Anytime someone mentions the Singularity and immortality through a cyber avatar, I think of this absolutely hilarious skit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I have a Volt. It charges at night, and you can set the charge time to be whenever you want. If utilities simply charged for time of use (which makes the most sense as it'd be the closest to the true cost), then owners would simply choose to charge whenever the price was lowest. With a Volt, I have a relatively small battery, so while I can choose when to charge at night, I can't easily shift charging to other days. With a 215 mile battery, you can now choose when you want to charge, just like you can choose when you want to fill up, particularly if workplace chargers are installed. This has the effect of actually leveling out the peaks and troughs in supply and demand BETTER than no EVs at all, not concentrating it in a "very small portion of the day."

Also, batteries are "energy accumulating tech." Tesla is building a Gigafactory (the initial portions of which are already operational) that will surpass the current global total Li-Ion production capacity. The Powerwall, and the utility-scale Powerpack (which is actually a big deal), beat basically all other grid-tied battery tech options available today. So if you want to "invest in energy accumulating techs," I suggest you buy Tesla stock.

It's not about people working harder, I don't know how you got that from my comment. Rich people aren't working any harder, either. It's about the gains through that work being much greater due to amplification from technology.

Another thing: a higher minimum wage would likely bring more people into the workforce since it'd actually be worth it to work more instead of just rely on the social safety net you mentioned.

I did mention "rightwingers," but that does not mean this is purely a left vs right issue. I believe it's more complicated than some ideological axis.

...which is exactly why a minimum wage hike is a good idea.

Also, a higher minimum wage would encourage more people to reenter the workforce. It'd encourage people to move out of their parents' basements and get a job.

I have been saying for years that an increase in the minimum wage can partly pay for itself by spurring automation. And that's a very good thing, for everyone.

Some business owners might prefer to pay a bunch of people $1/hour to dig a ditch using a shovel, but at $15/hour, you gotta use a backhoe.

I always find it funny when rightwingers complain that a minimum wage increase is simultaneously entirely inflationary AND that it will cause you to lose your job to automation.

I've often thought that we are using far too LITTLE automation, not too much. If burger flipping can be automated, why the heck aren't we automating it? Oh, right, because it's cheaper up-front (but not long-term) to just pay someone a poverty wage.

And it's also always funny to see rightwingers pull out the Luddite critique, i.e. that automation will put us out of jobs, when in fact we've had increasing automation for centuries, now, but not any lower voluntary unemployment. So the Luddite critique is ridiculous when OTHER people use it, but totally fine otherwise...

And then, realize that we had a real minimum wage of about $11/hour in the 1960s, when productivity was FAR lower, when we had far less economic productivity per person. If you adjusted the minimum wage for productivity growth, it'd be over $20/hour right now.

I actually think that by NOT raising the minimum wage, we've stymied technological progress. Yes, there's definitely a limit to how fast you can increase the minimum wage without hitting inflation (or possibly some unemployment), but we're not near that limit with $15/hour.

Yeah, it'd be great if we could just wish new physics into being.

Might as well wish for wormholes or teleportation.

In reality, we need rockets. And chemical rockets actually work just fine. Nuclear-thermal would cost about as much as SLS, and wouldn't even be that useful, it'd just be a nice in-space stage. Reusable launch tech (which we're getting thanks to SpaceX, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, and others) gets you cheap launch which makes a nuclear-thermal stage an unnecessary frivolity. Nuclear-thermal rockets tend to be much lower thrust than chemical rockets, too, so you don't get as full advantage of the Oberth effect without multiple passes through the Van Allen belts. Not as low thrust as electric propulsion (which has MUCH higher Isp than nuclear-thermal, so still pays for itself), but still bad compared to chemical rockets. You gain a little lower launch mass, but still not as good as electric propulsion can do.

Cheap launch with in-orbit refueling, high mass fraction chemical stages (like ULA's Centaur or ACES), aerocapture, and ISRU are ultimately much, much better than nuclear-thermal with it's deeply cryogenic (i.e. very high boil-off) liquid hydrogen and low-thrust-to-weight ratio and enormous, heavy tanks for that liquid hydrogen. Also, methane/oxygen is a LOT easier to produce on Mars (or even the Moon) than the same amount of liquid hydrogen. For the same amount of water, you can produce fully TWENTY times as much stoichiometric methane/oxygen for a chemical rocket as you can liquid hydrogen for a nuclear thermal rocket.

Electric propulsion (using either solar or nuclear for electricity production--solar is higher performing in the inner solar system and nuclear-electric is higher performing in the outer solar system) is close to constant-acceleration. Solar-electric especially would be a good choice for Mars transport (at very least for cargo), and improving solar technology (mainly producing lighter weight solar panels) can allow continual improvement in the amount of acceleration you can achieve. But chemical propulsion would work just about as well, though would require more mass (but if mass is cheap, who cares?).

There is a plan that would get us to Mars soon and in the budget we have. But Congress wouldn't like it because it wouldn't use their favorite pork rocket (SLS), and possibly not even Orion (which is a less-bad idea than SLS is, but still ultra inefficient).

But the fact is that we didn't even have a "plan" to get to the Moon when JFK made his Rice University speech. Or we did, but it was wrong. The original plan was to use direct ascent of the Apollo command module off the surface of the Moon and go straight back to Earth. But such a plan would've required a launch vehicle much larger than the Saturn V. Instead, we used Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, which allowed us to use just Saturn V. And of course, we had to shut down Saturn V production during the Apollo program because even Saturn V was too expensive and unsustainable. SLS is even worse, as it uses old Shuttle parts (developed in the 1970s, for God(dard)'s sake!) which were originally intended to be reusable but now we're just throwing away (the worst of both worlds... the upfront cost of reusable parts and the expense of throwing the whole thing away each time), and so we can afford to fly just once every other year (and each Mars mission will require several launches).

We can explore Mars entirely with EELV-class launch vehicles. Atlas V has a 7.2 meter fairing available, Delta IV Heavy can put about 28 tons in orbit (enough for the largest "single piece", provided we use docking... but no orbital assembly required), Falcon Heavy will launch within a year (it starts testing in Texas soon), can put over 50 tons to orbit (more with cross-feed), and Vulcan (the successor to Atlas V and Delta IV being designed now with Blue Origin's BE-4 engine) can handle a 8.4 meter fairing (same as SLS) and in Heavy configuration could also handle at least 50 tons to LEO.

We can also use either SpaceX's Dragon or Boeing's Starliner capsules, which are much more efficient, to get crew to space and back. The actual vehicle to bring astronauts to Mars vicinity wouldn't actually bring Orion along anyway, as the current plan is to rendezvous in a distant retrograde lunar orbit.

Our human exploration funding is dominated by SLS and Orion, both elements of which are way too expensive and will be available in full form much later than EELV-class vehicles (available now, with twice the capacity available sooner than SLS's first test launch) and Dragon/Starliner (set for 2017 crewed debut). Instead of wasting our funding on two elements we don't need, we could spend the money on a small transfer vehicle (perhaps using solar-electric propulsion, but chemical rockets would work, too) and a Mars lander/ascent vehicle in addition to surface elements.

Instead of duplicating effort, we should focus on what we actually need to do Mars. Lander and transit hab.

Congress (or rather, those in Congress who make a stink about space exploration because it provides jobs in their districtrs) knows SLS/Orion aren't strictly required, knows they're very expensive (which is why they're supportive of them... more cost = more jobs in their district), what they want is to somehow cement SLS/Orion in place so their districts are guaranteed to receive funds for decades. That's really the whole issue, here. ...there's also a huge revolution going on in spaceflight. Truly affordable reusable vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) rocket technology is now scaling up to enormous size. You have SpaceX with reusable flyback boosters for Falcon 9 and Heavy, plus Blue Origin tooling up for their own VTVL orbital vehicle. ULA (who makes Atlas V and Delta IV) is developing orbital refueling technology with Vulcan, which is hugely enabling. And we're just getting started. SpaceX has plans for an enormous reusable launch vehicle also using methane/LOx technology and intends to send people in 2025 (perhaps using Falcon Heavy and a Raptor-based lander, perhaps using the enormous vehicle). This is far earlier than any NASA plan could possibly hope for given its budget and Congressional-mandated pork. And there are other such efforts, such as Masten Space Systems (tooling up for a reusable launch demo for a DARPA project, whose tech inspired SpaceX to pursue VTVL booster reuse).

It doesn't make sense to develop a set-in-stone plan 2 decades in the future using technology (SLS/Orion) from 4 decades in the past (Shuttle tech from the 1970s, Apollo-style capsule solution from the 1960s) with a budget that likely wouldn't be available (NASA is discretionary, and there's no Soviet-level threat that would spark an Apollo-like budget spike) while the private sector (in concert with other parts of NASA) is making such great strides that would drastically improve the cost and timeline such that NASA could easily afford Mars missions in the 2020s. Congress, I can give you a plan for exploring Mars, but you wouldn't like it.

Given there are more bird strikes in a typical HOUR than have ever occurred for drones, perhaps we should force people to register birds with the FAA. After all, you could theoretically train birds to attack aircraft, and you could even have the bird carry harmful chemicals or explosives. After all, the Allies tested this device during WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Except we don't require registering your bird with the FAA because that'd be absurd. Have we become THIS dumb?

You know the fun thing about what you just shared?

Not a single drone strike. NOT ONE.

We wet ourselves just because we SEE a drone. Yet there are over 10,000 bird strikes every frakking year. There are more bird strikes in a typical HOUR than ALL DRONE-AIRCRAFT COLLISIONS EVER.

http://www.faa.gov/airports/ai...

SorryNotSorry for the all-caps, but this point needs to be driven home.

Shouldn't the "obvious" thing be that in spite of people losing their minds over drone "near misses," no drones have been hit by aircraft, yet EVERY SINGLE DAY bird strikes occur?

If we diverted aircraft for bird sightings like we do for drone sightings, we'd never be able to fly anywhere.

Heck, more turtles have been hit than drones!
http://mashable.com/2015/12/18...

Concorde couldn't operate profitably because it only had a few routes it could service due to the sonic boom restrictions. Some of the routes that it did originally serve had to be curtailed due to booms. Sonic booms most certainly IS the main problem keeping supersonic flight from gaining a foothold.

NASA's job is to research Aeronautics for all purposes, especially civilian (since the DoD has plenty of funding for defense purposes). It's what the first A in NASA stands for. It's not a waste, it's probably the most efficient part of NASA as far as how much direct benefit comes back to the US's economy.

NASA also has a huge initiative for energy-efficient aviation that's overall much bigger than this supersonic transport concept.

And as far as fuel efficiency, it IS possible to have supersonic flight using methane or other inexpensive fuels. Even fully electric supersonic flight is possible using lithium-sulfur and especially lithium-air battery chemistries. But you're never going to do that without first solving the sonic boom problem because there will simply be too few routes it can service.

"Mass" air travel ALSO used to be only for rich folk, and it took decades of price reductions and increases in incomes before it became feasible for most people in developed countries to travel by air on occasion. Supersonic air travel cannot EVER be mass market until it has /some/ civilian market to grow from. And that requires solving the boom problem.

Honestly, Russia is in the enviable position of already having the critical parts needed for a crewed lunar mission.

They have Soyuz for crewed launches, Proton for heavy uncrewed, plus Angara coming on line to replace the troublesome Proton. Soyuz was originally designed for lunar missions, and could be fairly simply modified for lunar return. Russia also regularly does propellant transfer and autonomous docking and have a large array of storable-propellant upper stages to use, so they could launch the lander partially filled using Proton into a distant lunar orbit and refuel and/or reposition using a Progress vehicle (perhaps tweaked to allow bigger propellant tanks).

Soyuz could dock with a couple of full Briz-M stages in LEO, push out a lunar orbit and meet with the pre-place lander. ...I suspect Russia will not build a mega-rocket like SLS. They don't need to, since they're very good at docking and propellant transfer (something they do regularly on ISS). Which is good because they don't exactly have a lot of money right now.

I have good news! We already have the capabilities you mention!

We're talking a 200+ mile electric car as a starting point for pure electric. I.e., you're talking a Tesla or Chevy's Bolt (not Volt, which is a great vehicle by the way). 200+ miles is much more than just enough for commuting, and you can top up every night. You need no more power than a clothes dryer, but even the power of a hairdryer is sufficient.

I'm from Minnesota, and it is common there for parking lots to have outlets for block heaters for warming engine blocks in the winter, even apartments. The cost is pretty trivial, and in this case, already exists. There's no reason apartment owners across the country can't do the same thing.

Hotels often have an RV hook up, which enables fairly quick charging.

And you keep talking about fast charging stations as if they don't already exist. But they do!!! Tesla has installed a network that reaches across the US and across much of Europe. About 15 minutes of charging (bathroom break) will get you about 100 miles of range, and they're working to improve it to be even faster. Tesla also has a couple battery swapping locations, but they're phasing it out because the cheap/free supercharging is already preferred by their customers and is fast enough.

We already have the technology to do this. I happen to have a Volt (which has a gasoline backup when the battery is drained), and I fill up my gas tank as often as a car owner changes their oil... 3000-5000 miles, and that's only with a 35-40 mile battery range. If I had a 200+ mile range, even that wouldn't have been required.

If you have an electric car, you leave your garage each morning with a full "tank," and you can charge up between errands (I do all the other things you mention including groceries, going out, taking kids to the park... and I only have a dryer outlet for my charger, yet I burn no gas except on long trips, even though I only have a 35-40 mile range.). If you have a Tesla, the rapid charging infrastructure is already in place, so on the very rare occasion where you're driving for hours and hours, you can charge up during a bathroom or meal break.

You don't need aluminum batteries. Battery swap could work, but isn't actually needed. Fuel cell cars are a huge waste of money. Supercapacitors for the most part are as well. Really, all we need is to ramp up production of the technology we already have and that Tesla has already demonstrated. But for some reason, lots of people refuse to realize we've actually proven EVERYTHING we need to fully electrify our cars.

Every house and apartment has electric service, and a charger for your electric car is almost always included in the purchase (and is only like $200-400 besides). Superchargers would be nice and are already built-out across the country, and they require much less infrastructure than running overhead catenary wires for trains.

Anyway, we can do both: electric trains and electric road vehicles. But the nice thing about electric cars is that they'll build out the battery manufacturing infrastructure we'll need to go to an efficient, renewables-heavy, carbon-free grid, while also allowing electrification of ships and even aircraft.

And heck, you'd probably want battery-electric trains so you would only have to run overhead lines at train stops.

It pretty much is, thanks to the Sun filling that thin air with 1000Watts per square meter of light. That's why solar power is awesome.

Yes, we need to solve the energy /storage/ problem, but electric cars directly and indirectly solve that problem through battery technology and demand-based charging (and even vehicle-to-grid technology). When affordable electric cars (of 200+ mile range) are manufactured at scale, we'd effectively have solved the energy storage problem (by utilizing old batteries and excess production capacity for grid storage along with demand-response and possibly vehicle-to-grid), and we literally can power our civilization with the energy that flows through thin air.

(Although I'm a big fan of a diversified grid, including lots of nuclear power and hydro, etc.)