3) I use out of date hardware and software as much as possible, being rigorously paranoid to never expose it to anything risky, and keep it locked down as much as possible. (Which means little Internet use... which is arguably a feature of the process.)
If the manufacturer doesn't support the software anymore (or better yet, is out of business) the odds of malicious updates go way down.
It's not just "any individual with a telescope" though. It's stuff like the Simonyi Survey Telescope, a set to map the southern sky down to below 27th magnitude that's in trouble.
How would a telescope like that compare to Webb or Hubble in its capability? Eg, if we had to trade the loss of that for many Webb scale telescopes, or presumably something much much bigger once starship can start launching - is that worth the trade?
Ok, who funds it? National Science Foundation doesn't allocate nearly enough money as it is, let alone enough to replace the tens to hundreds of active telescopes producing scientific data every night. And those telescopes are already oversubscribed with people waiting in line for available time. So unless we're slowing astronomy to a halt, we'd need similar numbers of telescopes.
And none of that takes into account that many of these telescopes are used specifically as experimenter telescopes where a given scientist can use their own equipment to perform unique observations that cannot be easily done with space-based telescopes.
It took over a decade to produce the Webb telescope and get it into space, and still is a massive feat of engineering not easily reproduced. We're not nearly to a point where we can just write off ground-based observatories in place of space-based ones.
My understanding (as a very amateur astrononer) is that it's an entirely different sort of scope - very wide field, with the ability to track extermely faint objects, rather than magnification of a much smaller field. I.e. we'd need to build and launch another immense scope to get the same sky-mapping ability.
Except... I find I get more useful results from bing, ddg, kagi than I do from Google. (Not great results, but reliably less contaminated with pure junk.) Obviously, my personal search habits aren't going to match those of everyone else, but a year ago this was not the case.
We already had 'minor planets' (asteroids). Planets are a continuum, from small rocky or icy ones the size of large moons, to "terrestrial" ones, to ice giants and gas giants.
Yes, that is how I think "planets" should be used. A root category over any number of subcategories defined over continuums and combinations of other features.
There is (or was several years ago), one on display at the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum in Nebraska. You could walk right up to it. (As is the case with most of their aircraft.) Gloriously strange little aircraft.
Look at the "morality" of America's wealthiest and most influental citizens, and how rarely they are ever held accountable for anything.
Our nation has been rotting from its head for decades, and telling the plebes to be better citizens is pissing into a firestorm and thinking you'll accomplish something.
If the manufacturer doesn't support the software anymore (or better yet, is out of business) the odds of malicious updates go way down.