First you can FREEZE the CO2 out of the atmosphere in Antarctica relatively cheaply because at -70C the Antarctic winter is close(r) to the freezing point of CO2 (-80C)*. As was outlined in a proposal by Dr. Agee (Chairman of the Climate Change dept. at Purdue University), the refrigeration plants can be put at locations on the coast due to the cold fast winds coming from the valleys that originate in the interior high desert. In addition to being easier for construction due to ocean access, the winds will provide the power.

Some of these locations on the coast, according to bathymetric charts, are near where the ocean reaches depths of greater than 1000 meters. Here you take the newly purified CO2 and then mix it with sea water. In the presence of a catalyst (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.1c03041) it quickly creates a carbon dioxide clathrate.

Now you just dump the clathrate into the nearby ocean depths where the pressure will keep the CO2 locked in PERMANENTLY. An undersea pipeline stretching a few tens(?) of kilometers from the refrigeration plant to the drop off point may be all that you need. This is in comparison to oil companies building undersea pipelines over 1000Km in length (Nord Stream pipeline). Considering that hundreds of billions of tons of clathrates have been present on the ocean floor for geologic ages, it is safe, stable, and environmentally friendly way of storing CO2 FOREVER.

So you've CHEAPLY (due to cold Antartica) removed CO2 from the atmosphere and permanently and SAFELY (doesn't cause acidification) disposed of it! It's worth a pilot project.

*okay okay actually -80C is the freezing point of PURE carbon dioxide at 1atm. The partial pressure of CO2 is much lower so the freezing temperature is closer to -140C. However, you can pressurize the gas (and require relatively little energy to do so) by using a energy recovery system that uses the outgoing pressurized gas to pressurize incoming gas (https://energyrecovery.com/co2-refrigeration/). They claim up to 98% energy recovered! This would allow you to freeze (and thus purify) the CO2 at Antarctic temperatures.

(Most of these ideas are not original to me but I did think up of disposing the CO2 or clathrates in the deep ocean as well as locate the appropriate locations on the Antarctic coast to do so. Otherwise I'm just putting together ideas!)

Hopefully, very soon, the space age will be marked into two periods:

Before Starship and After Starship

When* Starship comes online it will create such a gigantic jump in capability and, most importantly, COST that spaceflight will hardly be recognizable. With a potential two orders of magnitude decrease in the cost of getting LARGE payloads into LEO and, with in-orbit refueling, ANYWHERE** else in the solar system it is hard to predict what this will create other than it'll be great (for the U.S. at least***).

Think of it as ocean travel before the invention of the steamship (but more so) or air travel before the invention of pressurized cabins and jet engines (but more so).

One area is in the ability to launch large scientific payloads for a tiny fraction of the cost. Not just in the launch cost but in the development. For example the Webb telescope could have been launched with its multi-billion dollar main mirror UNFOLDED because of Starship's 9m diameter. I'm sure having to build a folding 6.4m optically perfect mirror (within nanometers) that could survive launch was a major driver of the cost. Also making it only 7 tons mass (whereas Starship can loft 100 tons) was not cheap.

Another is the military. With its capability to launch entire constellations in one go, it would make the American GPS and communications systems invulnerable to any non-nuclear attack (or another nation causing the Kessler syndrome to deny all of mankind access to space). Indeed there are rumors that the next generation of Starling satellites will be able to act as GPS satellites; having 30,000+ satellites is too many for even the most ambitious Chinese ground based laser or anti-sat system to take out.

As far as offensive capabilities, it would be practical for the U.S. to set up hardened (due to high mass) "space bases" possibly in geo-sync orbit over the Western Hemisphere (out of laser line of sight from China's mainland). From there they could launch high-delta V rockets that, without destroying them, could disable Russian and Chinese GPS/comm. satellites by rendezvousing with them and simply deploying a screen in front of them (and their solar panels). Anyway that's what I take as a possible reason for DARPA's granting this year of contracts for high delta-V nuclear thermal rockets. If all these did was block the satellites, I'm not sure they'd be regarded as "weapons" (and thus be allowed under treaty).

Another advantage is Starship has been designed for very high launch cadence, it has been been reported that Musk would like a two week launch schedule IN ITS FIRST YEAR OF OPERATION (next year, 2022!), If many (dozens?) of launch platforms are built by Musk and the U.S. military, it's conceivable there could be a simultaneous launch of ten or more Starships, If each one carried 100 non-nuclear tungsten "rods from god" that would mean 1000 extremely potent warheads could rain down anywhere on earth in an hour (each would have the kinetic energy of 1 ton traveling at several kilometers per second, more than equivalent to its weight in high explosive). Presumably these launches could be repeated in short order.

Again, nothing placed in orbit, so no breaking of treaties.

This is what I can think of, with just a little speculation, imagine what is being cooked up behind the scenes. There are doubtless many many applications, some could change the world (like really good worldwide internet) or the geopolitical balance (if the U.S. DOMINATES space and can deny its adversaries use of it, it would make it very hard to imagine a situation where they could lose a major conflict). Oh and did I mention the Musk wants to use it to go to Mars?

So when it comes to what will come after the ISS, I'd say: If Starship works, you'll probably be seeing MUCH bigger space stations (since even one Starship has the internal volume of the entire ISS, imagine what 5 of them lashed together could be like). Keep your fingers crossed!

*I don't know if it will work but considering that NASA has blessed it with its technical approval (and 2.9 Billion dollars!), I think there's a fair chance that it will. We'll know soon!

**I forget who said it but "once you get to LEO, you're halfway to anywhere" in terms of delta-V. In-orbit refueling gets you the second half.

***Sorry to all the non-Americans out there but last I checked SpaceX is an American company based in America with its employees, facilities, suppliers, and investors almost all American. Even its founder (I think) is American (naturalized). So don't expect it to be giving rides to the Chinese or Russian military.

I stand corrected! I had no idea that rodenticides were so effective (and apparently difficult/impossible to evolve resistance to). My only information on the subject was a documentary I saw (also about New Zealand!) where they had spent millions of dollars and sent teams of men (and dogs?) to try to eradicate a stubborn infestation of mice.

My main purpose was to stimulate conversation and awareness of new, powerful (and dangerous) biotechnologies. I am a major investor/director in a BioTech company and I see some pretty incredible stuff coming. (We are a leader in immuno-oncology so we're not trying to eliminate mice, mainly cancer :)

So, maybe you've heard of the "gene drive" a technology so unexpected it was never even predicted by science fiction.

What it does is use CRISPR to precisely insert a genetic sequence that causes ALL of the progeny of a mouse to be say male. Then, unlike other genetic technologies (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211203081525.htm) that can be used to restrict the sex of descendants, it copies this sequence AND ITSELF into the newly born mice. So all of their children are male. Repeat until the entire population becomes male and the population crashes.

The problem is obvious, if this got out into "the wild" (off the island), it could make ALL mice EXTINCT. That's why some people favor using it for use against mosquitos for example. Despite the possible catastrophic effects on the ecosystem, smart people like Bill Gates who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars fruitlessly trying to stamp out malaria, support it being used against mosquitos. (We probably don't want all mice to be extinct, do we?)

So what I'm wondering is, isn't it possible to tie the sex selection gene edit with removal of the gene for an essential vitamin? In this way, the introduction of these gene edited mice would be done concurrently with the dispersal of (say) Vitamin K on the island. This, the gene edited mice would no longer can make by themselves and require as a supplement. Keep supplying the Vitamin K only to the mice on the island and they will reproduce themselves into extinction, any that leave the island (and don't have the supplement) will die so you won't have to worry (so much) about it spreading. If it any time you want to "pull the plug" on the experiment, just stop supplying the Vitamin K.

This technique is used when genetically engineering bacteria, you knock out a gene so that they require a supplement to survive. That way, it is hard for them to leave the dish! Of course as everyone who's seen Jurassic park knows, "Nature will find a way" but this, in combination with tight restrictions on transport to/from the islands, should do the trick.

I mean, let's face it. All the rodenticide is going to do is cause the population to initially go way down but then the resistant surviving mice will rebuild the population in (considering how fast mice reproduce) a short time. Time to get out the genetic scalpels?

I wonder if they prohibit Apple devices being used at their firm, otherwise whenever they ask "Hey Siri..." the iPhone will answer!

Or maybe Siri will ignore a command if you say "Mr. Siri"? :)

On a more serious note, perhaps the FDA is trying to hide something? Not something like "the vaccine has microchips from Bill Gates" but maybe that each dose actually costs .02 to make and they don't want to show how they've given Pfizer a bucketload of money. Honestly I don't know if that's bad, I mean the R&D was very expensive (and RISKY!) so they should be handsomely rewarded but it would look bad.

I'm sure that Hyundai is now regretting the timing of their purchase of Boston Dynamics (not Robotics)

Given Elon's ability to create and take over entire industries (Tesla is now the most valuable automobile company in the world, Space X is completely dominating the launch market), having them enter their market must be (or should be!) frightening.

Not only is Elon an engineering genius (unlike most CEOs he actually understands the physics, engineering and production behind his products) but they use an extremely effective management technique (which our successful BioTech company also uses! :). I'm sure that the application of fast iteration development (fail fast, fail often) on the Teslabot will result in them catching up to Boston Dynamics Atlas' in no time. Elon's Tesla production experience means when they get a usable product, they'll actually be able to deliver in (mass) quantity.

(As is obvious from my comments I am not a materials scientist!)

I wish hardness is related to "strength" (is it?). Then, if diamond, an allotrope of carbon, is as strong as graphene maybe this is even stronger (according to the summary it is twice as hard so it would be great if it was twice as "strong").

The reason is because graphene (or carbon nanotubes) seem to be just barely capable of building a space elevator. If this were twice as strong, it would be possible (assuming you could manufacture the millions of tons of pure material) to build a space elevator without extreme engineering and with decent safety margins (you'd still probably need to clear out ALL of near earth space from space debris and satellites!).

Don't worry Elon, I'm sure this would take several decades so your investment into Starship will have been fully repaid by then!

By the way, (for any material scientists out there), is there any way to make a carbon chain so that instead of a single shared electron pair to the next carbon atom, you could have a double pair? I mean carbon has a valence of 4 right, so that means it shares four electron pairs with other carbon atoms (in diamond it is a tetrahedral shape). But would you be able to have two pairs shared with the carbon atom say to the left and two pairs shared with the carbon atom to the right? Wouldn't this make this much stronger in the direction of the shared pairs? Of course it would be very weak in the transverse direction but for tensile strength it wouldn't matter so much (if you're pulling along one axis, like a cable). This would be another way of making something a bit stronger than "ordinary" carbon nanotubes (if only in one direction).

Of course, it would probably have to be made by nanobots, one atom at a time with millions of tons needed so the technology is far far off.

of what is needed (unless it's SpaceX who can evidently self-fund their way to Mars! :). I see (from the linked article) that they have a small scale (fits on a desktop) engine prototype which is promising but they have a long long way to go :(. At least they're starting with the engine which makes me think of a saying attributed to an Air Force General

- A new plane doesn't make a new engine possible, a new engine makes a new plane possible

Seriously though, who knows when (if ever) this will become something real (and flyable). Will it be for military applications only? That would make some of the requirements significantly easier (like allowing for JATO units). Also what will be its fuel efficiency? My (unfortunate) prediction is that in about 5-10 years when climate change REALLY starts becoming apparent (deadly heatwaves, fires, floods and droughts a regular occurrence), there is going to be a very severe clampdown on air travel that doesn't use renewable fuels or is very efficient :(

"any attempt to observe them by an outside party would alter their state and destroy the information they were carrying"

Wait, doesn't that include the intended receiver? Isn't the receiver (by quantum rules) an outside party as well? I thought that altering their state was necessary (collapsing the waveform) in order to get the information from the entangled particles. The key is that if you ARE the intended receiver and see that the waveform has been collapsed, you'll know that someone is intercepting (some of) your message. This makes the message impossible to eavesdrop on WITHOUT detection. (I presume the moment you determine you are being eavesdropped, you can stop communicating before any more of the message can be deciphered).

Also, the summary doesn't mention the use of this for FTL (faster than light) communication, so the first comment is knocking down a straw man. What's more interesting is if entangled particles can exchange information (slower than the speed of light to be sure) ANYWHERE in the universe? Like separated by billions of light years? Or in the depths of a black hole?

Or closer to home, between a submarine and its base on the shore? An un-eavesdroppable, communications channel that can work at any distance, with anything in between would be a game changer for many critical applications.

Actually, that probably isn't possible as well, I think that information must be sent by some other route to make sense of the quantum bits you've disentangled. Or maybe not, like I said these are Noob questions! :)

... means truck in proper (American) English :)

Don't know much about other American cities (except L.A., comparatively a drivers paradise) but I think Boston is worse than NYC (having driven in both cities and many cities abroad, see parent post).

Boston, which is where I learned to drive, is pretty insane due to its, in places, narrow streets (the oldest parts of Boston were settled way before the invention of cars during the colonial era). Over the centuries there also seems to be no effort to gridify these older (until recently poorer?) neighborhoods, unlike the extensive planning of much of Manhattan. What makes matters worse is that much of the oldest parts of the city city was designed BY COWS, that is they put streets where cow paths were and they certainly didn't wander with any regard to efficiency (or even in a straight line). Add to that the, uh somewhat ethically challenged aggressive drivers there, and you have craziness (then again the time I had a baseball bat waved at me from another car might have been just another racist attack. I used to attend some trials in Boston of racially motivated attacks in the 80s and I saw some pretty ugly things).

As regards to the cow paths: I used to have a.nightmare where I would be driving on progressively narrower one way streets. They would force me to make a left, then a right, etc. until finally I would end up in a vast (parking?) area where there would be no outlet, just thousands of cars honking in desperation to get out.

An indication of the driving style in Boston/Massachusetts, is that, when the light changes, the driver in the oncoming left turn lane makes a quick left BEFORE the traffic gets going. I once saw a spectacular crash when a speeding (out of state?) motorist came flying through the intersection right when the light changed and slammed into the left turning Bostonian.

As I said, it was where I learned to drive and the experience served me well in an equally difficult (but in very different ways) next assignment: Seoul Korea. For true terror, the ride in the city busses during the late 80s, driven by hyper-competitive Koreans (not just bus drivers?) was, and has been, unmatched in my life.

As someone who's been to some of this planet's REALLY congested cities (New Delhi, Bangkok) it's obvious that New York City DOES NOT have "some of the most dangerous, congested, and poorly managed streets in the world", not even remotely close. I used to drive in Seoul at a time when the number of daily traffic deaths in the city were shown on a digital sign board on a major bridge; due to the insane level of drinking and driving then it was in the triple digits. As someone who's spent a LOT of time in traffic in Bangkok, (which is not even the worst in S.E. Asia that would be Jakarta) I can tell you that hours to go less than an a mile in rush hour is common. In India..., well that's another world entirely. I mean c'mon at least New York City has many working traffic lights (I remember when Phnom Penh had ONE) and we aren't even considering the urban disasters that I've heard of in Africa.

In fact, the article it links to doesn't even make that claim, it says "The New York City area officially has the worst traffic in the country, according to the latest survey for Texas A&M’s Transportation Institute.".

As an American, speaking to (presumably) another American, don't assume the biggest or best or baddest or worst in America is it for the world. (Like Los Angeles does not have the largest number of Koreans outside of Seoul or stuff like that).

So for me the true test of a self driving car will be when it can even find the courage to MOVE in the swarm of humanity riding motorbikes sprinkled with cars (driven by people with fake licenses) that is Ho Chi Minh City (the city formerly known as Saigon). Many foreigners who come here, when needing to cross the street are paralyzed with fear unable to step off the curb (they don't know that even the sidewalk won't save them from motorbikes who often drive on it). Some pretty famous people visiting Vietnam have died/been seriously injured trying to cross the street (like the MIT professor Seymour Paypert), The key is to swallow hard and, in a tiny break in the traffic, just step off the curb moving resolutely forward WITHOUT regard to oncoming motorbike traffic (avoid cars like you normally do). I've actually tried this with my eyes closed; unless this is the afterlife, I survived.

It takes courage but the Vietnamese* have that in spades. No wonder why they won the war!

*I'm not Vietnamese but I do have a VN gf :)

If (just) the top 30cm of material (ice primarily?) is exposed and sterilized then it seems that it would be easy to create our own impact crater that would expose fresh material. Just have the rocket stage that brings the probe to Enceladus hit the landing zone a little before it arrives; a few thousand kg of material traveling at several km/sec. would make a nice big crater.

Such a strategy was used for LCROSS, the lunar probe that had its upper stage (Centaur) impact shortly before the probe in order to kick up (and vaporize) a lot of lunar material. It was successful, so much so that it proved the existence of water (ice) on the moon thus leading to the current rush of missions to explore the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar South Pole.

Of course the lander would need to get into the newly created crater quickly but that would also be true of looking for (fresh) landslides or meteoric impacts. The success of the Perseverance rover landing on Mars, where the lander located in real time a suitable landing place, indicates that an autonomous probe could be tasked to land at the crater secure in the knowledge that it would find a safe place to land there.

Still, wouldn't the easiest thing be to have the lander land near one of the geysers which would presumably be bringing up fresh material constantly? Or even just having a probe coast through the plume in a low slow flyby? Enceladus is TINY which means that you should be able to orbit it really closely and really slowly, it is much smaller than for example the asteroid Ceres which NASA very slowly orbited with a probe.

I can't be the only person who took one look at the headline and thought of the movie "Snowpiercer"

Of course they don't make any mention of the dystopian social structure in the train or the (nuclear powered?) engine that gives it the ability to endlessly circle the earth but I'm sure that'll come next. (Actually, in the movie is the train much longer? A hundred or a thousand cars?)

Anyway, for some reason I associated this with the proposal by the murderer's I mean crown prince of Saudi Arabia's proposal to build a hundreds of km long (train line?) linear city in the desert. Maybe he could hang out with his fellow murderer I mean buddy Putin and go back and forth on this ridiculous train. If they could pick up a certain genocidal scale mass murderer from North Korea as well as one of their orange haired admirers from North America (he mentioned many times how much he envied the power these guys had) well the more the merrier when it derails.

You could call it "Dunepiercer"

The evolutionary biologist in me says you should consider one warning. Although the article is making a case for why drinking has been good for human society/civilization (getting people and groups together to bond), it “may” come at the cost of our individual welfare. So don't go out and get hammered just yet!

Evolution can work at shorter time scales than most people realize, just a few generations is enough to change the genetic characteristics of a population. The problem is that evolution doesn’t work on the scale of the individual, it works on the population as a whole (the body of interbreeding individuals) so while the social benefits of alcohol may be helping these alcohol loving genes spread by making the group larger and more dominant, the individuals may each be leading worse individual lives*. So if you get drunk often and (because of it?) have 10 kids, while your own life may be shorter and more brutish you’ll be considered an evolutionary success because you’ve reproduced (a lot).

I put “may” in quotes because getting people to bond on an individual level might be worth the (many) bad attributes alcohol has; who knows, getting your neighbor to drunkenly bond with you might be very useful when it comes time to fight the barbarians. However at a time when success is measured not so much by the number of people you can get to join your posse but rather by the outcome of a standardized test, maybe it isn’t so useful. If our rules and law (as opposed to trust) based civilization lasts for a few centuries and people who are more “successful” reproduce more (a very debatable assumption) perhaps the incidence of alcohol loving genes will go down.

Anyway, it’s obvious that I’m writing a lot because I just had a lot of that OTHER drink, COFFEE!!! :)

*this disjunct between social and individual welfare was explored in the book “Sapiens”. The author claims that agriculture, while making societies that practiced it much richer and more powerful, actually led to worse individual and “unnatural” (compared to their hunter-gather origins) lives.
Instead of spending a few hours a day hunting and gathering using the senses and abilities evolution honed in them, the farmers spent their days in backbreaking monotonous labor because it allowed for the massive production of food which enabled armies to be raised that could wipe out the hunter gatherers for their land**. Things didn’t get much better in the industrial revolution, now the former farmers slaved away in polluted factories with preserved food shipped in from the far away countryside. But it allowed for the rise of huge mechanized armies which allowed them to take land from the other farmers.

**and evolution, the author says, maybe didn’t need to be so stringent on these poor folk who were just blindly working the fields, they could be “less fit” (as long as they consumed less resources or reproduced more)***. So our hunter gatherer ancestors were possibly smarter and tougher than us (actually comparisons of brain size measured from skull measurements indicate this is true).

***But I actually think it was because the domestication of dogs made their lives easier :)