Apparently you don't know the meaning of the words "for fun".

If you plot the personal wealth curve of people who "made it big", it does not differ from the personal wealth curve of people who won the lottery. For nearly all of them, there is a big jump somewhere during their life, and before and after that, it's no different than for anyone else in the same wealth range.

I think the idea here is that we have only recently achieved the energy density needed from lithium ion batteries for this to be practical. This could not have been accomplished in 1999 - or at least it would have been a lot more heavy.

About 10 years ago I worked on simulating a rocket with electric turbopumps for fun. The concept was the exact same as theirs - minimize the number of parts that have to operate in harsh environments to reduce cost, maintenance and risk of failure. You don't even need any penetrations of the propellant lines, the rotor of the electric motor is the compressor itself.

I have no clue whether the design will actually be practical. But it's certainly not new. I'm sure I'm not the first person that this concept occurred to.

One of my highschool teachers when inquired as to why he was allowed to drink coffee while we were not, responded with this:
"Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi."

I've always detested this way of thinking, as it is just a stupid rationalization for the real reason: "Whatever, fuck you, I can get away with it."

They talk about how they need to regularly pick up and relaunch balloons when they come down. I don't see why they would need to design the balloons without any sort of reinflation system. The leak rate is tiny, right? So:

1. A little more solar panel area than they already need.
2. Hydrogen filled instead of helium filled.
3. Tiny container of sulfuric acid (hygroscopic - self-dilutes down to a given concentration with atmospheric moisture)
4. Electrolysis cell (sulfuric acid is used as the electrolyte in some types of electrolysis cells).

Problem solved. Sulfuric acid draws moisture from the air, and during the day the solar power electrolyzes it it to produce a minute trickle of hydrogen into the balloon, which replaces the minute trickle that leaks out. Your balloon's lifespan is now as long as your electronics and envelope last.

Indeed, the figures Musk cited a couple years ago was that over 80% of the part count of a Falcon 9 is sourced in-house; it's a critical part of their approach to keeping costs down. He wanted to do that with Tesla as well but it proved impossible, only about 20% of their parts (at the time) were produced in-house. Unsurprisingly the biggest problems in their early days came from external suppliers, like the gearbox issue on the Roadster.

ESAB is a Swedish company. What use is it to NASA to dote largess on a Swedish welding firm?

I'm actually rather disappointed with ESAB here. I have one of their MIG welders from the 1960s and it still works; they're a respectable name.

I feel bad for NASA mind you, in that I don't think many of their problems are their own. They get all sorts of legacy systems forced upon them due to political reasons ("You can't do decision X that would be more efficient because 1000 people in my district would lose their jobs"), they never get the funding to engineer new things from scratch based on lessons learned, etc. I do wonder, mind you, whether their heavy reliance on external contractors is something they could reform.

It of course doesn't, but you knew that.
However, you feed it carbon, and it spits it back out. In, out. No sequestration of carbon. Neutral.
Building a trillion cars adds 0 carbon to the carbon cycle, only adds steps to the cycle. It's the extraction of carbon from outside of the cycle that is not neutral.
This is unlike a tree, which takes atmospheric carbon, and builds this stuff called wood out of it.
Sequestration.

You still miss the point. Sure the forest becomes carbon neutral. Who cares. A car is carbon neutral. But that forest didn't spring forth magically from the ground. It took several metric fucktons of carbon to create that new chunk of carbon cycle right there. The existence of the forest is a net negative in atmospheric carbon, even if the forest's regular non-growing respiration is not.
Quit thinking about it in terms of emissions. Emissions aren't the problem. If you mean to say that we couldn't plant trees quick enough to offset the carbon we're injecting into the cycle from the depths of the Earth, then sure, you're probably right, at least in a long-term. The solution is to stop fucking adding that carbon to the cycle, or to offset that added carbon with more sink capability (trees) as much as possible. There is a fixed amount of carbon in the cycle, + what we are adding via hydrocarbon extraction. We want more of that carbon to be in the form of biomass than CO2. That means trees.

Curbing CO2 emissions is retarded, directly speaking. But it has the added bonus of reducing the demand for the actual bad aspect here- the carbon being added to the cycle from below the ground.
Electricity to drive the car comes from many sources. Here in Seattle, I assure you it is not coal. For all of the electric cars in the midwest and the south, I'm sure you're absolutely right.

I don't see how fossil burning becomes less efficient, at all when mixed with renewable energy. The base load is quite stable. I'm pretty sure reason #1 is the only real reason their CO2 output has increased... But what does that have to do with the conversation? We're talking about sequestering carbon in the form of trees...

1. That's not "a" study, it's from a metastudy. The simple fact of the matter is, while the news makes a big deal of any study that shows a statistically significant difference between genders, most of these statistically significant differences are barely above the level of noise.

2. Where are you getting that quote from the paper? A search for those words doesn't reveal that.

There absolutely are some very demonstrable differences in certain psychological regards - mainly sexual. The most obvious of these, for example, is the fact that women are more likely to be attracted to men and men to women. But that's far from the majority of studied sexual differences that get so much play in the press. " With very few exceptions, variability within each sex and overlap between the sexes is so extensive that the authors conclude it would be inaccurate to use personality types, attitudes, and psychological indicators as a vehicle for sorting men and women. "

3. Girls are far less likely to get involved in chess to begin with in all countries (again, the fact that children mimic sex distribution of behaviors of the previous generation, no matter what they are in the particular society one is in), so one shouldn't be surprised that this is reflectected in the highest levels. Chess, as a competitive sport, has always been predominantly a "men's sport", internationally. But as XKCD notes, this is changing. The Polgár sisters are a great example. Their upbringing was an experiment by their father; to see what would happen if children were raised with extensive training in a specialist intellectual topic from an early age. One ended up an International Master while the other two ended up as Grand Masters, with Judit ending up one of the world's most powerful players of any gender. Their father's choice removed gender self -selection from the picture.

4. Oh please, you're not seriously going to pretend that there weren't tremendous pressures in Victorian society for women to not be involved in STEM-style careers, or that they weren't usually expressly banned from such. Even women who took them up as hobbies (usually well-to-do women) were often strongly advised against it, that it was harmful to a woman's delicate composition to be mentally straining one's self (a risk of the catch-all Victorian women's distorder "hysteria"; the cure for "hysteria" was to refrain from all serious physical and mental activity). This is the culture that ours came from, and it's been a slow incremental process of moving away from it ever since. The fact that you'd call "citation needed" on that is absurd, that's like "A normal human hand has five digits [citation needed]."

5."I'll see your 50% and raise it to 100%" - how does this even make sense? Women are 50% of the population (roughly). Nobody is talking about disinteresting men from pursuing STEM careers. There's already interest there. The goal is to try to also get more interest from women, to work against the carryover cultural connotations of STEM as "men's work".

6. " Are there laws or even customs, that prevent girls from entering a STEM field and excelling in it" - it's like you didn't even read my post.

7. "But what if it is bilogicial — as seems perfectly probable?" - not according to the actual research. And if one person wastes their time trying to become a physicist when they'd have made a better fry cook? Well whoop-di-freaking-doo. The world is still a better place.

Sorry to disappoint you, but a car is carbon neutral as well. It produces as much carbon as it consumes.

Come on, dude. Certainly you understand that the addition of a forest where previously there was not is a carbon sink, and even if that new sink is neutral, it still represents a net decrease of unsequestered carbon floating around in the fscking atmosphere?

Bingo. The primary problem isn't that we're producing too much CO2, it's that we're putting Carbon that has been out of the cycle for a very long time back into it. If we source our carbon from the cycle, we're not adding anything to it. Whether that can be done is anyone's guess, but we need to stop adding carbon back into the cycle, otherwise we will *never* find magical ways to sequester it. That coal comes from a time when the entire damn planet was covered in trees. It can't be that way again. One hole. Trees go in it. Plant more trees. Rinse and repeat until carbon cycle contains desired amount of carbon.

You're right, of course. However, forest mass is loosely correlated with forest area, and the latter is simpler for people to grok, lest the conversation devolve into people saying: "Ha! What happens when the tree you planted dies?! All that carbon back in the atmosphere!"

Problem absolutely solved. After tree dies, new tree grows. Atmosphere now has -1 trees worth of carbon in its atmosphere as the new forest attains carbon neutrality, minus the mass required to grow it. Adding more machinery to the cycle necessarily consumes more energy, where cycle is the life and death of trees in a forest, and the energy is CO2. Unless of course you believe in perpetual motion.

What kind of timescale are we talking about? Hundred years? Thousand? Ten thousand? Millions? Hundreds of millions? Billions? You could be very wrong, or very right with that assertion. I'm going to assume you're right, and we'll talk hundreds of millions.

I had assumed in the first quote, you were defining history as "a really fucking long time", which humorously enough, is the exact timescale where the Sun's variance over time starts to play a real part in the Earth's thermodynamic equilibrium game. Turns out solar evolution is a pretty slow process. Of course, now that you've asserted that short-term variations in solar output are driving climate change, I can see I you've just attempted to change the definition of "history" that you initially assigned to fit a contradicting argument. Seems legit.

At least he isn't changing definitions every other statement to support his assertion. Ignorant, or trolling? Can't tell.