Next Big Future

Amazingly enough, yes: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/07/2020-fatalities-for-us-roofers-i…

Helion has been "pitching" for a long time now. Which is fine! But its not really worth believing their estimates until they have something. Their schedule, like all fusion schedules before them, is definitely not working as advertised. From 2014: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2014/08/nextbigfuture-interviewed-helion… > The breakeven machine will need about $35 million in funding (2015-2016) and the target is to develop it in 2016. > If all proceeds on schedule then a Helion Energy machine that that proves commercial energy gain would be a 50 Megawatt system built in 2019. $200 million will be needed for the commercial pilot plant. The plan would be to start building commercial systems by 2022.

I'm glad you asked :) It's a totally silly idea to built a big ass slingshot that throws things as high as possible. I figure calling it an "Orbital Slingshot" makes it at least as viable and investment worthy as some of the other efforts [1] and [2] forex. If I can get my daughter to do some artwork I might fire up a web page for it finally. [1] https://www.space.com/23015-slingatron-reusable-launch-system.html [2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/02/spinlaunch-is-using-large-centri…

For what it's worth, Asian-Americans in New Jersey (and several other wealthy states) have a higher life expectancy than Japanese people in Japan. Source: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/08/asian-americans-men-in-new-jerse…

The power density isn't the only variable that matters. The difference doesn't matter if the cost to build a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor is much lower, especially in terms of safety and size. MSR's don't need enormous containment vessels, they also reprocess fuel. Here's some links showing power densities inline with PWRs, or greater: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/molten-salt-reactor-about-50-tim… "Extrapolating from other liquid-to-liquid heat exchangers, roughly 150 MW/m3 is a practical upper limit to the power density of a primary-to-intermediate salt heat exchanger. For comparison, pressurized-water reactor core power density is ~110 MW/m3." https://info.ornl.gov/sites/publications/files/Pub29596.pdf

The US has about 8 seconds worth of battery storage. By comparison, to use renewables for 80% of our electricity we would need 12 hours of energy storage. For 100%, 3 weeks of storage [1]. 1 hour of energy storage in the US is 500 GWh. This amounts to more than the sum total of global lithium iron battery production (currently about 300 GWh) [2]. 1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-perc… 2. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/02/world-battery-production.html

> because it most likely is "Ark estimates that Deep Learning has created $1 trillion in market value so far. " -- we might be headed towards a warm winter (from https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/01/ark-invests-big-five-technologie…

> Nuclear power plants built in the 1970’s used 40 metric tons of steel, and 190 cubic meters of concrete, for each megawatt of average capacity. > Modern wind energy systems, with good wind conditions, take 460 metric tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2007/07/constructing-lot-of-nuclear-powe… First source I found. Wind turbine lifetimes are 20 to 25 years at the best. I agree for solar panels, they don't need lots of concrete and only loose efficiency over time. But you would need lots of them + a complete power storage system behind. So the cost and material used to have a similar power output is still order of magnitude higher.

Sure, maybe that happens. Only an irrational culture would squander an obviously great energy source. But you cannot dispute the massive resources, and square footage it requires to accomplish that future of massive wind farms, every building with solar panels installed, and huge battery warehouses littered throughout the nation... especially when compared to a handful of modern Nuclear Reactor Plants. More people die installing Solar Roof Panels than from all the Nuclear energy production combined [1][2][3] [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-so… [2] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bullet… [3] https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/05/green-deaths-the-forgotten-dang…

A significant part (literal billions of dollars) of fiat used to buy bitcoins went to miners direct electricity expenses, and those extreme amounts of resources were permanently spent, possibly wasted. It's not a zero-sum game, as sustaining the current system costs a lot. A quick, rough calculation - if ~30 TWh were spent on mining Bitcoin, and the marginal rate of death for electricity generation is at least 100 per TWh (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-… or https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/06/update-of-death-per-terawatt-hou… this means that we have sacrificed the lives of at least 3000 people to make this happen. Are the benefits worth this cost?

You’re doing a lot of hand waving: “One hundred small improvements in a day” That’s a lot of work in an 8-10 hour day... “if it's green code,..” My point is that you don’t start by looking for 0.09% improvements when you’re profiling your code. As for climate change, we are looking for cleaner energy options. The world’s energy use is going to increase greatly as billions more come out of poverty. China, for example, is going to increase nuclear energy to be almost on par with the US over the next decade: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/09/china-will-more-than-double-nucl…

That energy accident table could really use a row for utility solar. edit: No, it's not out of wack, it's just that one uses trillion kilowatt hours and one uses terawatt hours. Oops. It's also hugely out of wack with this article: http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.h… Do we trust that article and it's many sources or the basically unsourced Forbes article Wikipedia relies on (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-… ) It doesn't matter a great deal for the comparison, both articles point to many less deaths from nuclear.

The reverse is also true. The U.S recently prevented Intel from selling $1 billion worth of chips to China [1], so China is getting to work developing their own supercomputing chips on their own tech. [1].http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/05/us-supercomputer-chip-ban-delayed.htm…

Here is a good summary of the stats from various sources. Death rate per terawatt/hr is 0.04 for Nuclear and 0.44 for Rooftop Solar. Basically Rooftop solar is a full order of magnitude more dangerous. Coal is WAY more nasty at a world average of around 100 deaths per terawatt/hr if you consider heating/cooking/electricity or 60 for just electricity. Those numbers for China are 170 & 90 respectively. If you include the worst hydro accident, Hydro is 1.4 deaths per terawatt/hr, or 0.10 if that is excluded. Nuclear is the best game in town, even though the accidents are well publicized and the marketing for alternatives have done a really good job of making us scared of the nasty radioactivity, nuclear has the best safety culture and safety record. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

If a 'artificial leaf -> fuel cell -> power' is less efficient than 'photovoltaic cell -> battery -> power' and the cost is comparable, I don't see how your point is valid. Yes, we'll need a lot of energy, but note that that figure is for the whole world. I think it's doable. Hell, it's the best alternative so 'doability' doesn't really matter, but I guess we'll see how close we'll get (with nuclear+solar). Note that china alone has 200 nuclear plants in project right now [1]. [1] http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/china-could-build-200-nuclear-reactor…

Those technologies all have unknown unknowns. If we generate power some people are going to get hurt no matter which technology you pick. If we don't generate power some people are going to get hurt because we don't have access to the power necessary extend their lives. Nuclear, hydroelectricity and wind have pretty much the best deaths per MWH, solar happens to be worse than nuclear. http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources…

To get some sense of the numbers: labor currently takes around 65% of gdp[1]. Owners of the automation will take some of that gain ,so at best we'll see 50% reduction in prices. According to one calculation, a $10K per person over 21 is a possible basic income proposal[2]. So for family , after adding the 50% deflation, each family will receive $40K in today's dollars. $40K is close to the median family income in 2012($53K). And we still haven't factored non-automation based innovation. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_share [2]http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/11/a-basic-income-of-about-10000-per-us.…

It's just a visualisation of http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html figures from a couple of days ago, which I found highly dubious. For example where are all the biomass deaths from? Why no figures for non-rooftop solar? What does this "Hydroelectric power was found to to have a fatality rate of 0.10 per TWh (883 fatalities for every TW·yr) in the period 1969–1996" mean? How does spinning a turbine from dammed water cause death? Ah ... further down the page "... Paul Gipe estimated ..." - so someones estimates without proper working or sources for death rates and such ... I would love to see a well worked properly sourced analysis along these lines however.

BMW has a system in their top-end saloons that will safely pull your car over to the side of the road without crashing if the driver is suddenly incapacitated (e.g. a heart attack). These system are great and I hope we can overcome the social barriers eventually. Car accidents are still the #1 cause of preventable death worldwide. EDIT: Here's another great system expected to start trials in 2011: http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/11/road-trains-and-modular-vehicles.html If you have a vehicle fitted with this system you'll be able to join 'road trains' where the front vehicle is driven by a professional driver (e.g. truck or bus driver) and the rest of the cars follow behind it - driven automatically.

> A human mission to Mars might need 2 to 4 megawatts of power That’s 15x to 30x more than the ISS’s solar panels produce at their peak [1]. It’s 100x to 200x more power than the most-powerful reactors we plan to put in space before 2030 [2]. And that’s coming out of the nozzles—you have to put even more in. This reminds me of Zubrin’s takedown of the VASIMIR hoax: “electrical propulsion…is limited by electrical power, which comes at a premium in space” [3]. Electric is great for deep space. Until we have big power plants in space, it’s a distraction for manned spaceflight. [1] https://www.dsneg.com/info/a-comparison-between-the-photovoltaic-power… [2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2026/04/four-times-the-ion-drive-thrust-… [3] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=myYs4DCCZts&pp=ygULVmFzaW1yIGhvYXg%3…

I think the answer is that they are, because there aren't that many infrastructure deaths. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK448087/ says that in the US, where the statistics are best, "electrical injuries cause approximately 1000 deaths annually. Of these, around 400 result from high-voltage electrical injuries, while lightning accounts for 50 to 300 deaths." That's 400 deaths per year from high-voltage transmission lines and substations, and from other high-voltage sources such as CRT televisions being repaired or ion-implantation voltage sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States says the USA's utility-scale electricity generation was 4230.723 TWh in 02022. So that's ballpark 100 nanodeaths per megawatt hour from transmission wires and the like. Or 0.1 deaths per terawatt hour. By contrast, https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-so… claims that rooftop solar claimed 0.44 deaths per terawatt hour at the time; possibly that has improved since then, but I doubt that it has changed that much. Brian Wang returned to the question in 02021 in https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/07/2020-fatalities-for-us-roofers-i… and estimated almost 1 death per terawatt hour. So it seems clear that the infrastructural deaths are much lower than the deaths from falling off roofs.

> Perhaps space travel isn't easy or fast at all Except we have excellent knowledge about lower bounds on how easy and fast space travel can be. And its plenty fast enough to explore the entire galaxy on geological timescales. Voyager 1 is traveling at 17 km/s which would take it 1 light year every 17,700 years. Given that the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, that means that Voyager 1 could travel across the galaxy in 1.7 billion years. A spaceship built for that purpose would take vastly less time. Voyager weighed less than 800 kg. Using the [rocket equation](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/ideal-rocket-equation) and a realistic exhaust velocity for methane/oxygen of 3280 m/s, you can see that you could accelerate a voyager 1 sized craft to 3000 m/s with about 1200 kg of fuel, which is less than $1 of fuel, no joke (https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/02/spacex-reusable-rocket-costs-ver… Of course it takes a lot of money to just get that fuel into orbit: $1500/kg with a falcon heavy. But that means you could send a voyager-1-sized craft to space with the fuel it needs to achieve 3000 km/s for a mere $3 million (not including the cost of the craft itself). And harvesting methane and oxygen on smaller planets would bring down that cost by a lot. At that speed, the craft could cross the entire galaxy in 9.6 million years. A blink of an eye on geological timescales. And if we really cared enough to spend more than a couple million dollars on…

People just don't know Musk. Falcon Heavy was delayed for 8 years. It took 8 years longer. He still got it to work. With all 3 rockets landing simultaneously at the same time. SpaceX also beat Boeing with a smaller budget (NASA gave more to Boeing) in sending astronauts to the ISS. Boeing still is not able to get a successful test launch 2 years after SpaceX got the first astronauts to ISS from US domestic soil. Then there's Tesla, where the Model Y, despite being double the price of a Corolla, outsold the Corolla - https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/10/tesla-model-y-passing-toyota-cor… If you can stumble into so many achievements by luck. Or just by oh, lean on a few Shotwells and engineers.... then why are companies like Meta and Snap etc in the trash bin? Why is Boeing still stuck on the ground? Why after a half a decade of Tesla killers than nobody is getting killed but legacy automakers (all declining revenue and deliveries).

If anyone is about to watch this video, I want to warn you before you do that saying this guy "has an agenda" is like saying that a flat earther "has an agenda" in that they will absolutely be giving you "facts" and whenever the "facts" disagree with reality they will give you "facts" that are designed to make you abandon reality. If I were to state my actual opinion on him on Hacker News, I would be downvoted. If I were to try and express how I feel about someone else finding him at all reasonable, I would be downvoted. So in the kindest possible way let me direct your attention to the kind of techniques he uses. At 7:16 in that video he posts a screen capture of an article headline. It is a screen capture? Honest right? Great data. Not so fast. The screengrab was photoshopped. He edited out part of the title. In particular, he edited out the price for SpaceX to launch a satellite to orbit. Why, you might wonder, would he do something like that? Well... he was lying about the price just before that, so it would be kind of inconvenient to let people see the truth, wouldn't it? Here is the article whose title he photoshopped: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satellites-cost-… This isn't an uncommon thing for this liar. He regularly and willfully does things like this all throughout the video. You should be taking every number he gives with an enormous amount of salt. Dump the entire…

Tesla doesn't have anything to do with Starship launch prices. Let's look at costs to SpaceX for launches, since those are the most relevant numbers: Reused Falcon 9 launch: $15M[1] in the best case, but let's double it just to ballpark the average, so $30M. Falcon 9 can loft around 50 satellites per launch. 30M/50 = $600k/satellite. Starship: Aspirational goal of $2M cost to launch. Let's just round that up to $10M for whatever might be more expensive than expected. Starship has been predicted to be able to launch around 400 Starlink satellites at a time, the last figure I saw was that Starship launches would carry "100 plus" Starlinks[2]. $10M/100 = $100k/satellite. This is assuming Starship is launching v2.0 satellites though, rather than the current v1.5, which are way heavier (1 metric ton vs ~290kg)[3]. 1: https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-elon-musk-falcon-9-economics 2: https://spacenews.com/ksc-to-study-potential-new-starship-launch-pad/ 3: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/09/version-2-starlink-with-lasers-a…

Boeing's market cap is $132 billion, so it's not obviously crazy. They're already the world's cheapest launch provider by a significant margin, and currently the only human-rated private launch company. They've started launching the second-generation Starlink sats, which transfer data directly between each other by laser. If they get approval for the full network, they'll have total bandwidth about equal to the entire internet today.[1] It won't be competitive in cities but it'll be great in lower-density areas, exactly where cable/fiber are expensive. That alone is worth a lot of money. If Starship with anything close to the turnaround they're claiming, they'll multiply the world's launch capacity by several orders of magnitude, drop launch costs by a couple orders of magnitude, and open up all sorts of applications in space that aren't affordable today. There's risk of failure but altogether I'd say all that's worth as much as Boeing. If these things succeed, they'll be worth a lot more. [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/09/version-2-starlink-with-lasers-a…

if 20 milliseverts per year is the correct level for evacuation then why do we not evacuate Kerela in India, Ramsdar in Iran. Kerela has radiation levels 3 times higher than 20 milliseverts per year. Denver has higher background radiation than most places in the US. Higher altitude and higher radon levels. They are not quite to 20 milliseverts per year unless they have more radon in their house which some do. Flight crews get 3.1 milliseverts per year. About 50 days worth of Fukushima exposure. Air pollution causes 7 million deaths per year. 4 million from outdoor air pollution. The hospitalization rate increases on the bad air days. The effect is immediate for many elderly and asthmatics. Air pollution levels in some cities in India, China and other parts of Asia is like forcing everyone (including babies and the elderly or asthmatics) to smoke 6+ cigarettes a day. Being barely able to breath is very unpleasant and scary. 12,000 people died over 2 weeks in 1952 during the London Fog air pollution event. Atmospheric inversion trapped air pollution. People dropped dead with blue lips and their last few minutes to hours were spent gasping for breath. 144 people were killed in 1966. During the Aberfan disaster. Millions of tons of coal mine waste were left in piles on a mountain. A heavy rain caused the mine waste to slide down the mountain and into the town of Aberfan. It buried a school. 117 children…

Nuclear energy has the lowest death rate (deaths per TWh of any type of energy generation technique/source [1][2][3]. It is the obvious answer to the climate crisis but unfortunately the cultural and public effects are blocking the way for this solution. Unfortunately, facts do not change our minds. I believe the best approach is to show people gradually that newer generation reactors are much safer and better than older generations. Just to give an example, the technology of reactors at Chernobyl is from 1953. Newer reactor technologies are much safer and there are some types of reactors that they even use spent fuel rather than enriched fuel that all other types of reactors use. I believe Bill Gates also has invested some resources in this 'traveling wave reactors'[4]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-… [2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.… [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-change-nucle… [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower

The world bank estimates between 17-21m$/km. http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/07/10/cost-of-high… https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/04/chinas-high-speed-rail-is-one-th… So a little math - china has 22km of HSR ATM - well, that is a big number, $418 billion. If you are a private investor and your bonds paid for this, whether it can make a profit is important. Unless the government is going to bail them out (and being SOEs, everyone expects they will!), then it is important to move that debt from private to public. China's debt numbers ATM assume that much of the SOE debt is private, which is dubious at best. China Railway's $6 trillion yuan debt is 6% of China's GDP. I've ridden the Beijing-Guangzhou HSR a couple of times (my wife's hometown is on the route and it lacks an airpot), and the car we were traveling in was always very empty for much of the 8 hour trip.