I respectfully disagree. There are vast opportunities, even on Earth, to expand energy generation without overloading the environment — such as utilizing arid lands for large-scale solar farms and expanding nuclear power, among other solutions.
That said, I believe a robust space economy is imminent, not some distant uncertainty. Starship has already had partially successful test launches, and if it follows the same trajectory as the reusable Falcon 9, we will soon have a fully reusable vehicle capable of delivering 150 tons to low-Earth orbit per launch.
If Musk follows through on his ambition to develop a fleet large enough to transport the materials needed for a self-sustaining Martian civilization, we could see an explosion in lift capacity within the next decade or two, radically transforming the scale of human expansion into space.
Even a post-ww3 nuclear wasteland Earth with climate catastrophe is orderS of more habitable than anything else in the Solar system.
Musk is a scammer and is dumb as a rock on any technological question.
Also, energy is useless if it's not where you actually want to use it, and transporting it is expensive/lossy.
The cheapest energy is one which doesn't have to be used up to begin with, and we could optimize the existing workflow much more, over some child-dream Martian scam.
That is simply not true. A post-World War III nuclear wasteland would be subject to attack and pillaging by roving human bands, whereas a deep space colony would not be. And energy transportation being lossy is not a deal breaker when you can generate massive amounts of energy out in space. Even if you lose 90% of it, 10% of an enormous number is still an enormous number.
Starship is only a breakthrough compared to the status quo; compared to the scale needed to unlock even a full K1 power consumption it's about as close as the 25m swimming certificate I got as a kid is to swimming across the Atlantic from Lisbon to Miami… 276,400 times.
K2 is 10 orders of magnitude harder than K1.
Using rockets at all for K2 is a terrible idea, as you are forced to start treating oxygen as a mineral to be extracted from rocks, because there isn't enough in Earth's atmosphere… by 8 orders of magnitude.
1) "Opportunities on earth" will always be more efficient in many aspects. Cost, waste, energy demand, reliability, throughput to provide for the 99% remaining on earth, the ones we actually try to solve problems for. You are ignoring cost-benefit analysis, scaling factors and side effects.
2) You are betting on space industries to compete and replace earth bound processes but only give launch capabilities as an argument. I think there are vast uncertainties and unknowns to overcome. Even if it plays out as you imagine, it will probably neither happen in your lifetime nor in next generations. All the while we continue to damage your foundation because we chase a pie in the sky.
3) Shooting for mars is idiotic. Going for the moon yields similar results and is much "easier". From there the rest of the solar system gets closer to us but please keep in mind, I am still not talking about self sustaining colonies or industries. Given that our earth still provides plenty, shooting for space in general is idiotic imo. If I had to bet on a technical long shot solution, I would go for nuclear fusion instead of bezos/musk, who I suspect to be equally delusional.
Please read closely. Id like to tell you something about population dynamics.
Maybe you have heard about the malthusian point of crisis, where food demand overshoots supply and a population starts to decline/collapse. This picture is incomplete.
Every species faces 3 categories of destabilizing threats: resources/nutriment, waste products and selective factors (a general term for internal/external stressors like predators, war, diseases, catastrophes, etc). All of our man made problems fit into one of these categories! In the long run, every species has to solve these problems!
Pointing at the potential resources and space for landfills beyond earth will not free you from these constraints, it just extend your grace period and enables you to pretend to have solved anything. An actual self sustaining colony means producing _and recycling_ everything, from the vital technology stack down to every day products. If any tech billionaire ever reaches that awareness of the problem and a solution for it, then why build it in space?!
What we need is a circular, sustainable econmy, which is also a big moonshot, unfortunately. But either way, the realization of the problems we face is the first step. CO2 is just one our urgent waste products. Can you name a second one with global implications?
Just make roof solar panels with tiltable shades that limit the incoming sunlight for this kind of situations. This is when there is no battery storage involved.
If the solar-roofed house can involve home batteries, problem solved.
You don't need to. If you don't draw the energy from the panels, nothing happens. It's not like a turbine where you'd have to dump the energy into a dummy load. Solar power not used is simply not produced.
Nice, in this case the solution is really easy, just a switch that the grid operator can turn off to cut the solar panels off the grid when there is not enough demand.
That's how it does work now, at least in Australia, the energy meter on your house is connected to the internet and when the market rate goes negative (oversupply) solar production gets disconnected.
If you've got a battery you can continue to charge it, as well as consuming power from your own panels, but you won't feed back power at these times.
I'm surmising that it could be a useful first step towards converting the atmospheric CO2 into something easier to store long-term.
So the ammonia doesn't need to be useful in itself, but only to be able to be converted on-site to something more storable (more stable, liquefaction at lower pressure or higher temperature, and so on), or alternatively something more useful that could displace other standard CO2-intensive industrial processes.
> alternatively something more useful that could displace other standard CO2-intensive industrial processes.
Except they are talking about using it as a fuel. If you want to displace CO2 at least use methanol, it's a liquid that's more energy dense and easier to handle safely.
The text that the founder has shared is the blueprint written at the time of the creation of the startup, and even though obviously the potential for an IPO is evoked, even just in theory, it is clearly not a priority (and could also just never happen), as the two priorities are unambiguously listed as 1) build amazing products 2) achieve to make repairability a new industry-wide standard.
The press release[1] says it's using NVIDIA's Grace CPU[1], as well as this:
MediaTek, a market leader in Arm-based SoC designs, collaborated on the design of GB10, contributing to its best-in-class power efficiency, performance and connectivity.
I assume that means USB and such peripherals is MediaTek IP, while the Blackwell GPU and Grace CPU is entirely NVIDIA IP.
That said, NVIDIA hasn't been super-great with the Jetson series, so yeah, will be interesting to see what kind of upstream support this gets.
That's not true. My freshly printed passport was denied by a computer at the UK border, they ran forensic checks for 2 hours while I waited in detention and then it was all good and they let me go.
No, if you don't come with a database solution, any paper or physical only solution is 100% counterfeitable, with just enough means poured into it.
Mafias all around the world will buy expensively any valid or even used identity document just for this purpose, i.e. to study it and perfect their forgery skills.
The process you witnessed is a remnant of the past, a feature of the necessary transition period, and I hope it disappears soon, because that's a giant gaping security hole.
Btw, your fingerprints are in the database, as some facial features too. That could be in addition to retinal scans and, why not, DNA features too in the future.
Thanks to all those biometric data, in case of a problem, the process will be much more reliable using the database than using old fashioned paper IDs.
Also, all these tests are very fast to perform (excepted maybe DNA tests), much quicker than the unreliable administrative cross-checks that were performed until now when there was an ID issue.
They will better reconnect with their medieval history by having and keeping beautiful majestic living oak trees, as many as possible and as widespread in the country as possible.
Their boat project is in no hurry. Why can't it wait the natural pace of the "donations", slow as it may be?
The volunteers probably do want to live to see it done. The inhabitants of Woodbridge do not skew young, and the few pictures I was immediately able to find of the project suggest that the volunteers in fact skew old.
They could take it as a unique chance to experience/reenact a multi-generational project as it was common in the Middle Ages with the building of cathedrals or castles.
Different times have different constraints, and so what constitues a multi-generational project varies.
I agree- I'm not sure how many readers realise how old old oak trees are. Britain is home to ancient oak trees that are seceral hundreds of years old, and connected in amazing ways to the ecosystem. Obviously nobody is suggested using ancient oak trees, but it gives some idea of the life span of an oak tree.
A sutton hoo recreation would be amazing, but I'm not sure it justifies use of veteran stock over newer oak trees.
A neighbor of mine here in the US cut down a nearly 300 year old white oak that was in his yard to make room for a kitchen addition. I saved a small piece of a branch that I turned into a bowl, but the rest of it was cut up for firewood.
1) enable space harvesting of energy and minerals,
2) unleash growth.
Doing 2) first as we are is just planetary-scale suicide.
We should even first concentrate on 0) figure out how to preserve the biosphere liveability, and stick to these rules.
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