GreyEyedGhost

Mini splits come in air source systems, and can be quite efficient.

Marriage is by definition not consequence-free. It has many obligations. It's also great if you at least don't mind those obligations.

Nor should they. Lossless image manipulation doesn't remove data. Fortunately, a dumb pedophile was caught due to his lack of security awareness.

If you unsub and suddenly get emails from a new address from the same organization, that is absolutely spam.

Me: "Bob, I don't want to hear from your company anymore."

Bob: "Okay, you won't hear from me anymore."

Jeff, Bob's coworker: "Hey, we have some great stuff we'd like to tell you about!"

Me: "Fuck off, Jeff, and that goes for all of your and Bob's coworkers, as well."

Cancer treatments, longevity treatments, regrowing teeth, every fucking mouse trial that has been talked about for the last 20 years, CRISPR saving the world.

And then you hear about immune therapy cancer treatments, using CRISPR and our extensive knowledge of cancer from decades of research. Or our better diagnostics for cancer leading to better cancer treatment outcomes due to early detection. Or regrowing teeth! (In certain circumstances.) Or, yes, new solar panels with 34% efficiency...for 3 months, at which time they're only slightly better than existing panels. Or two new ways to make blue pigment in the last two DECADES.

Science is hard, and all of it is standing on the shoulders of giants. And when getting money to do that research, which is another way of saying "trying things you think might work in the hopes of something new", relies on convincing people that this one idea could be the next big thing, hype is built into the system. So, again, if you don't want hype, look at new products. If you want to hear about what researchers are working on, don't expect that everything is going to come to fruition. Even the failed ideas help build the foundation that future researchers will be working from.

In the last 30 years, batteries have gotten about 10 times more powerful at a tenth the size for about 1% of the cost. Every advance that got us to this point was just "stuck in the lab" prior to its release. And if you don't think incremental change can be significant, after hearing those numbers I provided above, perhaps you should read about compound interest.

Also, if you don't want to be let down by news of developments at the lab stage, which certainly don't always become viable, why are you reading posts in a technology community? That seems self-destructive.

First, there have always been people who have thought, "I'm fine with the chance of dying to do this thing." Free climbers, for instance. If the odds of survival are zero, and your personal effort isn't going to change it, that number goes down by a lot.

Second, unless we find a FTL solution, surviving in space indefinitely is the first step in interstellar travel, because 3000 years is functionally equivalent to indefinitely. If you're response to that is sleeper ships, you only survive if the ship survives, and we're back to the same point. The reason this is important is because if the planet at the destination isn't required for your survival, you have a lot more flexibility for how you colonize that planet, which vastly improves the odds of success.

As for the Fermi paradox, it doesn't require that everyone wants to colonize a different star, build a Dyson shell, or whatever, it requires that everyone who doesn't want to do that be willing to do whatever it takes to stop anyone else from doing it (and can make it count). It's a slightly different proposition, and one that I think is less likely than other solutions.

A generation ship and a sleeper ship are two different things (that we can't yet do). In one, you live on a ship so your kids can go to a new place. In the other, you don't really live on a ship so you can go to a new place.

Compare, say, convictions by race to population by race. When 3% of the population is black and 10%of the convictions are black people, there's an odd disparity. Now, a number of things could be happening there. Maybe black people are committing 3 times more crime than the population average. Maybe cops are charging black people more for a given crime than other races. Maybe black people are disadvantaged in some other way that's causing more crime than the average. The chart doesn't really say, and I'm not interested in doing a deep sociopolitical dive to have an idea why.

There are certainly issues with cultural beliefs causing crime which really can't be ignored. Honor killings, where, for instance, a woman is killed because getting raped brings dishonor to the family and killing her somehow restores it, will increase crime rates on a purely cultural basis. But this chart isn't going to show that, either. My Caribbean friend and my Nigerian friend have very different opinions on certain subjects, because culture doesn't necessarily follow skin color.

I can't be bothered because laymen don't generally know the difference, and it's the least important detail about this conversation. Granted, unimportant details seem to be your forte.

Fossil fuels do not store "power" at all.

Now, if you're quibbling about the term power vs. energy, I can't really be bothered with it. If you aren't, what exactly do you think is the reason we use gasoline in vehicles than because it's a highly portable source of energy?

As I mentioned in my other response, our battery capacity and longevity has increased by a factor of 10 in the last 30 years. Charging capacity has increased significantly, as well. And the only reason we don't have more powerful chargers is because we haven't needed them. It will certainly require a different configuration to charge twice as fast, probably with local power storage to reduce the burden on the electrical grid, but the only technical challenge is the power draw, and there are a number of ways to avoid that.