I have to agree. I mean come on, cpu coolers? There’s nothing proprietary about them, nothing particularly high tech or difficult to produce, it’s a heat sink and a fan… Fancy ones may have a coolant loop, but still… I just can’t see any reason that prices would go up noticeably for such easy to manufacturer, commodity parts.

I’m just saying, it seems a little early to start screaming “the sky is falling”.

I don’t know, it sounds like a pretty convincing argument to me.

It’s a strange take to say “you’re wasting your time trying to get legislation passed” I mean, that’s one of the primary ways you change anything in a country…

And it’s plain stupid to say the only solution to a problem is the “complete abolition of capitalism” and then the next moment, suggest someone else is asking the impossible by trying to get some minor policy changed… That’s just bonkers. I mean, that simply destroys your credibility for the rest of the conversation, it’s gone.

You could say that of any infrastructure. Bridges are expenses, ongoing maintenance for them is a burden our children will have to bear. But I expect they’ll be willing to do it.

The fact is, most of what we do affects the next generation, we just don’t think about it, or can’t quantify it. The only difference with nuclear is that we can quantify it.

This is true, the waste issue is different with these two technologies, but I don’t think it’s all that significant in either case.

Fission produces some awful waste, but what I like to point out is just how little it produces. My favorite example is nuclear submarines. Nuke subs have to come to port every so often for food, equipment, supplies, etc, but not because they’re low on fuel. They don’t carry a lot, about 500kg (half ton) and that lasts them a very long time. So how often do they need to be refueled? Once, most subs are refueled just once in their ~30 year lifetime. Some subs will be decommissioned before ever refuelling, using just one set of uranium fuel rods for their whole life.

Edit: I wanted to visualize how much 500kg is, and I know uranium is heavy but I really didn’t have any idea what a half ton would look like. Turns out, it’s about 26 liters, 1 cubic foot. (Though, ideally your uranium wouldn’t be measured in either of those units, you really don’t want liters of liquid uranium, and that’s exactly where a solid cube is headed too…)

Given the tiny volume of waste produced over such a long time… We can figure out the storage. Even if the solution is costly, there’s really not much to store, this is very manageable.

So yeah, I’m not saying waste isn’t an issue for nuclear power, it is. But I think it’s not the biggest drawback, it seems like the overall cost is still the bigger problem in operating a plant.

When you’re watching a dramatic cutscene, but then someone needs your attention, so you hit esc… which skips the cutscenes instead of pausing?! What the actual fuck? The button that pauses the game in every other context now (surprise!) skips the cutscene? Why would you do that?!

I gotta be honest, as amazing as the promise of limitless fusion energy is, I’m really not optimistic that it’ll be a major or even an important technology for the energy sector, at least for the next 200 or so years.

The thing is, we already have fission power and we’re struggling to use it right now. The biggest hurdle for fission is the upfront costs of building a plant, the time needed to build a plant (construction can take up to a decade), and ongoing costs. While nuclear power is probably one of man’s greatest achievements, it’s also generally pretty expensive. And fusion has almost all the same strengths and drawbacks, but bigger. I do believe we will achieve sustainable fusion, probably soon. But I’m certain that while it will “work”, it will also prove to be the most expensive form of power generation with the largest upfront costs that the world has ever seen. And I don’t expect those prices to come down for a very long time.

Personally, I think anyone who expects fusion to be some kind of miracle technology is kidding themselves. And if people really want a miracle technology in the energy sector, keep your eyes geothermal, that’s the only tech I see that has any potential to become cheap, limitless, and constant.

I do think fusion will have good applications, but it will likely remain niche for a while. I definitely look forward to seeing spacecraft propelled by ion drives and powered by fusion, it would be amazing to be able to get to Jupiter and back on one tank of (xenon) gas.

Ok, that paper is pretty fabulous. That does make for a good sanity check for quantum computing feasibility.

That said, don’t be surprised when these things catch up quickly!

No no, quantum computing is more about using the quantum properties of particles to do computing in ways that you simply can’t with traditional computers. If you write your program to accommodate this kind of computing, you can essentially design programs to test all possible outputs simultaneously - a pretty neat trick.

Right now we’re talking about photonic computing, simply using photons as the circuitry within a processor rather than electronic circuits using elections.

Though I’m not an expert on either, so I’m probably the wrong person to ask for more information on the subject.

Likewise, my father in law loves Libre now.

You don’t think Linux is a disenshittification solution for PCs?

Because that’s essentially what we’re talking about. You want to run a custom android os, perhaps security and encryption oriented, or perhaps drm defeating is your goal. That all becomes possible if it’s simply legal to do whatever you want with your devices and your software.

Disenshittification isn’t something you wait for companies to do, it’s something you take for yourself! And it’s a whole lot easier to organize and do that if it’s officially legal.

That’s what we do in our house, I decided it was the easiest way to be sure my son actually lifts the seat. If he has to lift the lid, he’ll just lift the seat at the same time.

I totally understand where you’re coming from and I mirror the sentiment, 100%. I’m tired billionaires steering the country, and I’m especially tired of musk, I hope I never have to hear his name in the news ever again.

That said, I think your take is misguided. For all that I hate musk, spaceX has achieved some truly astonishing things. And not only have they achieved their goals, but they’ve done it at an unprecedented rate and at a shockingly low cost. SpaceX is developing technology at a similar rate to NASA way back at the beginning, during the Gemini and Apollo programs, except back then NASA was getting 4% of the federal budget. SpaceX has not had anything close to that level of funding. In fact, though they have most definitely taken government contacts, for the most part, they’ve been able to foot the bill themselves (and with investors) for the majority of their development costs. When you compare costs and outcomes directly - what spaceX delivered vs what it cost us against any other launch provider, the difference is astonishing.

But that’s all business stuff. What spaceX has done that impresses me is the technical stuff. They developed a relatively inexpensive rocket engine with a 184/1 thrust to weight ratio. That’s the best thrust to weight ever achieved by an orbital class engine, like by a lot. Before that, I believe the record was held by the F-1 engine that powered the Saturn-V and took us to the moon, it boasted a 94/1 ratio.

For their next major rocket engine spaceX developed the raptor, a full flow staged combustion engine, running on methane. Explaining why “full flow staged combustion” is impressive is probably outside the scope of this comment, but please believe me, this is a huge technical achievement and it provides some very real benefits. And running on methane is a good choice for reusability, it burns cleaner, and there’s potential for producing it off earth.

And of course most importantly they changed the industry by landing rockets. That’s not a small feat, some of their competitors called them foolish for wasting time even trying, the industry was very much not moving in the direction of reusability. Now that SpaceX has proven the viability and in fact the huge advantage of reusable rockets, there are many rockets being designed for this, from Rocket Lab, Arianespace, Stoke Space, Blue Origin, Relativity Space, eXpace (a hilariously named Chinese company), and probably many more; this is now the way the industry is going, that’s a big deal.

It’s my understanding that the idea of a dense asteroid belt (the kind Han Solo might try to hide in) is basically pure fiction, they don’t exist. However… that is essentially exactly what some parts of a planetary ring system may look like up close. So perhaps Han could hide in a planetary ring.

I see, so the simplified/traditional specifically refers to the written characters. I appreciate all the extra context as well!

Ok, it’s a bit off topic, but can I ask a naive question?

What the reasoning behind the different terminologies for the Chinese languages? Usually I see them then referred to as Mandarin and Cantonese, but sometimes I see the terms “simplified Chinese” and “traditional Chinese”. Or have I totally misunderstood what those terms mean? (Entirely possible)

Please forgive my ignorance.

Kessler syndrome is no joke.

Except it kind of is.

It can’t really happen at very low earth orbit, where the majority of satellites are, as any unpowered space junk would deorbit relatively quickly. And it can’t really happen at geostationary orbit, where most of the rest of them are, because when you go out that far there’s just so much space between every single object… The only way you run into something out there is on purpose and after a lot of calculations.

So there’s medium orbits and higher LEO those are the only areas we need to be really careful with.

Hell yeah! Actual useful industrial endeavors are the way we finally get humans off the planet, this is the way to the future. Once there’s a reason for industry in space, there’s a reason for support industries, construction, material supply, fuel supply, maintenance, etc. With those support services comes reasons for people to start to actually live in space, where they work. And from there, we can start to spread our legs and really “move in” to solar system, and the story of the human race truly begins.

It’s like the rings of Saturn: the likelihood of a collision is so remote that they didn’t even consider it when we had a satellite move through it.

I didn’t realize that, what mission is this your talking about? Cassini?

Wow, that is technically impressive, very cool!

How many full seeds are there? I mean how many could there be? Who has 300 Tb to throw at this?