We can and should do both. In another 20 years we are still going to be fighting climate change. Nuclear power can help. It has unique advantages, like every power source. It should be part of the plan in some capacity.
QHC
joined 2 years ago
Protests against nuclear power have certainly helped prevent many counties, US included, from investing in new reactors over the last 30+ years.
Fun fact: I first found him by reading Outland, which I was surprised to find out takes place almost exclusively in my home town. I wish he'd come back and write more in that series, it was a pretty fun concept.
Edit: Posting this got me curious and it turns out he published a sequel called Earthside earlier this year!
The advantage to any space-based mining is not to directly benefit industry on Earth, but to help real manufacturing and other industrial scale operations in space. Doing that could lead to massive benefits for ground-based society, especially if we can automate so scaling to use resources beyond the Earth-Moon system became practical.
I am reading Daniel Suarez's Critical Mass right now, which is about a near-future mass industry getting bootstrapped on the moon after returning a bunch of raw materials from mining a nearby asteroid. Fun to see that reflected in actual news as I am reading fiction about the same thing!
(Sidenote: most of the tech is very realistic, but be aware the author has bought into blockchain hype, and you will be forced to read about how awesome DAOs are. But hey, maybe tech bros won't be allowed into space to ruin everything? not trying to be a total hater.)
The wiki summary of The American Astronaut is absolutely bonkers. Then realizing that it was released on DVD post-2000 and not pre-1975 is even more crazy!
I don't like this idea at all. QR codes are just a different way of encoding a URL, so as soon as someone stops paying the hosting bill that extended credits document is gone. Credits are in the movie itself so they can't be erased or forgotten. I highly doubt a web server for a movie, even an Oscar winner, is going to be online in 20-30 years from now.
I was surprisingly disappointed with Glover's performance as Lando in Solo. It felt like an impression of Billy Dee Williams more than an earnest take on the character. Donald certainly has the raw charisma that Billy Dee had, which is really all the character was ever about since we knew nothing about his backstory or personal motivations. So, not sure what was missing, but it felt out of place when I watched the movie.
As with any performance it's hard to know how much is due to the actor and how much from direction/editing, so I'm sure he can do the role justice. Assuming there's a good script and everyone else is doing a good job, of course!
Is it a cultural difference, or is it a combination of China being a more restricted market and the first wave of smart phone apps being aimed primarily at the English-speaking world? I am sure some of the apps that Westerners use were not available in China, either because they weren't allowed (e.g. financial services) or were not aimed at that market (e.g. Twitter), at least not initially.
Reminds me of how in high school, my different friend groups used different IM clients, but it was just a fluke of which gained mass appeal first in each community.
The Fermi Paradox is a thought experiment, it's not a physical law of the universe. There are big, essentially made-up assumptions that have to be plugged into the formula to end up with the answer of "there's probably lots of aliens out there". I think we probably both agree on those assumptions being reasonable, but they are not proven. For these reasons, I simply do not agree that it's relevant at all in this discussion.
Keep in mind that we're not talking about the existence of an alien civilization, or even specifically that aliens have visited Earth in modern times. Rather, the big question is about whether aliens are visiting Earth and some humans know about it, but are keeping it a secret. That is the core of what people like Grusch are claiming. To prove this we need both evidence of alien life existing (already a huge claim, one of the biggest questions science has yet to tackle) and evidence of a human conspiracy.
Theoretically this must be happening in other countries, too, right? If not, that means there's only been very limited incidents and not the hundreds to thousands of incidents over decades that UFO apologists claim. Except all of this is also tied into the UAP sightings which we now know are pretty widespread... looking at the full picture, things start to collapse under their own logic.
As a general space nerd you might benefit from entertaining the idea these accounts have veracity without accepting them as true.
Why should I spend any of my time or energy on an unproven claim? Should I also entertain the idea that an invisible pink teapot is orbiting earth until it's proven false? What if there is someone with "credibility" claiming they have (classified) photos of the teapot, is it worth considering then?
Nuclear power can do things solar, wind and other renewables cannot.
Not being fully sustainable from a capitalist perspective is not the only variable that matters. France and Germany have in some cases replaced old nuclear reactors with fossil fuels, which themselves have received massive subsidies by the entire planet. How is that helping?