You can buy those, they're just expensive to buy, to run, to insure, and to learn how to operate.
But you can buy them.
The material resources do not exist on Earth to switch to EV cars. The idea we’re going to live on Mars is hallucination.
Transfer of consciousness to other substrates is far more interesting than literally living out pop culture from the last half of the 1900s.
Might be due to the fact that man made energy was quite a new thing and it's getting cheaper quite fast and seemingly boundless.
Like Moores law. It ends eventually.
The price of energy recently resumed its exponential cost reduction, but only for those who have access to solar energy. Hopefully those cost reductions result in price reductions for the rest of us soon.
The problem is that politicians and governments saw shows like Idiocracy and Space Balls, and thought - hey, we can do that.
Plus the powerful elite tapped into the discontent that they'd created in order to further their own power, then crushed the useful idiots who rebelled against the oppression and doubled down with more oppression.
Fuck yeah!
I think that styling trend was due to making them look like jet aircraft. The taillights mimicked jet exhaust pipes closely. Even the front grille was often fashioned to look like a turbine intake.
Jet engines were some of the coolest, most visible, and most advanced tech in the 50s.
Maybe they were right but a little off on the timeline. For example there was a lot of crazy tech that people thought would take off in the 90s and flopped, but are now a reality (Online shopping, smartphones, electric vehicles).
There's the risk that we will develop stronger weapons to match our increasing resilience, but on the other hand in the last 100 years we've made good progress on either outlawing many weapons of mass destruction or at least making their development much harder, so there's hope.
(OT: I do not understand the U.S. policy in this, but surely they are doing everything in their power to prevent that, since this will affect, like, everything. Right?!)
And, the tension between the U.S. / NATO vs. Russia / China / Iran / (Brazil ?) has lessened, but it certainly it isn't gone. How optimistic are you?
We've also mostly stopped with firebombing, and have seriously dialed back the chemical and biological weapons that were much more popular in the WWI/WWII era.
This past week had a test in both N. Korea and Iran, so I don't think that is accurate.
> I'd say that's a massive improvement.
Oh, yes sure it's an improvement. But if we only have two countries intent on starting a nuclear war, thats already enough to hose the whole planet. And I am far from confident that we can safely say we aren't there.
Neither of these happened.
North Korea tested a missile which could be used to deliver a nuke, they haven't tested any nukes since 2017. I don't know what Iran tested, but it certainly wasn't a nuke. The only news of a missile test from Iran this week that I can find is them testing an anti-tank missile, which obviously isn't even meant to deliver nukes.
Which would hopefully be detected in time to "solve" the problem, but still... ;)
Orbitals at predictable orbits and surfaceinstallations on airless bodies might be more in danger though. There even a well targeted fast crowbar might do quite some damage.
Faster then: the kinetic energy of such a mass moving at 12 km/s, faster than escape velocity, would be 'only' 137 tons of TNT, approximately 1/15th of the 2020 Beirut explosion. Even if you throw the rods into the ground at a blistering 50 km/s, that only gives you the equivalent kinetic energy of 2.4 kilotons of TNT, or 1/6th of the Little Boy nuclear bomb.
Then there are the terminal effects; such a tungsten rod is basically an oversized armor piercing dart like tanks shoot at each other. It will drive itself straight into the ground and most of the rod's kinetic energy will be spent pulverizing bedrock and itself. Such a weapon would be great for taking out bunkers, but I think very wasteful for any other purpose.
Wonder if it could be precision enough for non-military applications? eg possibly faster for deep geothermal drilling than using the existing surface based borehole drilling approach.
For military applications though, it'd wonder if such a rod (or small sequence of them) could be effective when striking geological fault lines. eg the San Andreas Fault line
Aka the old "use the terrain" approach.
Not much more substantiated than what people believe will be the return of Christ, it's all sci-fi
Not much fundamentally changed in the last 100 years, even a nuclear reactor is just a fancy steam engine. We're closer to horse carriages than a solar system wide civilization
But I agree, it's a process, not a state machine.
1. The right star system (including organics and potentially habitable planets) 2. Reproductive molecules (e.g. RNA) 3. Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life 4. Complex (eukaryotic) single-cell life 5. Sexual reproduction 6. Multi-cell life 7. Tool-using animals with intelligence 8. A civilization advancing toward the potential for a colonization explosion (where we are now) 9. Colonization explosion
We have made it through 7 of the 9 steps and are currently in number 8. I would call that the end stages of the Great Filter.
For everyone else, the current climate trajectory doesn't bode well.
And our newest toy is a machine mimicking human written texts.
AR and VR like in books in movies are also not reach, self driving cars aren"t really a thing just like flying taxis.
It's more self-deception than future.
Climate change and it's consequences like new diseases will be problems we be the real yardstick of human capabilities.
Despite so much technology we still have so much precarity and poverty with new massive destabilizations happening every day. What a nightmare