The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

Rapid Accelerated Disassembly?

Rapid Anomalous Disassembly?

Or did you mean R.U.D. (Rapid Unscheduled/Unplanned Disassembly)?

Starship burns methane, not RP1.

Between SuperHeavy and Starship, a fully-loaded stack needs 3500 tons of LOX and 1000 tons of CH4. So what do those cost?

Well, oxygen is easy to get from the atmosphere, so the cost of LOX is really just some equipment (which isn't terribly expensive to buy and maintain) plus electricity, and the cost ends up being dominated by the cost of electricity. It takes between 150 kWh and 800 kWh to separate and liquify a ton of oxygen, so if you're paying $0.10 per kWh, LOX costs $15-80 per ton. There are some other costs to handle and store it, so let's say $100/ton.

CH4 can be created many ways. The cheapest is probably to purify natural gas, which costs about $190 per ton (that site shows ~$5 per 1000 ft^3, and a ton is 38k ft^3). Add some costs for purification and cooling, so call it $250/ton.

3500 tons LOX * $100/ton + 1000 tons CH4 * 250/ton = $600k. Musk usually calls it $1M, which seems pretty reasonable, since they're probably not separating/purifiying it themselves and there transportation costs. 150 tons of payload to LEO with $1M worth of fuel means the fuel-only cost is $6.67/kg.

Nonsense. Our only experience with reusable orbital rockets is the space shuttle, which was an unsustainably-expensive and complex beast that was more refurbishable than reusable and had a payload one fifth of what Starship is designed for. It's all of the differences that aim to make Starship both reusable and cheap that make it hard. It's possible that it's just too ambitious, that we don't yet have the technology to make a cheap, fully-reusable (not refurbishable, reusable) orbital rocket with massive capacity. No one else has done it... no one else is even trying, that's how hard it is.

Failure is expected. If they managed to launch and land both Starship and SuperHeavy in less than a dozen test flights, that would be the surprise.

Those articles just say that the gap between the richest and poorest in each country is growing, and that the US has a larger gap. The articles are not comparing the countries to each other so there may be different computation methods. In particular the CA article talks about the top 20% (at least for men, I'm going to have to assume for women) while the US graph talks about the top 1%.

It does look like there is better results for American rich, as the US graph allows me to guess as to what the top 20% are:

Top 20% life expectency in CA: men: 83 women: 86
Top 20% life expectency in US: men: 86 women: 87.5

That is waste heat inside a very small closed structure, which is different than any kind of Niven-style waste heat destroying an entire planet.

Mars? It's a great dream, but even in the most optimistic scenarios it will never be profitable.

Collecting contributions to send the most annoying politicians and celebrities there on a one way trip would be very profitable.

...if you just use AI."

Life expectancy of the top quartile in the US does not exceed the the top quartile of CA. Yes life expectancy of the top quartile in both the US and Canada exceeds the average of everybody but you seem to have deliberately lied or misled.

The top 10% of earners have a lot more than 72% of the wealth.

I know this is a joke, but waste heat is not what is causing global warming. We would have to raise the amount of energy we are using by some orders of magnitude for waste heat to make a measurable fraction of global warming.

IMHO I hope Google only paid a few hundred dollars for this.

I'm surprised, and you should be too, if your view is evidence-based, because this is a new effect that was not predicted by any of the previous models, which already consider the melting permafrost, methane emissions and fossil fuel use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I agree. Questions like this often seem to come from people who don’t *want* to use AI, or perhaps are afraid of it for whatever reason, and they’re looking for reasons that they shouldn’t use it.

Kind of funny to see how AI's improve by re-writing themselves, following immediately a story from earlier today about humans being driven into psychosis by AI's.

This claims it uses empirical evidence to judge improvement but why would an AI not be as much a cheerleader for anything it does as it is for any human?