wolfram74

You've done a bit of a bait and switch, "fulfill their dreams" and "decent quality of life" are two very different standards. One, sure, we're in a society and sometimes that calls for sacrifice, the other, if we can't promise a decent life we shouldn't be surprised when people break the contract and act in ways that hurt the common good.

A structural question comes to mind, if the pipes are arrayed horizontally, how important is it to keep the pipes straight while they're being compressed by metric tons of biomass? Are they at risk of being squished closed? It's too late at night for me to ball park the pressures involved, but it'll be something like an extra atmosphere of pressure every 20 to 30 meters? This thing is over a hundred meters tall?

Yeah, spaceX is an aerospace company, what business do they have saying the environmental scientists have no idea what they're doing? It's trivial for them to complain and get them crucified in the court of public opinion because spaceX is almost immune from the law since the US military relies on them so heavily.

but there was a critique, your proposal was "something something let an army fix it" and they provided context "something something various armies caused it."

I saw an interesting review[0] from a climatologist talking about the biggest scientific inaccuracy isn't what you'd think. The mega hurricanes that freeze jet fuel in their eyes because they bring down super high elevation air? Apparently air, like most things, gains a huge amount of kinetic energy when it falls from great heights and would actually be incredibly hot[1], not freezing cold.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlhj-0iAiMQ [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_temperature

My guess it is a reference to a neal stephenson novel, anathem

https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Reticulum

I assume you're using "performance" to mean "kwh/kg", which is a bit of a narrow view. Even if they had have the gravimetric energy density, grid storage doesn't care about that. With an annual growth rate of 60~80% in the CAISO grid there's plenty of places to put lower density but safer batteries.

I would contend the coal lobby successfully killed terrestrial fission power. It would have been a good replacement in the 60s and 70s when solar was still underdeveloped but now solar has worked out enough kinks that it's intrinsic advantages (larger exposed construction surface allows for better parallelization, less significant failure modes allows for weaker regulatory environment, less significant scaling advantages allows for easier "right sizing" of installations, and others) are going to be hard to surmount.

Mentioning the pedal assist bikes is important, for the amount of battery a cybertruck ships with, you could ship 400 of the ebike I use for 90% of my trips.

I think two-word contranyms are more concrete, like "fight together".

Oversight is a less ambiguous example of a single-word contranym.

Given the current lower bound of one passenger in personal vehicles the process for using driverless cars needs to incentivize car pooling to the point that the average occupancy of traveling cars is considerably above 1 to make up for all the cars taking up road space while empty.

There is a possibility of municipalities having many mid to large vans that do routes at higher frequencies because they don't need drivers.

Daily reminder that the sun is incredibly bad at making power

core power volumentric density: 276 w/m^3

core density: 150000 kg/m^3

alternative units:

1.8 mw/kg .276 w/L

hello practical says a typical powered push mower might have about 1.7 KW and might weigh ball park 30 kilos, so ~60 W/kg or tens of thousands more power dense than the sun's core

useful fusion is hard because we're not trying to recreate our sun, we're trying to recreate fusion environments so intense I suspect they don't show up outside of supernovas or shortly after the big bang.

I think what the parent post is referring to is that clarifying human intention rather axiomatically involves a human at some stage in the process.

there were a couple automated urban lines in pre-90s. If we hadn't cannibalized the inter-urban trolley cars for public roads but private rails in the 1920s, who knows what would have happened.

Well we have juice boxes for that now. Krakens are still a problem though.

no, it isn't. Over the course of a few decades, a kilogram of methane has the greenhouse impact of ~50 kilograms of CO2 because of the different absorption modes methane has that CO2 doesn't. If terraform leaks more than a few percent of their product into the atmosphere from carelessness (who cares about tracking such a low value commodity?) Then this is worse than just leaving the CO2 in the atmosphere. I really wish they'd address this fact more. Some possibilities:

-The hydrogen half is still a great way to make hydrogen for industrial processes

-The methane can be used on site of production for organic chem feedstocks

-Many new rockets are using methane as their fuel, using it at point of origin instead of transporting through leaky pipelines and trucks.

Any analysis along these lines would be reassuring that this isn't going to be a net-negative, climate wise.

My generous interpretation of OP is that during the covid pandemic our precautions that kinda-sorta slowed down covid were adequate to basically remove influenza from the human population as indicated by being the least amount of influenza activity on record[0]

[0]https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm

I'm not gonna argue that crosswords are primarily cognitive and don't have any muscle memory component, but my parents do the crossword together and their curiosity tends to make the try to understand the puns and jokes that usually make up the clues when they've only gotten a word to fit and not necessarily make sense.

I said a /comparable/ bike, single speed, steel tubing, medium precision chaining and teeth on the gear.

A similar price will get you a wildly superior bike the likes of which was well beyond their craft, quite serviceable pedal assist bikes are selling for under a thousand these days.

I've recently visited the aerospace smithsonian and they had an exhibit on the wright brothers. I'd known about their prior careers as bicycle makers and repairers, but the thing that really grabbed my attention was the price. For a single speed, bare bones tube design they were charging (when adjusted for inflation) around 1500 dollars. Now a comparable bike costs maybe a 10th that.

Well, the global system has a lot of mass. It'll take time to fix the things we've messed up. To survive in the interim while we do that, there'll need to be some harm mitigation measures.

If the planet had a decent magnetic field, it might actually be quite easy to navigate. A sextant would get you "solar latitude" as it were (the angle of the sun relative to the horizon defines a circle), and coupled with magnetic orientation I think that would narrow it down to one of four points on the day side of the planet (where the field lines have a given angle with the radius of the previously defined circle). Given even crude object permanence I think that should fix your position pretty well.

The precision in the physical construction of the proof though does help in assessing it's validity. If the insight was completely divorced from the visual representation then you may as well be doing straight up symbolic algebra.

Are those advantages worth inherently worse amortization costs on the first stage though? A TSTO can have one first stage for ~10ish orbiters since it's only used for 10 minutes while the orbiter has to do all it's supposed to do before coming back into the soup. An SSTO definitionally has to have all parts of the vehicle involved at all stages of operation.

I think a more complicated ground facility is fine if you're doing enough flights.

One way the super wealthy can over whelm the intent of voters is through emphasis of information. It doesn't matter if candidate A supports 2 or 3 things most people like, if they also support or symbolize something they hate. By emphasizing a less important true thing through disproportionate marketing budgets, you can decrease the chances of people voting in favor of their own interests.

Rough calculation get's me a dyson sphere big enough to bring the black body radiation of the sun down to ~4k being hundreds of times the orbit of pluto. At that point it's actually an interesting question of where you get all the mass for the nesting shells.

R_sol^2T_sun^4 = R_shell^2T_cmb^4 (R_sol^2*(T_sun/T_cmb)^4)^(1/2) ~= 2 light months.

$15/MWh is 1.5 ¢/KWh, right? that's pretty darn cheap and means that the other 10~20 cents would be transmission and fuel, yes?

I can't find it, but somewhere I read the sentiment that `Snow Crash` is best read by young men. I know I read it when I was in my early 20's and enjoyed it, have at most skimmed some amusing passages (like the bits from the perspective of the dog) since.

Cryptonomicon, Anathem, Seven-Eves have a bit more staying power for me.

slight non-sequitor, but was anybody else disappointed with Termination Shock? The daring new social structure needed to deal with climate change is... heritable monarchy?

Assuming something like air space territories in these other cultures, extending them out to infinity seems... tricky. Wouldn't it imply that the ownership of various celestial bodies changes with time?

My recollection of how it evolved on Earth was the soviet's more asked forgiveness than permission and eisenhower basically shrugged and said "whatever, at least our spy satellites can go over you too"

The thing I often think about is while the demands for an orbital class vehicle quickly become untenable, ICBM's stay viable for a lot longer. I don't know if MAD is more or less stable without the prospect of space exploration.