Always tripped me out that sociopathy and economic success seem to be so correlated in our society, EG there was that research that suggested that CEOs are among the professions with the most sociopaths/psychpaths. I don't know if "sociopathy should not be rewarded but punished" is a hot take.

> "since you use [app], you can avail of [benefits]."

Isn't this how the entire service sector works and has worked for a century? Just replace apps with signed cards, club memberships and catalogues.

Yes I'm sure a rocket will make Earth-based astronomy completely irrelevant. It's not like building things here is cheaper or something.

Utility solar is the cheapest form of solar though. There are very real benefits to industrialized mass-scale infrastructure.

There are 3 aspect to this: need, technology, and capacity.

Hyperloop is basically a maglev, but much smaller, with life support, inside a tube, that must be evacuated from air.

In terms of need, the vacuum tube is not actually needed. We already know you can do 600 Km/h with maglev just fine and with technological advancements you could probably push that to 900 Km/h if you really, really wanted to and the electricity was cheap enough. (this causes goemtric issues with the track but that's another point, and also one hyperloop conveniently does not address)

In terms of technology, pumping a thouosands-Km-long tube to be even a partial vacuum is horrifically hard to do. In addition, the tube creates a bunch of additional hazards.

In terms of capacity, one of the advantages of trains over planes is that because they have a much higher capacity, they can actually do mass transit at scale instead of becoming saturated like airports often are (you know how you take the plane and you randomly have to wait 20 minutes on the taxiway? That). Hyperloop has even less capacity than a plane by comparison. Economics also mean that lower capacity = higher ticket prices.

All this for an even higher cost than maglev (since the tech is maglev with a vacuum tube), which is in turn more expensive still than regular high speed rail.

> Nah. It's a glass tube with a mag Lev vehicle inside of it. > > > > Half the price of normal high speed rail

How is maglev, which is already more expensive than HSR, covered with an extremely long glass tube cheaper than HSR?

I'm fairly pro-maglev, but I don't see the point of pumping up the cost by covering it. In the urban areas where this would have some utility in shielding the populace from the 600 Km/h noise and wind you probably can't go very fast to begin with.

Yep. We already have digital ID in my country, although using it if you're a third party is still hard enough that EG Twitter won't allow you to use it to verify yourself. Which is a pity, because I'd much rather trust Twitter with a "verified" message from the government than a scan of my ID card.

Yup. I think in the future this will be expanded: there will be cryptographically verified sensors that sign their images (or other products) with a unique key that represents a "trusted" sensor. Fabricating keys or modifying sensors will carry extremely harsh penalties.

Unfortunately infrastructure is a political problem, not a technological one. The instant a satellite swarm becomes better than Comcast, it will just turn into the new monopoly and behave exactly like them.

In my country we had high-speed rail prices in the 50 euros for years until laws were changed to create a regulated market. Now a ticket can be had for 30 euros. No new railway technology was invented in that time.

LCOE isn't calculated on the basis of outliers.

Besides, it's actually more expensive than traditionally nuclear power, which has a LCOE of about 65$/MWh according to the IPCC and NEA, costs, say, 10 billion to build for a 1600MW power capacity, and performs better than gas power plants in the long term. It turns out there's a good reason nuclear reactors are typically built huge.

Well, Airbus has a large hydrogen program going right now. You can pack enough hydrogen or methane if you make the plane physically larger (which is why a lot of concepts are either flying wings or have a "hump"), and unfortunately there isn't really another way to make airliners CO2-neutral until we invent some really good synthetic fuels or improve batteries 10x.

It might be just a cost cutting measure. Same reason why future airliners are projected to use hydrogen or methane jet engines instead of fuel cells, there's just more expertise, know-how and established cheap technology in the existing field.

Yeah they'll just buy 1 billion worth of "carbon offsets" (which are a financial scam btw) from one of their shell companies which produced them by pledging to definitely not cut down some part of the Amazon they didn't have access to anyways.

It's more expensive than solar PV, but those only look so good because all the infrastructure and storage to actually use them as a primary energy source is not included in the price.

It's the same with offshore wind, nuclear and gas (which if you hear Reddit should have gone extinct 5 years ago): all these sources look worse than solar PV, until you include the cost of having zero power output for half the day or more. I read a study some time ago showing that if you add just 4-6 hours of storage to solar PV the LCOE shoots up to 100$ per megawatt/h. And to endure the winter you'd need more like 16 hours.

That would be so amazing. After it is not longer functioning, it could be boosted in a long-lived orbit where it could stay for as long as needed until we have the technological capability to recover it, or maybe even visit it for tourism. Imagine how cool that would be.

Well, for those of us who live under the socialist iron fist of universal healthcare this is great news at least.

This is nothing, but if the EU gets involved the fines could be as high as 4% of total global revenue.

Well, at least many current experiments use tokamaks, which this doesn't impact. So there's that.

One of the main advantages of hydrogen (or generally any other renewable gas) is that, to a degree, it can be pumped through existing methane infrastructure. In my country there was a pilot project making 10% of gas hydrogen without changing anything in the distribution.

Methane is one of the best synthetic fuels though. It doesn't have the storage and safety issues of hydrogen while being almost as easy to make from relatively simple chemical processes by consuming (renewable) energy.

Since not everything can switch to batteries, we need some kind of fluid fuel to use that can be made without fossil sources.

Isn't it more the senate's fault? I read somewhere that there's a single senator who threatened to filibuster all of NASA's budget if they worked on orbital refueling programs, because those would have made the SLS, which is based in his state, unnecessary.

Besides, their pollution per capita is lower than the USA's by a substantial margin. The countries that actually pollute the most based on their population are the USA and a few Middle Eastern states that do oil refining.

Yep. We have kind of arrived at a good stage in the tech tree, our chief problem is politics.

The issue is that the world's major problems are not scientific, they're political. A few western examples (since I'm from the west, but feel free to add your own):

Lack of housing? We know how to build housing perfectly well, but cities keep not building public housing for the people and investors keep snapping up all housing for speculation.

Impossible to build a family? We already have dishwashers, washing machines, roombas and whatnot to make family life much easier than during the 1950s baby boom. The reason people aren't building families are oppressive jobs, impossible economic conditions and garbage urbanism that makes cities a hellscape for children.

Bad broadband Internet? Running fiber optics is well-understood, the issue is telecoms forming cartels and/or pocketing grant money instead of actually using it to build the network.

Lack of food in Africa? We already produce enough food for 10 billion people and we already know how to conserve it long term to ship it elsewhere. The issue is that it's impossible to get it to communities in need due to wars and instability.

Tech is not going to save us this time around.