HDDs can be made tolerant to it. Constant rotation still puts significant extra strain on the bearings, when spinning however. The drive will likely fail faster than an SSD.
Your best bet might be to use a laptop as the basis. They are already designed with power efficiency in mind, and you won't need an external screen and keyboard for local problem solving.
I would also consider having a raspberry pi 3 or similar as a companion. Services that must be up all the time run on the pi (e.g. network admin). The main computer only gets kicked out of sleep mode when required. The pi 3 needs less power than the newer pis, while still having enough computing power to not lag unless pushed hard.
I definitely agree with SSDs. HDDs don't do well when rotated when running. Boats are less than a stable platform.
Life will almost certainly be fairly common, given the right conditions. On earth, it seems to have appeared not long after conditions made it possible. We either won the lottery on the first week, or the odds aren't actually that bad.
The problem is, we can't detect life right now. We can only see potential communicating civilisations. These are a lot rarer. We currently know of 1, humanity. That will change in the next few years. We have telescopes being designed/built capable of detecting the gasses in the atmosphere of an earth sized planet. While we won't recognise all life types this way, a lot will show up in abnormal gasses, e.g. free oxygen. This should help bound the possibilities a lot.
Even more so, the moon is slowly moving away from the earth. A couple of million years ago, it would have completely covered the sun. In a couple of million years, it will not fully cover the disc.
A million years is a long time for humanity, but a blink on the timescale of moons and stars. We didn't just luck out with the moon's large size, but also with the timing of our evolution.
I don't think there is a single filter. My personal gut feeling however is that the jump to "specialised generalists" would be a major hurdle.
Early human civilizations are very prone to collapsing. A few bad years of rain, or an unexpected change of temperature would effectively destroy them. Making the jump from nomadic tribal to a civilisation capable of supporting the specialists needed for technology is apparently extremely fragile.
Earth also has an interesting curiosity. Our moon is extremely large, compared to earth. It also acts as a gyroscopic stabiliser. This keeps the earth from wobbling on its axis. Such a wobble would be devastating for a civilisation making the jump to technological. Even on earth, we are in a period of abnormal stability.
I suspect a good number of civilizations bottleneck at this jump. They might be capable of making the shift, but get knocked back down each time it starts to happen.
The key point is that LLMs don't process information, as we see it. The knowledge they have is predigested, and embedded into the text they were trained on.
Don't get me wrong, they are a big step towards a true AI, but they cannot do some things that seem fundamental to intelligence. The best analogy is that they are a lobotomized speech centre. They can put on a veneer of being intelligent and self aware, but it's a veneer.
I personally suspect they will be a critical component to a future AI, but are a dead end path on their own.
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.
The consensus in the trans community is to let a potential partner know earlier, rather than later. It avoids the situation you've encountered. Some men also can react violently, when they find out, so it's quite a critical dilemma to them.
Unfortunately, not all follow that mindset. They also tend to bust out a lot, and so lead a lot of men on.
It's a bit like the scumbag dilemma women face. Very few men are scumbags, yet women encounter them regularly when dating. Most men try not to annoy the women they find attractive. They are careful in their approach mentality. This means they only make a few approaches (relatively). They also tend to pair off, and so exit the pool. Scumbags cast a wide net, and don't hang on to women for long. This means they make a LOT of approaches, and so annoy a vastly disproportionate number of women.
Basically most trans people try to be as polite and careful about it as possible. A few, unfortunately, can destroy the reputation of the rest by being scumbags about it, at least locally.
I strongly suspect all solutions will either be invalid, or be limited to the speed of light.
The universe seems to have a lot of weird quirks (the speed of light being 1) what they have in common is that they make time paradoxes impossible. This points to some deeper physics causing these disparate effects. Anything travelling faster than C can be configured as a time machine, and so create paradoxes.
That also raises the question of how many of Russia's nukes are still viable, and how many of their ICBMs will work properly. There is also the factor of how effective the anti ICBM system that America explicitly does not have in orbit would be. 🤔
In the karate kid film, the sensi has him waxing a car. He complains that it is useless make-work. A bit later on, he gets into a fight. The waz-on-wax-off motion was actually a block to a punch in the face. The constant practice trained muscle memory, and power, allowing him to implement it perfectly.
In short, it's an apparently useless practice, that trains a useful skill better than direct practice.
I can remember it fairly quickly. My spacial sense is particularly good. I can easily get a sense of negative space (hidden rooms etc) as well as good predictive skills. My personal problem is when maps get large or don't overlap. It's either mapped well, or not. It can take me a while to join up multiple smaller sub maps in my mind. (Think office or stadium sized spaces).