I was responding to a specific response about the ElectraFly. Physics is still the problem because it is inefficient to lift mass off the ground, and substantially more inefficient to lift it straight up than horizontally like an airplane. A Cessna 172 weighing 1700 lbs gets the rough mpg equivalent of 14 mpg, a Robinson R22 helicopter around 8 mpg. A Honda Civic weighing 2700 lbs gets 32 mpg.
I said nothing about the cost of regulation. Any person owning one of these is unlikely to be satisfied with traveling in the quadcopter equivalent of an ultralight and will instead expect some kind of enclosed pod in which to sit to protect them and their designer clothes from rain, cold, etc. This pod will either be aluminum and heavy, like an airplane, or carbon fiber, which is expensive and still 2/3 the weight of aluminum. Now the vehicle must carry the person plus the weight of the pod. It won't have any creature comforts like heating or air conditioning or if it does, those add weight. My point is that everything added to transporting anything more than just the person adds weight, which then requires more upward force so by extension, a more powerful engine and more fuel.
The flying car problem, imho, bears similarity to the tyranny of the rocket equation. Physics is unwavering. The problems are not insurmountable but they are way harder than most think to create a solution that anybody will actually want to use beyond its novelty value.
Electrafly is an idea, currently designed to carry a single person exposed to the elements in a large quadcopter with exposed blades. When a person can buy one of these approved by the FAA we can talk. I believe that most of the people discussing this particular near fantasy have little actual knowledge of flight. Safety is heavy and/or expensive. There is no way to make this affordable, safe and functional concurrently.
Drones have been flying a lot longer than they have been driving and they are actually pretty good at it these days.
The problem with using drones as a comparison is scale. At their weight, the standard drones people think about can perform feats of maneuverability that are amazing. Scaled to the size and weight required to transport a single human the realities of physics look very different. As a simple example, think about dropping an ant. An ant is one mm thick. A fall from one foot above the ground is ~300 mm or 300 times its height. The ant will survive this fall and walk away. A person is roughly one foot thick lying down. Dropped from 300 feet above the ground the outcome for the human will be very, very different.
Have you ever been near a helicopter? I used to have a job that required I be transported by helicopter. A pretty substantial area around the take off/landing spot is required for one. I think you grossly underestimate the space needed for this.
Any species capable of sending Oumuamua towards us would almost certainly have the means to send a more efficient craft towards us.
They may *today*. They may not have when this was launched. My 100 year old grandmother remembered when the first car came to her town. In her lifetime people went from literal horsepower to walking on the moon. Pretty sure we are going to one day think "I remember when..." in reference to some technology about which we currently have no clue.
Whisk(e)y takes long enough to mature that most master distillers will in their life times get to taste the end product of only a couple of batches from beginning to end. This does not stop them from doing their job; they simply accept that another will get to experience the one they cannot. I am not saying this is aliens or not-aliens but if a civilization can last for 100,000 years or more my guess is that some among them are capable of taking the really, really long view.
This may be one of the more misleading headlines out there. The seed germinated "on the moon" in the same way a seed germinates "on the ISS." It is in an enclosed artificial environment that replicates growing conditions on Earth sufficiently to germinate elsewhere.
As I do college planning with my high school junior I am appalled at the cost today. In 1989 my 13 hours of classes at UT Austin was $1378. A 130 hour degree plan was about $14000 all in. My off campus one bedroom apartment was about $310 a month. I used the UT shuttle and my food cost was about $100 week. All in cost for a four year degree was about $40,000. At many places today that won't get you one year.
You have no student loan and only pay (say) 10% of your salary on anything you make about 2x the national average
I prefer 10% of the amount above the standard tax deduction. If the government is going to say "each person gets to deduct the basic cost of being alive" then anything above that is "extra" and would be subject to the 10% fee. This would still allow people to enter low paying fields. The fund, of course, would be allowed to limit the number of students in those fields through something like a random lottery of applicants.
they may have significantly shorter remaining lifespans than you would expect for their age.
Define "shorter." In my 29 years of messing with hardware I have yet to replace a failed graphics card. No system I have ever used has lasted long enough that either the card was upgraded or entire system was replaced first. If someone tells me the lifespan of a card is 15 years but overclocking will reduce that by 50%, what do I care if abusing it will cause that to happen?
The chances of survival of the human species are almost 100% outside of a two sided nuclear war or a extinction level asteroid impact.
Something that few in the climate change crowd ever say is "...at current population levels." There will always be habitable land on Earth even if temperatures rise. The difference is that world may only support a few million people instead of billions.
even if it may be another 500 years before travel to Mars becomes routine like air travel today.
Unless some completely currently unknown means of getting out of the earth's atmosphere is found this will not happen. The space shuttle had a failure rate of 1 per 67 missions with a 100% fatality rate. Until and unless getting to space does not require being on top of a burning pressurized bomb no sane person will risk a nearly 2% chance of death.
Henry Ford II used to rave to his staff about the burgers in the company cafeteria. An employee wondered what made them so great so he went to the chef and asked. The chef's response was to drop a filet mignon into the meat grinder. Nothing more need to be said.
Modern, safer reactor designs are absolutely an integral part of combating climate change and divesting ourselves of fossil fuels.
I don't think design is the problem so much as regulatory and public resistance. The US navy uses two reactors rated at ~500MW on each Nimitz class carrier. Setting one of these up near a large body of water for cooling would be a trivial matter; these are already mounted in a ship. The Navy has plenty of retired personnel quite knowledgeable in the operation and maintenance of these and thus far their operational history is without incident. I don't think widespread nuclear adoption is a difficult task from an implementation standpoint.
but I'm having a hard time understanding why rare metal shortages would eliminate the possibility of making more wind turbines.
It isn't that that they can't be made; instead, it changes the cost-benefit equation. Let's say for example that element Imaginium improves the efficiency of generator windings by 50% and has the same mass as copper. A generator motor will then weigh substantially less than one using only copper. This then means that the tower to support the generator can be made with less material and the blades to turn it will have less stress. Removing the Imaginium then increases the cost and increases the lifetime maintenance of said turbine.
There is no conceivable way anything practical can done with this line of research, unless it ultimately reveals knowledge
This, in general, is how scientific progress works. This is a proof of concept. Now that one person has done this others will be inspired in ways not previously anticipated to look at other avenues.
In the US healthcare Insurance industry, there is just no substitute for FAX.
The same is true in my industry, financial services. Only a fax provides positive confirmation that a message was received in good order. When a person is making a six figure investment both sides need to have the confidence that information was sent AND received as intended.
It is important to note that Dallas May doesn't distrust *Chinese* people, only that he doesn't trust science coming out of China. As it is well established that the Chinese government controls all aspects of information flow stating a distrust of "Information from China" is very different from saying he distrusts a race of people.
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I was responding to a specific response about the ElectraFly. Physics is still the problem because it is inefficient to lift mass off the ground, and substantially more inefficient to lift it straight up than horizontally like an airplane. A Cessna 172 weighing 1700 lbs gets the rough mpg equivalent of 14 mpg, a Robinson R22 helicopter around 8 mpg. A Honda Civic weighing 2700 lbs gets 32 mpg.
I said nothing about the cost of regulation. Any person owning one of these is unlikely to be satisfied with traveling in the quadcopter equivalent of an ultralight and will instead expect some kind of enclosed pod in which to sit to protect them and their designer clothes from rain, cold, etc. This pod will either be aluminum and heavy, like an airplane, or carbon fiber, which is expensive and still 2/3 the weight of aluminum. Now the vehicle must carry the person plus the weight of the pod. It won't have any creature comforts like heating or air conditioning or if it does, those add weight. My point is that everything added to transporting anything more than just the person adds weight, which then requires more upward force so by extension, a more powerful engine and more fuel.
The flying car problem, imho, bears similarity to the tyranny of the rocket equation. Physics is unwavering. The problems are not insurmountable but they are way harder than most think to create a solution that anybody will actually want to use beyond its novelty value.
Electrafly is an idea, currently designed to carry a single person exposed to the elements in a large quadcopter with exposed blades. When a person can buy one of these approved by the FAA we can talk. I believe that most of the people discussing this particular near fantasy have little actual knowledge of flight. Safety is heavy and/or expensive. There is no way to make this affordable, safe and functional concurrently.
Drones have been flying a lot longer than they have been driving and they are actually pretty good at it these days.
The problem with using drones as a comparison is scale. At their weight, the standard drones people think about can perform feats of maneuverability that are amazing. Scaled to the size and weight required to transport a single human the realities of physics look very different. As a simple example, think about dropping an ant. An ant is one mm thick. A fall from one foot above the ground is ~300 mm or 300 times its height. The ant will survive this fall and walk away. A person is roughly one foot thick lying down. Dropped from 300 feet above the ground the outcome for the human will be very, very different.
Have you ever been near a helicopter? I used to have a job that required I be transported by helicopter. A pretty substantial area around the take off/landing spot is required for one. I think you grossly underestimate the space needed for this.
More that *who* is buying the tapes, I want to know what they are playing them on. What car today has a cassette player?
Any species capable of sending Oumuamua towards us would almost certainly have the means to send a more efficient craft towards us.
They may *today*. They may not have when this was launched. My 100 year old grandmother remembered when the first car came to her town. In her lifetime people went from literal horsepower to walking on the moon. Pretty sure we are going to one day think "I remember when..." in reference to some technology about which we currently have no clue.
Whisk(e)y takes long enough to mature that most master distillers will in their life times get to taste the end product of only a couple of batches from beginning to end. This does not stop them from doing their job; they simply accept that another will get to experience the one they cannot. I am not saying this is aliens or not-aliens but if a civilization can last for 100,000 years or more my guess is that some among them are capable of taking the really, really long view.
Even on Mars Mark Watney had to mix waste in with the soil to make his potatoes grow.
This may be one of the more misleading headlines out there. The seed germinated "on the moon" in the same way a seed germinates "on the ISS." It is in an enclosed artificial environment that replicates growing conditions on Earth sufficiently to germinate elsewhere.
I like the way they let terrorists know the precise location of a valuable technical target.
This is an amazing post. It should get modded to level 6: "Classic."
As I do college planning with my high school junior I am appalled at the cost today. In 1989 my 13 hours of classes at UT Austin was $1378. A 130 hour degree plan was about $14000 all in. My off campus one bedroom apartment was about $310 a month. I used the UT shuttle and my food cost was about $100 week. All in cost for a four year degree was about $40,000. At many places today that won't get you one year.
You have no student loan and only pay (say) 10% of your salary on anything you make about 2x the national average
I prefer 10% of the amount above the standard tax deduction. If the government is going to say "each person gets to deduct the basic cost of being alive" then anything above that is "extra" and would be subject to the 10% fee. This would still allow people to enter low paying fields. The fund, of course, would be allowed to limit the number of students in those fields through something like a random lottery of applicants.
they may have significantly shorter remaining lifespans than you would expect for their age.
Define "shorter." In my 29 years of messing with hardware I have yet to replace a failed graphics card. No system I have ever used has lasted long enough that either the card was upgraded or entire system was replaced first. If someone tells me the lifespan of a card is 15 years but overclocking will reduce that by 50%, what do I care if abusing it will cause that to happen?
Thank you for your money, now go home.
NVIDIA didn't even get the money. These shares were purchased on the secondary market.
99.9% of all the species ever to exist are extinct. I am pretty sure that every species is "facing extinction."
the survival odds of our species
The chances of survival of the human species are almost 100% outside of a two sided nuclear war or a extinction level asteroid impact.
Something that few in the climate change crowd ever say is "...at current population levels." There will always be habitable land on Earth even if temperatures rise. The difference is that world may only support a few million people instead of billions.
even if it may be another 500 years before travel to Mars becomes routine like air travel today.
Unless some completely currently unknown means of getting out of the earth's atmosphere is found this will not happen. The space shuttle had a failure rate of 1 per 67 missions with a 100% fatality rate. Until and unless getting to space does not require being on top of a burning pressurized bomb no sane person will risk a nearly 2% chance of death.
Henry Ford II used to rave to his staff about the burgers in the company cafeteria. An employee wondered what made them so great so he went to the chef and asked. The chef's response was to drop a filet mignon into the meat grinder. Nothing more need to be said.
Modern, safer reactor designs are absolutely an integral part of combating climate change and divesting ourselves of fossil fuels.
I don't think design is the problem so much as regulatory and public resistance. The US navy uses two reactors rated at ~500MW on each Nimitz class carrier. Setting one of these up near a large body of water for cooling would be a trivial matter; these are already mounted in a ship. The Navy has plenty of retired personnel quite knowledgeable in the operation and maintenance of these and thus far their operational history is without incident. I don't think widespread nuclear adoption is a difficult task from an implementation standpoint.
but I'm having a hard time understanding why rare metal shortages would eliminate the possibility of making more wind turbines.
It isn't that that they can't be made; instead, it changes the cost-benefit equation. Let's say for example that element Imaginium improves the efficiency of generator windings by 50% and has the same mass as copper. A generator motor will then weigh substantially less than one using only copper. This then means that the tower to support the generator can be made with less material and the blades to turn it will have less stress. Removing the Imaginium then increases the cost and increases the lifetime maintenance of said turbine.
There is no conceivable way anything practical can done with this line of research, unless it ultimately reveals knowledge
This, in general, is how scientific progress works. This is a proof of concept. Now that one person has done this others will be inspired in ways not previously anticipated to look at other avenues.
In the US healthcare Insurance industry, there is just no substitute for FAX.
The same is true in my industry, financial services. Only a fax provides positive confirmation that a message was received in good order. When a person is making a six figure investment both sides need to have the confidence that information was sent AND received as intended.
It is important to note that Dallas May doesn't distrust *Chinese* people, only that he doesn't trust science coming out of China. As it is well established that the Chinese government controls all aspects of information flow stating a distrust of "Information from China" is very different from saying he distrusts a race of people.
I don't think I can stomach any more of this.
We just make them all male. That worked in Jurassic Park, right?