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.
That would go a long way towards solving the range anxiety barrier. 1000km is close to the maximum that same people can do in a single day. Yes, you could push further in a day in a pinch, but not comfortably unless you’re rotating drivers. It’s pretty close to the limits enforced on long haul truck drivers in Canada or the US (depends on speed limits and traffic density and a few other things).
When you work out how to do this in practice, it doesn’t actually matter. You really should be stopping for ~20 minutes every few hours, anyway. Put in better charging infrastructure and there isn’t much point to vehicles over 400 miles of range. Even 250mi is probably enough. Use further advancements to reduce weight, not push range further.
And before someone shows up who thinks nobody else has heard that batteries have shorter range in cold weather, yes, I’m accounting for that.
After driving non-stop for 200+ miles I’m more than happy to take a break for 15-30 minutes to stretch my legs, hit the bathroom, grab some food, etc. My wife and I have done precisely this on multiple road trips that we’ve taken in our EV.
It’s not 1000km. You lose 30-40% range in the cold. And charging cadence is typically 10-80%, not 0-100%, so you lose another 30% on road trips. Now your 1000km EV does 420-490km between chargers. That’s around three hours on the Autobahn at a rather leisurely 150kph, with a 25-40 min stop. I agree with the user above. Affordable 1000km range is minimum before I’ll be buying another EV.
Space races are good for science. As long as spacex engineers keep Elon at bay, Starship should be able to launch stage biggest station modules in history.
The water powered car “disappeared” because it was never real in the first place. Every “demonstration” has turned out to be a hoax. It doesn’t even make sense in terms of physics.
Water is effectively the ash equivalent of hydrogen. If you burn carbon stuff you get ash from the impurities as well as CO2 (and some other possible things), and when you burn hydrogen you get water.
Second, we need to further modify V. natriegens so that it is capable of feeding on the byproducts it produces when it breaks down the PET. Lastly, we need to modify the V. natriegens to produce a desirable end product from the PET – such as a molecule that is a useful feedstock for the chemical industry
So it’s breaking PET down into some unspecified byproduct that it cannot currently eat or turn into anything useful.
I think humans are too specifically hardwired for actual human interaction for it to work. Like, it’s so specific that even online communication with real humans doesn’t fill the void. I can talk to friends on Discord for ages, but it’s not the same as meeting up and going to do something.
I really don’t think an AI, even a convincing one, is going to make a large dent on loneliness in the majority of cases.
I think it depends on the humans. Personally, I find online interactions more comfortable than in-person ones, most of the time. In-person interactions exhaust me, if they aren’t with the small handful of people with whom I’m most comfortable, so I can really only take them in short doses. I can chat online without any such issues, so if I were lonely, a companion A.I. that could carry on actual conversations might really help, even if it isn’t a 1:1 replacement for human interaction.
I’m aware that I am probably not representative of the majority of people, but I doubt I’m the only one who feels the way I do, so there could be a place for this sort of thing, where it could do some actual good.
Someone’s already killed themself after encouragement from an ai. I don’t think trusting ai with unrestricted and unsupervised access to vulnerable people is a good idea.
As a type 1 diabetic with a type 2 family member I want to be excited but I cannot for the life of me be suspicious, what are the talking about with the kidney. I mean maybe I’m missing something I only have diabetes idk everything about it
Diabetes can damage the kidneys, so presumably the patient got a kidney transplant. But yeah, looks like the journalist is getting the causation the wrong way round, I can’t think of why a kidney transplant would recover pancreatic islet function.
You’re grossly underestimating the skill and coordination required by human hands. Granted that we don’t notice it. But our body has complex neural pathways that do this without constant attention from our conscious mind.
I mean it’s not that hard to recognize “thorns” meaning difficulty and obstruction.
But as I’m saying this, I remember that younger generations didn’t spend time outside as kids. So they may never have pushed through a thicket of thorns.
Eventually, we’ll have people who’ve lived their entire lives in zero-G, and they won’t have an intuitive understanding of the feelings implied by the phrase “stand up for oneself”. They won’t understand the state of motivation versus fatigue implied by “holding one’s chin up”, that the posture of one’s body was a function of the interplay between gravity and dopamine.
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