Nonsense. CCDs collect electrons in "bins", which are then read-out. There is absolutely not "too much data for a non-dedicated vision processing system to deal with", you get just an array of raw "pixels". The most innate problem with a CCD is bloom if you wait too long for bin reads. But one could compensate for this by alternating short and long bin reads.
The pupil shrinks to prevent damage to the eye, not because images get washed out in brightness.
Of course, having a small aperture limits how many photons reach the retina from dark areas, thus limiting your ability to see there. But that's not due to some linearization / truncation effect, it's due to the limitation of your optics.
Many of the best IR lens materials can't stand humidity
Again, it depends on what you mean by "IR", which is a very broad spectrum range. Cameras often have to add a special IR filter to block near-IR because the lens doesn't block it on its own. You can see here the transmission spectrums of different types of glasses and plastics. You can see that as a general rule they're good at blocking UV but not IR, at least near-IR (750-1400nm). They tend to block more IR the closer you get to the far-IR spectrum, however.
This was a software issue. The camera 'saw' the truck, but the edges didn't have high enough contrast.
Images being overexposed will do that to you. And the overexposure of an image isn't a fundamental aspect of CCD hardware, it's a processing artifact.
Example: take this image. Note how the boundary between the car and the sky in this picture is completely lost. It's not like the CCD is receiving the exact same amount of photons from the car and the sky - they're actually going to be very different. But they're both truncated off at maximum brightness when saved into an "image" - and that image is then provided to the autopilot. In severe cases, the autopilot is highly disadvantaged, if not inherently doomed, no matter how good its software is. Human eyes don't have that limitation - we can see bright and dark areas simultaneously and make out details in both.
The CCD is getting the data that's needed. But the autopilot isn't.
This changes nothing written above: the autopilot software should be the ones processing it; it shouldn't be linearized and truncated before the autopilot gets it. Because that's killing off some *very* important information.
More to the point about spectrums... mid to near IR should show operating vehicle engines, potentially exhaust, etc as hot pixels. And long-wave IR should show people and animals as hot pixels. Both of which sound *incredibly* useful.
That said, I'm not sure where traditional CCDs stop being sensitive... I imagine they don't go all the way down to the long-wave spectrum. They do of course make cooled IR cameras that capture long-wave but they tend to be larger and more expensive. Hmm, let's see how far traditional uncooled CCDs can go... I'm seeing a number of pages putting the range limit at around 150 (or 300?) to 1100nm (human vision is 380 to 750nm, give or take). I wouldn't be surprised if some parts of an engine would glow reasonably well in the 1000+ nm range.... but that's *if* you could see it, though, without something blocking the radiation. I doubt they could see exhaust, at least at the point it leaves the tailpipe. You'd need a special designed, cooled camera if you want to see the lower ranges.
Another thing that probably could have prevented this: raw camera data.
There's no way that a truck was reflecting exactly the same amount of R, G and B (let alone full spectrums) as the sky. But it probably was the same pixel in the image taken by the camera: 255,255,255 (or higher if it's more than 8 bits). The process of converting raw data to linear space tends to truncate both dark and bright pixels; in reality you may have one pixel of a dark object in a shady place indoors that's numerous orders of magnitude lower light intensity than a pixel of a white object in direct sunshine out the window. Camera data should be returned to the autopilot system in raw format - either direct photon counts, or a floating point representation of total activation on the pixel.
The more data about what's in the pixels they can return to it - not just simply more resolution - the better. After all, more resolution may let you make out shapes further away, but the car here didn't even make out the truck close up. They should be collecting a broader spectrum and polarization data. Which may sound very difficult, but really it's not. CCDs are already IR sensitive - it's normally something that they have to try to work around by IR filtration. We already have numerous filters for different wavelengths and polarization filters that can be used in addition to the standard RGB filters - converting resolution to better spectral data. You can be assured that at least on *some* channel, with raw data, the truck would have been visible. And if not, then there's no way on Earth a human could have seen it.
But I think the problem here is much more fundamental then a lack of extra channels. It sounds clear to me that they had the horizon and truck wash out.
As you note, the fact that we only have evidence so far of certain pigments doesn't mean that those are the only ones - it just means that they're the only ones we know of today. Also, colours don't only come from pigments. For example, the green of parrots is a diffraction effect.
Well, at least the theropods are birdlike. The further you get toward the stegosaurus end of the dinosaur spectrum the closer you'll get to crocodilians (crocodilians are not descendants of dinosaurs but they're very close; their common ancestor isn't even as far back as the common ancestor between dinosaurs and pterosaurs.
The amazing thing to me is it's starting to look more and more like, in the right conditions, you can actually recover soft tissue from dinosaurs, even sequence proteins. There was some skepticism early on (arguing contamination and the like), but today the consensus seems to be they actually are what they appear to be: actual dinosaur soft tissue.
Previously, our best bet for "recreating dinosaurs" has been:
1) to start by contrasting bird genomes with other branches close to dinosaurs, like crocodilians, to reverse engineer as much of a generic "dinosaur genome" as possible (getting rid of as many of the avian changes that occurred in the past 65M+ years as we can) 2) For the rest, as much as you can, activate / deactivate genes that are already present in living species that are responsible for desired morphological features that may well have been active/inactive in the past 3) Where otherwise necessary, use custom insertions/ modification to recreate morphological features that we no longer have a trace of.
It's something... but not perfect. A great deal would be guesswork, at least when you only have modern species and fossilized bone structure to go on. But when you start having a wide variety of soft tissues that you can study on both macroscopic and microscopic scales, suddenly that's a very different picture. You know how the cells should look. You can see how each of the organs should be developing. You know what proteins are being produced - at least the bulk ones. It might actually be possible to get quite close to actual dinosaurs, even non-theropod dinosaurs whose specific mutations have been totally lost.
Indeed. Think of the massive amount of organic matter in the Cretaceous hothouse environment before the K-Pg impact. Even with all of the wildfires, there would have been a truly massive amount of it left. And thus detrivores and decomposers. And thus things who eat those things, and things who eat those. There was no shortage of food overall - just a radically, radically altered environment, with vastly reduced populations. I actually find it more amazing that plants made it than that animals did.
Speaking of birds/dinosaurs... it's not just only about appearances - picture their behaviors too. For example, parrots often have something called "eye pinning" in their threat displays. In rapid, jerky movements they lean their head down, back up, tail flayed out like a fan showing their bright colors, and stare down their targets. Their pupils pulsate in size - big, small, big, small, every 1-3 seconds. A beating black circle in an angry orange eye. Now picture that sort of threat display on something as big as, say, a T-rex. Can you think of anything more terrifying than that? Meanwhile a parrot may switch between holding perfectly still, and suddenly randomly snapping at anything, literally anything in range - clamping down on a stick, a toy, a steel bar, whatever, as hard as it possibly can, while staring at you with its pulsing eyes, as if to say, "THIS IS GONNA BE YOU NEXT!". Now again, imagine something the size of a T-rex, doing that display, snapping at whole tree trunks while pulsing its eyes at you.
Birds are also famous for having complex, diverse calls. The reason for this is that they have a syrinx rather than a larynx for making vocalizations. It's based around vibrating the walls rather than cords; the walls are divided and varied in tension, so they can impart multiple tones at the same time. Many of their ancestors probably had similar abilities. So expect complex "dinosaur song", or at least theropod song.
And not all dinosaur species died out. The avian dinosaurs survived. So we have most mammal lines dying out, and most dinosaur lines dying out. In short: "giant meteor killed most, but not all, species on Earth"
IMHO, it would be interesting if one could use the magnets from the MRI hardware itself for AMR cooling. The magnet is the lion's share of the cost of an AMR system. And AMR is much more efficient at cryogenic temperatures than compression/expansion cycles.
You know, it's funny, I've read a lot of papers on AMR, including cost analysis studies, and I've never come across anyone considering that possibility yet.
Except that it's the lightest component of our atmosphere, so it naturally diffuses upwards and eventually heads off into space
And it's also part of the uranium and thorium decay series, so it's constantly produced.
Sequestration of atmospheric helium would shift the equilibrium point slightly.
Insignificantly. The atmosphere loses 50 grams of helium per second and gains 50 from the ground (1.6MT/year). The mass of Earth's atmosphere is 5e15 tonnes. Helium is 5ppmv. You don't have to take the time to run the numbers to know that the mass of helium in the atmosphere is tremendous and only slowly cycled through over the course of a few million years. Not to mention that taking it out of the atmosphere, using it for a while, then having it escape back into the atmosphere is a closed loop.
Personally, I'm all for banning helium balloons.
That's akin to banning baking soda volcanoes to cut down on the global consumption of baking soda. You're not addressing the real issue, only a side show. All lifting purposes combined - balloons, airships, aerostats, etc - make up just a fraction of the smallest usage category (other = 13%), which also includes a wide variety of other non-industrial helium uses. Cryogenics is the biggest user (1/3rd of all helium production), followed by purging and controlled atmospheres. Even welding is a bigger user than lifting purposes.
They're one of the most wasteful products on the market.
Helium balloons are a kids toy. Virtually all kids toys are "wasteful products". Why not just ban children?
Whoops, correction: those prices were per cubic meter, not per kg. And per-volume is a better measure for party balloons anyway. So a party balloon full of neon would be about $1 and one full of xenon about $50. So helium would slot in closer to xenon, perhaps around $3-4.
Now factor in the future potential of more efficient refrigeration of the atmosphere, the use of low-quality ground sources rather than atmospheric, etc.... even wasteful uses like party balloons are going nowhere, even if we find no more good reserves - when in reality we're likely to find many more as we get better at learning what sorts of conditions are likely to yield helium traps.
It should also be added that we're far from knowing where all of the good helium reserves are - actually it's not gotten nearly as much attention as oil and natural gas, and we're still finding giant deposits of them. We're only just beginning to understand how helium concentrates in certain reserves and not others - a key aspect to locating future deposits.
Regardless, the "running out of helium" thing is a bit of hyperbole. For one, right now we waste most of our helium (in industry, not balloons - balloons and aircraft are only a tiny fraction of the total). We could reduce consumption by an order of magnitude by better recycling. Even concerning aircraft, new fabrics like vectran are significantly less permeable than old ones, and new techniques (hybrid airships, phase-change ballast, etc) help avoid the need for venting.
Helium can't "run out" on Earth because it's part of our atmosphere. Now, chilling it out of the air would be significantly more expensive than recovering from ground reserves - no question there. But from a concentration perspective, neon is about 3,6 times as common as helium, which is in turn about 57 times as common as xenon (by volume). Neon is about $70/kg, xenon about $3500. So it's not linear, but helium would probably slot in at around $150, about an order of magnitude more expensive than it is today. Some back of an envelope calculations show that a party balloon contains around 2 grams of helium, meaning that the helium would cost about $0,30. Hardly world changing, from that perspective at least.
Furthermore, we're not going to be switching to recovering from the atmosphere simply because there will always be more in the ground. We'll move from one deposit to the next, richest to next richest (a downward trend, offset by the upward trend of new finds and the advancement of new technology driving down recovery costs). So long as there's gases in the Earth of any kind, they're going to be more helium-rich than the air. They're also going to be easier to extract the helium from - dilutant gases like CO2, for example, are much easier to freeze out than O2/N2/Ar.
Lastly, the costs of cryogenic refrigeration are only set to go down. Right now, low temperature refrigeration not only has low thermal efficiency, it also has low carnot efficiency. That is, to say, physics says we can be far more efficient than we actually are. But new refrigeration systems, like AMR (magnetic), allow for much higher efficiencies at cryogenic temperatures.
Against a primitive foe, perhaps. Against someone like Russia or China, don't be shocked if communications are attacked in an unconventional manner, such as jamming from LEO or destroying / disabling comm satellites or relays.
Both Russia and China have been pumping a lot of money into electronic warfare.
... which, in the best case, takes you off the enemy's tail. In the worst case, it has you land in an area where the enemy can capture it.
Even the best case is a pretty terrible option. The way around that is of course that to have the drone pick its own targets on where to fly, what to engage, etc. But there's very few people with a stomach these days for letting a drone decide on its own those sorts of things.
The big advantage of a pilot over a drone is that you can't jam or spoof a pilot. Same reason that wire-guided ATGMs remain a major player in modern battlefields.
I have no clue what you're thinking of, but a single typical conventional air-to-air *missile* costs in the ballpark of $500k-$2m. And the whole point of the F-35 is to not be seen and locked onto by missiles before it's destroyed anything that could have threatened it with one.
A lot of people overinterpret the lessons of the Korean war where missiles were overstressed versus the technology of the time... and have taken it as some universal lesson which will apply forever into the future, that close-range dogfighting will always be the most critical aspect of aircraft design.
They seem pretty fragile and require far too much in support
Part of the whole point of the F-35 is that it's just the opposite, that it requires significantly less support than aircraft like the Raptor. Which is part of how it's justified its high pricetag - that it'll be cheaper to keep going in the field. To pick an example, all of the Slashdotters that complain about it not being as fast as various other aircraft due to its single engine design. But that single engine design, in addition to helping keep its radar and thermal signatures down, also reduces maintenance.
I find it funny how Slashdot tries to drag jabs at the F-35 into every conversation related to airpower, even if the topic at hand has nothing to do with the F-35. Neither of the linked articles mentioned the F-35 at all. One could perhaps reach conclusions about humans vs. drones in general, but even that's a stretch, as dogfighting is only a small fraction of what an aircraft is there for. The most realistic conclusion from these articles is "an automated dogfighting system looks like it would be a good idea for future aircraft that may be involved in aerial combat"
Part of the reason that you have humans in aircraft is the same reason that ATGMs are often wire-guided. You can't jam or spoof a wire. Likewise, you can't jam or spoof a pilot. That's not to say that drones aren't important - they are, and they'll be increasingly important in the future. But it does not mean that pilots are obsolete.
Which is again why it's funny to see pro-drone Slashdotters hate on the F-35 while being seemingly fine with legacy manned aircraft. Among the F-35's biggest selling points is its high degree of automation, situational awareness, communication, etc versus other combat aircraft. It's the most "drone-like" manned combat aircraft to date.
It's common here to evaluate the F-35 by a philosophy it was not designed for, and using "as it stands" hardware for comparisons rather than "as it's designed to be when development completes". The latter case was really put on display back in the "it's not a good dogfighter" articles Slashdot was running with a while back (never mind the followup from other pilots who found it to dogfight well which Slashdot never covered); they were comparing a half-developed F-35. But beyond that, in terms of philosophy, F-35 is designed to be able to project power long before others can reach it. It's designed to be able to detect and engage targets at long distances without those targets being able to detect and engage it. Yes, it had to sacrifice in various aspects for that - but it's hard to argue that this is some sort of pointless design philosophy not worthy of some degree of sacrifice. Criticizing it in these regards is sort of like criticizing a sniper for choosing a sniper rifle - "Meh, you've got a terrible rate of fire on that thing, you're going to suck in close combat". It's missing the whole point of what a sniper is used for. And even that analogy is unfair to the F-35, as it's designed to also be good in close combat as well - just not to the degree of a craft specifically designed for that purpose.
Could the huge amount of money spent on the F35 have been used better? Quite possibly. But it's spent, and they have something interesting coming out of it. It's certainly worth giving it a fair shot and letting it finish evolving to its design potential.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. CCDs collect electrons in "bins", which are then read-out. There is absolutely not "too much data for a non-dedicated vision processing system to deal with", you get just an array of raw "pixels". The most innate problem with a CCD is bloom if you wait too long for bin reads. But one could compensate for this by alternating short and long bin reads.
The pupil shrinks to prevent damage to the eye, not because images get washed out in brightness.
Of course, having a small aperture limits how many photons reach the retina from dark areas, thus limiting your ability to see there. But that's not due to some linearization / truncation effect, it's due to the limitation of your optics.
Again, it depends on what you mean by "IR", which is a very broad spectrum range. Cameras often have to add a special IR filter to block near-IR because the lens doesn't block it on its own. You can see here the transmission spectrums of different types of glasses and plastics. You can see that as a general rule they're good at blocking UV but not IR, at least near-IR (750-1400nm). They tend to block more IR the closer you get to the far-IR spectrum, however.
Images being overexposed will do that to you. And the overexposure of an image isn't a fundamental aspect of CCD hardware, it's a processing artifact.
Example: take this image. Note how the boundary between the car and the sky in this picture is completely lost. It's not like the CCD is receiving the exact same amount of photons from the car and the sky - they're actually going to be very different. But they're both truncated off at maximum brightness when saved into an "image" - and that image is then provided to the autopilot. In severe cases, the autopilot is highly disadvantaged, if not inherently doomed, no matter how good its software is. Human eyes don't have that limitation - we can see bright and dark areas simultaneously and make out details in both.
The CCD is getting the data that's needed. But the autopilot isn't.
And?
This changes nothing written above: the autopilot software should be the ones processing it; it shouldn't be linearized and truncated before the autopilot gets it. Because that's killing off some *very* important information.
More to the point about spectrums... mid to near IR should show operating vehicle engines, potentially exhaust, etc as hot pixels. And long-wave IR should show people and animals as hot pixels. Both of which sound *incredibly* useful.
That said, I'm not sure where traditional CCDs stop being sensitive... I imagine they don't go all the way down to the long-wave spectrum. They do of course make cooled IR cameras that capture long-wave but they tend to be larger and more expensive. Hmm, let's see how far traditional uncooled CCDs can go... I'm seeing a number of pages putting the range limit at around 150 (or 300?) to 1100nm (human vision is 380 to 750nm, give or take). I wouldn't be surprised if some parts of an engine would glow reasonably well in the 1000+ nm range.... but that's *if* you could see it, though, without something blocking the radiation. I doubt they could see exhaust, at least at the point it leaves the tailpipe. You'd need a special designed, cooled camera if you want to see the lower ranges.
Another thing that probably could have prevented this: raw camera data.
There's no way that a truck was reflecting exactly the same amount of R, G and B (let alone full spectrums) as the sky. But it probably was the same pixel in the image taken by the camera: 255,255,255 (or higher if it's more than 8 bits). The process of converting raw data to linear space tends to truncate both dark and bright pixels; in reality you may have one pixel of a dark object in a shady place indoors that's numerous orders of magnitude lower light intensity than a pixel of a white object in direct sunshine out the window. Camera data should be returned to the autopilot system in raw format - either direct photon counts, or a floating point representation of total activation on the pixel.
The more data about what's in the pixels they can return to it - not just simply more resolution - the better. After all, more resolution may let you make out shapes further away, but the car here didn't even make out the truck close up. They should be collecting a broader spectrum and polarization data. Which may sound very difficult, but really it's not. CCDs are already IR sensitive - it's normally something that they have to try to work around by IR filtration. We already have numerous filters for different wavelengths and polarization filters that can be used in addition to the standard RGB filters - converting resolution to better spectral data. You can be assured that at least on *some* channel, with raw data, the truck would have been visible. And if not, then there's no way on Earth a human could have seen it.
But I think the problem here is much more fundamental then a lack of extra channels. It sounds clear to me that they had the horizon and truck wash out.
As you note, the fact that we only have evidence so far of certain pigments doesn't mean that those are the only ones - it just means that they're the only ones we know of today. Also, colours don't only come from pigments. For example, the green of parrots is a diffraction effect.
Well, at least the theropods are birdlike. The further you get toward the stegosaurus end of the dinosaur spectrum the closer you'll get to crocodilians (crocodilians are not descendants of dinosaurs but they're very close; their common ancestor isn't even as far back as the common ancestor between dinosaurs and pterosaurs.
The amazing thing to me is it's starting to look more and more like, in the right conditions, you can actually recover soft tissue from dinosaurs, even sequence proteins. There was some skepticism early on (arguing contamination and the like), but today the consensus seems to be they actually are what they appear to be: actual dinosaur soft tissue.
Previously, our best bet for "recreating dinosaurs" has been:
1) to start by contrasting bird genomes with other branches close to dinosaurs, like crocodilians, to reverse engineer as much of a generic "dinosaur genome" as possible (getting rid of as many of the avian changes that occurred in the past 65M+ years as we can)
2) For the rest, as much as you can, activate / deactivate genes that are already present in living species that are responsible for desired morphological features that may well have been active/inactive in the past
3) Where otherwise necessary, use custom insertions/ modification to recreate morphological features that we no longer have a trace of.
It's something... but not perfect. A great deal would be guesswork, at least when you only have modern species and fossilized bone structure to go on. But when you start having a wide variety of soft tissues that you can study on both macroscopic and microscopic scales, suddenly that's a very different picture. You know how the cells should look. You can see how each of the organs should be developing. You know what proteins are being produced - at least the bulk ones. It might actually be possible to get quite close to actual dinosaurs, even non-theropod dinosaurs whose specific mutations have been totally lost.
Please don't confuse science with media coverage of science.
Indeed. Think of the massive amount of organic matter in the Cretaceous hothouse environment before the K-Pg impact. Even with all of the wildfires, there would have been a truly massive amount of it left. And thus detrivores and decomposers. And thus things who eat those things, and things who eat those. There was no shortage of food overall - just a radically, radically altered environment, with vastly reduced populations. I actually find it more amazing that plants made it than that animals did.
Speaking of birds/dinosaurs... it's not just only about appearances - picture their behaviors too. For example, parrots often have something called "eye pinning" in their threat displays. In rapid, jerky movements they lean their head down, back up, tail flayed out like a fan showing their bright colors, and stare down their targets. Their pupils pulsate in size - big, small, big, small, every 1-3 seconds. A beating black circle in an angry orange eye. Now picture that sort of threat display on something as big as, say, a T-rex. Can you think of anything more terrifying than that? Meanwhile a parrot may switch between holding perfectly still, and suddenly randomly snapping at anything, literally anything in range - clamping down on a stick, a toy, a steel bar, whatever, as hard as it possibly can, while staring at you with its pulsing eyes, as if to say, "THIS IS GONNA BE YOU NEXT!". Now again, imagine something the size of a T-rex, doing that display, snapping at whole tree trunks while pulsing its eyes at you.
Birds are also famous for having complex, diverse calls. The reason for this is that they have a syrinx rather than a larynx for making vocalizations. It's based around vibrating the walls rather than cords; the walls are divided and varied in tension, so they can impart multiple tones at the same time. Many of their ancestors probably had similar abilities. So expect complex "dinosaur song", or at least theropod song.
And not all dinosaur species died out. The avian dinosaurs survived. So we have most mammal lines dying out, and most dinosaur lines dying out. In short: "giant meteor killed most, but not all, species on Earth"
IMHO, it would be interesting if one could use the magnets from the MRI hardware itself for AMR cooling. The magnet is the lion's share of the cost of an AMR system. And AMR is much more efficient at cryogenic temperatures than compression/expansion cycles.
You know, it's funny, I've read a lot of papers on AMR, including cost analysis studies, and I've never come across anyone considering that possibility yet.
Ugh, can't write straight today. Helium would slot in closer to *neon*, perhaps around $3-4.
And it's also part of the uranium and thorium decay series, so it's constantly produced.
Insignificantly. The atmosphere loses 50 grams of helium per second and gains 50 from the ground (1.6MT/year). The mass of Earth's atmosphere is 5e15 tonnes. Helium is 5ppmv. You don't have to take the time to run the numbers to know that the mass of helium in the atmosphere is tremendous and only slowly cycled through over the course of a few million years. Not to mention that taking it out of the atmosphere, using it for a while, then having it escape back into the atmosphere is a closed loop.
That's akin to banning baking soda volcanoes to cut down on the global consumption of baking soda. You're not addressing the real issue, only a side show. All lifting purposes combined - balloons, airships, aerostats, etc - make up just a fraction of the smallest usage category (other = 13%), which also includes a wide variety of other non-industrial helium uses. Cryogenics is the biggest user (1/3rd of all helium production), followed by purging and controlled atmospheres. Even welding is a bigger user than lifting purposes.
Helium balloons are a kids toy. Virtually all kids toys are "wasteful products". Why not just ban children?
Whoops, correction: those prices were per cubic meter, not per kg. And per-volume is a better measure for party balloons anyway. So a party balloon full of neon would be about $1 and one full of xenon about $50. So helium would slot in closer to xenon, perhaps around $3-4.
Now factor in the future potential of more efficient refrigeration of the atmosphere, the use of low-quality ground sources rather than atmospheric, etc.... even wasteful uses like party balloons are going nowhere, even if we find no more good reserves - when in reality we're likely to find many more as we get better at learning what sorts of conditions are likely to yield helium traps.
It should also be added that we're far from knowing where all of the good helium reserves are - actually it's not gotten nearly as much attention as oil and natural gas, and we're still finding giant deposits of them. We're only just beginning to understand how helium concentrates in certain reserves and not others - a key aspect to locating future deposits.
In a single deposit, that's pretty huge.
Regardless, the "running out of helium" thing is a bit of hyperbole. For one, right now we waste most of our helium (in industry, not balloons - balloons and aircraft are only a tiny fraction of the total). We could reduce consumption by an order of magnitude by better recycling. Even concerning aircraft, new fabrics like vectran are significantly less permeable than old ones, and new techniques (hybrid airships, phase-change ballast, etc) help avoid the need for venting.
Helium can't "run out" on Earth because it's part of our atmosphere. Now, chilling it out of the air would be significantly more expensive than recovering from ground reserves - no question there. But from a concentration perspective, neon is about 3,6 times as common as helium, which is in turn about 57 times as common as xenon (by volume). Neon is about $70/kg, xenon about $3500. So it's not linear, but helium would probably slot in at around $150, about an order of magnitude more expensive than it is today. Some back of an envelope calculations show that a party balloon contains around 2 grams of helium, meaning that the helium would cost about $0,30. Hardly world changing, from that perspective at least.
Furthermore, we're not going to be switching to recovering from the atmosphere simply because there will always be more in the ground. We'll move from one deposit to the next, richest to next richest (a downward trend, offset by the upward trend of new finds and the advancement of new technology driving down recovery costs). So long as there's gases in the Earth of any kind, they're going to be more helium-rich than the air. They're also going to be easier to extract the helium from - dilutant gases like CO2, for example, are much easier to freeze out than O2/N2/Ar.
Lastly, the costs of cryogenic refrigeration are only set to go down. Right now, low temperature refrigeration not only has low thermal efficiency, it also has low carnot efficiency. That is, to say, physics says we can be far more efficient than we actually are. But new refrigeration systems, like AMR (magnetic), allow for much higher efficiencies at cryogenic temperatures.
Against a primitive foe, perhaps. Against someone like Russia or China, don't be shocked if communications are attacked in an unconventional manner, such as jamming from LEO or destroying / disabling comm satellites or relays.
Both Russia and China have been pumping a lot of money into electronic warfare.
... which, in the best case, takes you off the enemy's tail. In the worst case, it has you land in an area where the enemy can capture it.
Even the best case is a pretty terrible option. The way around that is of course that to have the drone pick its own targets on where to fly, what to engage, etc. But there's very few people with a stomach these days for letting a drone decide on its own those sorts of things.
The big advantage of a pilot over a drone is that you can't jam or spoof a pilot. Same reason that wire-guided ATGMs remain a major player in modern battlefields.
I have no clue what you're thinking of, but a single typical conventional air-to-air *missile* costs in the ballpark of $500k-$2m. And the whole point of the F-35 is to not be seen and locked onto by missiles before it's destroyed anything that could have threatened it with one.
A lot of people overinterpret the lessons of the Korean war where missiles were overstressed versus the technology of the time... and have taken it as some universal lesson which will apply forever into the future, that close-range dogfighting will always be the most critical aspect of aircraft design.
Part of the whole point of the F-35 is that it's just the opposite, that it requires significantly less support than aircraft like the Raptor. Which is part of how it's justified its high pricetag - that it'll be cheaper to keep going in the field. To pick an example, all of the Slashdotters that complain about it not being as fast as various other aircraft due to its single engine design. But that single engine design, in addition to helping keep its radar and thermal signatures down, also reduces maintenance.
I find it funny how Slashdot tries to drag jabs at the F-35 into every conversation related to airpower, even if the topic at hand has nothing to do with the F-35. Neither of the linked articles mentioned the F-35 at all. One could perhaps reach conclusions about humans vs. drones in general, but even that's a stretch, as dogfighting is only a small fraction of what an aircraft is there for. The most realistic conclusion from these articles is "an automated dogfighting system looks like it would be a good idea for future aircraft that may be involved in aerial combat"
Part of the reason that you have humans in aircraft is the same reason that ATGMs are often wire-guided. You can't jam or spoof a wire. Likewise, you can't jam or spoof a pilot. That's not to say that drones aren't important - they are, and they'll be increasingly important in the future. But it does not mean that pilots are obsolete.
Which is again why it's funny to see pro-drone Slashdotters hate on the F-35 while being seemingly fine with legacy manned aircraft. Among the F-35's biggest selling points is its high degree of automation, situational awareness, communication, etc versus other combat aircraft. It's the most "drone-like" manned combat aircraft to date.
It's common here to evaluate the F-35 by a philosophy it was not designed for, and using "as it stands" hardware for comparisons rather than "as it's designed to be when development completes". The latter case was really put on display back in the "it's not a good dogfighter" articles Slashdot was running with a while back (never mind the followup from other pilots who found it to dogfight well which Slashdot never covered); they were comparing a half-developed F-35. But beyond that, in terms of philosophy, F-35 is designed to be able to project power long before others can reach it. It's designed to be able to detect and engage targets at long distances without those targets being able to detect and engage it. Yes, it had to sacrifice in various aspects for that - but it's hard to argue that this is some sort of pointless design philosophy not worthy of some degree of sacrifice. Criticizing it in these regards is sort of like criticizing a sniper for choosing a sniper rifle - "Meh, you've got a terrible rate of fire on that thing, you're going to suck in close combat". It's missing the whole point of what a sniper is used for. And even that analogy is unfair to the F-35, as it's designed to also be good in close combat as well - just not to the degree of a craft specifically designed for that purpose.
Could the huge amount of money spent on the F35 have been used better? Quite possibly. But it's spent, and they have something interesting coming out of it. It's certainly worth giving it a fair shot and letting it finish evolving to its design potential.
So do you plan to have a world where everyone's car knows when every toddler on Earth decided to wander onto a road?
Sure, it's the kid's fault. That doesn't mean that there's no decision to be made.
Except that's an unavoidable situation. Sometimes there is no option where everybody ends up fine.