I would say the active camouflage would be the least useful thing among this list. Developing space technologies on such a scale is sure to give a return on terrestial life, creating living space on or beneath the ocean has obvious advantages, as have solar and wind power clusters in appropiate locations.

Perhaps the holodeck thing is actually the least useful, but even that is creating massive technological progress from the sub-technologies required to get there.

Microwave it longer with less power so the heat can spread evenly.

I think microwaves are already almost space magic. We put the thing in the box, hit a button, 2 min later its done. Imagine showing that people a few hundred years ago that had to find their fire wood to heat anything.

- Active camouflage, Predator style.

- something close to the Holodeck from Star Trek. But I feel like it won't take long anymore with VR and AI

- more space missions. For many large bodies in the solar system we still don't know how they look.

- Moon colony, Mars base, Venus explorative missions (with Zeppelins!)

- Space station(s) with rotational gravity - 2001ish at least, or perhaps even Babylon5 ish

- floating (on water) cities, or under the oceans, like Jaques Cousteau believed in

- massive solar farms in deserts, massive wind farms in the oceans. Instead we trickle those here and there in areas with much less sun or wind. Like my own country Germany which is one of the least sunny places in the world, yet one with the most solar energy.

Jep, enough funding to not let fusion die, but not enough to make real progress either.

The western world easily finds hundreds of billions for saving corrupt governments, banks, funding wars etc. but not for the one thing that could solve half of our problems.

What sucks about them?

The thing with fossil fuels is - they are pretty great. Easy to handle, not very dangerous - extremely energy dense. 1 liter of Diesel contains 50x the energy of LiPo batteries.

Even though electric motors are over 90% efficent (and combustion engines only 30% or so) - this massive advantage of energy density will prohibit larger electric planes or ships for many years.

If they meant land surface though, and in proper units, then it would be 298800 km², roughly the size of the Phillipines or Italy.

If they meant the whole surface of earth it would be 1019795 km², or the size of Egypt.

Energy production is one thing, but storage another and also energy density of that storage. Especially when talking about transportation.

Airplanes need to be light; powering them with liquid fuels is great because they are very energy dense and also the airplane gets lighter as it goes. Not the case with batteries.

Similar issue for ships like cargo ships - space is valueable there, you can not waste 50x the amount of space for batteries compared to fuel.

In the transportation sector liquid fuels will be there for a long time. Perhaps we manage to make them non-fossil though.

Yes and they fail to mention alternative sailing systems and technologies alltogether and instead follow the example of the Ecoclipper, which does not present a suitable method for mass freight transport using wind powered or -assisted systems. It is a nice showpiece, but a 19th century solution - not a 21st one, as the articles headline promises.

A true 21st century sailing ship solution would offer comparable performance as a standard ship and have significant advantages in efficency, ultra-low maintenance and low cost when compared to a traditional sailing set up.

They end with the note that a (traditional) sailing ship transport economy would require a drastic cut down on the amounts of cargo and/or passengers that get transported, or a massive increase in the number of ships and crew required which is a understandable conclusion - but it is made only under evaluation of the Ecoclipper (and similar) example which represents obsolete technology.

With actual current day technology the transport volume can stay the same or even grow - while decreasing costs. Rotor sails could offer lower costs, higher effectivity, lower maintenance and more unobstructed deckspace to add solarpanels and windturbines. With that in mind the conclusion would be much different - namely that wind powered or rather wind- (and sun) assisted shipping while keeping modern requirements for speed, costs, power consumption etc. is totally feasable.

This article seems to be like an argument "Well computers are nice and all, but producing them is really terrible for the environment. Perhaps we should return to calculating by hand on paper and accept that it is slower - but that would be so much more environmental friendly!" Which would be unworldly naive. Humanity never ever downgrades on such things. Instead it finds solutions that offer the same or better performance at lower costs. It will be the same with transport.

Or perhaps you should elaborate what you think I got wrong.

Trying to revive traditional sailing for modern commercial shipping is a dead end. It requires too much manpower (meaning: more than current commercial shipping requires) to operate these, too much maintenance and too much deckspace. Add to that the relative unreliability because the wind is not always blowing of course and it is just not economical viable.

The solution to still use the wind as a power source is to use Rotor Sails (Flettner Rotor) - these can be fully automated, require very little maintenance, have a 8x higher efficency per area and require far less deckspace compared to traditional sails.

However, if we still want our cargo delivered in the same reliable time schedules this will only always be an additional thing to the diesel main engine. It makes not yet sense to have the main engine be electric on such large ships, because the required battery capacity would require an enormous volume of batteries.

As far as sailing goes I think the rotor sail is the future.

>Do you intervene?

Good question? Do we now? Not really when it is not in our own country. Politicians send a strongly worded letter and celebrities write some angry twitter posts, but thats pretty much it.

Only when things really escalate and threaten other countries, especially our own, we actually doing something. Uigurs get mistreated in China. This is a known fact that is against what western societies believe. Yet we don't really interfere because it doesn't actually inflict us in any way.

I don't say that is good, but that is how it is and that will likely continue, because risking war as the only way to actually force someone to change something over things of smaller magnitude such as the mistreatment of Uigurs or a strange space-harem would only get more deadly than they already are and thus get avoided as much as possible.

Well different for each person. I think in an advanced future where humanity (and its off-spawn..) are able to settle space en massé and ressource based fighting we have now (territory, oil, power, EEZ, fishing rights, etc.) largely seizes, each group could just have their own society really.

One likely future is one where the solar system and eventually other star systems are settled by many habitats on other planets, moons, asteroids or in plain space and each essentially is its own nation.

I think there will be hardcore conservative techno-primitivists and also the opposite, what ever that means, and anything in between.

I think the border will be drawn where behaviour of one group threaten others in their existence, so groups like hardcore space Nazis or -Commies etc. that want to convert everyone else or outright kill them.