Screw thanking aliens, it's an incredible team of engineers that have the skills and dedication to do what seems impossible. This was 100% humanity at its best.
They rebuilt the most critical core code on a near antique spacecraft that has effectively left the solar system over an equally ancient radio link. They had 1 shot, and nailed it.
It makes a lot more sense in the earlier versions of chess. The queen used to be the "Vizier". The sultan made the decisions, the Vizier ran around and implemented them.
What's really screwy is memories survive that process. You can do Pavlov's dog type training on a caterpillar. The resultant butterfly will still react to the trigger.
The brain goes through a liquid phase, but still manages to maintain its wiring!
My personal record is over 12 years.
I applied for some temp work, doing building work (among other things). At the time I was at university, so wanted to make money in my time off. I never heard back from that particular agency, and wrote it off as a bust.
Cut to a decade after finishing uni. I get a random call, to see if I am available. I'm now a veteran freelancer, in a highly specialist field, so I'm used to being cold called with work offers. It quickly becomes apparent that they are not talking about my field however.
I eventually got enough info out of them to realise where the info must have come from. Even funnier was how annoyed she was that I hadn't made them aware I was no longer available! I don't know which is more impressive/disturbing, that they kept my application for that long, or that they were so short handed that they managed to get that deep into the pile of old applications!
Further to the other answers, "sovereign citizens" are an interesting variant on a "cargo cult" mindset.
The cargo cults, if you've not heard of them, came about after WWII. The Allied forces, advancing through the Pacific, set up airbases on various islands. These islands had tribes living on them. The tribes got a crash course in the wonders of modern society, American army style. Unfortunately, the gap between their experiences, and the world they were now exposed to was huge, and brief. A lot of misunderstandings were made (either due to insufficient background knowledge, or bored/malicious information from the troops involved).
When the allies upped stakes and left, the tribes were left a little shell shocked. They had the bright idea that if they recreated what the Americans had done, they too could summon the metal birds from the sky, full of a vast wealth of cargo! They then went about reproducing everything they had seen. They built runways, control towers, and fake planes, to bait down the cargo planes. But it never worked! They obviously weren't doing it exactly right. So they tried harder, recreating all they could as closely as they could.
Now to us, this seems crazy. Of course you can't summon a cargo plane by sitting in a wooden "control tower" talking into a coconut! We have a larger context however. We know that those planes were sent, not summoned etc.
"Sovereign Citizens" have a lot in common with these cults. However, they are focused on the legal system. Most legal systems are convoluted and arcane. They are less designed, than accreted over time. Lawyers, and the hyper rich who imply them, use this to run rings around the systems in place. They used complex legal entities to game the system to their advantage.
"Sovereign Citizens" see this and thought "why can't we do that?". Unfortunately, they didn't understand what was actually happening. They tried to recreate it, but lacked fundamental information. Even worse, a number of grifters found them, and decided they were excellent marks. They fed them additional bullshit, and gave them ever more complex instructions to make their plans work. When they failed, it's obviously because they did it wrong, or got out-spelled, not because the instructions were BS to begin with.
In short, "Sovereign Citizens" are a mix of the desperate, the stupid (not always the same thing!), the brainwashed and the grifters, all wrapped up in an almost religious cargo cult.
It's the little things that count.
The drain pump is just 3 bolts to take off (pump came back to life after I tipped it. The new one is still sat in the cupboard a decade later).
The electronics are mounted on their own door. They swing out, and are VERY easy to service.
The wiring diagram was in a plastic wallet inside the machine.
The shocks are easy to access and come off with an M10 spanner and are easy access.
Those are just the ones that have noticed explicitly, the whole machine was built with that mentality.
I work in live sports TV.
Champions League Final (European Football). Kind of a big deal. Doing a money shot camera behind the goals. 4 minutes in, one of the cameras goes dead. I try all the fixes I can remotely, while all the while the director wants the camera back up and getting quite heated about it. The only thing left to try is to replug the remote head. That part is, unfortunately, 10m past the ad boards, on the grass.
I waited for play to be down the other end (and gave the security guy a heads up what I was about to do!). Jumped the ad boards, and replugged everything. At that moment, there's a roar from the crowd, as there is a break down the wing. I am VERY much NOT supposed to be on the grass! My brain tries to freeze, luckily, 100 million years of instincts kick in to save my arse. Next thing I know, I'm finishing a sort of head first leap/ airborne commando roll, over the ad boards to tuck in behind them.
The camera restarted just before a shot on goal. The operator captured it perfectly. Much to the directors relief/delight. I also, somehow managed to avoid being on any of the camera shots. I'm still not quite sure how.
One of my professors, at uni, put it best. You should be able to second guess your calculator.
Also, it's often faster to do an approximate calculation in your head, rather than getting out a calculator (or phone) and plugging the numbers in.
112 x 9.
By approximation, it's 100ish by 10ish, so around 1000. This can often be enough. (E.g is a current below 1500mA?)
The calculator should give 1008. If it claims it is 10,080, or 12.4, you know you've screwed up, and should recheck your calculations. If you can't do it in your head, then you can't check for issues.
Pig organs are approximately the same size and configuration as human ones. They also share a very similar immune system and biochemistry. We also have experience breeding and genetically modifying them. This makes them the easiest option to modify for human use. Still not easy, but easiest.
For those confused, it's worth noting the difference between observed as a layman concept and as a quantum mechanical one.
In QM, to observed is to couple the observer to the "system" being observed. Think of it like "observing" your neighbour, over a fence using a BB gun. When you hit flesh, you know where your neighbour is. Unfortunately, the system has now been fundamentally changed. In a classical system, you could turn down the power, until your neighbour doesn't notice the hits. Unfortunately, QM imposes fundamental limits on your measurements (heisenburg and his uncertainty principal). In order to observe your neighbour accurately, you need to hit them hard enough that the will also feel it and react differently.
QM behaves in a similar way. Initially, the system is just a single particle, and is not very restrained. This allows it to behave in a very wave like manner. When you observe it, the system now includes the whole observation system, as this coupling propagates, more and more atoms etc get linked. The various restraints cause an effect called decoherence. The system behaves ever more like a classical physical system.
In short, a quantum mechanical "observer" is less sneaky watching, and more hosing down with a machine gun and watching the ricochets.