Rockets are really cool. They are our one major way of getting off this planet and even without humans involved are the way we send things to space so we can understand the universe around us. You shouldn't have to like any of the people involved or can even actively dislike them for other reasons, and still get that.

Only one commencement speech about AI is going to get applause: https://www.smbc-comics.com/co... .

oh I guess I really hadn't thought about heating needs. The batteries generate heat when being charged or discharged so I was just assuming they never really would need external heating.

I live in Iowa, and I've heard some pretty brutal accounts of bad EV performance when it gets really cold here. All rechargeable batteries perform poorly in the cold though, I remember NiCD batteries being absolutely terrible in the cold.

You are correct to recognize that cell phones don't work well for a bunch of reasons as the cause. But your causes suffer some of the same problems. In particular, fertility rates are going down throughout the world, and have been since the 1970s, while almost everything you've listed is US specific in the last 30 years.

incorporate advanced refrigerant-based and liquid cooling circuits

That's nothing new, AFAIK, all EVs already do this.

75kW is a lot of heat. Think about the heat from a 100w light bulb (99% of which is heat) Now stack 750 of them and feel the sun!

Also, this car isn't flying down the freeway, forcing massive amounts of air through the radiator to cool it. This one's parked, and only has the forced airflow of the radiator's fan to keep it from melting into goo.

But that 75kW is talking about the charger, which may be able to handle more than one vehicle, or larger vehicles like EV trucks and busses, so the number is likely a lot smaller for the average EV car. But still, lotta heat!

Usually rapid chargers produce quite a bit of heat in the battery, how are they managing this?

I assume the EV stays turned on and runs a cooling loop and blasts hot air out a radiator somewhere, but even that has to have its limits?

"It was hard to figure out how do you balance getting ready to go, not go, all that stuff,"

That must be pretty stressful... "hey you MIGHT be going to space in a few months, but maybe not! Plan accordingly!"

Those are some pretty radically different options there, going to space and staying on earth really aren't two separate scenarios that are easy to come up with a flexible plan that can cover both.

I recall Neil saying he wasn't able to get life insurance when he was flying the experimental planes, and so NASA had to cover him. I wonder how that works with astronauts? I can just imagine making that phone call to your insurance company.... heeeey say I'm going to be flying around the moon next month so... "thank you for letting us know, we've suspended your insurance coverage for the next two months". Gee thanks.

That phrase gets tossed around from time to time and this is why. The only reason we don't have warrantless searches and other intensely invasive government surveillance right now is it's specifically banned in the US Constitution. But of course the founding fathers knew nothing of cell phones, so this one is fair game.

Unfortunately for us, the Constitution, which the founding fathers envisioned as a "living document", one that was periodically updated to address new developments, only very rarely gets updated anymore. And all this modern tech that WOULD be in the constitution (like personal electronic devices, online privacy, etc) if they'd have known about it when it was written isn't, so it all just gets trampled on.

The concept of the Constitution as a "living document" is basically dead, and that's unfortunate for all of us. What we really need right now is a "Technology Bill of Rights". That would breathe some life into this important document, and bring us closer to what the founding fathers envisioned a free people to be protected by.

You mean countries who had escaped Russia's grasp asked to join NATO so they wouldn't get invaded by Russia. Fear of Russia made the Baltics ask to join NATO. And of course, Russia then invaded Ukraine, a country not in NATO, showing the Baltics were right to be worried. On top of that, to invade Ukraine and then continue its car with Ukraine, Russia had to remove troops along the borders with NATO countries, showing that the Russian government, for all its claims otherwise, understands that NATO is not a threat to Russia except in so far as it stands in the way of the Russia government's imperialist ambitions.

This is a 30 year old module. It was originally made for MIR and has now been in space for 25 years. Even good engineering is in space is going to start having leaks at that point. Space is really hard.

Do you mean fusion power? If so, it is worth recognizing that we've made major progress on fusion power with the average predicted time to fusion power going down over time. For example, the triple product, which is an important measure of how effective a fusion system is, has been growing since the 1950s. with a brief pause slowed down in the early 2000s when almost all fusion research money went into ITER and is now increasing again https://www.fusionenergybase.c... . Additionally, usion research has been drastically underfunded compared to what predictions of fusion being soon would have assumed https://x.com/ben_j_todd/statu... . .But even given that, the predictions by experts of when we're going to have fusion power gone down over time https://link.springer.com/arti... at about 1 year every 3 to 5 years. To some extent, the question for fusion is not will we develop it, but given the timeline, will it ever be cost competitive in practice against very cheap wind and solar whose prices are dropping rapidly.

The state of quantum computing is pretty similar. There's ongoing progress in a bunch of ways. There's been not just improvement on the physical end, but there's been improvement on the algorithmic end on how quantum error correcting codes and other needed algorithms would function, reducing the quality of qubits and number of qubits needed for applications. See for example https://www.quantamagazine.org/thirty-years-later-a-speed-boost-for-quantum-factoring-20231017/. Microsoft's 2029 claim is likely overly optimistic, but it is a mistake to think we're never going to have these systems.

As I stated though, I fully expect that when the GOP digs themselves out of Trumpism, they will eventually deploy the "No True Scotsman" defense to claim that their cult leader was not a "true conservative" all along. But when they move the goalposts that far, will they be required to look at what they have so willingly mischaracterized in the past on the other side?

(that 16 is 16 of my NiMH AA devices, part of the 20 "nicd/nimh cells")

According to my notes, I have here:

9v: 13
AA: 13
AAA: 17
AAAA: 1
C: 8
D: 2
coin: about 30
SLA/FLA: 5
LIFE: 4
lipo/nimh pouch and pack: 25
lipo cell: 9
nicd/nimh cells: 20
sealed plug-in charged: 16
sealed usb-charged: 27
uncommon disposable: 3

Those are not battery cells, those are devices. So for example, 16 of my AA devices use six AAs. (I have a crap-ton of NiMH AA, well over 100) and all of my C devices use at least three cells. So, sadly for me, there's a huge amount to keep an eye on. I realize I'm somewhat of an edge-case here, but that also makes me a good "how bad can it really get?" case study.