You want a practical route? Buy a car or convert one to run on natural gas. There's tons and tons of it being pumped, for dirt cheap, and this will continue for decades until the easy to frack reservoirs are drained. One way or another all that methane is going to be used, you might as well burn it when it is cheap.

1. That's what I am saying. For the system as a whole, LESS resources are used if you do some skilled labor for someone and trade that labor for solar cells than if you were doing hard labor in your own backyard. Sure, people USED to do everything on their own lands, but the population has been too high for this to be possible for centuries now.

2. I'm saying that anyone BUT a hillbilly with no education or capital will get more usable energy, faster with solar cells than wasting time with ethanol.

3. The thermoelectric effect is useless for energy production of any noticeable quantity. Go take a few math and physics classes. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/

Yes, but you can't grow nearly everything else needed for you to survive in your back field, either.

The point is that in the long run, cheap solar cells will be produced that need very little in the way of resources to make (whether it be skilled labor, materials, or energy). The fact that China can make a profit (albeit yes with some cheating such as a deflated currency, and no OSHA standards) selling them this cheap means that the resources in them are already down to moderate levels.

Silicon is pretty darn common an element. The rare earths aren't, but some solar cells types need very little of those.

Infinite states? Doesn't the universe have a finite resolution?

Also, doesn't quantum uncertainty and noise mean that regardless of the large number of states the transistor is capable of, only a far smaller number of states are actually distinguishable or matter in a working system.

When I'm launching my rockets full of explorers from the planet Kerth, we don't do aborts! If the engines are still attached to the ship, I'm punching the throttle and hitting the stage selection control! We're going to the Mun (or at least leaving the ground) no matter what!

Also, I don't do any pansy ass "test flights" guided by computer to some orbiting tin can! Every one of my flights is crewed by red blooded, beer chugging, motorcycle riding Kerbals who LOVE it even when it all goes wrong.

SpaceX and NASA could learn a lot from my experiences...

Not revolutionary - just problematic to achieve a working plant. Certain forms of fusion release almost exclusively beta particles, which are pure electrons.

What's you're really doing is using photosynthesis, a form of solar energy, to produce your fuel. Fun fact : most crops are between 1-2% efficient at converting sunlight to chemical energy. Then, you're going to lose at least half of that energy converting the crops to ethanol, then you'll lose 2/3 of the energy in the ethanol when you burn it for motive power.

Also, those crops need water and fertilizer, generally, costing you energy. If you use the good fertilizer, you won't even gain energy doing this.

Or you could use cheap Chinese made solar cells (less than $1 a watt) and use it to charge batteries. Commercial solar cells are 7-14% efficient, and the battery charging is around 80% efficient or better. When you drive the car on those batteries, another 80% or more of that power actually propels the car.

Do the math. The problem today are the high technology items needed to make all this work have high manufacturing costs (that are falling rapidly). However, in the long run, it seems pretty obvious where this is heading.

The story was NOT finished, and does end on a cliffhanger. Don't listen to the AC.

Wool IS an excellent story. It should be thought of as a series of books : honestly, the first 5 wool books would fit into one movie. (normally it's the other way around)

With point to point mesh networking using beam forming antenna, I'm not sure how effective any countermeasure would realistically be. Basically, all the drones in a swarm as well as various other aircraft as a relay station have point to point links between them. Any RF signal not coming in a straight line from the location of an allied system is more or less ignored. There would be hundreds or more nodes in the mesh network, and the encryption would be one time pad.

  With this kind of inter-unit communication, the only thing that would be able to realistically break the com-links would be weapons capable of frying the radios themselves. And the drones could have limited artificial intelligence - in 20 years, they would probably be able to fight enemy aircraft and bomb an existing target without needing further instructions from their controllers.

But again, how could you tell? From a physical sense : YOU are a copy of a past self. The atoms are NOT the same.

So if you were going to die TOMMOROW, and you can choose to have a near perfect copy made, or to just die for good...you'd still choose the latter?

Remember, from your perspective it will seem as if you wake up in the copy. There's no subjective way to show otherwise.

Except that you don't have this option. That Corsica is headed for the crusher, and there's no way to stop the conveyer. You can either make a near perfect copy or find out what it's like to die for good. (as in, probably find nothing at all...no afterlife, nothing. That to me is more upsetting than even the christian hell)

This isn't current technology. In order to do this at all, we would need molecular manufacturing : the ability to create things with control of the placement of every atom in the product.

Thus, not only would we be able to build the scanner I described (which uses trillions of tiny heads to do the destructive scanning) but also we would be able to create circuitry that is atomicly precise.

Also, the reason why it takes a nuclear power station worth of energy now is that our emulators try to do things too inefficiently. Instead of using digital computers to model the movements of every ion through an ion channel, my hardware emulator idea (which is not mine, I read about it elsewhere and it's been demonstrated on a smaller scale already) uses analog components to represent each important part in a neuron.

The problem is that engineering nanomachines that work inside a living human body, in a chaotic and dirty environment, separated from each other, is vastly more difficult than machines that can only function inside a clean vacuum at a fixed temperature and only function when fixed to a host machine that gives them structural stability, power, intermediates, digital instructions, and other supportive functions.