That way you're still blocked by clouds. Also I'm not sure whether it's as feasible from geostationary.

The only way to make it economical is to have fully-reusable rockets. We never had those before, but it looks like we will soon.

Fossil fuels don't just emit CO2, they produce waste heat. The microwave beam would produce the same waste heat, without the CO2. The waste heat from fossil fuels is well under 1% of their greenhouse effect, so that's a pretty good deal.

If we got all our energy from solar panels, the albedo change from all those block panels would also cause the planet to absorb more energy (and of course that'd be a relatively minor effect, too).

Current designs would be redundant, with a large number of identical parts, of several types, self-assembled in orbit.

The satellite would be 22,000 miles out and incapable of sending a beam that tight. As the article mentions, the beam would be less concentrated than sunlight.

I totally support nuclear but solar power satellites would also do that. They'd be in geostationary orbit, putting them in sunlight 99.5% of the time.

Yes but almost all SPS designs are microwave. If you use laser then you get blocked by clouds. A 2GW microwave transmitter in geostationary will give a footprint of several square miles. Birds could fly through the beam without harm.

Assuming you're using a phased-array transmitter, which is the only practical method, the only way to get even that much focus is to use a reference signal from the ground target.

From LEO maybe, but from 22,000 miles out there's no such thing as a highly focused microwave beam.

It'd be replacing the waste heat from burning fossil fuels, which is a tiny percentage of the impact of their greenhouse effect.

A Falcon Heavy costs $90M for up to 141,000 lbs to LEO, for a total cost of $638/lb. And the Heavy isn't fully reusable, so the main cost is the upper stage that gets thrown away. If Starship or something similar works out, the price will drop to about $30/lb. At that price, space solar starts to make sense.

I plugged that number into the cost estimates from the book The Case for Space Solar Power, which has detailed numbers based on NASA's SPS-ALPHA project, and it came out to 4 cents/kWh including everything (manufacturing, ground station, etc), which is pretty great for clean power on demand without needing storage.

Starship is fueled by methane which can be made pretty easily from water and CO2. With a clean energy source, the whole project could be carbon neutral.

No, the reason is that there's no way to actually pass information you want, instead of just random outcomes of quantum measurements.

Any production D-T fusion reactor would breed its own tritium from lithium. Doing this effectively has been a major part of fusion research for a long time now. Generally the idea is to have a breeding blanket with lithium plus a neutron multiplier like beryllium or lead. In some designs that material doubles as the primary coolant.

No that is not how quantum entanglement works. Here's the standard example of how it works:

Electrons have a property called "spin." You can measure the spin and it will have a value of either "up" or "down."

The spin is in an indeterminate state until you measure it. Then when you measure, it will be either up or down, randomly. If two particles are entangled, then if you measure one and find that it's up, you already know that the other one is down.

But if you're that second person and haven't been tipped off by the first person, then you still just have an electron with a spin you don't know. So you'll measure it and find out that it happens to be down. Now you know the other one is up. But it's still just a random value.

Quantum entanglement does not cause particles to move around like you described.

But the person with the second coin knows nothing about it until they measure it, then it's randomly either heads or tails. That's it.

For a while, physicists put a lot of work into figuring out whether quantum entanglement would allow faster-than-light communication (which is what would allow messages into the past). They ended up with a proof that it would never work.

Basically, entanglement means you have two coins, such that if you flip one and it comes up heads, the other will come up tails. But you can't make the first coin come up the way you want, it's just random. There's no way to use it to send a message.

SpaceX Starship could well get us there. If they get it working at scale, it'll reduce launch cost to LEO to about $30/kg, and give the world thousands of times as much annual launch capacity.

That makes it feasible to build a lunar colony at reasonable cost, and makes a trip to the moon cheap enough for upper-middle-class people at least.

So the article mentions the theory isn't compatible with the Big Bang, and the preface to The Dynamic Theory mentions Eric Lerner, who wrote The Big Bang Never Happened (and btw also has a fusion project). Lerner has been in the news lately because he and a colleague wrote a paper predicting what the JWST would see, and posted it to Arxiv, which removed it. Then the JWST saw exactly what Lerner predicted.

Lerner's youtube channel has several videos on this, e.g. here. Basically, what JWST saw is normal-looking galaxies from a time long before standard cosmology predicts they would appear. Not only that, but if the universe is expanding, then the visual size of the galaxies will increase over time, so if we correct for that effect then it means these normal-looking galaxies were actually way smaller and brighter than normal, even though they otherwise look the same as modern galaxies.

So far, recent "debunkings" of Lerner by mainstream physicists that I've seen have been nothing but glib dismissals and ad hominems. Still looking for one that addresses his core points. I haven't yet watched the debate videos Lerner posted.

Transitioning to a zero-carbon economy would be a huge change in how we physically do things. I don't think there's any way to do that without some people losing their current jobs. The upside is that civilization doesn't collapse into chaos.

Might be reasonable to put some extra money towards helping out particular groups like that, though.

The most prominent idea is fee-and-dividend. Charge a fixed fee per ton of carbon, and distribute all the money to residents. Everybody gets the same amount. If you emit less carbon than average, you come out ahead.

This way everybody has an incentive to conserve what they can, but most people end up with more money in their pockets. The more important aspect is that all our industries get a massive incentive to decarbonize.

More like they led the slow crawl. We're way behind and climate change is extending its lead. We're just not falling behind quite as quickly as before.

I guess that's progress but business-as-usual but with EVs and renewables is not going to win this race.

That's about 50 months on dialysis, not counting the cost of the complications you'll get, and the kidney transplant you'll still need if you want to live longer than six or seven years, and the anti-rejection drugs you'll need after transplant. That $500K pill would be a bargain.

We're definitely not nearing the limits of computation in general, just silicon chips specifically. We went from mechanical relays to vacuum tubes to silicon chips, now we need something else for the next big leap.

Sure there's a difference. But in terms of sheer compute it's still just 3.5% annually, according to OP's article. That's not Moore's Law. Tech progress continues but Moore's Law is still dead until we get a whole new chip tech. It's not complaining to just recognize reality.

Yeah that's great, but that's just regular technological progress. Of course that will continue. That's not the same as Moore's Law, which was a doubling of performance every 18 to 24 months over a long period of time. If there had been a Moore's Law for cars, they'd get millions of miles per gallon by now.

I didn't say I bought a new computer every two years. I said people with money did. Doesn't mean I sat around being depressed about it. I was still super excited to see it all happening, and I got to experience it when we upgraded at work, in addition to the few upgrades I managed at home.

And all this is a side issue to that measly 3.5% annual improvement we have now.

But please, yes, hop off, this is getting unpleasant.

Yeah GPUs are a bright spot. But partly it's because they're massively parallel and can just keep getting bigger and more power-hungry.

Another bright spot is neural chips, which aren't so much about Moore's law as getting better at specialized machine-learning architectures.