and identities in urban regions, however this would need to be explored further from a sociological perspective to draw any definitive conclusions.
A majority of our participants (57.47%) were born in the USA. The United Kingdom (7.6%), Canada (7.17%), Australia (3.58%) and Germany (2.17%) encompass the next 4 most popular responses. This is largely consistent with the responses in the 2019 survey.

Religion and Spirituality

For the 2020 survey Christianity (the most popular result in 2019) was split into it's major denominations, Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, among others. This appears to be a linguistic/location difference that caused a lot of confusion among some participants. However, Catholicism at 30.76% remained the most popular choice for the religion participants were raised in. However, of our participant's current faith, Aetheism at 36.23% was the most popular choice. A majority of 78.02% listed their current religion as Aetheist, no religious or spiritual beliefs, or Agnostic.
A majority of participants (61%) rated religion as "not at all influential" to the childfree choice. This is consistent with the 2019 survey where 62.8% rated religion as "not at all influential". Despite the high percentage of participants who identify as aetheist or agnostic, this does not appear to be related to or have an impact on the childfree choice.

Romantic and Sexual Life

60.19% of our participants are in a relationship at the time of the survey. This is consistent with the 2019 survey, where 60.7% of our participants were in a relationship. A notable proportion of our participants are listed as single and not looking (25.81%) which is consistent with the 2019 survey. Considering the frequent posts seeking dating advice as a childfree person, it is surprising that such a high proportion of the participants are not actively seeking out a relationship. Unsurprisingly 90.13% of our participants would not consider dating someone with children. 84% of participants with partners of some kind have at least one childfree partner. This is consistent with the often irreconcilable element of one party desiring children and the other wishing to abstain from having children.

Childhood and Family Life

Overall, the participants skew towards a happier childhood.

Sterilisation

While just under half of our participants wish to be sterilised, 45.21%, only 12.2% have been successful in achieving sterilisation. This is likely due to overarching resistance from the medical profession however other factors such as the logistical elements of surgery and the cost may also contribute. There is a slight increase from the percentage of participants sterilised in the 2019 survey (11.7%). 29.33% of participants do not wish to be or need to be sterilised suggesting a partial element of satisfaction from temporary birth control methods or non-necessity of contraception due to their current lifestyle practices. Participants who indicated that they do not wish to be sterilised or haven't achieved sterilisation were excluded from the percentages where necessary in this section.
Of the participants who did achieve sterilisation, a majority began the search between 19 and 29, with the highest proportion being in the 19-24 age group (35.85%) This is a marked increase from the 2019 survey where 27.3% of people who started the search were between 19-24. This may be due to increased education about permanent contraception or possibly due to an increase in instability around world events.
The majority of participants who sought out and were successful at achieving sterilisation, were however in the 25-29 age group (37.9%). This is consistent with the 2019 survey results.
The time taken between seeking out sterilisation and achieving it continues to increase, with only 50.46% of participants achieving sterilisation in under 3 months. This is a decline from the number of participants who achieved sterilisation in 3 months in the 2019 survey (58.5%). A potential cause of this decrease is to Covid-19 shutdowns in the medical industry leading to an increase in procedure wait times. The proportion of participants who have had one or more doctors refuse to perform the procedure has stayed consistent between the two surveys.

Childfreedom

The main reasons for people choosing the childfree lifestyle are a lack of interest towards parenthood and an aversion towards children which is consistent with the 2019 survey. Of the people surveyed 67.06% are pet owners or involved in a pet's care, suggesting that this lack of interest towards parenthood does not necessarily mean a lack of interest in all forms of caretaking. The community skews towards a dislike of children overall which correlates well with the 87.81% of users choosing "no, I do not have, did not use to have and will not have a job that makes me heavily interact with children on a daily basis" in answer to, "do you have a job that heavily makes you interact with children on a daily basis?". This is an increase from the 2019 survey.
A vast majority of the subreddit identifes as pro-choice (95.5%), a slight increase from the 2019 results. This is likely due to a high level of concern about bodily autonomy and forced birth/parenthood. However only 55.93% support financial abortion, aka for the non-pregnant person in a relationship to sever all financial and parental ties with a child. This is a marked decrease from the 2019 results, where 70% of participants supported financial abortion.
Most of our users realised that did not want children young. 58.72% of participants knew they did not want children by the age of 18, with 95.37% of users realising this by age 30. This correlates well with the age distribution of participants. Despite this early realisation of our childfree stance, 80.59% of participants have been "bingoed" at some stage in their lives.

The Subreddit

Participants who identify as childfree were asked about their interaction with and preferences with regards to the subreddit at large. Participants who do not meet our definition of being childfree were excluded from these questions.
By and large our participants were lurkers (72.32%). Our participants were divided on their favourite flairs with 38.92% selecting "I have no favourite". The next most favourite flair was "Rant", at 16.35%. Our participants were similarly divided on their least favourite flair, with 63.40% selecting "I have no least favourite". In light of these results the flairs on offer will remain as they have been through 2019.
With regards to "lecturing" posts, this is defined as a post which seeks to re-educate the childfree on the practices, attitudes and values of the community, particularly with regards to attitudes towards parenting and children, whether at home or in the community. A commonly used descriptor is "tone policing". A small minority of the survey participants (3.36%) selected "yes" to allowing all lectures, however 33.54% responded "yes" to allowing polite, respectful lectures only. In addition, 45.10% of participants indicated that they were not sure if lectures should be allowed. Due to the ambiguity of responses, lectures will continue to be not allowed and removed.
Many of our participants (36.87%) support the use of terms such as breeder, mombie/moo, daddict/duh on the subreddit, with a further 32.63% supporting use of these terms in context of bad parents only. This is a slight drop from the 2019 survey. In response to this use of the above and similar terms to describe parents remains permitted on this subreddit. However, we encourage users to keep the use of these terms to bad parents only.
44.33% of users support the use of terms to describe children such as crotchfruit on the subreddit, a drop from 55.3% last year. A further 25.80% of users supporting the use of this and similar terms in context of bad children only, an increase from 17.42% last year. In response to this use of the above and similar terms to describe children remains permitted on this subreddit.
69.17% of participants answered yes to allowing parents to post, provided they stay respectful. In response to this, parent posts will continue to be allowed on the subreddit. As for regret posts, which were to be revisited in this year's survey, only 9.5% of participants regarded them as their least favourite post. As such they will continue to stay allowed.
64% of participants support under 18's who are childfree participating in the subreddit with a further 19.59% allowing under 18's to post dependent on context. Therefore we will continue to allow under 18's that stay within the overall Reddit age requirement.
There was divide among participants as to whether "newbie" questions should be removed. An even spread was noted among participants who selected remove and those who selected to leave them as is. We have therefore decided to leave them as is. 73.80% of users selected "yes, in their own post, with their own "Leisure" flair" to the question, "Should posts about pets, travel, jetskis, etc be allowed on the sub?" Therefore we will continue to allow these posts provided they are appropriately flaired.

5. Conclusion

Thank you to our participants who contributed to the survey. This has been an unusual and difficult year for many people. Stay safe, and stay childfree.

Since 1983, I have lived, worked and raised a family in a progressive, egalitarian, income-sharing intentional community (or commune) of 100 people in rural Virginia. AMA.

Hello Reddit!
My name is Keenan Dakota, I have lived at Twin Oaks, an income-sharing, intentional community in rural Virginia for 36 years, since 1983. I grew up in northern Virginia, my parents worked in government. I went to George Mason University where I studied business management. I joined Twin Oaks when I was 23 because I lost faith in the underpinnings of capitalism and looking for a better model. I have stayed because over time capitalism hasn't looked any better, and its a great place to raise children. While at Twin Oaks, I raised two boys to adulthood, constructed several buildings, managed the building maintenance program, have managed some of the business lines at different times.
Proof this is me. A younger photo of me at Twin Oaks. Here is a video interview of me about living at Twin Oaks. Photo of Twin Oaks members at the 50th anniversary.
Some things that make life here different from the mainstream:

The labor system - all work is considered equal, whether you are earning income for the community or not. Cooking/cleaning counts the same as planning the annual budget. Also, you don't have to do the same job all week - your day can be a mix of indoor and outdoor work, you have freedom to arrange your day, and you can gain skills in a wide array of tasks and trades.
Non-gender binary, queer and trans people are very welcome at Twin Oaks. People introduce themselves with their pronouns and a significant number of our members go by they/them.
Verbal consent culture is very important here. It is not okay to touch anyone without asking.
Nudity and partial nudity is allowed in some parts of the farm, such as in the sauna, swimming hole, on the hiking trails, etc.
Our social norms prohibit using phones in common areas when other members are present, with the exception of a few cafe-style spaces.
Every day we provide a home-cooked, plant-based lunch and dinner with options for special diets including vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and no onions & garlic.
Raising kids here is easier. Some of the time that parents spend raising their children counts towards their labor quota. Many of the kids are home-schooled or "unschooled", and they spend more time outside than in front of a screen. The kids have no problem passing the state's annual standardized test to move onto the next grade level.
We have a shared clothing resource called Commie Clothes, which is like a free thrift store. Borrow something and then return it dirty, and it gets washed and re-hung up.

More about Twin Oaks:
Twin Oaks is an intentional community in rural central Virginia, made up of around 90 adult members and 15 children. Since the community's beginning in 1967, our way of life has reflected our values of cooperation, sharing, nonviolence, equality, and ecology.
We do not have a group religion; our beliefs are diverse. We do not have a central leader; we govern ourselves by a form of democracy with responsibility shared among various managers, planners, and committees. We are self-supporting economically, and partly self-sufficient. We are income-sharing. Each member works 42 hours a week in the community's business and domestic areas. Each member receives housing, food, healthcare, and personal spending money from the community.
We have open-slots and are accepting applications for new members. All prospective new members must participate in a three-week visitor program. Applicants to join must leave for 30 days after their visit while the community decides on their application.
We offer a $5 tour on Saturdays of the property, starting in March. More info here.
Ask me anything!
TL;DR: Opted out of the rat-race and retired at 23 to live in the woods with a bunch of hippies.
EDIT: Thanks for all the questions! If you want some photos of the farm, you can check out our instagram.
EDIT2: I'm answering new, original questions again today. Sort by new and scroll through the trolls to see more of my responses.
EDIT3: We DO have food with onion & garlic! At meals, there is the regular food, PLUS alternative options for vegan/vegetarian/no gluten/no onions & garlic.
EDIT4: Some of you have been asking if we are a cult. No, we are not. We don't have a central leader or common religion. Here are characteristics of cults, FYI.
Edit: Yikes! Did I mention that I am 60? Reddit is not my native land. I don't understand the hostile, angry and seemingly deliberately obtuse comments on here. And Soooo many people!
Anyway, to the angry crowd: Twin Oaks poses no threat to anyone, we are 100 people out of a country of 330 million? Twin Oaks reached its current maximum population about 25 years ago, so not growing fast, or at all. Members come and go from Twin Oaks. There are, my guess is, 800 ex-members of Twin Oaks, so we aren't holding on to everyone who joins—certainly, no one is held against their will.
Twin Oaks is in rural Virginia, but we really aren't insular, isolated, gated or scared of the mainstream culture. We have scheduled tours of the whole property. Local government officials, like building inspectors, come to Twin Oaks with some frequency. People at Twin Oaks like to travel and manage to do so. I personally, know lots of people in the area, I am also a runner, so I leave the property probably every day. There are lots of news stories about Twin Oaks over the years. If you are worried about Twin Oaks, maybe you could go read what the mainstream (and alternative) media have to say.
Except about equality Twin Oaks is not particularly dogmatic about anything. (I know some people at Twin Oaks will disagree with that statement.) Twin Oaks isn't really hypocritical about Capitalism, Socialism, or Communism, we just don't identify those concepts as something that we are trying to do. Twin Oaks is not trying to DO Communism, we are trying to live a good life with equally empowered citizens—which has led us to try to maintain economic parity among members. Communists also do that. In making decisions in the community I don't remember anyone trying to support or oppose an idea due to excess or insufficient Communism, Socialism, or Capitalism. In most practical senses those words aren't useful and don't mean anything. So, no need to hammer Twin Oaks for being insufficiently pure, or hypocritical.
Twin Oaks is very similar to the Kibbutz in Israel. If anyone has concerns or questions about what would happen if places like Twin Oaks suddenly became much larger and more common, read about the history of the Kibbutz, which may have grown to possibly 1% of the population at their largest? There was and is no fight with Capitalism from the kibbutz—or with the State. My point is—not a threat.
To the other people who think that the ideas of Twin Oaks are interesting, I want you to know it is possible to live at Twin Oaks (or places like Twin Oaks) and happily live ones entire life. There is no central, critical failing that makes the idea not work. And plenty of upside. But do lots of research first. Twin Oaks maintains a massive web site. (Anyway, it takes a long time to read.)
But what I would like to see is more people starting more egalitarian, income-sharing communities. I think that there is a need for a community that is designed and built by families, and who also share income, and provide mutual support with labor and money. If you love this concept, maybe consider gathering together other people and starting your own.
Ideologically speaking:
-Ecology: the best response to ecological problems is for humans to use fewer resources. The easiest way to use fewer resources is to share resources. Living communally vastly cuts down on resource use without reducing quality of life.
-Equality: ideologically speaking, most people accept the idea that all humans have equal rights, but most social structures operate in ways that are fundamentally unequal. If we truly believe in equality then we ought to be willing to put our bodies where our ideology is. In a truly equal world, the issues of sexism and racism and all other forms of discrimination would, essentially, not exist.
-Democracy: Twin Oaks uses all manner of decision-making models and tools to try to include everyone and to keep people equally empowered. There is no useful word for this. We do use a majority vote sometimes, as a fallback. But sometimes we use consensus. We sometimes use sociocracy (dynamic governance). The word "Isocracy" (decision-making among equals), would be useful to describe Twin Oaks' decision-making model, but Lev in Australia has written an incomprehensible "definition" on Wikipedia, that he keeps changing back when someone corrects it.
-Happiness: The overarching goal of all ideologies is to make people happy, right? I mean, isn't it? Capitalism is based upon the belief that motivation is crucial to human aspiration and success (and therefore more happiness). Under Capitalism, equality is a detriment because it hinders motivation (less fear of failure, or striving for success). Twin Oaks believes that humans are happier when they are equal, and equally empowered. So the place to start up the ladder of happiness is to first make everyone equal. Well, Twin Oaks is mainly still working on that first step.
EDIT5: Some have asked about videos - here are links to documentaries about Twin Oaks by BBC, VICE and RT.

Google Play to Ban Binary Options

Electrician / Foreman at a Union Shop (Minneapolis, MN USA)

Salary: $97,000
Years of experience: 8.0
Recommended Education: Apprenticeship

What’s a day in the life for an electrician?

I’m a foreman, which is a much different role then if I was still a journeyman electrician. As a foreman, it’s more managing than electrical work. My goal is to make project managers happy, keep everyone focused (so the customer is satisfied), make sure our shop is making money, and deliver something that I can be proud to stand by. The electricians beside me need to be enjoying their day; otherwise, they will resent me and put in sub-par work. Part of what I do is to try and keep things interesting, so my team doesn’t lose interest. I do this by giving guys responsibility, because there’s pride associated with everything they do, or when things are more mundane, creating competitions.
The best thing about being a journeyman is that when you go home, you don’t have to think about work AT ALL. When you wake up, you don’t think about work; even when you drive to the job site, you don’t have to fire up your brain until the clock starts. But, as soon as you start working, you’re in a different world, and none of the problems from your home life consume you because you’re too busy problem solving, you’re dealing with something different every couple hours.
On a typical day, you wake up early as hell and drive to your job site. The site might be a mudhole, or it might be a nice parking garage, but it changes every couple of months, you’re never in the same situation. For example, let’s say I get assigned to work at General Mills at a factory assembly line with some issues and have to work on it for three days. That might be a casual experience where they have prints, plans, and diagrams to look at, and you follow the instructions and install it. Or, you might be working for that customer and BOOM, an entire assembly line goes down, which prevents thousands of chocolate bars from being made. You now have workers standing there, and your job is to get that line fired back up, quickly. You need to be able to walk into that environment and figure out how to approach it safely. I go through a mental checklist: turn the power off, determine what’s feeding it, find the electric room, what kind of equipment is needed, how many motors there are, what caused the problem, isolate the source, etc. At some point, you go on auto-pilot, and your brain solves the issue. There’s also more thought to it; you need to quickly determine if you can fix it today, how soon you can get the part, whether there’s a temporary solution, or whether you have enough knowledge to fix it.

What’s the best part of being an electrician?

Don’t be afraid to try it; once most people get into the work, they end up liking the profession a lot more than they ever expected. The variety of backgrounds I see seems to be increasing; this includes first-generation Americans, people looking for new careers later in life, and many more women. There’s a lot of job stability, and it’s something that isn’t going away because there’s a huge need. You’ll challenge yourself physically and mentally, and will likely receive opportunities you would never see elsewhere. If you have a lot of ambition, it can be your passion, but it also doesn’t have to be.
When you’re starting, you need to push through your training until you’re able to get your license. Once you get your license, you can’t have it taken away, and there’s a lot of freedom that comes with it, so it’s worth sticking it out.

What’s the downside of being an electrician? Words of caution?

For most people trying to get into the trades, I recommend thinking about the long-term implications. Don’t go after the first big paycheck you get offered; if the situation isn’t what you’re looking for, keep looking. Also, you need to be continually aware of what you’re doing, attentive, and present to the task. You learn to be hyper-focused.
If you’re looking to get experience and you can’t get into a union program, there’s no problem working non-union. If you’re going to be a non-union worker, you have to have more ambition; you have to be more confrontational, vouch for yourself, ask your employer for more, and there’s no one backing you with negotiated contracts. If you want an excellent education that’s varied and hope to prevent yourself from getting into dangerous situations, the union might be the way to go. Non-union, there’s no curriculum, and you have to do additional research. All things aside, there are some great non-union workers out there. You can do it if you have the drive and determination.
If you’re somebody who has no mechanical aptitude, doesn’t like to spend your free time figuring out how things work, or you’re afraid to fix something that’s broken, it might take you a while to enjoy being an electrician. You might still be good at it, but it might not come naturally. You need to have a strong work ethic if you want to have consistent employment and want to be a good electrician. You don’t need to be a perfectionist, but you need to try and do your best.

Describe the path you took to become an electrician

Before I started, I had a vague idea of what trade work looked like, and I tried to visualize myself as one of “those guys.” I wasn’t necessarily thinking, “do I like electricity?” or “do I want to work on electrical hazards?” I figured I could probably do it and gave it a try. Many people expect that if you’re blue-collar and your parents are blue-collar, then you’re the next candidate to be a trades worker. But, that’s an outdated idea. Most people don’t get into the trades because they want a high income, but when you tell anyone how much you make, they’re generally surprised.
Because there’s such a demand for electricians, there’s limited space in apprentice training programs. As a result, there are many pre-apprentice (or unindentured apprentice) training programs emerging to ensure that the people who get accepted are likely to see it through. How much pre-apprentice work you need is location dependent (usually 6-24 months), so if you want to get in without this, you may need to research various states or cities.
I completed six months of pre-apprentice work and was able to sign up because you no longer needed to complete the full two-year program. Due to high demand (in Minneapolis), they lifted the requirement so long as you could pass their interviews and entrance exams.
Once you’re accepted, you have five years of apprenticeship. Each year brings a different program, a pay increase, and every six months, they switch you to a new contractor. Some of the content included learning various installations, people skills, safety, bending pipe, physics/math, high voltage, DC/AC theory, ladder logic, binary, national/state code, etc. But, the biggest thing is learning how to problem-solve, which goes well beyond the codebook. You get a taste for more technical aspects, but you can also really dive into topics like programmable logic controllers, solar, building automation, data, etc. There are lots of certifications for each of these, and in the end, they prepare you very well to take the state exam for the journeyman license.
Starting as an apprentice allows you to make money right away. In my first year, I started at $15/hour, which doesn’t include your perks: paid vacation, pension, annuity, an unemployment slush fund, full health coverage for family, etc. Fast forward to today, I make $48.50/hour as a foreman or $46.50/hour as a journeyman. The pay rates are standardized through the union by location. What’s most in-demand right now is for low voltage and inside wireman, which is what I am. But, where you end up depends on your ambition and what you want to do. A lot of guys are content just being a worker; they don’t mind being laid off or moving from contractor to contractor. My preference is to work for a contractor that I like; I work hard to have that security.
In terms of options, you can be a journeyman, a foreman, a general foreman (required when you exceed a specific crew size), or a master electrician (requires 2,000 hours of additional work and a master’s license). As a master electrician, you’re likely to get paid more, but you’re bonded to the shop, so you may not do much electrical work, and you will take all the heat if things go wrong.

What’s the future outlook for an electrician?

Since COVID hit, our shop has had to adapt by taking on less profitable jobs; doing this allows our best guys to keep working and stay engaged. For example, we just did a sizable solar rooftop installation, where the work was mostly outside in a safe environment versus a busy construction site. If things start to change, and people don’t want to invest in new commercial buildings, there’s always going to be a need to build homes, apartments, hospitals, schools, or facilities that need constant maintenance. The trades might take bites and hits along the way, but if you’re reasonably smart with your finances, you’ll be able to make it through any tough times, which I’ve never really seen. If need be, I could always find low voltage or travel to where the work is. I know several guys who went to Australia to improve the electric grid and help train locals. The scenario is a little extreme, but there are always opportunities.
Ultimately, technology isn’t going to slow down; electrical equipment will always get better, faster, cheaper, and more efficient. Electrical work is nearly impossible to automate, so that can be a good thing if you’re coming from an industry that’s in decline.

Anything else?

If you’re trying to change careers, analyze the things you don’t like about your position now, because if you’re not coming from a trade, you could be in for a big surprise. I’ve observed that service workers who work in fast-paced environments and do a lot of multitasking do very well. You have to enjoy physical work; you have to be willing to work in many different environmental conditions, whether that’s filthy outdoor dirt, extreme temperatures, hot and cold, uncomfortable positions, etc. You have to be able to see the bigger picture so that your work doesn’t become mundane.
Job/Career Demand - 5.0
Positive Impact - 4.0
Satisfaction - 4.5
Advancement/Growth - 4.0
Creativity - 4.5
Work-Life Balance - 4.7
Compensation & Benefits - 5.0
Work Environment - 4.0
---
For anyone with questions, I am unfortunately not the writer of this content. We are working on building messaging capabilities on our website, which will hopefully be live in a couple of months. If there are any urgent questions, I can reach out to my friend directly :)

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Recent Interview on PathViz on what it's like to be an Electrician

What's a day in the life for a electrician?

I’m a foreman, which is a much different role then if I was still a journeyman electrician. As a foreman, it’s more managing than electrical work. My goal is to make project managers happy, keep everyone focused (so the customer is satisfied), make sure our shop is making money, and deliver something that I can be proud to stand by. The electricians beside me need to be enjoying their day; otherwise, they will resent me and put in sub-par work. Part of what I do is to try and keep things interesting, so my team doesn’t lose interest. I do this by giving guys responsibility, because there’s pride associated with everything they do, or when things are more mundane, creating competitions.
The best thing about being a journeyman is that when you go home, you don’t have to think about work AT ALL. When you wake up, you don’t think about work; even when you drive to the job site, you don’t have to fire up your brain until the clock starts. But, as soon as you start working you’re in a different world, and none of the problems from your home life consume you, because you’re too busy problem solving, you’re dealing with something different every couple hours.
On a typical day, you wake up early as hell and drive to your job site. The site might be a mudhole, or it might be a nice parking garage, but it changes every couple of months, you’re never in the same situation. For example, let’s say I get assigned to work at General Mills at a factory assembly line with some issues and have to work on it for three days. That might be a casual experience where they have prints, plans, and diagrams to look at, and you follow the instructions and install it. Or, you might be working for that customer and BOOM, an entire assembly line goes down, which prevents thousands of chocolate bars from being made. You now have workers standing there, and your job is to get that line fired back up, quickly. You need to be able to walk into that environment and figure out how to approach it safely. I go through a mental checklist: turn the power off, determine what’s feeding it, find the electric room, what kind of equipment is needed, how many motors there are, what caused the problem, isolate the source, etc. At some point, you go on auto-pilot, and your brain solves the issue. There’s also more thought to it; you need to quickly determine if you can fix it today, how soon you can get the part, whether there’s a temporary solution, or whether you have enough knowledge to fix it.

What's the best part of being a electrician?

Don’t be afraid to try it, once most people get into the work; they end up liking the profession a lot more than they ever expected. The variety of backgrounds I see seems to be increasing; this includes first-generation Americans, people looking for new careers later in life, and many more women. There’s a lot of job stability, and it’s something that isn’t going away because there’s a huge need. You’ll challenge yourself physically and mentally, and will likely receive opportunities you would never see elsewhere. If you have a lot of ambition, it can be your passion, but it also doesn’t have to be.
When you’re starting, you need to push through your training until you’re able to get your license. Once you get your license, you can’t have it taken away, and there’s a lot of freedom that comes with it, so it’s worth sticking it out.

What's the downside of being a electrician? Words of caution?

For most people trying to get into the trades, I recommend thinking about the long-term implications. Don’t go after the first big paycheck you get offered; if the situation isn’t what you’re looking for, keep looking. Also, you need to be continually aware of what you’re doing, attentive, and present to the task. You learn to be hyper-focused.
If you’re looking to get experience and you can’t get into a union program, there’s no problem working non-union. If you’re going to be a non-union worker, you have to have more ambition; you have to be more confrontational, vouch for yourself, ask your employer for more, and there’s no one backing you with negotiated contracts. If you want an excellent education that’s varied and hope to prevent yourself from getting into dangerous situations, the union might be the way to go. Non-union, there’s no curriculum, and you have to do additional research. All things aside, there are some great non-union workers out there. You can do it if you have the drive and determination.
If you're somebody who has no mechanical aptitude, doesn’t like to spend your free time figuring out how things work, or you’re afraid to fix something that’s broken, it might take you a while to enjoy being an electrician. You might still be good at it, but it might not come naturally. You need to have a strong work ethic if you want to have consistent employment and want to be a good electrician. You don’t need to be a perfectionist, but you need to try and do your best.

Describe the path you took to become a electrician

Before I started, I had a vague idea of what trade work looked like, and I tried to visualize myself as one of “those guys.” I wasn’t necessarily thinking, “do I like electricity?” or “do I want to work on electrical hazards?” I figured I could probably do it and gave it a try. Many people expect that if you’re blue-collar and your parents are blue-collar, then you’re the next candidate to be a trades worker. But, that’s an outdated idea. Most people don’t get into the trades because they want a high income, but when you tell anyone how much you make, they’re generally surprised.
Because there’s such a demand for electricians, there’s limited space in apprentice training programs. As a result, there are many pre-apprentice (or unindentured apprentice) training programs emerging to ensure that the people who get accepted are likely to see it through. How much pre-apprentice work you need is location dependent (usually 6-24 months), so if you want to get in without this, you may need to research various states or cities.
I completed six months of pre-apprentice work and was able to sign up because you no longer needed to complete the full two-year program. Due to high demand (in Minneapolis), they lifted the requirement so long as you could pass their interviews and entrance exams.
Once you’re accepted, you have five years of apprenticeship. Each year brings a different program, a pay increase, and every six months, they switch you to a new contractor. Some of the content included learning various installations, people skills, safety, bending pipe, physics/math, high voltage, DC/AC theory, ladder logic, binary, national/state code, etc. But, the biggest thing is learning how to problem-solve, which goes well beyond the codebook. You get a taste for more technical aspects, but you can also really dive into topics like programmable logic controllers, solar, building automation, data, etc. There are lots of certifications for each of these, and in the end, they prepare you very well to take the state exam for the journeyman license.
Starting as an apprentice allows you to make money right away. In my first year, I started at $15/hour, which doesn’t include your perks: paid vacation, pension, annuity, an unemployment slush fund, full health coverage for family, etc. Fast forward to today, I make $48.50/hour as a foreman or $46.50/hour as a journeyman. The pay rates are standardized through the union by location. What’s most in-demand right now is for low voltage and inside wireman, which is what I am. But, where you end up depends on your ambition and what you want to do. A lot of guys are content just being a worker; they don’t mind being laid off, or moving from contractor to contractor. My preference is to work for a contractor that I like; I work hard to have that security.
In terms of options, you can be a journeyman, a foreman, a general foreman (required when you exceed a specific crew size), or a master electrician (requires 2,000 hours of additional work and a master’s license). As a master electrician, you’re likely to get paid more, but you’re bonded to the shop, so you may not do much electrical work, and you will take all the heat if things go wrong.

What's the future outlook for a electrician?

Since COVID hit, our shop has had to adapt by taking on less profitable jobs; doing this allows our best guys to keep working and stay engaged. For example, we just did a sizable solar rooftop installation, where the work was mostly outside in a safe environment versus a busy construction site. If things start to change, and people don’t want to invest in new commercial buildings, there's always going to be a need to build homes, apartments, hospitals, schools, or buildings that need constant maintenance. The trades might take bites and hits along the way, but if you’re reasonably smart with your finances, you’ll be able to make it through any tough times, which I’ve never really seen. If need be, I could always find low voltage or travel to where the work is. I know several guys who went to Australia to improve the electric grid and help train locals. The scenario is a little extreme, but there are always opportunities.
Ultimately, technology isn’t going to slow down; electrical equipment will always get better, faster, cheaper, and more efficient. Electrical work is nearly impossible to automate, so that can be a good thing if you’re coming from an industry that’s in decline.

Anything else?

Superposition: Transcript of Audio Essay Episode 35

Hi. It's Eric with some thoughts for this week's audio essay on the topic of superposition. Now, to those of you in the know, superposition is an odd word, in that it is the scientific concept we reach for when trying to describe the paradox of Schrodinger's cat and the theory and philosophy of quantum measurement. We don't yet know how to say that the cat is both dead and alive at the same time rigorously, so we fudge whatever is going on with this unfortunate feline and say that the cat and the quantum system on which its life depends are a mixture of two distinct states, that are somehow commingled in a way that has defied a satisfying explanation for about a century. Now, I'm usually loath to appeal to such quantum concepts in everyday life, as there is a veritable industry of people making bad quantum analogies. For example, whenever you have a non-quantum system that is altered by its observation, that really has nothing to do with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Jane Goodall's chimpanzees are almost certainly altered in their behavior due to her presence. But there is likely no competent quantum theorist who would analogize chimps to electrons, and Goodall to a Hermitian observable, executing a quantum observation. Heisenberg adds nothing other than physics-envy to the discussion of an entirely classical situation such as this.
However, I have changed my mind in the case of superposition, as I would now like to explain. To begin with, superposition isn't a quantum phenomenon. For example, imagine that you'd come from Europe to Australia, and that you had both euros and Swiss francs in your pockets. You might then be said to be in a superposition, because you have pocket change in both euros and francs rather than a pure state of only one currency or the other. The analog of the physical observable in this situation would be something like a multiple-choice question found on a landing card about the contents of your pockets. Here, it is easy to see the danger of this set up. Assuming you have three times as much value in euros as you do in francs, what happens when you get a question that doesn't include your situation as an answer? What if the landing card asked, is all of your change in A) euros or B) Swiss francs, with no other options available? Well, this as stated, is a completely classical superposition problem, having nothing to do with quantum theory. Were you to have such a classical question asked of you like this, there would have been no way for you to answer. However, if the answer were on the multiple-choice menu, there would be no problem at all, and you would give a clear answer determined by the state of your pockets. So, if the state in question isn't on the multiple-choice menu, the classical world is forced to go mute, as there is no answer determined by the system; whereas if it is found on the list of allowable choices, the answer is then completely determined by the system’s state at the time that the question was asked.
Oddly, the quantum world is, in a way, exactly as deterministic as the classical one just described, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. In order to understand this, we’ll have to introduce a bit of jargon. So long as the system (now called the Hilbert space state) is on the list of answers (technically called the system of Eigenvectors) corresponding to the question (now called a quantum observable) the question will return a completely deterministic answer (technically called the Eigenvalue corresponding to the state Eigenvector.) These are, in a sense, good questions in quantum theory, because the answer corresponding to the state of the system actually appears as one of the multiple-choice options.
So, if that is completely deterministic, well then what happened to the famous quantum probability theory and the indeterminacy that we hear so much about? What if I told you that it were 100% confined to the situation which classical theory couldn't handle either? That is, quantum probability theory only becomes relevant when you ask bad quantum questions, where the state of the system isn't on the list of multiple-choice answers. When the landing card asked if all your change were completely in euros or only in francs, the classical system couldn't answer because three times the value of your Swiss francs were held in euros, so no answer could be determined. But if your pocket change were somehow quantum, well then you might find that 75% of the time your pocket coins would bizarrely turn into pure euros, and would bewilderingly turn into pure francs 25% of the time just by virtue of your being asked for a measurement by the landing card. In the quantum theory, this is due to the multiple-choice answers of the so-called observable, represented by the landing card question, not being well-suited to the mixed state of your pockets in a superposition between euros and francs. In other words, quantum theory gets probabilistic only where classical theory went mute. All of the indeterminacy appears to come from asking bad multiple-choice questions in both the classical and quantum regimes, in which the state of the system doesn't fit any given answer.
Quite honestly, I've never heard a physicist rework the issue of quantum probabilities in just this way, so as to highlight that the probabilistic weirdness comes only from the quantum being overly solicitous, and accommodating really bad questions. For some reason, they don't like the idea of calling an observable that doesn't have the state of the system as an allowable answer, a bad question. But that is precisely why I do like it. It points out that the quantum is deterministic where the classical theory is deterministic, and only probabilistic where the classical theory is mute. And this is because it is weirdly willing to answer questions that are, in a sense that can be made precise, bad questions to begin with. That doesn't get rid of the mystery, but it recasts it so it doesn't sound quite so weird. The new question is, why would a quantum system overcompensate for the lousy questions being posed, when the classical system seems to know not to answer?
So why bring any of this up? Well, the first reason is that I couldn't resist sneaking in a personal reformulation of the quantum measurement problem that most people will have never considered. But the second reason is that I have come to believe that we are wasting our political lives on just such superposition questions.
For example, let's see if we can solve the abortion debate problem right now on this podcast using superposition; as it is much easier than the abortion problem itself. The abortion debate problem is that everyone agrees that before fertilization there is no human life to worry about. And that after a baby is born, there is no question that it has a right to live. Yet, pro-choice and pro-life activists insist on telling us that the developing embryo is either a mere bundle of cells suddenly becoming a life only when born, or a full-fledged baby the moment the sperm enters the egg. You can guess my answer here. The question of, is it a baby's life or a woman's choice, is agreed-upon by everyone before fertilization or following birth because the observable in question has the system as one of the two multiple-choice answers in those two cases. However, during the process of embryonic development, something miraculous is taking place that we simply don't understand scientifically. Somehow, a non-sentient blastula becomes a baby by a process utterly opaque to science, which as yet has no mature theory of consciousness. The system in utero is in a changing and progressing superposition tilted heavily towards not being a baby at the beginning, and tilted heavily towards being one at the end of the pregnancy. But the problem here is that we have allowed the activists, rather than the embryologists and developmental biologists, to hand us the life versus choice observable, with its two terrible multiple-choice options. If we had let the embryologist set the multiple-choice question, there would be at least 23 Carnegie stages for the embryo, before you even get to fetal development. But instead of going forward from what we both know and don't know with high confidence about the system, we are instead permanently deranged by being stuck with Schrodinger's embryo by the activists who insist on working backwards from their political objectives.
So, does this somehow solve the abortion issue? Of course not. All it does, is get us to see how ridiculously transparent we are in our politics, that we would allow our society to be led by those activists who would shoehorn the central scientific miracle of human development into a nutty political binary of convenience. We don't even think to ask, who are these people who have left us at each other's throats, debating an inappropriate multiple-choice question that can never be answered? Well, in the spirit of The Portal, we are always looking for a way out of our perennial problems to try to find an exit. And I think that the technique here of teaching oneself to spot superposition problems in stalemated political systems, brings a great deal of relief to those of us who find the perspective of naïve activism a fairly impoverished worldview. The activist mindset is always trying to remove nuanced selections that might better match our world’s needs from among the multiple-choice answers, until it finds a comical binary. Do you support the war on drugs, yes or no? Are you for or against immigration? Should men and women be treated equally? Should we embrace capitalism, or choose socialism? Racism: systemic problem or convenient excuse? Is China a trading partner or a strategic rival? Has technology stagnated, or is it in fact racing ahead at breakneck speed? Has feminism gone too far, or not far enough? In all of these cases, there is an entire industry built around writing articles that involve replacing conversations that might progress towards answers and agreement, with simple multiple-choice political options that foreclose all hope. And in general, we can surmise when this has occurred because activism generally leaves a distinct signature, where the true state of a system is best represented as a superposition of the last two remaining choices that bitterly divide us, handed us by activists.
So, I will leave you with the following thought. The principle of superposition is not limited to quantum weirdness, and it may be governing your life at a level that you never considered. Think about where you are most divided from your loved ones politically. Then ask yourself, when I listen to the debates at my dinner table, am I hearing a set of multiple-choice answers that sound like they were developed by scholars interested in understanding, or by activists who are pushing for an outcome? If the latter, think about whether you couldn't make more progress with those you love by recognizing that the truth is usually in some kind of a superposition of the last remaining answers pushed by the activists. But you don't have to accept these middlebrow binaries, dilemmas and trilemmas. Instead, try asking a new question. If my loved ones and I trashed the terms of debate foisted upon us by strangers, activists and the news media, could we together fashion a list of multiple choice answers that we might agree contain an answer we all could live with, and that better describes the true state of the system? I mean, do you really want open or closed borders? Do you really want to talk about psilocybin and heroin in the same breath? Do you really want to claim that there is no systemic oppression, or that it governs every aspect of our lives? Before long, it is my hope that you will develop an intuition that many long-running stalemated discussions are really about having our lives shoehorned by others into inappropriate binaries that can only represent the state of our world as a superposition of inappropriate and simplistic answers that you never would have chosen for yourself.

Superposition: Transcript of audio essay intro to The Portal Episode 35

Hi. It's Eric with some thoughts for this week's audio essay on the topic of superposition. Now, to those of you in the know, superposition is an odd word, in that it is the scientific concept we reach for when trying to describe the paradox of Schrodinger's cat and the theory and philosophy of quantum measurement. We don't yet know how to say that the cat is both dead and alive at the same time rigorously, so we fudge whatever is going on with this unfortunate feline and say that the cat and the quantum system on which its life depends are a mixture of two distinct states, that are somehow commingled in a way that has defied a satisfying explanation for about a century. Now, I'm usually loath to appeal to such quantum concepts in everyday life, as there is a veritable industry of people making bad quantum analogies. For example, whenever you have a non-quantum system that is altered by its observation, that really has nothing to do with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Jane Goodall's chimpanzees are almost certainly altered in their behavior due to her presence. But there is likely no competent quantum theorist who would analogize chimps to electrons, and Goodall to our mission observable, executing a quantum observation. Heisenberg adds nothing other than physics-envy to the discussion of an entirely classical situation such as this.
However, I have changed my mind in the case of superposition, as I would now like to explain. To begin with, superposition isn't a quantum phenomenon. For example, imagine that you'd come from Europe to Australia, and that you had both euros and Swiss francs in your pockets. You might then be said to be in a superposition, because you have pocket change in both euros and francs rather than a pure state of only one currency or the other. The analog of the physical observable in this situation would be something like a multiple-choice question found on a landing card about the contents of your pockets. Here, it is easy to see the danger of this set up. Assuming you have three times as much value in euros as you do in francs, what happens when you get a question that doesn't include your situation as an answer? What if the landing card asked, is all of your change in A) euros or B) Swiss francs, with no other options available? Well, this as stated, is a completely classical superposition problem, having nothing to do with quantum theory. Were you to have such a classical question asked of you like this, there would have been no way for you to answer. However, if the answer were on the multiple-choice menu, there would be no problem at all, and you would give a clear answer determined by the state of your pockets. So, if the state in question isn't on the multiple-choice menu, the classical world is forced to go mute, as there is no answer determined by the system; whereas if it is found on the list of allowable choices, the answer is then completely determined by the system’s state at the time that the question was asked.
Oddly, the quantum world is, in a way, exactly as deterministic as the classical one just described, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. In order to understand this, we’ll have to introduce a bit of jargon. So long as the system (now called the Hilbert space state) is on the list of answers (technically called the system of Eigenvectors) corresponding to the question (now called a quantum observable) the question will return a completely deterministic answer (technically called the Eigenvalue corresponding to the state Eigenvector.) These are, in a sense, good questions in quantum theory, because the answer corresponding to the state of the system actually appears as one of the multiple-choice options.
So, if that is completely deterministic, well then what happened to the famous quantum probability theory and the indeterminacy that we hear so much about? What if I told you that it were 100% confined to the situation which classical theory couldn't handle either? That is, quantum probability theory only becomes relevant when you ask bad quantum questions, where the state of the system isn't on the list of multiple-choice answers. When the landing card asked if all your change were completely in euros or only in francs, the classical system couldn't answer because three times the value of your Swiss francs were held in euros, so no answer could be determined. But if your pocket change were somehow quantum, well then you might find that 75% of the time your pocket coins would bizarrely turn into pure euros, and would bewilderingly turn into pure francs 25% of the time just by virtue of your being asked for a measurement by the landing card. In the quantum theory, this is due to the multiple-choice answers of the so-called observable, represented by the landing card question, not being well-suited to the mixed state of your pockets in a superposition between euros and francs. In other words, quantum theory gets probabilistic only where classical theory went mute. All of the indeterminacy appears to come from asking bad multiple-choice questions in both the classical and quantum regimes, in which the state of the system doesn't fit any given answer.
Quite honestly, I've never heard a physicist rework the issue of quantum probabilities in just this way, so as to highlight that the probabilistic weirdness comes only from the quantum being overly solicitous, and accommodating really bad questions. For some reason, they don't like the idea of calling an observable that doesn't have the state of the system as an allowable answer, a bad question. But that is precisely why I do like it. It points out that the quantum is deterministic where the classical theory is deterministic, and only probabilistic where the classical theory is mute. And this is because it is weirdly willing to answer questions that are, in a sense that can be made precise, bad questions to begin with. That doesn't get rid of the mystery, but it recasts it so it doesn't sound quite so weird. The new question is, why would a quantum system overcompensate for the lousy questions being posed, when the classical system seems to know not to answer?
So why bring any of this up? Well, the first reason is that I couldn't resist sneaking in a personal reformulation of the quantum measurement problem that most people will have never considered. But the second reason is that I have come to believe that we are wasting our political lives on just such superposition questions.
For example, let's see if we can solve the abortion debate problem right now on this podcast using superposition; as it is much easier than the abortion problem itself. The abortion debate problem is that everyone agrees that before fertilization there is no human life to worry about. And that after a baby is born, there is no question that it has a right to live. Yet, pro-choice and pro-life activists insist on telling us that the developing embryo is either a mere bundle of cells suddenly becoming a life only when born, or a full-fledged baby the moment the sperm enters the egg. You can guess my answer here. The question of, is it a baby's life or a woman's choice, is agreed-upon by everyone before fertilization or following birth because the observable in question has the system as one of the two multiple-choice answers in those two cases. However, during the process of embryonic development, something miraculous is taking place that we simply don't understand scientifically. Somehow, a non-sentient blastula becomes a baby by a process utterly opaque to science, which as yet has no mature theory of consciousness. The system in utero is in a changing and progressing superposition tilted heavily towards not being a baby at the beginning, and tilted heavily towards being one at the end of the pregnancy. But the problem here is that we have allowed the activists, rather than the embryologists and developmental biologists, to hand us the life versus choice observable, with its two terrible multiple-choice options. If we had let the embryologist set the multiple-choice question, there would be at least 23 Carnegie stages for the embryo, before you even get to fetal development. But instead of going forward from what we both know and don't know with high confidence about the system, we are instead permanently deranged by being stuck with Schrodinger's embryo by the activists who insist on working backwards from their political objectives.
So, does this somehow solve the abortion issue? Of course not. All it does, is get us to see how ridiculously transparent we are in our politics, that we would allow our society to be led by those activists who would shoehorn the central scientific miracle of human development into a nutty political binary of convenience. We don't even think to ask, who are these people who have left us at each other's throats, debating an inappropriate multiple-choice question that can never be answered? Well, in the spirit of The Portal, we are always looking for a way out of our perennial problems to try to find an exit. And I think that the technique here of teaching oneself to spot superposition problems in stalemated political systems, brings a great deal of relief to those of us who find the perspective of naïve activism a fairly impoverished worldview. The activist mindset is always trying to remove nuanced selections that might better match our world’s needs from among the multiple-choice answers, until it finds a comical binary. Do you support the war on drugs, yes or no? Are you for or against immigration? Should men and women be treated equally? Should we embrace capitalism, or choose socialism? Racism: systemic problem or convenient excuse? Is China a trading partner or a strategic rival? Has technology stagnated, or is it in fact racing ahead at breakneck speed? Has feminism gone too far, or not far enough? In all of these cases, there is an entire industry built around writing articles that involve replacing conversations that might progress towards answers and agreement, with simple multiple-choice political options that foreclose all hope. And in general, we can surmise when this has occurred because activism generally leaves a distinct signature, where the true state of a system is best represented as a superposition of the last two remaining choices that bitterly divide us, handed us by activists.
So, I will leave you with the following thought. The principle of superposition is not limited to quantum weirdness, and it may be governing your life at a level that you never considered. Think about where you are most divided from your loved ones politically. Then ask yourself, when I listen to the debates at my dinner table, am I hearing a set of multiple-choice answers that sound like they were developed by scholars interested in understanding, or by activists who are pushing for an outcome? If the latter, think about whether you couldn't make more progress with those you love by recognizing that the truth is usually in some kind of a superposition of the last remaining answers pushed by the activists. But you don't have to accept these middlebrow binaries, dilemmas and trilemmas. Instead, try asking a new question. If my loved ones and I trashed the terms of debate foisted upon us by strangers, activists and the news media, could we together fashion a list of multiple choice answers that we might agree contain an answer we all could live with, and that better describes the true state of the system? I mean, do you really want open or closed borders? Do you really want to talk about psilocybin and heroin in the same breath? Do you really want to claim that there is no systemic oppression, or that it governs every aspect of our lives? Before long, it is my hope that you will develop an intuition that many long-running stalemated discussions are really about having our lives shoehorned by others into inappropriate binaries that can only represent the state of our world as a superposition of inappropriate and simplistic answers that you never would have chosen for yourself.

[Table] Asteroid Day AMA – We’re engineers and scientists working on a mission that could, one day, help save humankind from asteroid extinction. Ask us anything!

Source
There are several people answering: Paolo Martino is PM, Marco Micheli is MM, Heli Greus is HG, Detlef Koschny is DVK, and Aidan Cowley is AC.

Questions	Answers
Can we really detect any asteroids in space with accuracy and do we have any real means of destroying it?	Yes, we can detect new asteroids when they are still in space. Every night dozens of new asteroids are found, including a few that can come close to the Earth.
	Regarding the second part of the question, the goal would be to deflect them more than destroy them, and it is technologically possible. The Hera/DART mission currently being developed by ESA and NASA will demonstrate exactly this capability.
	MM
I always wanted to ask: what is worse for life on Earth - to be hit by a single coalesced asteroid chunk, or to be hit by a multiple smaller pieces of exploded asteroid, aka disrupted rubble pile scenario?	DVK: This is difficult to answer. If the rubble is small (centimetres to meters) it is better to have lots of small ones – they’d create nice bright meteors. If the rubble pieces are tens of meters it doesn’t help.
Let’s say that hypothetically, an asteroid the size of Rhode Island is coming at us, it will be a direct hit - you’ve had the resources and funding you need, your plan is fully in place, everything you’ve wanted you got. The asteroid will hit in 10 years, what do you do?	DVK: I had to look up how big Rhode Island is – a bit larger than the German Bundesland ‘Saarland’. Ok – this would correspond to an object about 60 km in diameter, right? That’s quite big – we would need a lot of rocket launches, this would be extremely difficult. I would pray. The good news is that we are quite convinced that we know all objects larger than just a few kilometers which come close to our planet. None of them is on a collision course, so we are safe.
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Why are you quite convinced that you know all object of that size? And what is your approach in finding new celestial bodies?	DVK: There was a scientific study done over a few years (published in Icarus 2018, search for Granvik) where they modelled how many objects there are out there. They compared this to the observations we have with the telescopic surveys. This gives us the expected numbers shown here on our infographic: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/06/Asteroid_danger_explained
	There are additional studies to estimate the ‘completeness’ – and we think that we know everything above roughly a few km in size.
	To find new objects, we use survey telescopes that scan the night sky every night. The two major ones are Catalina and Pan-STARRS, funded by NASA. ESA is developing the so-called Flyeye telescope to add to this effort https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2017/02/Flyeye_telescope.
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Thanks for the answer, that's really interesting! It's also funny that the fist Flyeye deployed is in Sicily, at less than 100km from me, I really had no idea	DVK: Indeed, that's cool. Maybe you can go and visit it one day.
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What about Interstellar objects however, like Oumuamua?	DVK: The two that we have seen - 'Oumuamua and comet Borisov - were much smaller than the Saarland (or Rhode Island ;-) - not sure about Borisov, but 'Oumuamua was a few hundred meters in size. So while they could indeed come as a complete surprise, they are so rare that I wouldn't worry.
Would the public be informed if an impending asteroid event were to happen? And, how would the extinction play out? Bunch of people crushed to death, knocked off our orbit, dust clouds forever?	DVK: We do not keep things secret – all our info is at the web page http://neo.ssa.esa.int. The ‘risky’ objects are in the ‘risk page’. We also put info on really close approaches there. It would also be very difficult to keep things ‘under cover’ – there are many high-quality amateur astronomers out there that would notice.
In 2029 asteroid Apophis will fly really close to Earth, even closer than geostationary satellites. Can we use some of those satellites to observe the asteroid? Is it possible to launch very cheap cube sats to flyby Apophis in 2029?	DVK: Yes an Apophis mission during the flyby in 2029 would be really nice. We even had a special session on that topic at the last Planetary Defense Conference in 2019, and indeed CubeSats were mentioned. This would be a nice university project – get me a close-up of the asteroid with the Earth in the background!
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So you’re saying it was discussed and shelved?	In the conference we just presented ideas. To make them happen needs funding - in the case of ESA the support of our member countries. But having something presented at a conference is the first step. One of the results of the conference was a statement to space agencies to consider embarking on such a mission. See here: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/documents/336356/336472/PDC_2019_Summary_Report_FINAL_FINAL.pdf/341b9451-0ce8-f338-5d68-714a0aada29b?t=1569333739470
	Go to the section 'resolutions'. This is now a statement that scientists can use to present to their funding agencies, demonstrating that it's not just their own idea.
Thanks for doing this AMA! Did we know the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013 (the one which had some great videos on social media) was coming? Ig not, how comes? Also, as a little side one, have there been any fatalities from impact events in the past 20 years?	Unfortunately, the Chelyabinsk object was not seen in advance, because it came from the direction of the Sun where ground-based telescopes cannot look.
	No known fatalities from impacts have happened in the past 20 years, although the Chelyabinsk event did cause many injuries, fortunately mostly minor.
	MM
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How often do impacts from that direction happen, compared to impacts from visible trajectories?	In terms of fraction of the sky, the area that cannot be easily scanned from the ground is roughly a circle with a radius of 40°-50° around the current position of the Sun, corresponding to ~15% of the total sky. However, there is a slight enhancement of objects coming from that direction, therefore the fraction of objects that may be missed when heading towards us is a bit higher.
	However, this applies only when detecting an asteroid in its "final plunge" towards the Earth. Larger asteroids can be spotted many orbits earlier, when they are farther away and visible in the night side of the sky. Their orbits can then be determined and their possible impacts predicted even years or decades in advance.
	MM
There must be a trade-off when targeting asteroids as they get closer to Earth, is there a rule of thumb at what the best time is to reach them, in terms of launch time versus time to reach the asteroid and then distance from Earth?	DVK: Take e.g. a ‘kinetic impactor’ mission, like what DART and Hera are testing. Since we only change the velocity of the asteroid slightly, we need to hit the object early enough so that the object has time to move away from it’s collision course. Finding out when it is possible to launch requires simulations done by our mission analysis team. They take the strength of the launcher into account, also the available fuel for course corrections, and other things. Normally each asteroid has its own best scenario.
Do you also look at protecting the moon from asteroids? Would an impact of a large enough scale potentially have major impacts on the earth?	DVK: There are programmes that monitor the Moon and look for flashes from impacting small asteroids (or meteoroids) - https://neliota.astro.noa.g or the Spanish MIDAS project. We use the data to improve our knowledge about these objects. These programmes just look at what is happening now.
	For now we would not do anything if we predicted a lunar impact. I guess this will change once we have a lunar base in place.
Why aren't there an international organisation comprised of countries focused on the asteroid defence? Imagine like the organisation with multi-billion $ budget and program of action on funding new telescopes, asteroid exploration mission, plans for detection of potentially dangerous NEA, protocols on action after the detection - all international, with heads of states discussing these problems?	DVK: There are international entities in place, mandated by the UN: The International Asteroid Warning Network (http://www.iawn.net) and the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (http://www.smpag.net). These groups advise the United Nations. That is exactly where we come up with plans and protocols on action. But: They don’t have budget – that needs to come from elsewhere. I am expecting that if we have a real threat, we would get the budget. Right now, we don’t have a multi-billion budget.
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There is no actual risk of any sizable asteroids hitting earth in the foreseeable future. Any preparation for it would just be a waste of money.	DVK: Indeed, as mentioned earlier, we do not expect a large object to hit is in the near future. We are mainly worried about those in the size range of 20 m to 40 m, which happen on average every few tens of years to hundreds of years. And where we only know a percent of them or even less.
President Obama wanted to send a crewed spacecraft to an asteroid - in your opinion is this something that should still be done in the future, would there be any usefulness in having a human being walk/float on an asteroid's surface?	DVK: It would definitely be cool. I would maybe even volunteer to go. Our current missions to asteroids are all robotic, the main reason is that it is much cheaper (but still expensive) to get the same science. But humans will expand further into space, I am sure. If we want to test human exploration activities, doing this at an asteroid would be easier than landing on a planet.
^{this is another reply}	Yes, but I am slightly biased by the fact that I work at the European astronaut centre ;) There exist many similarities to what we currently do for EVA (extra vehicular activities) operations on the International Space Station versus how we would 'float' around an asteroid. Slightly biased again, but using such a mission to test exploration technologies would definitely still have value. Thanks Obama! - AC
I've heard that some asteroids contains large amounts of iron. Is there a possibility that we might have "space mines" in the far away future, if our own supply if iron runs out?	Yes, this is a topic in the field known as space mining, part of what we call Space Resources. In fact, learning how we can process material we might find on asteroids or other planetary bodies is increasingly important, as it opens up the opportunities for sustainable exploration and commercialization. Its a technology we need to master, and asteroids can be a great target for testing how we can create space mines :) - AC
By how much is DART expected to deflect Didymos? Do we have any indication of the largest size of an asteroid we could potentially deflect?	PM: Didymos is a binary asteroid, consisting of a main asteroid Didymos A (~700m) and a smaller asteroid Didymos B (~150m) orbiting around A with a ~12 hours period. DART is expected to impact Didymos B and change its orbital period w.r.t. Didymos A of ~1%. (8 mins)
	The size of Didymos B is the most representative of a potential threat to Earth (the highest combination of probability and consequence of impacts), meaning smaller asteroids hit the Earth more often but have less severe consequences, larger asteroids can have catastrophic consequences but their probability of hitting the earth is very very low.
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Why is there less probability of larger asteroids hitting earth?	DVK: There are less large objects out there. The smaller they are, the more there are.
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Is there any chance that your experiment will backfire and send the asteroid towards earth?	PM: Not at all, or we would not do that :) Actually Dimorphos (the Didymos "moon") will not even leave its orbit around Didymos. It will just slightly change its speed.
I'm sure you've been asked this many times but how realistic is the plot of Armageddon? How likely is it that our fate as a species will rely on (either) Bruce Willis / deep sea oil drillers?	Taking into consideration that Bruce Willis is now 65 and by the time HERA is launched he will be 69, I do not think that we can rely on him this time (although I liked the movie).
	HERA will investigate what method we could use to deflect asteroid and maybe the results will show that we indeed need to call the deep sea oil drillers.
	HG
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So then would it be easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts, or to train astronauts to be oil drillers?	I do not know which one would be easier since I have no training/experience of deep see oil drilling nor becoming an astronaut, but as long as the ones that would go to asteroid have the sufficient skills and training (even Bruce Willis), I would be happy.
	HG
If budget was no object, which asteroid would you most like to send a mission to?	Nice question! For me, I'd be looking at an asteroid we know something about, since I would be interested in using it for testing how we could extract resources from it. So for me, I would choose Itokawa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25143_Itokawa), which was visited by Hayabusa spacecraft. So we already have some solid prospecting carried out for this 'roid! - AC
^{this is another reply}	Not sure if it counts as an asteroid, but Detlef and myself would probably choose ʻOumuamua, the first discovered interstellar object.
	MM
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Do we even have the capability to catch up to something like that screaming through our solar system? That thing has to have a heck of a velocity to just barrel almost straight through like that.	DVK: Correct, that would be a real challenge. We are preparing for a mission called 'Comet Interceptor' that is meant to fly to an interstellar object or at least a fresh comet - but it will not catch up with it, it will only perform a short flyby.
	https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/ESA_s_new_mission_to_intercept_a_comet
After proving to be able to land on one, could an asteroid serve as a viable means to transport goods and or humans throughout the solar system when the orbit of said asteroid proves beneficial. While it is probably quite problematic to land the payload, it could save fuel or am I mistaken?	Neat idea! Wonder if anyone has done the maths on the amount of fuel you would need/save vs certain targets. - AC
	PM: To further complement, the saving is quite marginal indeed because in order to land (softly) on the asteroid you actually need to get into the very same orbit of that asteroid . At that point your orbit remains the same whether you are on the asteroid or not..
can the current anti-ballistic missiles systems intercept a terminal phase earth strike asteroid? or it is better to know beforehand and launch an impacting vehicle into space?	DVK: While I do see presentations on nuclear explosions to deflect asteroids at our professional meetings, I have not seen anybody yet studying how we could use existing missile systems. So it's hard to judge whether existing missiles would do the job. But in general, it is better to know as early as possible about a possible impact and deflect it as early as possible. This will minimize the needed effort.
How much are we prepared against asteroid impacts at this moment?	DVK: 42… :-) Seriously – I am not sure how to quantify ‘preparedness’. We have international working groups in place, mentioned earlier (search for IAWN, SMPAG). We have a Planetary Defence Office at ESA, a Planetary Defense Office at NASA (who spots the difference?), search the sky for asteroids, build space missions… Still we could be doing more. More telescopes to find the object, a space-based telescope to discover those that come from the direction of the Sun. Different test missions would be useful, … So there is always more we could do.
Have you got any data on the NEO coverage? Is there estimations on the percentage of NEOs we have detected and are tracking? How can we improve the coverage? How many times have asteroids been able to enter earths atmosphere without being detected beforehand?	Here’s our recently updated infographics with the fraction of undiscovered NEOs for each size range: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/06/Asteroid_danger_explained
	As expected, we are now nearly complete for the large ones, while many of the smaller ones are still unknown.
	In order to improve coverage, we need both to continue the current approach, centered on ground-based telescopes, and probably also launch dedicated telescopes to space, to look at the fraction of the sky that cannot be easily observed from the ground (e.g., towards the Sun).
	Regarding the last part of your question, small asteroids enter the Earth atmosphere very often (the infographics above gives you some numbers), while larger ones are much rarer.
	In the recent past, the largest one to enter our atmosphere was about 20 meters in diameter, and it caused the Chelyabinsk event in 2013. It could not be detected in advance because it came from the direction of the Sun.
	We have however detected a few small ones before impact. The first happened in 2008, when a ~4-meter asteroid was found to be on a collision course less than a day before impact, it was predicted to fall in Northern Sudan, and then actually observed falling precisely where (and when) expected.
	MM
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	DVK: And to add what MM said - Check out http://neo.ssa.esa.int. There is a ‘discovery statistics’ section which provides some of the info you asked about. NASA is providing similar information here https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/. To see the sky which is currently covered by the survey telescopes, you need to service of the Minor Planet Center which we all work together with: http://www.minorplanetcenter.org, ‘observers’, ‘sky coverage’. That is a tool we use to plan where we look with our telescopes, so it is a more technical page.
Are there any automatic systems for checking large numbers of asteroids orbits, to see if the asteroid's orbit is coming dangerously close to Earth, or is it done by people individually for every asteroid? I ask it because LSST Rubin is coming online soon and you know it will discover a lot of new asteroids.	Yes, such systems exist, and monitor all known and newly discovered asteroids in order to predict possible future impacts.
	The end result of the process is what we call "risk list": http://neo.ssa.esa.int/risk-page
	It is automatically updated every day once new observational data is processed.
	MM
What are your favourite sci-fi series?	DVK: My favorites are ‘The Expanse’, I also liked watching ‘Salvation’. For the first one I even got my family to give me a new subscription to a known internet streaming service so that I can see the latest episodes. I also loved ‘The Jetsons’ and ‘The Flintstones’ as a kid. Not sure the last one counts as sci-fi though. My long-time favorite was ‘Dark Star’.
^{this is another reply}	Big fan of The Expanse at the moment. Nice, hard sci-fi that has a good impression of being grounded in reality - AC
^{this is another reply}	When I was a kid I liked The Jetsons, when growing up Star Trek, Star wars and I also used to watch with my sister the 'V'.
	HG
When determining the potential threat of a NEA, is the mass of an object a bigger factor or size? I'm asking because I'm curious if a small but massive object (say, with the density of Psyche) could survive atmospheric entry better than a comparatively larger but less massive object.	The mass is indeed what really matters, since it’s directly related with the impact energy.
	And as you said composition also matters, a metal object would survive atmospheric entry better, not just because it’s heavier, but also because of its internal strength.
	MM
What are your thoughts on asteroid mining as portrayed in sci-fi movies? Is it feasible? If so would governments or private space programs be the first to do so?What type of minerals can be found on asteroids that would merit the costs of extraction?	Certainly there is valuable stuff you can find on asteroids. For example, the likely easiest material you can harvest from an asteroid would be volatiles such as H2O. Then you have industrial metals, things like Iron, Nickel, and Platinum group metals. Going further, you can break apart many of the oxide minerals you would find to get oxygen (getting you closer to producing rocket fuel in-situ!). Its feasible, but still needs alot of testing both here on Earth and eventually needs to be tested on a target. It may be that governments, via agencies like ESA or NASA, may do it first, to prove the principles somewhat, but I know many commercial entities are also aggresively working towards space mining. To show you that its definitely possible, I'd like to plug the work of colleagues who have processed lunar regolith (which is similar to what you may find on asteroids) to extract both oxygen and metals. Check it out here: http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2019/10/Oxygen_and_metal_from_lunar_regolith
	AC
Will 2020's climax be a really big rock?	DVK: Let's hope not...
Considering NASA, ESA, IAU etc. is working hard to track Earth-grazing asteroids, how come the Chelyabinsk object that airburst over Russia in 2013 came as a total surprise?	The Chelyabinsk object came from the direction of the Sun, where unfortunately ground-based telescopes cannot look at. Therefore, it would not have been possible to discover it in advance with current telescopes. Dedicated space telescopes are needed to detect objects coming from this direction in advance.
	MM
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Is this to say that it was within specific solid angles for the entire time that we could have observed it given its size and speed?	Yes, precisely that. We got unlucky in this case.
	MM
Have any of you read Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven? In your opinion, how realistic is his depiction of an asteroid strike on Earth?	DVK: I have – but really long ago, so I don’t remember the details. But I do remember that I really liked the book, and I remember I always wanted to have a Hot Fudge Sundae when reading it.
I was thinking about the asteroid threat as a teen and came up with this ideas (Hint: they are not equally serious, the level of craziness goes up real quick). Could you please comment on their feasibility? 1. Attaching a rocket engine to an asteroid to make it gradually change trajectory, do that long in advance and it will miss Earth by thousands of km 2. Transporting acid onto asteroid (which are mainly metal), attaching a dome-shaped reaction chamber to it, using heat and pressure to then carry out the chemical reaction to disintegrate asteroids 3. This one is even more terrible than a previous one and totally Dan Brown inspired — transporting antimatter on asteroid, impacting and causing annihilation. Thank you for this AMA and your time!	DVK: Well the first one is not so crazy, I have seen it presented... the difficulty is that all asteroids are rotating in one way or another. So if you continuously fire the engine it would not really help. You'd need to switch the engine on and off. Very complex. And landing on an asteroid is challenging too. Just using the 'kinetic impactor' which we will test with DART/Hera (described elsewhere in this chat) is simpler. Another seriously proposed concept is to put a spacecraft next to an asteroid and use an ion engine (like we have on our Mercury mission BepiColombo) to 'push' the asteroid away.
	As for 2 and 3 I think I will not live to see that happening ;-)
What is the process to determine the orbit of a newly discovered asteroid?	The process is mathematically quite complex, but here's a short summary.
	Everything starts with observations, in particular with measurements of the position of an asteroid in the sky, what we call "astrometry". Discovery telescopes extract this information from their discovery images, and make it available to everybody.
	These datapoints are then used to calculate possible trajectories ("orbits") that pass through them. At first, with very few points, many orbits will be possible.
	Using these orbits we can extrapolate where the asteroid will be located during the following nights, use a telescope to observe that part of the sky, and locate the object again.
	From these new observations we can extract new "astrometry", add it to the orbit determination, and see that now only some of the possible orbits will be compatible with the new data. As a result, we now know the trajectory better than before, because a few of the possible orbits are not confirmed by the new data.
	The cycle can then continue, with new predictions, new observations, and a more accurate determination of the object's orbit, until it can be determined with an extremely high level of accuracy.
	MM
What are some asteroids that are on your "watchlist"?	We have exactly that list on our web portal: http://neo.ssa.esa.int/risk-page
	It's called "risk list", and it includes all known asteroids for which we cannot exclude a possible impact over the next century. It is updated every day to include newly discovered asteroids, and remove those that have been excluded as possible impactors thanks to new observations.
	MM
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That's quite a list!! Do you guys ever feel stressed or afraid when you have to add another dangerous candidate (and by dangerous I mean those above 200m) is added to this Risk List?	Yes, when new dangerous ones are added it's important that we immediately do our best to gather more data on them, observing them with telescopes in order to get the information we need to improve our knowledge of their orbit.
	And then the satisfaction of getting the data needed to remove one from the list is even greater!
	MM
What inspired you to go into this field of study?	I was fascinated by astronomy in general since I was a kid, but the actual "trigger" that sparked my interest in NEOs was a wonderful summer course on asteroids organized by a local amateur astronomers association. I immediately decided that I would do my best to turn this passion into my job, and I'm so happy to have been able to make that dream come true.
	MM
^{this is another reply}	DVK: I started observing meteors when I was 14, just by going outside and looking at the night sky. Since then, small bodies in the solar system were always my passion.
As a layperson, I still think using nuclear weapons against asteroids is the coolest method despite better methods generally being available. Do you still consider the nuclear option the cool option, or has your expertise in the field combined with the real-life impracticalities made it into a laughable/silly/cliche option?	DVK: We indeed still study the nuclear option. There are legal aspects though, the ‘outer space treaty’ forbids nuclear explosions in space. But for a large object or one we discover very late it could be useful. That’s why we have to focus on discovering all the objects out there as early as possible – then we have time enough to use more conventional deflection methods, like the kinetic impactor (the DART/Hera scenario).
It seems like doing this well would require international cooperation, particularly with Russia. Have you ever reached out to Russia in your work? Do you have a counterpart organization there that has a similar mission?	DVK: Indeed international cooperation is important - asteroids don't know about our borders! We work with a Russian team to perform follow-up observations of recently discovered NEOs. Russia is also involved in the UN-endorsed working groups that we have, IAWN and SMPAG (explained in another answer).
how much can experts tell from a video of a fireball or meteor? Can you work out what it's made of and where it came from? https://www.reddit.com/space/comments/hdf3xe/footage_of_a_meteor_at_barrow_island_australia/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x	If multiple videos or pictures, taken from different locations, are available, then it's possible to reconstruct the trajectory, and extrapolate where the object came from.
	Regarding the composition, it's a bit more difficult if nothing survives to the ground, but some information can be obtained indirectly from the fireball's color, or its fragmentation behavior. If a spectral analysis of the light can be made, it's then possible to infer the chemical composition in much greater detail.
	MM
I've always wanted to know what the best meteorite buying site is and what their average price is??	DVK: Serious dealers will be registered with the 'International Meteorite Collectors Association (IMCA)' - https://www.imca.cc/. They should provide a 'certificate of authenticity' where it says that they are member there. If you are in doubt, you can contact the association and check. Normally there are rough prices for different meteorite types per gram. Rare meteorites will of course be much more expensive than more common ones. Check the IMCA web page to find a dealer close to you.
Just read through Aidans link to the basaltic rock being used as a printing material for lunar habitation. There is a company called Roxul that does stone woven insulation that may be able to shed some light on the research they have done to minimize their similarity to asbestos as potentially carcinogenic materials deemed safe for use in commercial and residential applications. As the interior surfaces will essentially be 3D printed lunar regolith what are the current plans to coat or dampen the affinity for the structure to essentially be death traps for respiratory illness?	At least initially, many of these 3d printed regolith structures would not be facing into pressurised sections, but would rather be elements placed outside and around our pressure vessels. Such structures would be things like radiation shields, landing pads or roadways, etc. In the future, if we move towards forming hermetically sealed structures, then your point is a good one. Looking into terrestrial solutions to this problem would be a great start! - AC
What kind of career path does it take to work in the asteroid hunting field?	It's probably different for each of us, but here's a short summary of my own path.
	I became interested in asteroids, and near-Earth objects in particular, thanks to a wonderful summer course organized by a local amateur astronomers association. Amateur astronomers play a great role in introducing people, and young kids in particular, to these topics.
	Then I took physics as my undergrad degree (in Italy), followed by a Ph.D. in astronomy in the US (Hawaii in particular, a great place for astronomers thanks to the exceptional telescopes hosted there).
	After finishing the Ph.D. I started my current job at ESA's NEO Coordination Centre, which allowed me to realize my dream of working in this field.
	MM
^{this is another reply}	DVK: Almost all of us have a Master's degree either in aerospace engineering, mathematics, physics/astronomy/planetary science, or computer science. Some of us - as MM - have a Ph.D. too. But that's not really a requirement. This is true for our team at ESA, but also for other teams in other countries.
What is the likelihood of an asteroid hitting the Earth In the next 200 years?	It depends on the size, large ones are rare, while small ones are much more common. You can check this infographics to get the numbers for each size class: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/06/Asteroid_danger_explained
	MM
Have you played the Earth Defence Force games and if you have, which one is your favourite?	No I have not played the Earth Defence Force games, but I just looked it up and I think I would liked it. Which one would you recommend?
	HG
How close is too close to earth? Space is a SUPER vast void so is 1,000,000 miles close, 10,000,000? And if an asteroid is big enough can it throw earth off its orbit?	DVK: Too close for my taste is when we compute an impact probability > 0 for the object. That means the flyby distance is zero :-) Those are the objects on our risk page http://neo.ssa.esa.int/risk-page.
	If an object can alter the orbit of another one, we would call it planet. So unless we have a rogue planet coming from another solar system (verrry unlikely) we are safe from that.
How can I join you when I'm older?	DVK: Somebody was asking about our career paths... Study aerospace engineering or math or physics or computer science, get a Masters. Possibly a Ph.D. Then apply for my position when I retire. Check here for how to apply at ESA: https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Careers_at_ESA/Frequently_asked_questions2#HR1
How much is too much?	DVK: 42 again
Are you aware of any asteroids that are theoretically within our reach, or will be within our reach at some point, that are carrying a large quantity of shungite? If you're not aware, shungite is like a 2 billion year old like, rock stone that protects against frequencies and unwanted frequencies that may be traveling in the air. I bought a whole bunch of the stuff. Put them around the la casa. Little pyramids, stuff like that.	DVK: If I remember my geology properly, Shungite forms in water sedimental deposits. This requires liquid water, i.e. a larger planet. So I don't think there is a high chance to see that on asteroids.

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# /r/Peloton Pre-TDF Survey 2020

You and Cycling

1. Where do you live?

2. What's your age?

3. What's your gender?

4. How much of the men's season do you watch/follow?

5. Do you maintain an interest in women's professional road racing?

6. How much of the women's season do you follow?

7. How long have you been watching cycling?

Sporting Favourites

8. Do you have like/dislike feelings about WT teams?

10. Do you ride a bike regularly?

11. Out of the sports you practice, is cycling your favourite?

12. What other sports do you follow?

13. Out of the sports you follow, is cycling your favourite sport?

Subreddit stats

14. How often do you participate in a /Peloton Race Thread whilst watching a race?

15. How do you watch Races?

16. Where else do you follow races live (in addition to watching them)?

17. Do you use /Peloton mostly in classic reddit or redesign when on the desktop?

18. With what version of reddit do you browse the sub?

19. How did you find the sub?

Other bits and bobs

20. Did you think back in March we would see any more racing this year?

21. Will we manage to fulfill the rest of the UCI calendar without further Covid-19 issues postponing more races?

22. When did you become aware of Alexander Foliforov?

23. Who will win the 2020 Tour de France?

24. What for you was the defining cycling moment of the previous decade?

25. Any suggestions for the Survey?

26. Any suggestions for the sub?

Subreddit Demographic Survey 2020 : The Results

2020 Childfree Subreddit Survey

1. Introduction

2. Methodology

3. Results

General Demographics

Age group

Gender and Gender Identity

Sexual Orientation

Birth Location

Ethnicity

Education

Highest Current Level of Education

Career and Finances

Religion and Spirituality

Faith Originally Raised In

Current Faith

Level of Current Religious Practice

Effect of Faith over Childfreedom

Effect of Childfreedom over Faith

Romantic and Sexual Life

Current Dating Situation

Childfree Partner

Dating a Single Parent

Childhood and Family Life

Sterilisation

Sterilisation Status

Age when starting doctor shopping or addressing issue with doctor. Percentages exclude those who do not want to be sterilised and who have not discussed sterilisation with their doctor.

Age at the time of sterilisation. Percentages exclude those who have not and do not want to be sterilised.

Elapsed time between requesting procedure and undergoing procedure. Percentages exclude those who have not and do not want to be sterilised.

How many doctors refused at first, before finding one who would accept?

Childfreedom

Primary Reason to Not Have Children

Dislike Towards Children

Working With Children

4. Discussion

Child Status

General Demographics

Education level

Career and Finances

Location

Religion and Spirituality

Romantic and Sexual Life

Childhood and Family Life

Sterilisation

Childfreedom

The Subreddit

5. Conclusion

Thank you to our participants who contributed to the survey. This has been an unusual and difficult year for many people. Stay safe, and stay childfree.