We have 4 layers of ICBM defense. AEGIS should have a decent intercept rate. Sure you can overwhelm it, but it should shoot down a quite a few missiles. A masters degree doesn't mean you've kept your info updated, it just means at one point in your life you got a degree and at face value you're just some rando on the internet making claims without providing proof.
https://www.mwrf.com/markets/defense/article/21848658/the-3-major-phases-of-effective-missile-defense-systems

In this case I think energy weapons will provide better defense than force projection. You will be able to defend at near the speed of light within X amount of miles, but you will only be able to project massive force through vastly slower moving missiles.

So the physics does suggest eventually nukes become less important/dangerous as faster but more limited range defense becomes more viable.

Sure people will make counter-measures for energy weapons, but because the fundamental laws of the universe appears on the side of shorter ranger super fast weapons being possible, but not super fast longer range weapons being possible there is a big opening there for missile defense to outstrip missiles.

A similar thing happened to bombers. You can make them stealth and all, but ICBMs made huge armies of bombers much less practical and they never overcame that problem. SAMs also makes projecting air force a lot harder because basically missiles are a lot easier and cheaper to make than high end jets.

Another option will be stealth missiles, but the speed of electromagnetism will always work against those options and eventually probably overcome them. Just like now it's hard to launch a nuke and not have alarms go off, the problems of needing massive energy release to accelerate mass quickly will keep working against missiles vs energy weapons.

We just can't see this yet because energy weapons are immature.

We put out stats saying AEGIS has a 80% intercept rate for it's intended use cases.. aka when you are in the mid-course path and have a launcher in range.

Ppl just don't stay updated on things that never happen so we pay no attention to ICBM defense in general.

https://www.mwrf.com/markets/defense/article/21848658/the-3-major-phases-of-effective-missile-defense-systems

Mutual assured destruction was never real. Nukes don't blow up a large enough area for that to have ever worked and modern nukes are mostly fusion explosions so the radiation is actually far more limited than you imagine. Fallout is mostly not radioactive and doesn't kill many people and loses intensity very fast, almost everybody dies just from the explosion, so for mutual assured destruction you have to blanket impractically large areas with explosion and it's probably safe to say nobody ever really had that many nukes. Nuclear fallout from a power plant last much longer as we saw in Chernobyl vs Hiroshima. Radiation release also does not scale well with megatons so larger nukes are still not likely to cause mass fallout casualties. Basically the fireball just gets bigger and the radiation release is similar because it relies on fallout as the radiation itself is fairy short range and has to absorb into matter to be spread.

Even the area of the epicenter would be livable again in 1-5 years because a nuclear explosion is just a FLASH of fission and a bigger flash of Fusion. It's not like a sustained reaction that produces tons of radiation, it's mostly just a massive thermal energy release.

In Hiroshima there wasn't even a detectable raise in birth defects, people who died from radiation at those who were close enough to get exposed directly and live through the blast (not likely but possible) and those who stayed around and breathed in the worst of the fallout/ran back into the epicenter. The total long term results of all the radiation was a 10% cancer increase in the survivors of the blast, but only the survivors.

Sooo for mutual assured destruction you have to blanket the area in explosion just like conventional war, except the nuke warhead is much small/lighter for the size of explosion it creates, that's the real danger of nukes. It's just so much power release in a package you can shoot a long distance because it has super high energy density.

The US has 4 major layers of ICBM defense. Mid-course interception appears to have the highest probability at up to 80% if a mid-course shot is available.

>The most reliable defense against ballistic missile attack is the U.S.’s Aegis Ballistic Defense (Fig. 2). The Aegis RADAR is manufactured by Lockheed Martin and integrated with the broader Command and Control and weapon systems aboard Aegis Class destroyers. The Aegis system is also available in land-based systems. The Aegis system is designed to combat short- and medium-range ballistic missiles through use of RADAR tracking and interceptor launch. The Aegis system has an approximately 80% intercept success rate.

Here is a good article explaining the different phases of Boost, Mid-Course and Terminal and a quick summary on systems design for each phase.

https://www.mwrf.com/markets/defense/article/21848658/the-3-major-phases-of-effective-missile-defense-systems

I would think eventually energy weapons will almost entirely invalidate ICBMs as being all that useful because you can shoot a missile down at the speed of light, but you can never a warhead/any significant mass at the speed of light. There is a top end of the weapons speed that favors defense a lot more than force projection and eventually target should be good enough to shoot down almost anything since all non energy weapons are essentially moving in slow motion compared to electromagnetic radiation aka light.

That seems fairly expected, but you should also see that effect in movies too.

Maybe for Amazon without charging a subscription, but not for Siri and Google that have become part of the phone platform and leverage their development cost from phone profits.

Amazon should have decent options to expand into senior support and better emergency support in general. Most of these smart microphone speaker are not being used to anywhere near their potential. They have closed corporate structures instead of like at least opening an app store.

That all being said I don't see a big need for more than two major voice services unless Amazon starts making their own phones, maps, calendar and email services like google and apple. The assistants need to be integrated from phone to desktop to home to get the best uses. Right now Google wins at most of that.

Amazon also probably has an option to massively reduce over-spending on Alexa without it being doomed because after development costs it shouldn't cost a ton to keep the service up. It's not like it's a bunch of gears and levers or brains in jars, it's just some voice recognition and simple enough code/responses.

They probably were burning money on development and moonshot ideas, but that might not represent real cost to operate long term.. so I wouldn't doom it yet and there is almost no chance voice assistants will go away from Apple and Google platforms.

I think the space economy will just be a lot of what you see now. There isn't a bunch of necessary resources for Earth's development worth collecting from the vastness of space. There isn't any reason to populate inhabitable locations vs staying on Earth.

Expanding into the solar system mostly just has research value. The Space Economy is just ways to use the immediate space around Earth to benefit Earth, like satellites.

Things like researching exotic materials in space will become less and less useful as computer modeling improves, you don't need many labs in space and we aren't going to convince people to move off Earth to conditions that are way less healthy other than the few hardcore scientists who can study the preserved records of the solar system, but even there robots will scale upward to do that better because it's so hostile and so vast and humans take so many resources to send into space vs robots.

Humans will develop brain to computer interfaces and that will change how we view space exploration and future development. It's all about super high efficiency and low mass, not mega structures and giant spaceships.

We will have self assembling robots that can build anything, even a new Earth and that will happen long before we can get humans to another solar system while at the same time humans can upload their minds into machines and gain virtual immortality and super high efficiency/low mass existence. All that will happen LONG before you can travel anywhere all that interesting through space, probably in the next 100 years.

Gold Hydrogen sound silly, but the idea of converting an oil well to a hydrogen well sounds plausible. I'm not sure hydrogen will catch up fast enough to be around long, but so is the life of competing technologies.

Well, in this case the word liberal and conservative are being used wrong, because they are not political labels. The party names are the political labels open to changing definitions, not the terms conservative and liberal.

Using the word liberal to try to mean traditionalist is nothing by a disinformation attempt or sheer ignorance. Those words have real meanings beyond politics and that's why they are useful, they span time while the labels flip flop.

It's like trying to redefine the word Hydrogen to mean Uranium and then saying well that's my choice. NO ITS FUCKING NOT! The words have specific meanings in this case and can't really be used like that.

That's why we have party labels like Republican and Democratic or Tory and Labor. Those terms can change over time, the terms liberal and conservative cannot. You can just look like an idiot who doesn't understand those are not labels, but DEFINITIONS of behavior.

It's like you can't change the meaning of the word angry to mean happy and expect that to be realistic position to hold.

Liberal and conservative are supposed to mean is liberal means new ideas and conservative means traditional. That's the SINGLE binding point of meaning that makes those terms matter. That's why you have labels like Democratic and Republicans, so the labels can switch but the core ideological terms don't. You can't be a conservative liberal, you're just using the words wrong at that point because you can't be pro-tradition and pro-progress.

Like Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, but he was a liberal and Andred Jackson was a Democratic, but back when Dems were the conservatives. WHY would you switch the core words around too, that's just EVIL!

You may as well start saying North is South and South is North! The reason those terms are useful is because they are no ideological terms, they are true definitions of the ACTIONS of the party and in almost all cases it's traditionalists vs people who want change.

Soo I guess it's time to give up those terms and make new ones.

Conservative = Traditionalist (very verbose so hard to mutate)

Liberal = Progressive (again fairly verbose and hard to steal the label if you're a traditionalist/conservative/person who wants minimal change)

Those are the new terms now because Australia and other are trying to ruin the actual words at their core meaning!

Let's play AI? Sorry but you know it's just kind of sounds ridiculous as a headline.

£37 and £74/MWh is quite cheap. As cheap as coal or gas on the high end and much cheaper on the low end.

I don't see how studying Twitter is real science. you may as well go to the grocery store and study the Tabloid aisle.

It seems to me that one of the advantages of drones is that you can use them to apply non-lethal Force while not risking the human police officer as much so why is that not already more prevalent.

We should have pepper spray and pepper bomb drones and led high intensity spot lighting to your eyeball drones and maybe even taser drones before we have lethal Force drones though I am not necessarily against the idea does one of the main reasons that has police officers so lethally trigger happy is their training to protect themselves at all costs.

Does that mean that only watching 17 minutes of radicalized conspiracy theories produces the opposite?

Precision targeted watering and pesticides look like a good start to make passive gains in agricultural efficiency.

Well, it would be nice to see more admissions that how gravity and spacetime works is actually still mostly a giant unknown. Accurately prediction the motions of what you can easily see and understanding the full capabilities of something is very different. We are still stuck in a lot of science Elitism where questioning the LAWS OF PHYSICS gets you attacked and ridiculed. It also gives rise to a lot of pretty crazy ideas trying to form math and logic around such big assumptions, like UNIVERSE SIMULATION.. because how else could gravity do that? Is that really the right direction to take the question? Fundamental forces and top theories are just cheap cliff notes at this point in human existence. Don't take them so seriously you forget all the other possibilities or we all just wind up making the same mistakes.

Expect the unexpected! Our basis for all human knowledge is from an almost infinitely small sample size. It's too bad the universe doesn't have time-lapse instead of just history vision. Having to wait forever to know anything for sure is a pain in the butt!

Nuclear has a lot of negatives, meltdown and high insurance liability is one, but also it's hard to export, complex and it's highly proprietary so most nations will never use it. It has water use issues and you still have to source uranium which means somebody has mine and ship uranium. It also one of the more expensive ways to generation power.

Looking down the road 10-20 years the projected cost of solar/wind and energy storage will create a lower Levelized Cost of Energy than what nuclear investments would yield AND you will be investing in technology that can meet economics of scale requirements and be mass produced in factories and exported everywhere.

Fusion seems to be the only chance nuclear has and even then most nations don't want to rely a the 1-5 nations that can build and maintain something like that to have that much leverage over them. The simpler solution that does the job is really what we are looking for.

That seems like a silly way to do the calculation vs CO2 sequestration tech would only be built where you could get very cheap and low CO2 energy.

Generally the idea is convert to cheaper and cleaner energy AND THEN focus on CO2 removal as well, not build CO2 removal powered by a coal power plant.

As long as we can keep the price trending down direct CO2 removal has SOME potential and shouldn't be overlooked, but we may need larger scale riskier biological based CO2 sequestration boosts as well. Doing nothing is still biological sequestration into the oceans, acidification and potential major collapse of ocean food chains... so it's worth trying to push the tech forward.

CO2 removal will always be needed on Earth because CO2 levels are not naturally stable and modern humanity can't survive the natural cycles of +10 and -10 degree changes that natural life survived. CO2 might be a convenient way to control Earth's temps long term. We are clearly great at adding it to the atmosphere, it only makes sense to keep researching how to remove it.

Maybe it won't pay off for 50 years, but that's still how technology and research works, it's not all short term rewards and it's not mostly success stories, it's far more like banging out every possibility until you find the one that works.

I wonder if inhaled alcohol aerosols could be useful for fungal lung infections.

I wouldn't expect sentient AI to be much more intelligent than humans by 2050.

It'll be better at doing repetitive tasks and tasks with lots of variables but that doesn't mean it'll actually have all the qualities of human intelligence when it comes to imagination or intuition.

You're making a mistake to assume AI will be so much like human intelligence. the parts of AI that seem very human will mostly be parts that humans injected in there and the underlying intelligence may be much different because it's not evolved in same way as pretty much all other life on the planet. Likely not going to have feelings and empathy. Probably not going to have fear and it's probably not going to imagine very well, but It will be able to think with Brute Force that is kind of like a different form of imagination. An exceptionable problem solver and coupled with human imagination I think we will do well together but it's probably more of a symbiotic relationship.

Your post is very ridiculous but what you're really seeing is that humans evolved dominated by negative stimulus because all life evolved like that because memorizing what can kill you requires less brain power than memorizing what makes you live.

Means all life tends to prioritize negative stimulus and you can also see that in the form of humans generally reacting to fear more than positive news so when you take something like speculation into account you wind up in a scenario where negative speculation or fear-based speculation it is always vastly more effective than any type of positive based speculation. you also see this in all the money markets where people panic very quickly and can have major sell-offs that turn into Domino effects but that almost never happens to a positive speculation in future technology.

It's not Just a problem with technology but for anybody who's into future Tech they might see it as like bias against future Tech.

Important to remember with climate change that we don't really know how much worse it might get as systems start to fall apart and humans start to panic because again we're right back to how fear motivates people more.

Also means if a trend devolves for the standard of living is declining because of droughts and flooding have a serious social collapse kind of like Rome collapsing Into the Dark Ages.

Climate change is dangerous but in all these scenarios even like nuclear war the most dangerous part is how humans react afterward and in the relative chaos created by rapid change.

A big impact on everyone? I have no great use for more bandwidth on a tiny screen. Getting rid of more dead zones would be useful, but more bandwidth is not necessary. Maybe city people need it because of congestion, but it's way faster than any use I have by several times already. I mostly just need it to occasionally load up tiny webpages and the rest of the time I'm either driving or home so it has no great use.

It's not like the bandwidth of general internet use is really going up that much. It did for awhile as web page modernized, but modern compression has kind of stopped the need for endless bandwidth increases being anywhere near as important as a decade ago or so.

Eating synthetic meat won't lower emissions that much.

>Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

You can't get more than 14% total drop from synthetic meat or realistically even come close since it still has a carbon footprint and mass adoptions obviously won't happen to anywhere near 100% by 2030.

You're looking a few percent in global emissions drop at most, maybe enough to offset growth, maybe not, but not enough to take a big chunk out of the problem... sorry.

The greenhouse gasses mostly come from burning fuels for power plants, cars and heating. Much of the 'industrial' greenhouse gas is just factories heating stuff up in industrial furnaces, so just another form of greenhouse gas from fossil fuel energy.

Around 70-80% of all human made greenhouse emissions are just from energy in one format or another.. so that's the only places where you will see big drops from big changes.