You are a space researcher living in a country run by oppressive dictatorship. Historically your bloodline and family have been treated badly by the ruling regime. You happen to be in the good books of the regime because of your scientific expertise. But you are forced to work against your will at their space research institute. You succeed in establishing contact with an alien race that is technologically far superior to Earth. You happen to realize that they are an aggressive race and have set their eyes on colonizing Earth if they can. You have the opportunity to pass on information that can give them a tactical advantage. You and your bloodline will receive clemency from the alien race if they are successful in their invasion. You are not sure if this action would be found out or not by your government.

The FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement is a lifestyle and financial philosophy that emphasizes frugality, saving, and investing with the goal of achieving financial independence and retiring at a younger age than traditional retirement norms. Followers of the FIRE movement aim to accumulate enough wealth and passive income so that they can have the flexibility to leave traditional full-time work in their 40s or 50s and pursue their interests, hobbies, or alternative forms of income generation. FIRE adherents focus on saving a significant portion of their income and aggressively investing.

Alternative metrics, or Altmetrics, are measures of research impact that attempt to assess the wider societal impact of scholarly works by measuring non-academic sources, such as the level of engagement a specific study receives on non-academic online platforms (e.g. number of mentions/likes/reach of a study on podcasts, videos, social media). The current measure for assessing the value of scholarly articles is the impact factor (IF), which measures the frequency of citations by other published work. 

Hard infrastructure: The physical foundation that facilitates the movement of goods, people, and information. This encompasses tangible assets like transportation networks (roads, bridges, railways, airports), energy grids (electricity, gas), and water distribution systems.

Soft infrastructure: The institutional framework that supports economic activity and social well-being. It includes intangible assets like educational systems, healthcare systems, legal systems, financial systems, and governance structures.

Panopticon is a futuristic technocratic state. The government has discovered a technology that can quantify and measure, with certainty, the happiness levels of every single living unit within its borders at any given point in time. It can extract and reallocate portions of the happiness if instructed to. It can also identify groups that are likelier to experience happiness. The panopticon government has the only master access to the technology. The technology is not hackable.

Digital nomads are individuals who, by the nature of their work, can leverage technology to work remotely and live a location-independent lifestyle such as traveling abroad frequently, moving from one place to another.