Isn’t it at meme levels when YouTube games have their screen go black and they mention Nvidia crashing?

I’ll give you an upvote just for knowing what type of gem it was. So many South African diamond mine comments smh.

The scientist Robert L. Forward discussed possible ways to handle this in his novel Rocheworld. The fiction part wasn’t about the light sail, more the general AI, life extension tech, and the aliens.

This is about rocket launches, not satellites.

…SpaceX is part of the program to get back to the moon.

*Probably typed on a smartphone, one of the most technology-dense products ever created by humanity, currently used by over half of humanity.

Tell that to a bronze age engineer, and they will probably respond that those two are closer to each other than they are to his best efforts. And he would probably be right.

o7

I have just enough skill with hardware to get away with it with some swearing.

I don’t disagree, but I think automation is cool, especially if you can keep it local (or have the tools to secure it on the internet). Valetudo can help make that possible. My current robot vacuum is pretty crappy, but it doesn’t have cameras or mapping. My next will be one that has mapping and can be easily flashed with local hosting.

They apparently sold 4 million units of the pico family. Given the product, I’d say that isn’t amazing, but not a failure, either.

Cancer treatments, longevity treatments, regrowing teeth, every fucking mouse trial that has been talked about for the last 20 years, CRISPR saving the world.

And then you hear about immune therapy cancer treatments, using CRISPR and our extensive knowledge of cancer from decades of research. Or our better diagnostics for cancer leading to better cancer treatment outcomes due to early detection. Or regrowing teeth! (In certain circumstances.) Or, yes, new solar panels with 34% efficiency…for 3 months, at which time they’re only slightly better than existing panels. Or two new ways to make blue pigment in the last two DECADES.

Science is hard, and all of it is standing on the shoulders of giants. And when getting money to do that research, which is another way of saying “trying things you think might work in the hopes of something new”, relies on convincing people that this one idea could be the next big thing, hype is built into the system. So, again, if you don’t want hype, look at new products. If you want to hear about what researchers are working on, don’t expect that everything is going to come to fruition. Even the failed ideas help build the foundation that future researchers will be working from.

In the last 30 years, batteries have gotten about 10 times more powerful at a tenth the size for about 1% of the cost. Every advance that got us to this point was just “stuck in the lab” prior to its release. And if you don’t think incremental change can be significant, after hearing those numbers I provided above, perhaps you should read about compound interest.

Also, if you don’t want to be let down by news of developments at the lab stage, which certainly don’t always become viable, why are you reading posts in a technology community? That seems self-destructive.

I can’t be bothered because laymen don’t generally know the difference, and it’s the least important detail about this conversation. Granted, unimportant details seem to be your forte.

Fossil fuels do not store “power” at all.

Now, if you’re quibbling about the term power vs. energy, I can’t really be bothered with it. If you aren’t, what exactly do you think is the reason we use gasoline in vehicles than because it’s a highly portable source of energy?

As I mentioned in my other response, our battery capacity and longevity has increased by a factor of 10 in the last 30 years. Charging capacity has increased significantly, as well. And the only reason we don’t have more powerful chargers is because we haven’t needed them. It will certainly require a different configuration to charge twice as fast, probably with local power storage to reduce the burden on the electrical grid, but the only technical challenge is the power draw, and there are a number of ways to avoid that.

Fossil fuels are currently the largest disconnected power storage by overall power used. You know, the thing cars use when they aren’t EVs. You may have heard of diesel and gasoline generators, or oil-fueled ships.

As per the previous part of my comment that you quoted, my point was that incremental changes can accumulate to the point where at some point revolutionary changes can occur. We increased capacity and longevity by a factor of 10 over 30 years, have a new technology hitting mainstream, and another that could double power density in the next 5 to 10. Yet you seem skeptical that’s possible, in spite of the decades of advances we already have made.

First and foremost, this is the technology community. If you wanted to see mature tech that is in production, you’re in the wrong place.

Second, battery tech has had steady improvement for decades. The cell phone I had 30 years ago had a battery pack that was about as big as my current cell phone with a capacity of 500 mAh. My current cell phone has a battery tucked away somewhere inside it that has a capacity of 4000 mAh. The price per mAh has also gone down about 99% over that time span. There have also been three major “new battery” types over those 3 decades. The changes have been happening whether on not you bothered to notice it.

“I came to the technology community and was surprised when they started talking about things that aren’t in production.”

There is a solid state sodium battery factory being built in Japan, I think, and one in America. (Yes, I mixed up my two battery technologies, a common problem in a stagnant field…) But yes, real life isn’t a game, you can’t immediately use new tech as soon as it becomes viable, and factories take time to build. That doesn’t mean that advances haven’t been constantly occurring, just like advances continued to occur with NiMH battery technology a decade after lithium was mainstream. Partly, no doubt, because factories are expensive, they take time to build, and companies like to maximize the profits from their investments.