The problem is we can’t keep the same resources waste up. Lower range and smaller cars is what is needed. The perfect car of the future would be a one-seater that is as small and light as a electric velomobile (~70kg). Build a few millions of them and replace all cars in a city with those. Ideally self driving and as a robo-taxi, but even without the self driving this would be good. Of course cars isn’t really that high on the list for climate change.
But as a civilization we are simply not an intelligent species.
Consider something like 50% bigger than a podbike.
3000 miles is not something we as a society should accommodate to travel by car. The whole problem is that everyone thinks we can keep doing the same lifestyle just with zero carbon. We simply can’t. We need to change how we live and work.
Huh this video just dropped which is one possible solution to design a different work / live environment. If you imagine a village like that but large enough to have a school and some more amenities: Building a village designed for people (not cars) near Phoenix
But you’d still want public transport, bikes and delivery vans. But in Europe you also get a lot of cargo quadricycles to deliver goods.
I’d love gel and lithium-ion batteries in an ebike or a velomobile. It would result in a 40% increase in range with no extra weight, making them more of a viable alternative for somewhat longer commutes (think 10-15 miles). Sure we should be serving those by high speed public transit, but this would be a faster stopgap/alternative.
Oh and it would be useful for electric trucks too, even short-range ones could be made lighter with less batteries.
Yeah it’s not a solution to everything. I imagine the standard “super light” robo taxi as a two seater with the seats facing each other. Without a driver seat you can redesign individual transport to be narrower which improves aerodynamics.
But yeah for families or cargo transport you still need larger vehicles. Or take two. And I also imagine this to be more of a “gap filler” besides public transport or bicycles. It would really require a pretty big redesign of how we live and work to reduce our energy and resource usage to zero.
Yeah I always wish my car had one of those divider windows like limos have so I can close the kids in the back when they argue. It’s not really offered though haha
yeah but think of what would be lost when the saying, “Don’t make me turn this car around!” is never uttered again. The loss of decades of tradition… ;)
Actually surprised how little cars actually contribute to climate change I thought it was a major factor but they’re not really. If everyone in the world just switched to using LED light bulbs rather than incandescent it would be equivalent to removing half of the world’s cars from the road. And honestly seems easier to upgrade everyone’s light bulbs to LED than to replace every car.
Yeah, the single biggest thing we could do is ban industrial meat production and regulate food production to be more local. But the overall scale of change needed is staggering. We’re not going to do much really.
Directly via exhaust? It’s a significant number, but maybe not the biggest one. But add manufacturing, oil (or battery materials) extraction and refining, road infra construction and maintenance, emissions connected to suburbanization, microplastic pollution from tires, health and safety impact, and you’ll get a much grimmer picture. LEDs won’t cut it, and cars do not scale to 8B people.
I won’t be buying a new car. ICE or EV. Specifically because my old car doesn’t have a lot of the things that allow the car manufacturer to spy on me, and I won’t upgrade to any of the nonsense. Right now I can fix pretty much everything in that car for less than the price of a new vehicle.
I’ve managed to somehow make friends with the owner of a local junkyard. Not quite sure how I did that it wasn’t intentional but it’s quite useful because I can get parts for my car that the manufacturer would want hundreds of pounds for otherwise.
In the future I bet they pull some apple style rubbish and start software locking components to individual vehicles so you can’t just pull them off a donor car to fix yours
Seems unlikely. For one because donor parts like computers would have to be programmed (either by the manufacturer, or a mechanic with access to a scan tool that could do so), and so if you need a new ECU you’re limited to those options or a third party service that will clone that computer. And two, most of the things I’d need to replace on that car that aren’t computer related are easy to get second hand from a pick n pull, junk yard, or aftermarket and don’t really have the kinds of electronics used to send and receive info to a car manufacturers servers. I’m not worried that my MAP sensor is gonna spy on me to BMW. I would worry if it were an ECU or a TCM or the like. The other thing is it would require upgrading the 3G chip in a lot of cars on the road to 4G or similar and or plugging a 4G device into the car somewhere like the OBD port which would be quite obvious in my car.
Projections from BNEF suggest that sodium-ion batteries could reach pack densities of nearly 150 watt-hours per kilogram by 2025. And some battery giants and automakers in China think the technology is already good enough for prime time. 1
because it has the potential to be sustainable, cheaper, and less explosive. It’s not technically superior as far as energy density goes, but right now batteries are prohibitive in many applications, moreso due to cost than weight.
They’ve tried everything except actually funding NASA, and they’re all outta ideas.
NOTE: China WILL overtake NASA, the same way they are dominating the renewable energy sector — because they invest heavily in science, and they do it early. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand this shit.
Unfortunately that company is the best hope we have to stay ahead. With their low cost they can monopolize the worldwide launch market(except Russia and China). So that funding, strategically, must continue.
What should also happen is funding spacex competitors, so we stay on the bleeding edge.
No, it won’t. They’ll just relocate to China, or maybe a super yacht out in international waters. They’ll continue milking every last cent out of the US until it’s a dead dried up husk of a nation and then they’ll just move to the next one. Their supporters are too stupid to realize where the end of the path they’ve been told to walk is going to take them, and they’d rather blame anyone else but themselves for all the problems they face. So no, a space race with China won’t fix shit.
That goes double for our educational system, which has been aggressively gutted by the GOP: People aren’t just born engineers and scientists. These greedy assholes have doomed us as a country.
EDIT: GOP stands for Grand Old Party, which is the Republican party in the United States.
Also to whoever asked and deleted their comment: There’s nothing wrong with asking questions when you don’t know what something means or otherwise want clarification.
This is the power of not funding your space program and actively destroying your own educational system, which is where things like engineers and scientists come from in the first place.
I don’t believe in racial science and “superiority”, however I refer to hiring based on only merit and not just for the sake of fulfilling a diversity quota. The tech industry has suffered enough because of this.
You don’t happen to have any numbers to back that up, by chance? Because you’re sure saying all the right things to make it sound like you’ve been wildly mislead about hiring diversity laws, and if we know what specific flavor of kool-aid you’ve been peddled we might be able to clear up the wild misconceptions / blatant lies
Gee whiz, maybe we should have been properly funding our space program all of these years instead of wasting it on making the military industrial complex filthy fucking rich and the world less secure overall?
Especially stupid considering last time they gave the space program appropriate funding, it led to a lot of advancements that the military industrial complex could use.
The goal was optics. Kennedy didn’t know what advances would result from Apollo. He wanted to show that the US was better at science and technology than Russia.
The science of putting a ballistic payload anywhere, including heaven.
The space race was awesome because it let the two countries measure their dicks (specifically their military dicks) without actually obliterating the planet.
The “for all mankind” angle was a great way to frame things for the population of Earth, for sure. But just like mobile chemical WMD labs in Iraq, sometimes the given justification and actual justification are two different things.
Don’t get me wrong, there absolutely were beneficial optics. Something doesn’t have to just be for one thing. But it was always primarily about practical demonstration of weapons capacity under the facade of human exploration.
No, I don’t think anyone has definitely proven that George W Bush and Colin Powell KNEW that the WMD claims in Iraq were bullshit when they were presenting them as the primary justification for the war.
Ha, I was actually taking about the space program, but same for the invasion. Although, I feel like more people have come forward about the invasion being BS than early space program stuff.
People behind the scenes are siphoning NASA space research money and turning it into space profit instead. The growth of private space companies starting in the US is no coincidence. Blame oligarchs for steering the country into a dead end.
Hate on spacex and its competitors as much as you want, im not saying you dont have cause.
But defunding NASA caused this. Those billionaires looked and said holy shit, the entire nasa budget is only that much? And they arent building rockets anymore? I can literally fund my own space program? Ide be crazy not to
To be fair, it’s not as if those things are mutually-exclusive. For example, you know how the Hubble Space Telescope is this extremely unique and nigh-irreplaceable scientific instrument that cost a pretty big fraction of NASA’s entire budget?
Well, it turns out we actually have dozens of the damn things; it’s just that we couldn’t be bothered to actually point more than one of them away from Earth instead of towards it.
Hell, a decade ago the National Reconnaissance Office https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-nasa.html 'cause they just had 'em lying around, but (as far as I know) NASA hasn’t managed to scrounge up enough money from the couch cushions to spruce 'em up and launch 'em yet.
They certainly don’t have to be, but there is a well established pattern of the US government getting waaay too chummy with corporations to the point that it can undermine what’s best for the people in pursuit of corporate interests.
But as someone who works in the industry, it is a bleak outlook. NASA absolutely needs more funding for its human spaceflight exploration, Earth Science, robotic exploration, and astronomy/astrophysics.
While US youth are rotting their brains via china’s tiktok, Chinese youth are actually learning about science and other useful skills. Of course this is going to happen
Wait. This is a joke right? You really think all youth in america is just messing around on tiktok (yeah just forget facebook, twitter, myspace, instagram and whatever other social media we’ve had) and ALL youth in china is doing science?
So they had no issue relying on Russia to service the ISS ever since they shutdown the space shuttle, but now they’re afraid of China… doing space science faster?
Ignoring the fact that this is not even a real concern, maybe don’t spend morbillions on free munitions for Israel or Lockheed’s next stupid idea.
They defunded NASA so hard that they started hallucinating about going back to the moon with 15% of the Apollo budget.
At the time, Russia wasn’t as……problematic. We had been working with Russia as an International Partner since the very early days of ISS and even during Shuttle/Mir.
Obviously they did become problematic, but we didn’t have other options until SpaceX. Now that’s….obviously got its own issues, but Russia is vastly different than China when it comes to space. Russia needs the money, China already has it.
The fact that NASA had to rely on Roscosmos in the first place is shameful. It highlights long standing issues facing the space program. I think some of these problems trace back to the cost of the ISS. It’s been hard to convey the importance and investment into the future the station provides.
For China their station provides proof of concept that they can achieve similar results one day both to themselves and the world watching.
The amount of money spent on Apollo was insane. A reduced budget should have been sufficient. It’s just been weighted down by shit cost-plus contracts and the abomination that is SLS.
The fear of China here is that they are basically single handedly their closest competitor. They’re the only other nation thats managed a Mars Rover landing, building space station, and have their own plans for Moon and Mars with taikonauts( astronaut equivalent) on the ground in the future.
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