Their station has like three modules (with plans to add 3 more) and capacity for 3 people. The ISS has at least 16 modules (maybe over 30 depending on what you count as a module) and capacity for over a dozen people.
Like many things from authoritarian countries, it looks nice but isn’t even close in terms of capabilities.
This is a fantastic idea, here in the UK we’ve just been dumping raw sewage in the rivers and poisoning the coast because it’d cut into water companies record profits to treat it (also Brexit chemical shortages or something)- if we can turn the poop into something useful that can sell then the won’t let a drop off that precious filth go to waste.
As someone who knows nothing about canals (or what they are even used for), anyone want to explain why they are used, why they are dumb, and what we should do instead?
Imagine a canal which is 3 feet wide at the minimum. It contains a constant volume of water. This canal ultimately waters farm land. By way of example, California has the imperial valley which contains these canal systems. They feed desert farm land. The problem is these canals are often:
open
in a hot dry desert
cheap
Water rights have perverted water usage. People take cheap water which was grandfathered in by old laws and agreements and they waste it to evaporation. If you think “well the water isn’t lost, just evaporated, right?” You’d be close, but slightly off the mark. The water is evaporated but it’s transported often hundreds or thousands of miles from its original source. We are basically bleeding rivers to feed a desert. And deserts might as well be an infinite sink for water.
We should not have farm land in deserts. But if we do, we should at least conserve the water we are using. Just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it’s good (not that you’re implying that, just saying).
This guy has never been to the Phoenix area :P we even have rivers with no water, too! Bring the whole family, camp out and have imaginary marco / polo by the hill infested with scorpions, only a half-mile from the city dump! Bring your RV so you can feel like a complete moron with the other people who thought it was a great idea to buy a mini house on wheels that gets 6 miles to the gallon. And if you are early to rise, you can make Laughlin a day-trip to lose all your social security check by dusk, before sauntering back to the depression-rut of a life you have carved out for yourself. Because living in a desert with a large elderly population, just-barely-enough power during the summer even though there is a fucking nuclear power plant 20 miles out of town, and has been in a drought for my entire life while everyone waters their lawn 3 times a week, never felt so good!
Oh sorry I got mixed up with my “fuck off and stop moving here” speech. Give me 10 minutes.
An irrigation canal like this is a big ditch to move water from a river to near farm fields. Without the extra water taken from the river, there wouldn’t be enough water in the soil for crops to grow in the area.
Being a big ditch open to the sky, the hot sun and dry air make a bunch of the irrigation water evaporate before it even gets to the field. So we went to all the effort of taking water out of the river just to waste it humidifying the nearby air.
Why did we do it in the first place? Because it’s way easier and cheaper to dig a ditch than to lay a big pipe, and I don’t know if the US had any other water-delivery tech at the right scale when these were built.
There probably are, but Saudi Arabia owns a bunch of land in Arizona and decided it was the perfect place to grow alfalfa, a very water intensive crop. That said, some farming does make some sense even in the desert, since it is almost certainly cheaper to have local produce than to need to import everything from places that have an abundance of water, even if that means building canals to water them.
The US has lots of land that doesn’t require irrigation, but also lots of land that can grow crops if irrigated. Some of that land in California is some of the best farmland in the whole country, growing things that prefer California’s Mediterranean climate (similar to parts of Australia’s southwest coast).
We have the technology and have had it for a while. But we don’t have the laws and habits of dry countries so US water laws are a wasteful mess.
Evaporation. You lose a phenomenal amount of water moving it by canal over large distances in an arid climate. Ideally you’d enclose the whole system to reduce loss but sticking a roof over the top helps to some degree and is less complicated.
Seems soooo much more complex than simply using regular noise canceling technology which we’ve had for ages now. In my previous company it was amazing how well it worked. You could be maybe 5 feet away from someone you could hear them perfectly fine, but move 10 feet away and everything was just muted down. One day we had some electrical problems and the system was down, and that’s when you really could notice how well the system worked because you could hear people all the way from the other side of the building when before when the system was running those noises were totally gone.
Most office centers these days pipe in low-dB white noise to mitigate some of the chaotic noises of office work. Unfortunately if you’re the kind of person with a neurodivergence that makes you sensitive to sensory overload this could be one of the reasons office spaces make you feel so exhausted 😃
Spike is confident its aircraft will not create sonic booms when going supersonic, allowing it to fly at these speeds even over land.
3D renderings are certainly capable of doing any type of magical things. I’ll need a demonstrator before this can be entertained as anything but fantasy.
Holy shit that’s actually really big news even if any practical applications are very far off. As someone said in a comment below, this is essentially Maxwell’s Demon, which as I understand it violates the second law of thermodynamics-- that entropy must always increase. In other words, “waste heat” is no longer truly a waste; we can extract energy from heat without a temperature gradient! I’ll be watching for more news on this (both for confirmation and dispute) in the future. If this does turn out to be true, it’s almost certainly Nobel Prize worthy.
It’s not needed in today’s EVs. Things should be upgradable yes, but it’s not necessary to replace current existing lithium batteries with this and doing so would probably do more harm than good. The ones we have already outlast the vehicle’s lifespan, and go further than a tank of gas.
We don’t even know how to recycle these new types, at least we’ve made some headway with the current gen packs.
Two questions if that’s the reasoning: how often are you driving 600 let alone 300 miles? How often are you out of range of charging, if at all? Charging at fast chargers already only takes 20 minutes, the same amount it takes to pee and get a drink.
Charging at home makes range not matter. It’s not gas, you’re just always charged up. You don’t want to sit at 100% anyway, because again, it’s not gas.
The object is to get people to give up gas cars, you do that by providing a better range and a “refill” time roughly equivalent with sitting at a gas pump.
And, yeah, vast areas of the country do not yet have good access to charging stations:
You’re missing the point: it’s not like gas, and can’t be compared as such. If you have a home charger, you never need to use public charging except when road tripping, because your car charges within 4-6ish hours (my home charger does around ~22mi/hr), or overnight if you have a slower charger. You cannot do the same with gas unless you just top off at the gas pump every day.
I’m not trying to get into charging deserts right now - frankly, most people do not live in them, and thus make up less of the EV market at the moment. We haven’t even come close to meeting your given objective of replacing gas in even populated areas. Anyway, this article is about a 600 mile solid state battery that will only be in luxury $200k+ cars (which most people in very rural counties wouldn’t be able to afford), if at all. Not charging deserts.
I’m living in an apartment and charging at home is not an option. I do have a EV though and when we take a larger trip, I need to plan a bit more to charge up before the trip.
That sucks a bit, else it’s pretty great
I think landlords should, legally, have to allow you to put a wallbox at the space where you park your car. Maybe they should also just have to pay it themselves. It’s stupid that people have to pay so much more and go through such a hassle to charge their car because, I assume, landlords dom’t allow them to put a wallbox at their car’s parking space.
I own the apartment and even a parking place, that’s my own. but just doing the cableing will cost me a few thousand Euros.
And I’m one of the lucky ones who don’t need to search through public parking slots.
Fair point, yep. But it is still very possible to road trip in most places without 600 miles of range or a home charger, and it only seems to be getting easier. I was mostly referring to those in the aforementioned “charging desert” counties in the US which are majority standalone single-family residences.
Hopefully in the future, it’s a requirement for modern apartments.
Not everyone can have a home charger. People living in apartments and condos won’t have access. Heck, even people who do have their own homes will have to upgrade their electrical panels to allow for charging.
Until everyone can charge at home, it all boils down to how much range a car gets and how fast it recharges, which is why this new battery tech is such a game changer.
Again, the people that can’t have a charger at home will not be able to afford this. It’s not a game changer, it would take higher powered chargers than the ones that currently exist, making your whole “charging desert” issue more problematic (not to mention that you first had an issue with rural charging and are now talking about urban environments where charging access is easy to come by even if not directly in your apartment).
The solution isn’t prohibitively expensive 600 mile range batteries (are you still saying you need that on the daily?), it’s more chargers.
Once again, it seems like you think EVs work and charge/fill up in the same way as ICE vehicles. They don’t, and unless you’ve driven or owned one I’m not sure why you’d be speaking from such an authoritative standpoint.
Not true. Before we bought our house we could have easily afforded an EV. We didn’t buy one because we had no place to charge it.
After buying a house, we had to do other upgrades before we could even think of adding a charger, like upgrading the electrical panel from 100A to 200A, and even then, there were other priorities like a new roof and solar panels.
What I don’t get is why you’re so averse to the basic premise of EV owners being able to upgrade the battery tech in their vehicles to get a superior range and charging time.
As it stands right now, range is inadequate and varies greatly with operating temperature:
“It’s well known that EVs lose some of their travel range in the cold, especially in subzero temperatures like those that hit the nation’s mid-section this week. Studies found that range loss varies from 10 percent to 36 percent.”
The average range on an EV is around 300 miles, so losing 10 to 36% of that in the cold is no good, especially when it takes longer to charge in the cold as well. With a 600 mile range and 9 minute recharge, that’s less of a factor. Even if it takes 2x as long to charge in the cold, that’s still less time than it takes to charge a standard EV in good weather.
Every EV owner should have the option to upgrade to this new tech for better range and faster charging. Especially since the batteries are designed to be replaced ANYWAY.
All of that goes out of the window if you read what I have been saying this entire time: this would be absolutely unaffordable to you and me, in battery costs but also charger and infrastructure costs. It would take a national infrastructure upgrade to accommodate that precious 9 minute charging figure. Forget a 200A panel for home charging (not that expensive compared to what you just listed), I’m sure this would require more and take 5x as long at home.
You are advocating for an unproven and expensive technology for ever-changing reasons, all while we just got our current tech in a decent place. What you are asking for would ultimately make it more difficult to own an EV and likely harm EV adoption. We aren’t there yet, and it’s really not necessary now.
So, if you don’t own an EV, why do you continue to talk like you know what is best for consumer adoption? Why not listen to the consumers that actually have them instead of insisting you need to drive 450+ miles in one sitting without ever stopping?
That’s the trick though, the current tech is NOT in a decent place. When it takes <10 minutes to fill a gasoline car at a pump, but it takes 40 to 60 minutes (or more!) to charge an EV, this new tech is absolutely a necessity.
I talk about consumer adoption because I research this stuff. EV sales are down, they’re down because of the problems I’ve already noted with range, charging time, and charging availability. Increasing the range increases the time between charges. Decreasing the charge time makes it more convenient to re-charge.
““It might make sense [to buy an EV] if you could recharge that vehicle in the driveway of your house while you’re asleep,” he says. “The problem is that many Americans don’t even have driveways.” J.D. Power’s Krear adds that “one in three shoppers don’t have access to home charging”.
At this point, even figuring in the drive to a fossil-fuel station, “it’s still much easier to refuel your vehicle with gasoline than with electrons”, says Nunes. “If you pull up to a gas station with an empty tank, and you just pump it full of gas, it’ll take you maybe six, seven minutes at the most. With EVs, it’s going to take you hours to charge that vehicle to the maximum rate. And that’s the kind of time that everyday Americans simply don’t have.”
Experts agree that establishing a robust infrastructure of public charging stations is key to mass adoption of EVs. But the creation of that infrastructure lags. Stations are scarce, particularly in low-income and minority communities. Where they do exist, they are often unreliable.
With EVs, it’s going to take you hours to charge that vehicle to the maximum rate. And that’s the kind of time that everyday Americans simply don’t have – Ashley Nunes
“One out of every five public charging attempts is a failure,” says Krear. Findings from a 2022 University of California, Berkely study showed that one-quarter of public chargers in the San Francisco Bay Area didn’t work due to “unresponsive or unavailable screens, payment system failures, charge initiation failures, network failures, or broken connectors”.”
It does not take 40 minutes in modern EVs. It takes like 20 minutes, max. It certainly does not take hours at L3 chargers like the misleading claim the person in your quote makes. I think that’s also what you’re missing: this is a marginal improvement overall, other than range itself. Once again, the problem is not battery tech, it’s charging access. L3 charging access needs to be improved, not battery tech. If we upgrade our battery tech now, it will only make the problems you are mentioning worse by reducing the amount of available chargers. This will not work with our current L3/L2 tech, and you want to make the L3 charging situation you’re talking about even worse. We simply do not have our infrastructure in a good enough place where we can accommodate this technology.
Research and quote things all you want, it doesn’t change the fact that you have never personally owned one and therefore should not be speaking on this subject like you are an authority. This isn’t the first time we’ve had this “chat” and I’m sure I’ll see you claiming you need to drive 450+ miles in a single sitting the next time this gets posted and we can go in circles again.
For now, I see that you think your needs and wants are what everyone else’s are (this is not the case), and that because you think you know best (again, without ever owning an EV) you will never admit that maybe your need to drive 450+ miles is unnecessary with today’s EVs and that it would cost unfathomable amounts to upgrade cars and infrastructure to even use this tech. See you in the next post, I can’t wait for you to tell me more about how I can’t road trip in my EV even though I’ve done it across the country!
The other guy is being dumb. He’s trying to tell people what they do and don’t need, and that’s not going to work; especially when you are considering people who are stuck on ICE cars for the exact reasons you’re saying.
I love my ICE vehicle, but I’ve said many times that I’d consider a battery powered vehicle when I can get 500+ mile range. The last thing I’m going to do is allow myself be inconvenienced by something I don’t care about, and this is the story here. I’m passionate about my WRX, but I could never be passionate about a battery and electric motors. When I switch, it’ll only be because the benefit is incredible and undeniable. People will simply not convince me that a 300 mile range in optimal conditions is going to suit me, because things never play out like the paper specs say.
Yup. It’s not “300 mile range”, it’s “300 mile range*”.
But if the max range is 600 miles under optimal conditions, and worst case scenario, you lose 35% due to “reasons”, that’s still a 390 mile range, which is better than most cars on a tank of gas. Plus the 9 minute re-charge is a game changer.
The benefit is incredible and undeniable, as long as you can plug in to a wall somewhere regularly. If you have to rely on public fast charging they may not be for you.
The only benefit of a gas powered engine is you can fill the gas tank up in about 5 minutes.
Forgotten benefits of gasoline: you can fix it yourself and you’re not locked into a shiny new consumerist downward spiral that demands you buy a new vehicle every ten years when the car can’t go 200 miles in a single charge anymore? And the next guy who gets the battery powered vehicle is just worse off than you were, as the poorer along us suffer even worse condition vehicles and the risk of massive expenses in the way of new battery failure. Why is nobody concerned with the fact that batteries are going to lock us into excess and unavoidable consumerism as they degrade? Engines -might- fail, but batteries -will- fail.
List one battery powered device that isn’t basically disposable.
I own a Tesla because my engine died at 95k miles in my 2016 VW, with regular maintenance, and it was $11k for just the engine, not counting labor to install it.
I could change it myself, and I could have bought a used engine for roughly $5500, but the economics of that dont work out.
I’m willing to take my chances with a battery pack installation.
Also, 200 miles range is 6x the average daily miles driven, so for almost everyone, it should be plenty! Unless you’re thinking we should mass produce solutions for the 1%?
There’s some EVs that are integrating the battery into the frame in order to save weight. And it does save weight, but there’s no way to replace the battery.
Oh my God my wife bought this bean bag once. It was a photography thing so it had to be absolutely packed full. So the skin came folded up in this tiny little plastic bag and then it came with three giant bags of styrofoam balls.
If you stuck your hand in the back and pulled it out it would just be coated. I spent hours just trying to scoop them into the bean bag.
When I got to the second bag to fill I found a long narrow box and taped it up to the side of the bean bag slice the bean bag open and used it to pour them through.
The whole experience was awful. And the cleanup took nearly as long as the fill.
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