That's actually a pretty good concept, if the engineers agree. A battery built for fast charge that is good enough for a regular commute and a battery built for max energy density.

Of course, if you're heading off on a 2000 km trip you're probably not going to like having to stop every 100 km after the first half of the trip.

Also because of coal. Honestly, more as a result of coal, though they certainly have built a lot of solar. But the reason they've been building coal plants like crazy, so much so that many of them are idled from the day they go into service, is because it was their insurance against problems with the oil supply.

I'm a fan of solar power and happy to see the world is building a lot of it, but intellectual integrity demands that we also acknowledge China's investment in coal generation capacity.

I once convinced my landlady I wasn't going to try and sacrifice her and her son in an effort to summon Satan after she found out I played D&D.

OK, she wasn't terrified or anything, but she was seriously concerned for a few minutes until I managed to explain the game to her.

There actually was a push in the UK a few years ago to outlaw pointy kitchen knives, but it met with great resistance and was dropped.

However, the point remains that stabbings in the UK are actually less common that stabbings in the US. This points out that while many think that guns are the cause of the US' violence problem, the real problem is deeper: US culture is just more violent.

I'm doing my part!

That sounds nice and all, but there's really no legal way to do that. The money was collected illegally, so it has to be returned (with interest) to the people it was collected from -- the importers.

It's going to take years to find out just how corrupt, and we'll never get the full story. What we can see isn't even the tip of the iceberg.

Heh. The usual metric is "mission success". For a manned flight, that includes getting the people down safely. For a typical unmanned flight the mission is "get the payload to the right orbit". If you manage to land the rocket after that, that's gravy.

Zipline is still around, still making deliveries in Africa and some other places, and also doing some in the US, for Wal-mart.

Is a new functional economic system that rewards useful work without the runaway conditions that lead to billionaires.

Unfortunately, they're well entrenched and will actively resist changes to the current system.

Wheels, at least macroscopic scales, are probably impossible for evolution to produce. Anything that has to freely rotate, in fact.

But it would be fun if that weren't true - I'd expect to see fish with propellers for tails.

The best concept I've seen involved a robot with knee and toe wheels. When presented with a smooth surface, it knelt and could travel at high speed. It only used legs when obstacles required the extra flexibility.

There isn't any launch platform with no failures, ever, that's not how you measure reliability. Reliability is measured on percentage of successful launches (payload reached target orbit), and Falcon 9 is, indeed, the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever, by a wide margin. Here are the platforms with >= 100 launches (the 100-launch line is kind of arbitrary, but you have to draw a line somewhere and platforms with very few launches don't have meaningful statistics):

#1 Falcon 9 (including Falcon Heavy): 637 successes of 640 launches, 99.5% success rate. If you focus only on the block 5 variant (most-flown version, currently flying), it's 572 out of 573, 99.8%.
#2 Atlas V: 106 of 107, 99.1%
#3 Delta II: 153 of 155, 98.7%
#4 Space Shuttle: 133 of 135, 98.5%
#5 Long March 2/3/4: 503/521, 96.5%
#6 Ariane 5: 112 of 117, 95.7%
#7 Soyuz: 1889 of 2014, 93.8%
#8 Kosmos: 559 of 610, 91.6%
#9 Proton: 382 of 431, 88.6%

Soyuz has to get props for the sheer number of launches, of course, though that's probably mostly because the Russians couldn't afford to build another platform. Soyuz isn't a particularly great rocket in any way -- smallish payload, good but not great reliability -- but they kept using what they had. It's also worth noting that assuming Falcon 9 maintains its current launch cadence (which it won't; Starship will probably start taking its launches eventually, and if that doesn't happen, the cadence seems likely to increase), it will match Soyuz' launch count around 2033.

Arguably, you left out Canada and Mexico. And Venezuela and Cuba and Iran. Maybe Denmark.

>What would you spend all the money on if you knew we'd all be gone in 50 years?

I think this is one of those really character revealing questions if you can get an honest answer from someone. Most of us will be dead in 50 years no matter what, but you're probably not living like that's all that matters. Even while you're alive, you should probably give a shit about your fellow human beings and the quality of their lives.

If you're response is, "what the hell, let's burn it all down" then you're probably not a great person to know. I'd like to keep things going at least as nice as they are until I'm gone, and I think it's not the worst idea to try and help others have a decent life too.

On the other hand, if your response is, "Well, we probably shouldn't invest in anything that takes more that 50 years to return value", that I can get behind.

Pretty much anything past the frost line starts requiring prohibitive amounts of solar panel to get decent power, and Voyager is much, much further than that.

If you could send a refueling mission, it would be for sentimental reasons only. Any vessel you send that could catch up to Voyager would be much better utilized simply carrying a new and improved instrumentation and communications package.