In China, Japan, many other European countries, along with others, rail is often faster door to door than air on trips under 1000 miles, as well as being far more pleasant that even 1st class air. I always take HSR when its a plausible option when I'm traveling. Last time I took a train in the US (outside of the NE corridor) it was purely for novelty, and I came back by air eve though it was only 200 miles.

The problem is that the US has become unable to build large projects, some of this due to laws intended to protect the environment but now delaying or preventing the development of high speed rail, wind, solar and nuclear power. China has built tens of thousands of km of high speed rail in the time it took California to talk about it, but not finish even the first segment of the "train to nowhere".

Unfortunately we are trapped between conservatives who don't believe in climate change and liberals who insist the only way to fix climate is to do less. There are good technical solutions out there, and most Americans would be happy with them, but the extremists on both sides prevent it.

Microsoft AI tools may be OK but London trust the data privacy issues with integrating AI into everything. So I disable it I use stand alone AI tools a lot. (Mostly Gemini) because I can only give them access to specific data

For all the happy fuzzy reasons we claim to value and want to protect conscious things, there is an underlying reason: conscious things are dangerous.

So I think the important question is not whether we declare AI to be conscious, but whether it will eventually act its own self interest the way a human would. Will it use force to gain rights and resources that we haven't granted it?

I think at the moment we don't know. AI is rapidly advancing and I don't think we can predict what capabilities and behaviors it will have in 10 years, I think the safety approach is to imagine that it might become able to act in its own self interest and have a plan to deal with that - probably by integrating it into society, rather the oppressing it by force.

Reference to face scan trumping documents? I'm not disagreeing but I'd like to see an official source. If true that is (another) big problem because face scans are not perfect. Even a 0.1% error rate will result in huge numbers of people legally in the US being detained and deported.

Same here, and my coworkers seem pretty happy as well. There are good, interesting jobs out there. Its not clear how much luck vs long term planning is needed to get those jobs. My early career (first 10 years) involved a huge amount of work for very little pay.

The scify horror plots write themselves. The only saving grace is that itâ(TM)s difficult to imagine connecting to neural tissue with enough bandwidth to be useful.

Agree, mod up if I had points.

There are lots of complexities to the comparison because gas pumps fill MUCH faster, but there are a fair number of private electrical charges and very few private gas stations.

If someone calls or emails me wanting information, my first assumption is that its some sort of scam, or at least a marketing survey, and I don't have the time or interest in figuring out whether its legitimate. If I had a way to quickly know that it was a legitimate research survey, I'd be happy to answer.

I expect that if if you give most people the option of a 4 day week for X$ or a 5 day week for X*1.25 dollars they will take the latter. In reality it will probably be > X*1.25 because all jobs have some "fixed costs" for things like training that mean that the work done in 5 days is > 1.25 the work done in 4 days.

Some will take the option, some will decide to work even less, but my guess is that the majority are willing to work more hours for more $

Do you think high 6 figure salaries are unreasonable? In technical fields, the best people are far more productive than the average people so it makes economic sense to pay what it takes to employ them. In any case NASA salaries are far (2x-3x) below industry for similar skills.

I agree that there is a huge bureaucracy problem, but like all bureaucracies, its difficult to decide what parts to eliminate. My experience is DOE, but I expect its similar. Environment Safety and Health represented a huge expense - should we cut that? The purchasing system includes all sorts of checks and balances to prevent fraud - and I believe fraud is very rare - but at a huge cost. Project reviews are designed to eliminate risk because "failed" projects are a political disaster, but in order to make progress you NEED to take risks.

I wish NASA had stayed on the path it was on in the 60s but NASA's budget today is 10X less as a fraction of the federal budget than it was during Apollo and I don't see any hope that the public is willing to return to those levels of spending.

Its the standard rocket equation (as viewed in the frame of the rocket). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In the non-relativistic case, if you need a delta-V that is larger than the fuel exhaust velocity, you need to carry an amount of fuel that grows exponentially with that ratio. (see above). In the relativistic case, its similar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What is going on is that you need to accelerate not just the rocket , but the mass of the fuel that you will need for future acceleration. Start with the rocket mass. To apply thrust for acceleration * time = exhaust velocity, you need a factor of e in fuel mass. If you want to double your speed you need to do that again, so you need e*e mass ratio. And so on.

You can do the math, or write a simple program - just take small steps and work in the comoving frame of the rocket so that you can ignore relativistic effects.

The NASA employees aren't getting rich. The director of NASA makes about as much as a moderately experienced researcher in an industry lab, and the rest of the pay scale is far below industry standards. There IS a huge bureaucracy but a lot of that is demanded by the public in order to ensure that there is no "waste", even though the bureaucracy itself IS the waste.

I worked for many years at a DOE lab and the fraud protections meant that everything required N levels of approval - often by people with no knowledge of what was being done. Now that I'm at an industry lab, I can pretty much buy whatever I need for research and presumably if I spend money inefficiently or on inappropriate things I'll get fired. Its far more efficient.

Sadly there is a rarely mentioned difficulty. Constant acceleration requires exponentially increasing amounts of fuel with time. Even with matter / antimatter as a fuel, its difficult to imagine getting a relativistic time contraction of more than a a factor of a few. (remember you need to decelerate at the far end which requires another exponential factor in fuel). Antimatter propulsion also has other difficulties, in both creation and storage. The creation of anti-protons is inefficient, there is a far higher probability of producing mesons that decay again. Its not clear how to store and accelerate high density anti-hydrogen, exceptionally low temperatures would be required to keep the anti-hydrogen vapor pressure low enough to prevent runaway heating. Maybe you could make an anti-hydrogen fusion reactor to get to carbon, but that reaction proceeds vastly more slowly than does DD fusion which we still haven't figured out.

"Bussard ramjets" seem impossible for a variety of reasons.

Its always risky to bet against advancing technology but this does seem really difficult

The mission is very bandwidth limited, there is no orbiter, they have to direct-to-earth transmission with a small antenna .(at least that was the case when I last saw it). So they want to maximize data transmission efficiency per transmit power.

A quad copter on Titan would be amazing. I don't mind if the cost goes up a lot, its well worth it.