It also seems like there’s some sort of unlock mechanism for what civs will be available for you to choose from in the next era - you’ll assumably have to do certain things in an era to unlock specific civs for the next era

I’m not super sure. If I recall correctly, we’ve known for a while that something was going on, because surface hearing alone couldn’t account for all of the water evaporating from oceans, but we couldn’t tell what. In defense of humanity here, the concept of photons interacting with something as comparably massive as molecules is kinda wild. We were caught way off guard when the photoelectric effect was announced, and that’s photons interacting with whole atoms instead of just elementary particles. The idea of the photomolecular effect is thus even wilder.

If you read the article, it’s pretty clear. Instead of the energy of the photons being used to heat the water molecules to state change, that energy is used to break the molecular bonds between small groups of water molecules, and those groups are small enough to then be picked up by the air and evaporate. This way, the energy contained in a photon is converting much more liquid water to water vapor than if that same amount of energy was actually used to excite the water molecules, as in a microwave.

Yes, and that’s their goal. They don’t want viable universities for the masses.

IDK. Most of the early games were actually pretty entertaining. I fairly recently played sorcerer’s stone on the gbc, and it was still pretty fantastic.