The grid is not made of copper. You thought it was? Copper is for home wiring, if that. Up to that point, it's alumium, bundled with steel on major lines for tensile strength. Does it look like copper to you?

As for the article: grid operators don't build out grids on a lark. They do it to sell power, because they make money selling power. If people want to buy more power because they want to charge an EV, then that's more money available for them. EVs are a boon to grid operators. They're almost an ideal load. Most charging done at night, steady loads, readily shiftable and curtailable with incentives, etc. Daytime / fast charging isn't, but that's a minority. And except in areas with a lot of hydro, most regions already have the ample nighttime generation capacity; it's just sitting idle, power potential unsold. In short, EVs can greatly improve their profitability. Which translates to any combiation of three things:

1) More profits
2) A better, more reliable grid
3) Lower rates

    * ... depending on the regulations and how competitive of an environment it is.

As for the above article: the study isn't wrong, it's just - beyond the above (huge) problem - it is based on stupid assumptions. Including that there's zero incentives made for people to load shift when their vehicles charge, zero battery buffering to shift loads, and zero change in the distribution of generation resources over the proposed timeframe. All three of these are dumb assumptions.

Also, presenting raw numbers always leads to misleading answers. Let me rephrase their numbers: the cost is $7 to $26 per person per year. The cost of 1 to 5 gallons of gas per year at California prices..

You sure you're responding to the right person?

Funny that to you, "Israel" and "Jews" are synonymous. As if all Jewish people unconditionally support all actions of the state of Israel, even those which are highly controversial within Israel itself.

This false synonymy creates an extremely harmful backlash. Stop doing it.

Ukraine is not free

Give me a list of Ukrainian prime ministers since 2000, and compare it to a list of Russian presidents since 2000 . Thanks in advance.

Even before the conflict it was the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe

This is not even remotely true. Ukraine's Rule of Law Index in 2022 was 0,50; contrast with NATO members Turkey at 0,42 and Hungary at 0,52. And its scores were dragged down by the consequences of the war in Donbas.

with a military second in size in Europe only to Russia (hence the poverty)

Ukraine's percentage of GDP spent before the current invasion was 3,2%, and that was *with* the ongoing Donbas conflict . By contrast, the US, at peace, spends 3,45% of its GDP on the military. For some European contrasts:

Azerbaijan: 4,5%
Armenia: 4,3%
Russia: 4%
Greece: 3,7%

Before the 2014 Russian invasion, Ukraine's percentage of GDP spent on the military was 1,6%.

ED: Just saw your second paragraph. But the things you speculate on are not exactly common on Titan, if they even exist on the surface at all (it's an icy crust ,not a rocky one). And either way, it'd be much easier with compounds other than methane.

And no, there doesn't seem to be meaningful amounts of nitrates in the atmosphere at least. You can see a list here. Nitrogen compounds are cyanide and nitrile compounds.

Metabolized with what oxidizer?

It's just the opposite - methane on Titan is like nitrogen on Earth; it's things like acetylene and free hydrogen that are the potential energy sources, and to a lesser extent the more common (but less reactive) higher mass alkanes, etc.

The main problem is that LAWKI isn't even remotely compatible with existing in the cryogenic environment of Titan. There are a lot of interesting alternative chemistries, but they require basically redesigning life from scratch. We're simply not up to this task with our current technology.

Sadly it's being launched to near the equator, not the poles :( The geophysicists won out over the geochemists...

Freedom is great and neglectable, until you very suddenly don't have it.

History has not ended. The world order that makes life nice and comfy for you is not a given into the future.

It's funny how we so strongly disagree further down in the comments, but I 100% agree with you here.

0,38g being largely fine for health is... I mean, if I had to bet, I'd put my money on it probably being true, but it's anything but guaranteed. There was a private project to test this, the Mars Gravity Biosatellite, but it ran out of funding; I'm not aware of any similar experiments that have been conducted. There've been a variety of attempts to simulate various gravity on Earth, such as having people lie on tilted beds or hanging them from cranes at an angle or whatnot, but they all have obvious weaknesses.

There's not just the question of adults who visit from Earth, but also children who grow up on 0,38g, and what impact that would have to their physiology.

Venus is hot, but it's not *that* hot... ;)

NASA is getting there

It most definitely is not. Are you being deliberately obtuse?

one can do for more than a few minutes before shit implodes and burns

You clearly didn't read anything I wrote, so why should I even bother responding? (A) Literally nobody was talking about settling the surface, and (B) It's been repeatedly pointed out that basically indefinite lifespans can be achieved for surface vehicles, as backed up by peer-reviewed research from NASA. And "christoban on Slashdot disagrees with peer-reviewed research from NASA" isn't exactly a compelling argument.

B) building floating cities, which would probably take another century of engineering and investment before we could do so reliably.

We were flying balloons on Venus almost 40 years before we flew a helicopter on Mars. We directly sampled Venus's atmosphere 4 years before we sampled Mars. We successfully landed and transmitted data either 1 or 6 years (depending on your definition) from the surface of Venus vs. Mars.

Your incredulity about levels of difficulty doesn't translate to actual levels of difficulty.

That book presented a nonstop stream of pseudoscience as if it were hard sci-fi, and it's unfortunate that it's spread so many myths as a result.

I think your confusion stems from analogy to baking clay or ceramics. But what's happening there is sintering. You have extremely fine grains, and you're leading certain crystals to soften and merge as a "glue" between grains, so that the grains stay together.

While sintering is important in the formation of some types of sedimentary rock, this has nothing whatsoever to do with igneous rock. It's already as "together" as it's ever going to be when it a lava flow solidifies. The only thing its grains can ever become is "less together".

And even ignoring that, by definition, you're not going to be sintering something that formed at Venus temperatures, by exposing them to Venus temperatures. The process of sintering requires a radical change in conditions.

We are not capable of building anything that can withstand the surface pressures and temperatures for very long

The Venera probes have likely still not experienced any sort of crushing. You seem to be confused about how pressure works. If you don't exert stress pass the yield point of a material, the length of time until something crushes is "infinite". Which is why, say, almost all rocks buried in Earth's crust are able to remain intact over millions to billions of years.

You build of a thickness that the yield point at the design temperature is well above the amount of pressure-induced stress. The Venera probes' pressure vessels - uninsulated - hit surface temperature quite quickly (indeed, mostly during the descent itself). This did not make them crush, because their engineers were not morons who didn't do the math first when determining the probes' required specs.

All probes are designed to their environment. There is nothing magical about the nominal 92 MPa / 464 C of Venus's mean surface (note: this is for the mean surface; the highlands are significantly lower pressure and significantly cooler) that makes it impossible while, say, designing a lander to operate in the cryogenic conditions of Titan or whatnot is easy. This is 1960s tech. Steel alloys usually melt at up to 1400 C or so. Titanium at 1670 C. Tungsten at 3422 C. Some ceramics don't decompose until nearly 4000C. And pressure increases melting points. Now, it's not just the melting point that matters - higher temperatures mean lower yield strengths, so you have to design with the high temperature yield strengths in mind, not room temperature ones. But the simple fact is that various alloys and compounds can operate fine at WAY above Venus surface temperatures. It's not even close. The pressure vessel needed for the Venera probes was just a thin skin.

And to repeat: if the stress doesn't don't go above the yield point, the time to crushing is infinite. Same as any other pressure vessel, from aerosol cans to propane tanks to spacecraft in space (-1 atm).

And I'll repeat: with the same trivially-simple 1960s-tech method as the Venera probes, you can get surface residence times of a couple hours. With heat pumps, indefinitely. And "Baron_Yam at Slashdot" isn't going to override the actual NASA researchers who have worked on this topic.

The rock of Venus is dry-baked to incredible strength

The fact that you think that rock can be "baked to incredible strength" is itself a boggling concept. Not even accounting for the fact that we can literally see sand and gravel in the Venera images, and the Venera probes literally took surface samples. We can see dunes from orbit on radar. Just the very concept that you think that if you heat rock to a couple hundred celsius that makes it super hard, when the rock formed from vastly-hotter lava. Heat makes rock softer, not harder. And subliming away compounds or chemically eroding rocks makes them weaker, not stronger.

From a bulk composition perspective, Venus's surface is mostly just basalt - though there's some probable rhyolitic flows in places, possibly some unusual flows rare or nonexistent on Earth, and there's speculation that some of the highlands may contain residual granitic continental crust. The specific details of said rocks can be quite interesting, but from a bulk perspective, it's like oceanic crust. We know this because we've literally sampled it..

Since Reddit announced it was going to sell "its" data (i.e. the data it was given for free by all the redditors), I've been busy deleting most of my posting history, and pumping old posts I left there full of technical idiocies and fake facts,

Why you ask?

Because 1/ it hurts Reddit and 2/ it trains AI on bad data.

I have no intention of helping business models based on mooching off people's contributions.