It does, it radiates away into space. That's why the Earth, which receives over 1.3kW/m^2 in energy from the sun, has not been baked to a crisp over the billions of years it has received such energy: it just wamred up the to point that the rate of radiating energy matched the rate at which the sun adds it. Since the rate of radiation is roughly proportional to the temperature to the power 4, adding additional heat sources to the Earth (especially ones many orders of magnitude less than the power of the sun's heating, has negligible effect on the temperature.

The reason that global warming occurs is because CO2 is very good at absorbing radiation in the wavelengths that objects at the Earth's temperature want to radiate at. This traps heat from the sun by reducing the amount that is radiated until the Earth heats up enough that the new rate of emission overcomes the effect and since the sun's power is many orders of magnitude higher than any human power sources this effect is many orders of magnitude larger than direct heating. For reference the total global power generation was about 3.5 TW in 2024 averaged over the year while the sun's power hitting the earth is about 167,000 TW.

It's not risky it's insane. The only way that could possibly happen is if someone came up with a brilliant idea that turned out to be spectacularly easy realize. The problem is that the last ~70 years of fusion research has been filled with the exact polar opposite: brilliant ideas that all looked easy to realize but that all, without exception, turned out to be impossibly hard to make them work.

We'll achieve fusion in the end but expecting it to be 7 years away is insanity - I suspect it is still several decades away at best although nothing would make me happier than to be wrong.

> Why are we struggling to do now what we once achieved decades ago with far more complexity and far less technology?

"Everybody is stupid and lazy now" isn't the most parsimonious explanation.

Especially from the Gulf of Tonkin/MK Ultra era.

To add to what you said there wasn't a bright line between the Apollo Program and the ICBM program.

Though SpaceX is being funded to build a war-fighting duplicate of Starlink and a weapons-deployment copy of Starship for the Air Force.

Whether or not Armstrong walked on a moon or a set at Elgin Air Force Base wasn't important to the ICBM program, just to TV and politicians. And he refused any TV interviews for decades.

I don't know, I just asked Perplexity AI to design me a solution for a trip to Mars. It took a few back and forths, but eventually it came up with a solid solution. So I'll be sending you messages from Mars this time in 16 months. Last month I built a perpetual motion machine no cap.

This isn't hard, I don't know what everyone else's problem is. Maybe it's because they are using ChatGPT, the inferior AI. Jump into Perplexity, it will solve all your problems. I'm tired now but tomorrow I'm going to build a fusion reactor from pine needles. It's all about making the right prompt.

I can't figure out what the author wants at all. I am stupider for having read his article. His article looks like a polemic you would see in a college newspaper. For example:

ok, less hype, more results. I'm ok with that, let's set some concrete goals. What goals/results does he want? Maybe it will be an improvement over the status quo. What brilliant plan does the author have, or even mediocre idea? Nothing.

He doesn't say.

ED: Looks like it's 24(!) hives per beehome, and they charge $2k delivery ($83/hive) plus $400/mo ($400/hive/yr) for maintenance.

Clearly not something of use to amateurs, and I'm not sure whether you can make that economics work out for professionals, either. I guess it depends on how truly independent it is, vs. your local labour costs.

There is little correlation between "presence or absence of pollution" (what a general term to begin with...) and CCD. There is a strong correlation with the presence / absence of varroa. And this system treats varroa.

I've been thinking about getting into beekeeping (I first need to increase the accessibility of my ravine where they'd be), and had been thinking about a sort of high tech solution, with electric blankets, heat-exchanging baffles, a flow hive, and maybe some mass and/or noise sensors for monitoring colony health. But this is WAY more high-tech than I envisioned, and honestly I'm scared to even look up the price ;)

The best correlation between the presence and absence of CCD is varroa. CCD is probably not single cause, but if you had to pick only one, varroa is that one.

And glyphosate is probably WAY down on the list. At least pick an insecticide as your culprit.

How is this?

There's been a robot soccer in this robot form factor for decades, here's an example with commentary.

Deep mind has been doing that form factor for years now, and they look decent.

Not with far-UV (~222nm) you didn't.

Leaders aren't there out there e.g. building the rockets or doing the vast majority of the engineering. Musk doesn't get credit for that. But they do set the culture and direction for their companies. And in this regard, the "build quickly, launch quickly, fail quickly, learn quickly, and iterate quickly" culture developed for SpaceX happens to be very effective. Musk gets credit for instilling that. Another thing he should get credit for is the broad design strokes such as "focus on designs that are cheap enough that they can be mass produced, gaining you economies of scale and the ability to iterate quickly during testing, but are still capable of being reused" (this differs from the two previous predominant paradigms, either super-expensive low-volume reusables, or cheap high-volume disposables).

I don't like the guy, but absolutely, credit where it's due.

Except that Musk is allowed to show up at work or not whenever he feels like it, so he's a giant hypocrite who forces everyone else to do that which he himself is not willing to do.

I think a lot of people miss the fact that SpaceX engineers know very well that what they're doing might fail spectacularly, and that this is the cost of speed.

A random example: autogenous pressurization.

It's beneficial to have a rocket's engines pressurize the tanks themselves rather than to haul up pressurant tanks and a separate pressurant. But it's surprisingly tricky. For a methalox rocket, you ideally want hot methane injected into the methane tank, and hot oxygen into the oxygen tank. But hot oxygen is very difficult to work with in an engine, as it tends to eat your engine.

If you're still working on reliably producing hot oxygen, there is a hack available to you, but it's not pretty: just inject exhaust into the oxygen tank; after all, it's not combustible. BUT, it is water and carbon dioxide. Both can settle out as frosts or plated ices, and in the liquid, the water ice will float at the top, while the CO2 will form a snow at the bottom. Frosts / ice plating can block e.g. your RCS jets. The CO2 snow will kill your engines. You can put in filters around their intakes, but it'll clog your filters. You might try expanding the filters, and maybe that'll work for a while, but then you rotate the rocket, the snow rushes ti one side, and a bunch of engines die from clogging. You may put some big mesh plates across the whole tank to keep the snow off the bottom, but they can cause their own problems with fluid flow and still sometimes clog or let snow through during maneuvers. Etc.

So then comes the question: put Starship on hold while working on getting the engines to reliably produce hot oxygen, potentially for years, or forge ahead with a hack solution that you know has a reasonable chance of killing your rocket?

To SpaceX, the question is obvious. You cannot afford to give up years of critical flight data just to avoid some booms. The decision is immensely lopsided in favour of "put in the hack solutions and launch, while you work on the proper solutions". Because you learn SO much from every launch that can be used to evolve your design. And you also learn so much from every rocket that you build, whether you launch it or not, so you might as well launch it.

To be clear, you don't want to lose rockets due to doing stupid things. Like, for example, if it turns out that some SpaceX engineer installed the wrong COPV and caused the recent pad explosion**, basically the only thing they would learn from that is "have tighter controls on your COPV processes", which isn't at all worth the cost of the explosion. But in general, if you launch and it clears the pad, you're getting good, important data from it, it's worth it even if it blows up seconds later, and it's on to the next evolved version of the rocket in your production sequence with both production- and flight lessons learned.

** It's clear that the recent explosion was from a COPV failure, but it's unclear why. Some claimed leaks state that a COPV may have been coded to a higher pressure than it actually was during production, so when they scanned it it checked out as being the right tank, but actually was not designed to handle the needed pressures. But I'll wait for official confirmation on this. SpaceX only makes some of their COPVs, usually not the smaller ones - ones that have washed up ashore were made by Luxfer. So this could be a supplier problem, like the strut failure on a 2015 Falcon flight. But again, too early to say.