I went through exactly this trade in putting together a UPS for my mom when she was on oxygen. She was in a city with occasional severe weather that could lead to blackouts and needed her O2 generator to function so she could move around at all. A friend of hers was at the home depot and saw generators on sale and called her, pushing her to get one. She had him call me, and I had to explain that there was no way it would be useful-- it would have to be stored in the house (out of the weather), maintained, and then if there was a power outage would have to be moved out and started up, probably in the dark with bad weather, by a 68 year old dependent on a high flow of oxygen. After that I put together a 1 kWh battery backup system with a Tripplite inverter/charger and some scooter batteries that her O2 machine ran off and would give her enough time to sleep through most of a power outage without knowing it, and then get to the LOX supply and switch to that. Almost no maintenance and no active operation required for the user. It cost more than a cheap generator, but it met the use case and worked.

It depends on where you live. In SoCal people use the AC for the heat-- it's often ~100+F and 10% RH in the hot months. People sit around in my neighborhood and report the line voltage over email until it goes out completely. I don't have AC - a couple oak trees over the house take care of that about 99.9% of the time, but neighbors without trees run their AC pretty hard.

Holography is much further off than practical LFD, which is further off than stereogram goggles. Realtime holographic imaging with useful performance has only become practical recently, and still only in limited applications. Realtime true holographic display is a whole different animal.

stereo vision is constructed in your brain from the two slightly different images on your retinas. Your brain does a lot of complicated things in constructing 3D models-- to the extent that you can have perfect refraction in both eyes and perfect retinas, but be missing half of your field of view due to neural damage in between your eyeball and your conscious brain.

which is part of the 2D map of photons on your retina. I can construct a 2D image that has proper DOF cues.

which is also in your brain and unnecessary for a 3D display (but is necessary in the computer that constructs the images to project)

LFD can make the job easier so you can be less vomit-inducing without retinal tracking, but it's not necessary.

Neither holography nor light-field-display is necessary for a goggle based device. Each retina collects photons on a surface and with a single eye you get a 2D image*. Your brain combines the images from your eyes in very complex ways to create a 3D internal model, but as far as what needs to get shined into your eyes, it's just the 2D image constructed on your retina that matters. Slightly different images to form a realtime stereogram is all that's necessary.

(*although with one eye that moves around your brain can construct 3D models. I've known people with one eye that had very depth perception for athletic things, and have experimented a little throwing and catching with one eye and it is possible to be accurate).

Probably not long after you can get the on-road version.

There are very real commercial applications for OR autonomous driving, and keep in mind that this was 10 years ago and those were self-funded (or by whatever sponsors they could round up) university teams doing one-off vehicles. If you look at what they achieved for what they spent, and extrapolate it to mass production it's very reasonable to expect off-road autonomy to be available on the same time scale as on-road.

And as zippthorne notes, you have to put a ton of time in to get any good at driving off road. With the autonomous version you pay some money and get tens of thousands of hours of experience built into the system at delivery.

You mean like in the DARPA grand challenge?

You don't really "look through" them so much as reserve time and then sit in a control room in Waimea, or more likely your home institution anywhere in the world, and wait for digital data. Some stuff is done with a realtime observer making decisions (based on the digital data), but a lot of it's automated and planned on schedules that optimize the amount of observing vs. the amount of repointing and other overhead. There's various ways to get access, but mostly they require being part of a research institution and proposing for time. The various institutions involved in building them get observing time in return, and then some amount is probably also available through gov't grants to "buy" time. A nice thing about ground based telescopes over space based is the amount of effective observing time relative to things like calibration and maintenance, so they're effectively accessible to more people. The number of people on the summit is getting to be fairly small and tending toward the people who are doing construction, maintenance, installation, or any kind of hand-on instrument calibration or adjustment, but observing is moving to be more and more remote, which also makes it more accessible to more people.

It's got a good balance of elevation, good seeing, dry atmosphere to look through, accessibility, and political stability. There aren't very many places that have all of those (among other factors) which is why there are so many telescopes there. The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the few realistically competitive areas (and it's better in some of those features), but it's not as accessible and maybe less politically stable.

Red Laser. It's been around for years.

A single data point isn't all that useful with respect to understanding the mass and composition of asteroids. There are potentially a variety of asteroids around-- ranging from solid hunks of metal or rock to loose bunches held together by their very weak mutual gravitational attraction. A test would be useful for demonstrating the ability to intercept one, navigate to an appropriate place to push, and then push. Depending on how far out they catch it, a very low thrust, very efficient thruster pushing for a long time might be able to produce a useful amount of deflection.

Math isn't science at all, though it has tremendous value in its application to science. Science is all about falsifiability rather than provability-- science is the process of developing descriptions of the world, testing the validity and limits of those descriptions, and then extending the descriptions and testing further. Without comparisons to reality it's not science (yes, I *am* looking at you string theory).

Math lets you prove assertions based on a logical framework and derive things that are true within that framework, but there's nothing built in that says anything you prove mathematically is going to be realized in the physical world.

That would be terrible for small inventors and great for patent trolls with big bank accounts. Small inventors would have to put the current value at something they could afford to pay tax on. Then trolls can just walk through with little or no opposition and sweep up patents with low current value and potentially high future value. Assuming multiple trolls doing the same thing, it would lead to a forced auction market until someone assigned a value just higher than everybody else was willing to pay, so it would stop changing hands, and the actual inventor would be the person least likely to see a gain in the process.

Feynman diagrams?

Start with attaching an encrypted picture of a cat to every email...