The (also awesome) writer Jo Walton wrote a great celebration of Ursula Le Guin's life. She wrote in part:
She widened the space of science fiction with what she wrote. She got in there with a crowbar and expanded the field and made it a better field…
Le Guin expanded the possibilities for all of us, and then she kept on doing that. She didn’t repeat herself. She kept doing new things. She was so good. I don’t know if I can possibly express how good she was.
This doesn't address the ecosystem problems and costs imposed by climate change - but for crops and drinking water, it looks like fresh water created by solar powered desalinization is going to be very inexpensive in the future. [1][2] This is mainly due to the fact that solar power will be almost free in the near future.[3]
As a close follower of Casey, I have become disillusioned with the lack of progress in this space. Certainly solar is cheaper but his own company is very slow to scale up and ignores the logistical challenges of these huge endeavors. The salton sea lithium project should be a slam dunk but is very slow because building big things takes time.
Projects at that scale will never get built - it doesn't matter if it is solar desalination. High speed rail in CA is a perfect analog - way too many ways (regulatory + environmental) to kill projects of this size. The only way something happens at the salton sea is with state mandate to implement it.
Too cheap to meter, as long as you have no SLA. Much like solar-generated heat is "too cheap to meter" in traditional greenhouses.
Desalination is not sensitive to input power fluctuations, as long as you have a large enough reservoir to even out the spikes. The natural desalination cycle, with evaporation of ocean water, clouds, mountains, and rivers, already worrks like that, but probably a more localized setup with electric pumps and reverse-osmosis membranes could bring freshwater more directly where humans need it.
Labor of installation is anywhere from 5 to 25% of the cost, depending on location. Add in any missing parts (wiring, inverters) and permitting costs, and you may find yourself just as well off buying new panels for the added efficiency.
You'll either need less labor and materials, or get more output from the same land space, depending on your needs.
Reusing old cells makes sense in some applications, but for almost anything commercial or not a handyman special, I don't know that the numbers work out very well in their favor.
It depends on what you are thinking critically about - what is your frame of mind. You don't see a viable business here.
But SpaceX does see several possibilities. One is supplying a US Moon base and US space stations. Since Starship/Superheavy rockets are so inexpensive to build (about 100M in expendable configuration [1] even doing something like that would be profitable for SpaceX.
For Mars colonization, Elon Musk has said his target for Starship to Mars cost per flight was USD 10M. If it can take 100 people, and they each pay USD 200K per person, that's USD 20M, a 10M profit for SpaceX.
It might also be that a nation state might want to fund something like that to establish a base there.
Again, you may see a viable business in Mars colonization. But SpaceX does. So do other people. It was conventional wisdom that Starlink would not work, but it is now quite profitable. [2]
You seemingly ignored the cost of the return ticket, which even with your fantasy numbers would cost many millions of dollars.
Cramming one hundred people into a starship is eerily reminiscent of overloaded slave ships. The assumption is that you will die on the journey or at your destination.
> For Mars colonization, Elon Musk has said his target for Starship to Mars cost per flight was USD 10M. If it can take 100 people, and they each pay USD 200K per person, that's USD 20M, a 10M profit for SpaceX.
Musk has lied many times about many things. This one in particular makes less than 0 sense - Starship has nowhere near the capacity to take 100 humans to Mars even just including the provisions needed for the trip, unless you assume that those people will essentially sit in their own little cell for 2 months.
Thank you. I was timed out, but I was going to say there's 0% chance of Starship taking 100 people. Do you have any concept of how much water, oxygen, C02 scrubbing, food, shielding, medicine, and infrastructure you need to support 100 people?! Imagine the device they have on the ISS, multiply it by 20, and then pack all the water it uses in a year in advance onto the ship. Then pack 100 warm bodies in there too?
It's simply not possible in the ship they've designed.
It's not nonsense. To refuel Starship to land on the Moon like the NASA HLS program proposes [1], it will take 16 Starship Tanker flights [2][3]. So 16 launch, transfer propellant, land, refuel and refill propellant on the ground, and repeat.
For Mars launches, which is what Starship is mainly designed for, it's also 8-16 Tanker flights to fully fuel a Mars Starship. But SpaceX anticipates sending fleets of ships each synodic period (2 years), when Earth and Mars are closest. For a fleet of 10 Starships, that would be 10 launches of the Mars Starships, then 160 launches of Tanker Starships to fuel them.
You might debate whether Mars colonization is possible or desirable, but Starship and the high launch rate is designed for refueling Moon and Mars landing vehicles.
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China may be behind the US, Taiwan, and Europe in semiconductor manufacturing, but they are developing workarounds and developing their own EUV machines and EDA tools.
Check out Jeffrey "JB" Straubel's new company, Redwood Materials[1][2]. They recycle lithium-ion batteries. He was Tesla's former chief technology officer.
They are essentially a lithium mine that's using a very high quality ore, ground-up batteries.
Our team builds iOS apps, back-end cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, and does AI/ML model training and inference to support Apple's AI efforts. Native iOS (Swift or Objective C) and cloud infrastructure experience are both required. Apply at the link above and include a cover letter. It will come to me.
She widened the space of science fiction with what she wrote. She got in there with a crowbar and expanded the field and made it a better field… Le Guin expanded the possibilities for all of us, and then she kept on doing that. She didn’t repeat herself. She kept doing new things. She was so good. I don’t know if I can possibly express how good she was.
https://reactormag.com/bright-the-hawks-flight-in-the-empty-...