Yeah, but...
The guess at the size is based on the guess of the albedo. If it's covered with something dark, it a LOT larger. (I'm presuming they're guessing it's covered with methane ice.)

Very good point. One of the issues with changing lifestyles is that a "better" lifestyle is a natural goal for humans. We're hardwired for comfort. How that can be circumvented is a real issue.

As well, here we are, around 80 years into nuc plant power, and I question if we are any closer to getting it right. The Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station scandal, AKA NukeGate, shows that there is a certain contempt about nuc power advocates, with unqualified people making critical infrastructure without engineers signing off on them, parts not fitting, coupled with the Baseload Review Act, a law passed that made customers responsible for every cent of the construction. The people of South Carolina are still paying for the billions of dollars lost, without getting a single milliwatt of energy.

So in the modern age, a nuc power plant was being constructed with dangerous controls, and never generated power, although all of the sunk cost is being extracted from the customers.

Another thing not often mentioned is scalability. On any centralized power plant, nuc, gas, or coal, you have to design the plant to some maximum capacity. You go over that, and you need a new plant, or at least the equivalent of one with massive re-fitting.

With solar or wind, you can add more as you need more. Here in PA, we have a lot of places mapped out, and if we need more wind turbines in teh future, we know where to place them.

Side notes, solar installs turn out to be a haven for animals, especially birds.

Plausible. Most communicable diseases are addressable by social habits...if you can get people to do them.

I disagree. I think it probably CAN get much faster, but I'm not sure how much cheaper it can get.

The approach I think could succeed is the "bio-chip", with lots of cells and feed lines so different wells in the chip would host different combinations of bacteriophage and sample. This would need to be screened frequently, probably by an AI, that would pick out the most successful set. I think this could, in principle, usually be done within a couple of days in a mostly automated way. But that's a pretty complex setup, and I doubt that it could be done really cheaply.

It's not even that. Most of the drug-resistant bacteria existed before antibiotics came out of the lab. But they weren't a very successful part of the population. Antibiotics killed off their competition, and now they're successful. Most methods of resisting antibiotics have an energy cost, so bacteria that don't use them are more successful if the antibiotics aren't around. Unfortunately, it's not usually a very high cost, so stopping the use of an antibiotic doesn't reset the population, at least not quickly.

But, yeah, bacteria mutate really rapidly to fill a new niche, so you probably literally CAN'T have an antibiotic both in wide use and remaining effective.

Are you still wondering why CEOs blacklisted Ivy League school graduates after pulling political stunts, or is the revolving door Gen Victimhood installed in HR telling enough?

It's quite obvious how silly it has all become when The Onion finds their parody writers as pointless as South Park did.

We've tried making the many the boss. Turns out it doesn't work so well. Just enables the not-so-good guys rise to the top more easily.

Welcome to the human condition. People can go reeee about the governments they hate, and lay all the problems at "capitalism" a dog whistle for the USA, but that shows you are more worried about governance than the actual problem. Especially when the big four are China, US, India, and Russia. Laying this at the feet of the USA is pointless and simply wrong. We are part of the problem, not the actual problem.

And the problem is that we have a pretty big problem. We are in a bit of a positive feedback loop now, de-sequestering methane. The time to speak of tipping points is long gone. IMR&IO, the actual tipping point was some time in the mid 1980's.

So what should we do? We should understand that we have a rough ride ahead of us. We should shift to renewables, we should consider the environmental impact of the "data centers" we should stop de-sequestering greenhouse gases. We should not try quick-fixes like aerosol injection, which will simply create as many problems as CO2 and Methane, and likely be worse. A thousand years of acid rain is not good for living beings or infrastructure.

We should work to preserve as many species as possible What will we do? Probably not much of anything. People will bring their favorite axes to grind, just like we see here. The US will get blamed, and the other polluting countries will pat themselves on the back.

What will happen? Despite the political rhetoric, we are all in this mess together, and we'll be pointing fingers at each other as we have hundreds of years (at the very least) of adaptation.

But hey - maybe the archenemy of Capitalism, which is Communism, can take over and lead us to a glorious future, just like it always has. It has a perfect track record so far. And I put that sentence together to show just how silly the political axe grinding is.

If Uranus dug deep into the darkest smelliest parts of our galaxy, it still wouldn't find a reason to get excited about dwarf planets after Plutos fuckening.

Actually, getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere is possible, but *quite* expensive. Thermodynamics + entropy mean it will take more energy to get the CO2 re-concentrated than it released in being created.

Not fair. There are applications for which nuclear appears to be the best solution.

But, yeah, solar and wind scale a lot faster and more cheaply, even when you include the needed storage.

You're correct, butThat's a pretty low bar. We used to get a lot of posters in PowerPoint form. You can make a decent poster from PP, but it would fall apart between the person originating the poster and our office that had a large format inkjet, where it was printed Seems the file kept track of the printer used while creating it. That wreaked havoc. If the aspect ratio was different, between the two, it would summarily stretch or squeeze. Plus some people liked using the obscure fonts coming from those cheap font sets. Never knew how those would show up. We often ended up just completely re-doing the thing. I was pressed into service doing them after we had a couple people leave in short order. I told people who wanted to make posters to just come sit with me, and I could save them a lot of time by just doing the job once instead of twice.

Point is, you can make some decent poster images with PP, but it had so many quirks that it could be a nuisance.

Sigh, Yes, it is all due to capitalism, even in countries without capitalism. Top four are China, US, India, and Russia. Thanks for letting us know that they are all capitalist countries.

Axe grinding and trying to turn every discussion into your axe to grind is silly. Can we get anyone to claim it is internalized misogyny? How about Joe Biden, or Barack O'Blama?

You aren't helping.

Are you an LLM trained on the political cartoons in The Onion?

They're not going to buy a weird brand. That's way too exploratory.

And I won't buy a Bezos brand.

I won't buy American any more either, though. I'm over that shit. American automakers can't make a car worth a fuck, period.