imagine something reflective entering this beam, it could blind people in a very large radius.
for me it means that thus would still need some pipe/fiber that would protect world from this laser.
A friend of mine was looking for a stargazing spot between WSMR and the Rio Grande River a fair bit south of San Antonio, NM and got her Chevy Blazy stuck and figured her best bet was to walk across the security perimeter and get caught by the security force and they caught her pretty quickly.
(1) You always hear it wrongly repeated that the first nuclear bomb was tested at Alamagordo but Alamagordo is 100 miles from the Trinity Site. San Antonio, NM was the closest settlement.
(2) Conrad Hilton, founder of the hotel chain, was born there (in his autobiography "Be My Guest" he talks about riding his horse up to Socorro, where I went to undergrad school)
(3) The Owl Bar and Cafe still serves a great green chili cheeseburger
there was that time I ran from Socorro to San Antonio in a race and, despite being underage, got offered a beer from the bartender.
- Ground-satellite-ground relaying, with at least one geostationary satellite between the ground stations. The satellites being geostationary means that the path of the beam through the atmosphere is constant, and air traffic can be routed around them in a reasonable way. (You could do this with lower orbits, but it'd be a hassle with current aviation industry technology).
- Beaming by tunnel! Can't get hit by a laser if it's under your feet. Obviously, this negates the benefits of the technology, and just turns into fibre lines without the fibre, over shorter distances, with all the pain in the ass of laying underground cable.
In the first approach, there'd have to be an effective exclusion zone around the receiving station (how big, I don't know), and it'd be nice to have satellites fail safe, so that if they end up pitching or rolling off axis, the beam will be shut off before becoming an accidental weapon.
And tunnels, not really, no, if you read my comment you'll see that this is a comically impractical option.
Also see this (with remaining eye): https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/07/how-i-got-my-laser-eye...
The dams could burst and drown millions.
The highrise you live in could topple over or burn.
The bridge carrying the train could crash into the valley.
The passenger plane could lose lift and crash into a residential building.
The power source in your car could catch fire.
We engineer around it.
We've known about global warming for almost 50 years and yet to this day the debate is divided between "eh" and "no, it isn't".
Coal plants have been consistently depositing smog in our lungs with no end in sight.
Boeing has successfully lobbied itself out of criminal charges for the deadly consequences of their (IMHO) negligence regarding the 737 Max.
Companies have stopped pretending that they'll put human lives before profit. As a human, I am therefore beyond giving any company the benefit of the doubt that they'll "engineer around it" when it comes to safety.
Defense companies are rather refreshing to read for corporate postings, since they see to always be proud of how many Iraqi's they bulldozed to death.
So much work is being done on that front.
> Coal plants have been consistently depositing smog in our lungs with no end in sight.
Not the #1 killer of humans. We're still making lots of progress on healthspan, especially in pulling people out of poverty. We're well ahead of where we were 50 years ago. People are no longer starving to death at unprecedented scale.
> Boeing has successfully lobbied itself out of criminal charges for the deadly consequences of their (IMHO) negligence regarding the 737 Max.
Sometimes bad things happen. Not to diminish these lives, but this is just a footnote in the list of impressive things technology and society have accomplished, though. Boeing and execs should face punishment, but this is a very small downside to a much greater set of accomplishments that vastly outweighs the bad.
> Companies have stopped pretending that they'll put human lives before profit. As a human, I am therefore beyond giving any company the benefit of the doubt that they'll "engineer around it" when it comes to safety.
What are you talking about? To just cite one instance, Waymo is already going to be one of the biggest needle movers in terms of human lives saved. Or another - look at what Moderna did during Covid.
Life is better than it used to be, not worse. You're wearing miasma-tinted glasses.
Yes, it is, but not nearly enough and it had to be done by dragging corporations kicking, lying and screaming every step of the way. Corporations, mind you, powerful enough to drive several of the wars of the last 50 years.
> We're still making lots of progress on healthspan
Yes, as long as your health insurance covers the treatment. UnitedHealth investors are suing the company for not willing to follow the "aggressive, anti-consumer tactics" that got their CEO murdered [1].
I've also personally heard a mildly drunk executive of a Fortune 500 company brag about how, on a cancer-related lawsuit, the US government would never let them go bankrupt because that would dry up the taxes they would collect otherwise. Time proved him right.
> Boeing and execs should face punishment, but...
They should, but they won't. And they are not the exception.
> Waymo is already going to be one of the biggest needle movers in terms of human lives saved (...) look at what Moderna did during Covid.
Uber made ignoring the laws at a worldwide scale their whole business model. And how has the market rewarded Moderna for their to humanity? Their stock is at its lowest since 2020.
People have been making the comparison to the robber barons recently, but I think they miss the point where the robber barons didn't have a worldwide surveillance apparatus and the kind of propaganda power that Orwell could only dream of.
I agree that technology has advanced for good in a lot of areas, but I also think it's worth noticing that many of these advances are behind gatekeepers who will burn a forest to the ground before upgrading infrastructure that's one hundred years old to keep shareholders happy.
[1] https://futurism.com/neoscope/unitedhealthcare-investors-wil...