Why did Ford sell cars instead of manufacturing them, keeping them, and just running a big taxi service?

It's claimed not to expel anything, including electrons. IIRC, it's based on some theories of quantized inertia, and apparently that can be harnessed somehow to create a reaction less drive. I'm skeptical, but I say, go for it if you think it will work.

You joke, but this is actually a very plausible scenario towards the end of the century. If we don't get our emissions under control, by 2100, the CO2 level could be 800-1000 ppm. Levels 1000 and above start to have increasing effects on human beings. Above 1000, it will start to feel like being in a stuffy room, even while outside. Prolonged time in elevated CO2 environments like this actually has a measurable effect on human cognition.

But we know how to remove CO2 from a space, it just takes energy. And if people realize they can get noticeable performance and cognitive improvements by installing CO2 scrubbers inside buildings, they eventually will. People will do this for their homes, and companies at the point they become worth the cost. Currently, companies consider CO2 management for facilities like factories. They may add extra ventilation to make sure they don't exceed certain CO2 values. But if the whole atmosphere is at these levels, the only way to lower CO2 indoors will be to install CO2 scrubbers as part of the building's HVAC system.

Which means, yes, you could in theory have a service that rented out CO2 scrubbers for offices, schools, or private homes. If you failed to pay the bill to the CO2 scrubber company, you would have your scrubber repossessed. Or, alternately, the "scrubber" might use materials that chemically absorb CO2, and a technician stops by once and awhile to swap a cartridge out. That cartridge would then be recharged and the material recycled in a plant somewhere. In that case, if you don't pay the bill, your cartridge deliveries cease, and your indoor air quickly becomes as CO2-filled as the atmosphere outside.

So yes, in the future, you could literally have your access to fresh air cut off. If the atmosphere itself is so contaminated that it can't be comfortably breathed, people would seek to ameliorate this by moving to airtight, CO2-conditioned indoor spaces.

Oh, and here's a final bit of fun. In such a world, homes might have airlocks! Imagine a weird airlock that doesn't require you to wear a space suit. You don't want to have to open the front door and let all that CO2 in. Instead, you have a small room you enter. To leave, you first enter the airlock. The air inside the airlock is filled with low-CO2 air. The inner door closes, and the air inside is pumped down to a low, but still livable pressure. Maybe it pumps the air down to the equivalent of, say, a 15,000 ft elevation. The air removed from the airlock is pumped into the house. Then, the airlock is repressurized, but this time with air from the outside. The outer door opens. You leave. The outer door closes, and the airlock lowers its pressure again, shoving the surplus air outside. Finally, the airlock is repressurized, this time with air from the house. The inner door opens, and the cycle is complete. Reverse for someone entering the house. Essentially, a home airlock would serve as a means of preserving low-CO2 air. (A dedicated mudroom would also perform a similar function, though a mechanical airlock system would be much more efficient.)

People would certainly keep working with UBI. The concept is to just ensure a minimum quality of life for everyone. Think enough money for a small studio apartment, a very basic grocery budget, and a small budget for incidentals. Enough that you can always keep a roof over your head and food in your belly. And health care covered by a universal healthcare plan.

The thing is, most people don't actually want to live like that. Most people don't want to live in a studio apartment their whole life. They want space to relax, pursue their hobbies, have space for kids, etc. Living a pure-UBI existence would be pretty spartan. UBI wouldn't be high enough for that, unless we start considering cases of extreme automation where no one really needs to work anymore.

Ok. Here's the plan:

1. Spend centuries fully terraforming Callisto into a paradise with verdant Earthlike conditions on its surface.

2. Populate it exclusively with Amish settlers.

I wonder if binary gas giants are possible. Think two Jupiter-sized planets orbiting around a star. For some reason, I find that idea vaguely terrifying...

Can it be a city floating in the sky? If you haven't heard of the concept, let me introduce you to the late, great, Buckminster Fuller's Cloud 9 concept.

Geodesic domes are one of the few structural forms that gets proportionally stronger the larger it gets. Which means that, in principle, you can build geodesic domes of massive size. You could in principle build geodesic domes across entire metropolitan areas if you wanted to.

But an interesting thing happens if you make them big enough, as Buckminster Fuller realized. If you have a geodesic sphere a half a mile in diameter, the air inside it weighs about thousand times more than the geodesic sphere enclosing that air.

And this means, if you heat the air in such a sphere the slightest bit warmer than the air inside, that sphere will experience a colossal buoyant force. You could build a city in such a sphere and it would heat itself. Just the body heat of the people living there plus the heat output of all their machines and the heat used to heat and cool homes would be more than enough to raise the temperature of the entire sphere to the point where the city could float.

In other words, such a city would be a giant hot air balloon; except it wouldn't even need a burner, the waste heat of its inhabitants would keep it constantly warm enough to make the whole city float.

I love this concept because flying cities are one of those things casually thrown into a scifi setting to indicate an impossibly advanced civilization. Just throw a floating city on screen, and you know that civilization must have some sort of anti-gravity technology. They're capable of doing things that are so far beyond us they might as well be magic. We have no more idea how to create anti-gravity than we know how to be a literal magical wizard.

But it turns out, we actually could make flying cities today if we wanted. We don't have anti-gravity, but if enough raw buoyant force, you can lift an entire city. If we wanted to, we could have a world where we look up at the sky and see an entire city lazily bobbing about, slowly drifting on the wind, gradually passing over you and floating off over the horizon.

Titan's surface seas actually interest me a lot more than the water oceans of the ice shell moons. This is for a couple of reasons. First, they're a lot more accessible. You don't need a probe capable enough to land, drill/melt through miles of ice, etc. You can plop down directly in them from space and start exploring. They're exposed directly to the atmosphere.

But that's not the real reason I'm interested in Titan's hydrocarbon seas. People have come up with speculative models for life that could actually exist in this environment. I'm not talking about microbes hiding out in the liquid water mantle of Titan, I'm talking exotic life that actually uses methane or ethane as its solvent, as Earth life uses water. Biologists have proposed models for such life forms and how their biochemistry could work.

Why is this so interesting? For one, it would just be a really neat discovery; it would prove that our type of life isn't the only type of life possible. But it goes much deeper than that.

Let's say we find some microbes in the waters of Europa or hiding in a briny aquifer in Mars. That would be a neat discovery, but we'll quickly run into a problem; how do we know that this life truly represents a second case of abiogenesis? In other words, how do we know that the microbes or other life we find is actually a truly unique instance of life? If panspermia is in play, then it's entirely possible that life originated on Earth and then was transferred to the other bodies in the Solar System. Or, life could have originated somewhere else and been transferred here. We have examples of Martian meteorites on Earth; we know that the various planets have all contaminated each other with some of their surface rocks. It's hotly debated whether microbes or their more durable spores could survive being launched into space by an asteroid, drifting for years in the vacuum, and then survive crashing onto another planet or moon. But the important part is that is a possibility. It's by no means proven, but it's not an unreasonable hypothesis.

If we find these microbes on Mars, biologists will immediately try to sequence their genomes and see if there is a common ancestor with Earth life. But the big problem is that ambiguity will still exist. We can't for sure know what kind of microbes existed on the early Earth. Even if the life we find seems to be evolutionarily distinct from Earth life, there will always be a possibility that the microbes we find are simply descended from a now-extinct branch of Earth life. Especially if it largely uses the same chemical elements as Earth life, whether such life is truly a second genesis will remain ambiguous. Biologists will debate the topic for generations, arguing for this reason or that reason why Earth life and Mars life do or do not have a common ancestor. We may never get a firm answer.

And this answer matters because what I'm ultimately most curious about is how common life is in the universe. If life on Mars and Earth share a common ancestor, we just go from only knowing that one planet has life to only knowing that one solar system has life. We could just be from one freakishly lucky solar system that happened to have an abiogenesis event, and almost every star in the sky is orbited by completely dead worlds. However, if we had clear evidence that two genesis events happened in one solar system, it would mean life is everywhere. Life cannot be incredibly rare if there are two independent occurrences of it in just our star system.

And that's where the potential of Titan's seas really shines. It may be possible for life to exist in Titan's seas, but it would have to be, from the molecular level up, constructed completely differently from every life form on Earth. I've heard it eloquently describe that, "such life would be as different from us as a stone fish is from a stone." There is zero chance that a microbe that uses methane or ethane as a solvent and can only exist at temperatures cold enough for liquid methane will share any ancestry with Earth life. The discovery of a single microbe in Titan's seas would represent an undeniable, completely unambiguous example of a second abiogenesis event. In an instant, we would know that life is absolutely everywhere in the universe.

I see life in Titan's seas as the hail Mary play of astrobiology. Though we have some conjectural models for how such life might work, we have no way of knowing if such life is truly even possible. No one has managed to assemble such a microbe in a lab. So it's a huge gamble whether such life exists. But if it does, it would provide unambiguous proof that life is everywhere in the universe. It's the ultimate high risk/high reward gamble.

Mr. Spacely demands you come into the office, even though your job consists literally of just pressing buttons that you could do from home.

I think this approach, just massively deploying an overbuilt capacity of solar, really is the future. There are a lot of things you can do with excess power. For example, with enough overcapacity, you don't have to worry about seasonal variations. A solar panel even on a cloudy day in winter still produces some power. If you build enough panels to meet your peak demand on a cloudy winter day, then you really don't have to worry about seasonal variations; only day-to-day variations.

That gives you a ton of excess energy to use during the summer months, but we've always found ways of using excess energy when it's available. Some things we could do:

• Carbon capture

• Synthetic fuel production

• Vastly cheaper aluminum smelting (and other metals where the ore is abundant, but the refining takes a lot of energy.)

• Large multi-story indoor vertical farms. (Vertical multi-story farming is often seen in sci fi, but real indoor farms tend to be confined to single-story greenhouses. This is because there's only so much sunlight available in an area. But with cheap/free energy at peak times, the energy problems disappear.

For the daily swings, even beyond moving energy long distances across a few time zones, there's a lot that can be done to move more demand toward the peak times. For example, homes can be built with better insulation and thermal mass. If a building is constructed with this in mind, it is absolutely possible to have a building that only needs heating/cooling equipment running during the times when solar power is available. In the winter, you use heat pumps powered by cheap solar to heat the building to a bit above the preferred temperature. When the Sun goes down, the heater turns off, but the building has enough insulation and thermal mass that it's only cooled to a bit below comfortable temperature by morning. You can do the same trick with fridges, freezers, water heaters, etc. For washers and dryers, they can be built to give you options. If you want something washed right now, even at 11 PM at night, you can do so, but more for electricity. If you're not in a hurry, you load your laundry and have the washer/dryer simply wait until the Sun rises and drops the spot price of electricity.

I think we have far more potential to shift electricity demand through a day than we give ourselves credit for. We're not used to thinking this way, because we're accustomed to a world where the cost of electricity is constant throughout the day. Batteries and other methods like thermal storage, compressed air storage, etc will always have their place. But I think we can probably eliminate 80-90% of our need for storage to meet daily swings just by being a bit more clever about when and how we use energy.

Hell, I could even think of a way of using thermal mass for something like cooking/baking. Many traditional stoves were built with a ton of thermal mass. Things like this. You could have an oven that was a box surrounded by a ton of insulation and thermal mass. It uses solar power during the day to heat up to say, 350F and then just retains that heat all evening. If you need to cook something in the evening, you just pop it into the already-warmed oven. If you need a temperature over 350F, you use a small bit of expensive evening energy to drive the temp up a bit hotter.

Sure, this seems like a gluttonous waste of energy in a contemporary context. But if energy is superabundant and essentially free during the day, then things like this become possible.

Also, any country in a potentially unstable region will be looking very closely at the current Ukraine war when considering fission plants. Look at how many close calls, near disasters, and potential outright blackmail Ukraine has had to deal with from its fission plants. Both sides have accused each other of planning to use them as dirty bombs. And, as a precaution, all the Ukrainian nuclear plants have been taken offline.

It's all well and good to design a fifth generation reactor with automatic safety features that rely on the laws of physics alone for safety. Your molten salt reactor still ends up as a puddle of radioactive ooze on the ground if someone blows it up, and your pebble bed reactor turns into radioactive grapeshot if someone lobs a bunker-busting bomb right through your containment dome.

These aren't things engineers typically consider, but they are things nations have to consider. Add to this that a distributed grid based on lots of solar, wind, and batteries is much more resilient to artillery and missile attacks. If a nation is entirely powered by rooftop turbines and solar, the only way to cut off their power is to destroy every one of their buildings. And at that point, even the most fortified nuclear plant is irrelevant, as they have no customers left to deliver power to.

I agree. It might be useful as an aid, but not as a final diagnosis. For example, maybe machine learning is able to discover some hitherto-unknown correlation between two seemingly unrelated conditions. That could be used as an aid in diagnosis and treatment.

For example, imagine a machine learning algorithm spat out a conclusion, "male patients of South Asian ancestry with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder have a 50% increased chance of later receiving a diagnosis of testicular cancer."

I chose these criteria off the top of my head, so they're meaningless. But bipolar disorder and testicular cancer are two diagnosis that have seemingly very little connection, and it would be even more counter-intuitive if this only significantly affected South Asian men. So it's the kind of correlation that would be very unlikely to be found through any other method than big machine learning studies. But biology is complicated, and sometimes very nonintuitive results do occur.

If this result was produced, and it was later confirmed by follow-up work, then it could be used as a diagnostic tool. Maybe South Asian men who have bipolar disorder need to be checked more often for testiclular cancer. But you would be crazy to assume that just because a South Asian man is bipolar, that they automatically also must have testicular cancer, or vice versa.

Fusion reactions can be triggered by lasers, and the fusion reaction emits most of its energy as high-energy neutrons. Literally the entire basis of fusion reactors is transmuting lower-Z elements to higher-Z elements.

Yes, hitting a nucleus with a photon will not cause it to gain new nucleons. However, intense laser light can cause nuclei to collide with sufficient energy to fuse. That's literally the entire basis for the fusion processes discussed here.

>I believe there are just better ways to do this, and I mean much much much better ways. There are other neutron sources which are cheaper, easier and produce better neutrons than NIF and the actual fusion explosion doesn't help except as a neutron source. The most obvious neutron source is a fission reactor but there are others, any country could build a breeder reactor if they wanted to (though they might face consequences if they were seen to be using it for weapons tech).

There are other ways to do it. But the key thing to worry about is the production of fissile materials from entirely mundane elements. Sure, you can make plutonium in a breeder reactor, but you still need to at least get a hold of a good amount of U-238 to do so. If today I call up a uranium mine and ask to buy a few hundred tons of yellow cake, I'm going to have some very angry-looking men carrying automatic weapons showing up at my front door very quickly. If I want to do anything involving uranium, I need to obtain special licenses and permits, plus regular inspections to make sure I'm not doing something I shouldn't be doing.

But think of the incredible lasers needed for a practical pulsed-fusion plant. This current step is good progress, but really we need to do about 100x better if we want a practical pulsed-fusion plant. We need lasers that can get 100 MJ of fusion energy for 1 MJ of input laser energy; and they need to be able to fire several times a second 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We need laser tech far, far beyond our current levels.

And the thing is, that technology is simply far too useful to see it used only in fusion power plants. Highly precise, high-power, high-efficiency lasers have all sorts of applications, including in manufacturing, communications, even things as mundane as drilling deep holes. If we get the tech needed for a pulsed-fusion plant, these lasers are going to be used everywhere, not just in fusion plants.

And that's the real concern. You have to worry about some terrorist group buying some surplus mining or manufacturing equipment, and then using it to breed lead into plutonium. Or, if the knowledge is public enough, they might just build the lasers themselves. It represents a path to nuclear weaponry without ever having to get a hold of an ounce of uranium.

So here's one thing I'm wondering. What's the proliferation risk of pulsed fusion technology?

So, as you note, a LOT of improvements would need to be made to this system before pulsed fusion could ever be possible. So we would need far, far better lasers, better in power, charge time, and efficiency, in order to make a practical pulsed fusion reactor.

But let's say we do manage to build these lasers. What I wonder is, what ELSE can you use these hyper-efficient, super-powered lasers for? Two disturbing scenarios that have crossed my mind:

1. Could you build a pure fusion bomb, a thermonuclear weapon without any uranium needed at all? In principle, if you can direct enough energy at a sufficiently large chunk of fusion fuel, you could create a nuclear explosion without any uranium, plutonium, etc. Our current non-proliferation strategies rely on monitoring and tracking fissile materials like uranium, plutonium, etc. But this might make it possible to build nuclear weapons out of only mundane materials, no uranium needed. It will probably be a long time til we have to worry about someone building a nuke in their basement. But if sufficient numbers of sufficiently high-powered lasers find their way into many industries and applications, this might be something that we have to worry about.

2. Creation of fissile materials from non-fissile materials. Miniaturizing the entire laser setup of NIF (let alone the super-NIF I was thinking of in part 1) small enough to fit on top of a missile may never be possible. However, what if someone were to use an NIF-type facility to breed fissile materials from non-fissile ones? I don't know enough about the nuclear chemistry to suggest possible elements. But there probably are some non-fissile elements that are abundant, currently unmonitored by international agencies, and can be transmuted into fissile materials through heavy neutron bombardment. What happens if you build a target for the NIF (or a super-NIF) filled with a combination of fusion fuel and some transmutable element? For example, imagine if someone figured out that ordinary lead could be transmuted into U-235 in the intense neutron flux of a super-NIF facility. In such a world, every fusion reactor we build would be a proliferation nightmare. Every one would have to be continuously monitored to make sure some nefarious government or private company isn't using it to turn mundane, untraceable lead into plutonium or similar.

Also, consider that rockets themselves emit lots of CO2 as they launch. Sure, you can use a hydrogen/oxygen rocket, but then you need a source for hydrogen. And if you don't want greenhouse emissions, that means you need a huge plant cracking water into H2 and O2. In other words, you effectively need to build a huge energy storage facility. You could just attach a fuel cell to your rocket H2/O2 plant and skip the rocket launch entirely. It is possible to create green rocket launches, but the equipment needed is essentially already a massive base load solar/wind plant.

You know what would be really fun? Imagine a few years from now, when we've got atmospheric profiles of several dozen extrasolar planets. Imagine creating a museum display for a science museum, "The Taste of Alien Worlds" or similar. Then have some means that visitors could smell or taste our best guess at what these atmospheres would smell/taste like. Smell has an immensely powerful emotional connection, and I think it would be amazing to smell an alien atmosphere while also watching a summary of the info we have on the planet. Such a thing would go beyond mere knowing facts, but to provide a visceral, emotional experience of what it would be like to see these worlds around other suns. I'm not sure how you practically present specific smells to thousands of visitors, but it seems like the type of problem that has likely been solved before. Maybe some sort of scratch-and-sniff or similar, IDK.

If the worst predictions of climate change come to pass, and we do collapse or regress to a much reduced or primitive state, our descendants will say:

Men were as Gods in those days. They could shout loud enough to be heard on the other side of the world. They could fly through the air like birds, and even soar beyond the bonds of Earth itself. Some say the Ancestors even tasted the air of worlds orbiting the distant stars!

Of course, and part of that is informing others of their practices. You have a right to your own religious beliefs. You don't have a right to avoid the consequences of your actions.

The surrogacy argument is a red herring. They also don't let lesbian couples adopt. They explicilty discriminate against people.

And don't let them co-opt the term "Christian." They're bigots that just happen to be Christian. There are plenty of churches flying pride flags.

And while surrogacy is legally complex, so is the entire thing they're doing. They're taking embryos from one couple and gestating them in another. The whole operation has to involve lawyers with experience in fertility law. Bringing LGBT people into the mix isn't anything more complex than what they're already doing.

They're bigots, pure and simple. They claim they want to help unborn children, and maybe they do. But for them, the absolute highest priority is bigotry. Everything else is secondary.

At first, I thought "good for them." Then after reading the article, damn. Fuck everything about this.

They "adopted" the embryo from the National Embryo Donation Center. This organization cares more about bigotry than they do about their own stated mission. They want to help "unborn children" and help couples who can't conceive have kids. But that only applies if you're a straight cisgender couple. Two men can't adopt an embryo to be used with a surrogate. A cisgender man married to a transgender woman aren't welcome.

In other words, they are explicitly discriminating against some of the demographics that could most readily "adopt" the embryos they have in storage. People who could offer good and loving homes, but just happen to not be straight and cisgender.

Helping unborn children is important, but bigotry comes first.

Fuck the lot of these assholes.

Ok, back up. What is up with that site? Is that the actual Vatican, if so, why are they running an auction site?

Indoor? Yes. Vertical? Not so much. There are a lot of gains that can be made by moving to indoor farming, but there's no reason to make that indoor space a tall multistory building. Indoor farms are something for single-story warehouses on cheap land on the outskirts of cities, not tall skyscrapers in the middle of a downtown.

Watching Colin Furze is like watching the real-time development of a supervillain. Like, imagine the 15 minutes of a movie that documents the life story of a supervillain, and expand that into a multi-year YouTube channel. That's Colin Furze.

And make a point of doing landscaping right near major banks and government buildings! So the police are always watching, befuddled as they try in vain to figure out what dastardly plot you're running.