DennisP

35 ms·

691.
by DennisP 2y ago
Iterate on designs quickly in development. Build lots of the same thing in production. Smaller hardware helps for both phases.
692.
by DennisP 2y ago
We have plenty of small but commercially successful natural gas plants, so it doesn't seem to be a general principle. The only scaling law mentioned in your article is this: > a 400-MW reactor requires less than twice the quantity o
693.
by DennisP 2y ago
Since I don't see moral deficit in the means involved in either example, I don't understand the point of your question.
694.
by DennisP 2y ago
Worth mentioning here that the SpaceX Falcon is the world's most reliable rocket, with a full success rate of 99.24% out of 394 total launches, 325 successful launches of the current version, and 98.5% successful booster landings of th
695.
by DennisP 2y ago
Could you be more specific? Because as a launch rocket, it's so absurdly expensive that it will never be useful other than for low-volume national vanity projects. What technologies has it developed that might be usable on other platfo
696.
by DennisP 2y ago
Since SpaceX is a private company, neither of us knows how much SpaceX spent internally on their fixed-price contract. What we do know is that NASA awarded contracts to both companies in 2010. Crew Dragon worked perfectly on their first cre
697.
by DennisP 2y ago
NASA still does great stuff but SLS specifically is not exactly a pioneering program. It's a disposable rocket using Space Shuttle engines, attempting to go to the Moon again. Meanwhile SpaceX got reusable first stages into production,
698.
by DennisP 2y ago
Stoke Space seems like it has potential. Same engineering philosophy as SpaceX, really innovative design, going for 100% reusability from the start. Everyday Astronaut visited them last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
699.
by DennisP 2y ago
It's not weird if you consider that paying for preventive care tends to be profitable for the insurance companies, because it's cheaper than paying for the problems that arise if you skip preventive care. Auto insurance doesn&#x27
700.
by DennisP 2y ago
It was definitely way overoptimistic on making the material. But it does present a pretty interesting design, for whenever the material becomes available.
701.
by DennisP 2y ago
Sure, the material had not been produced yet, and still hasn't. Getting all those long nanotubes to line up parallel is another of the hard parts. It's just a theoretical result. A key part of the design is for the glue to have a
702.
by DennisP 2y ago
You'd make a lot of money on the way to doubling the world's supply. 3000 tons annually just doubles how much we mine, not how much we have; that's more like 190,000 tons. And even if you doubled the total supply instantly, y
703.
by DennisP 2y ago
Starship has a return capacity of 50 tons.[0] If you have 5000 tons of material to return, that's a hundred Starship flights. I wouldn't expect asteroid mining to be viable until we have Starship or something like it at scale, doi
704.
by DennisP 2y ago
Heh that's an interesting point. It doesn't have to orbit the Earth, so it doesn't necessarily have lots of lateral velocity to burn off. It'd be interesting to work the numbers for just matching the Earth's velocit
705.
by DennisP 2y ago
We don't need kilometers. We need lots of 7cm nanotubes, bonded together with epoxy. http://images.spaceref.com/docs/spaceelevator/521Edwards.pdf
706.
by DennisP 2y ago
For precious metals that doesn't necessarily mean it's not worth going to get them in large quantities. Aluminum used to be more precious than gold. Now we make airplanes out of it.
707.
by DennisP 2y ago
Here's a NASA-funded study from the early 2000s, arguing that a space elevator could be built as a paper-thin ribbon at least a meter wide, composed of carbon nanotubes 7cm long, bonded together with epoxy. http://images.spa
708.
by DennisP 2y ago
AI can already write short stories, just not very good ones. It'll be doing novels once the context windows are big enough.
709.
by DennisP 2y ago
Sure but the idea at the link is more like fermenting our food in vats. (Or at least our livestock's food.)
710.
by DennisP 2y ago
There probably aren't enough roofs and parking lots to run civilization plus produce enough calories to feed us. Deserts are nice but then you're talking about a lot of long-distance transmission, which gets expensive; most likely
711.
by DennisP 2y ago
I don't find it particularly mean-spirited to say "actually, our product didn't kill him, he wasn't using that feature." I don't even find it especially pejorative to note that the victim at that particular tim
712.
by DennisP 2y ago
Well if we can only recover 36% of the planet's land area, I guess that's not worth it then.
713.
by DennisP 2y ago
Yes, but inefficiently. The idea is to do the same thing with much less land area, so we can stop using 40% of the planet's land to feed ourselves.
714.
by DennisP 2y ago
The problem is land area. > Today, almost half the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that, an astounding 80% is dedicated to livestock grazing and animal feed. > We need more forests...they are home to many billions o
715.
by DennisP 2y ago
But GP mentioned saturated fat, not dietary cholesterol.
716.
by DennisP 2y ago
I think fishmeal is mostly smaller fish. And as the article mentions, it'd be great if we could replace the enormous land area we devote to growing grains for animal feed. It doesn't sound like they've solved that completely,
717.
by DennisP 2y ago
I could push back on some of these but I mainly want to ask about this: > the way he publicly disparaged people who were killed by their Tesla using telemetric data that are supposed to be confidential In the cases I've seen, Tesla
718.
by DennisP 2y ago
It's quite common for new species to kill off old species. We ourselves have obliterated many species that we outcompeted for resources.
719.
by DennisP 2y ago
It's possible for current harms and future risks to both be real. It's also possible for human civilization to address more than one problem at a time. "You care about X but that's just a distraction from the thing I car
720.
by DennisP 2y ago
You're the one who referenced their earlier published schedule, which said they were "supposed to reach break even in 2023." They had a couple years of delay in funding after making that statement.

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