NIF's "COP>1" run that you joke about here points out how its style of fusion generation will never scale economically. Check out Helion's design and approach. Lofty targets, but my fave design among all I've reviewed by a lot. Electrolyzed heavy water? Direct-to-electric operating principle? Now we're talking

The answer is in smart deployment. If we put 1,000,000 wind turbines on a grid across the whole planet, we would make less electricity than putting them in clusters where conditions are most favorable. This describes how flying fauna might be impacted by modern wind turbine installations, and so adds one more factor to favorable conditions.

Another way to address this is to get the rotor tips higher off the ground.

How small are these systems? Can the plasma be held in place for a meaningful period of time? This screams weaponry. It would have ammo - solid ablation targets. Possibly a charge time. Probably tunable to some degree. High enough power just vapes the clouds - ultimate air defense.

I wonder then if the ablation material could also be used as armor to the same kind of laser?

So it IS a fib based in marketing! Thank you for the enlightenment!

This makes sense, with the marketing being "equivalent to theoretical planar transistors of X nm".

So, if I infer correctly, tunneling is still a technical wall of sorts, and the game is more about optimizing actual logic gate and circuit design more than simply shrinking components like it used to be?

Jesus that's twenty carbon-carbon bonds.

Is this actually real or is "3 nm" cooking the books with a technicality somehow?

Especially NEO surveyor, file that one under "for the benefit of all humanity", deserving of funds on the first priority pass, no expenses spared! At least they gave it enough to keep the lights on.

4 Big Reasons: 1. Mainly compactness, as liquids ate much more dense than gases. 2. Also importantly, the enthalpy of evaporation. This adds a significant boost to the heat energy that can be moved by a given volume of refrigerant. 3. Further, liquids have higher thermal conductivity than gases under most conditions, especially low temperature ones. 4. Liquid evap temperature is fixed for a given system, which is convenient for most refrigeration apps like freezing water, or chilling without freezing. A gas-only system, on the other hand, would need precise flow control and sensor feedback to maintain temperature regardless of load.

For trucks I can see energy supply expansion being a significant hurdle, but for most passenger cars the energy draw won't need massive rapid upgrades.

Really this whole shift is happening pretty gradually, so paced-out upgrades and energy company planning all come into play.

It's ultimately a real estate infrastructure play, like you say. Restaurants have real estate not currently used for recharging cars, but where customers naturally appear, sp the play is obvious. You're probably right about structuring: energy company installs a "vending machine" and the restaurant gets a cut for the place and the customer draw.

Restaurants as competitors makes a lot of sense. Most EVs take longer to charge than fuel filling, but plug it in while you eat lunch or dinner and its charged when you're done? That's appealing.

Lasers are finally getting strong enough to make space-based solar-powered weapons platforms something that can be prototyped... the tech to usefully absorb power lasers scross space would be neat if it was cheaper than big batteries or fission cells.

Truly, the biggest variables are:

1. The economics of green energy
2. Geopolitical circumstances (conflict, sanctions, etc.)

Everything else is details: Returns on new petroleum recovery tech is likely diminishing. New well finding is also, as you mention, unlikely to add a large boon either.

I really hope Peak Oil is by 2040. otherwise we're boinked.

Yes and no.

Mars atmosphere is much thinner than earth's. Gravity is already the hardest part of getting to orbit from the ground on both planets, on Mars the atmosphere component is smaller.

The bulk of acceleration to reach orbit isn't the up part, it's the sideways part. By having a low-hanging and sub-orbital "docking point" at the base of the elevator, you are still conserving a lot of fuel and delta-V even though it doesn't go "the whole way".

Also, having an asteroid anchor point gives space elevator architects more freedom. Unwinding the inner and outer tether doesn't need to be perfectly synchronized, and tether lengths and counterweights could further be used to adjust Phobos' orbit around Mars.

None of what I just said is fast or easy, but when we're talking about space elevators nothing really is. As described, this might be the "beta version" space elevator that's deployed before any are used on earth - lesser risk, more room to experiment and learn, still has some use if we're jacking around on Mars, etc.

The article's framing is dumb. Synthetic gem-grade 1 carat cut diamonds are super impressive! When the tech matures a bit more, these stats will be a better comparison to "traditional" (* cough * exploitative) diamond mining.

An old citation suggested analgesic synergy between opiates and cannabis. Lower doses of each, when combined, give as much benefit as a large dose of just opiates. Good to see this generic finding supported by new evidence!

This example is nuts and i'm only using the names for the example, no shade intended, bear with me:

Imagine that in America, Presbyterian churches in New England were also a giant communist mafia that killed cops and civilians and blew stuff up, while running scammy businesses everywhere. Factor in that a mostly-friendly country just gave their Canadian counterparts a big heap of guns and grenades to fight against the Westboro Baptist Church neo-crusader extremists that were beheading people in now-lawless and war-torn Canada, and those guns are trading hands with the (fictional) Presbyterian mafia who are ramping up the violence and threats.

Now change Presbyterians to PKK, WBC to ISIS, Canada to Syria, and America is Turkiye. This is what Turkiye is dealing with, in a weird metaphorical nutshell.

Seriously, stable or not, Reddit needs to figure out how actually tolerant most of Turkiye's citizens are, it's tiring seeing all the uneducated vitriol.

Neutrons have a magnetic dipole I.E. are a tiny magnet with a north and south, despite being electrically neutral. Electrons and protons also have a magnetic dipole - which is more commonly called spin.

Edit: clarity

Yes, THC isn't for everybody that is for sure - even though CBD helps to hold back the psychosis-like bits. THC seems to act like an amplifier for the subconscious, so if there is something under the surface it comes roaring out. Especially with edibles, where it lasts for a long time. I'm sorry to hear it affected you like that. Likewise for steroids (probably prednisone), there is a direct interference with cortisol there.

How are you with exercise and/or meditation?

Simply put, distance.

Gravitational force is proportional to each mass and the reciprocal of the distance between them squared.

So with a black hole, you can get a lot closer to the center of its mass than with a star. If you lose half your distance, you feel 4X the gravity. Since the sun is almost 1.4 million km wide, and a black hole of the same mass would be tens of km wide at most, we can get a lot closer to the black hole. Orbiting 50 km away from a 1-solar-mass black hole (near the event horizon), you would feel almost 200 million times the gravity that you would on the surface of the sun. From the same mass.

The math is more complicated IRL (always is).

All the sci fi has us prepped to think that various robot companions are a worthy and worthwhile future, yet those rosy stories often failed to depict the part about the large corporation or government having direct surveillance access I to everybody's homes.

And you don't have to be a roght-wing prepper to want to avoid surveillance... I wonder if this plays into the marlet for tech gadgets? And is this fixed, or are we all slowly adjusting to surveillance conditions with tracking cookies, etc.?

This is the direction we are headed, though.

In a few generations, people will be willingly plugging themselves into "the matrix" in order to save money on resources.

I want to be wrong, but given our increasing addiction to digital infotainment and the reasons behind it this is the logical conclusion.

Think about it: you log in to a frigging dreamland that is more convincing and thrilling than reality could ever hope to be, thanks to top-notch brain-computer interface and digital consciousness modeling. The option to simply never log back out would be appealing to many, especially if system safety and uptime had great track records. We could always spin up humanoid robots to pilot, as in Surrogates.

I wonder if this helped to enable the staggering level of drinking people used to do. Cars helped sober us up lol

That's wild, input carbon for industrial food chain coming from petrochem. We definitely live in the future.

Very confusing, since geostationary implies programed with respect to earth's rotation.

A retrograde geostationary-equivalent or it maybe?

I'm sure I'm not the first to realize we need a crap ton more shorthand vocabulary for orbital situations.

Sick! Probably less fire hazard than sodium ion, too.

Large scale cheap batteries that still charge and discharge reasonably quick. As long as the energy density is on par with NiCd rechargeables, that's all we need.

If it's not powerful enough / stores enough charge, just scale it up some. Stationary batteries just don't have all the same constraints as mobile ones.