I disagree with it being hard to comprehend. The maths is an absolute bitch, but the basic premise is fairly simple. Everything is (quantised) waves. The rest clicks, once you get your brain to accept this. Everything else is a consequence. Those consequences can lead you down deep dark tunnels, filled with evil maths and mind bending results, but the basic idea is simple.
I have a bit of an issue with memes that are actively misleading.
That is part of what bugs me.
Quantum mechanics isn’t magical or unknowable. It’s just an area of physics where some of our base assumptions/approximations break down. It’s not even that hard to wrap your head around, it just seems most people don’t want to try.
So was “Donald Trump for president” and look at the damage that has caused.
Perception and observation are different things. Air molecules can be “observers” when looking at electrons etc.
This sort of comic always bugs me. Observation in QM is not the same as observation in layman terms.
Best think of it as hit it and watch the pieces fly. When you get small enough, you can’t approximate out the impacts. It’s akin to studying road traffic by sending an overloaded freight truck the wrong way and counting tires that hit the verge. It might also affect the current traffic’s motion.
Orbits are all about speed, not height. To deorbit, you need to reduce your speed at the highest part of your orbit. This will lower the lowest part. You jump off the back. You would need to jump FAR harder than your legs are capable of though.
Unfortunately, the sheer speed will kill you, without shielding. As you hit the air, you are going so fast, the air can’t get out of your way. You compress it ahead of you, that heats it up. It gets hot enough to melt most metals. The air will cook you, long before you get slow enough to use your parachute.
For comparison, terminal velocity (max speed you reach falling) is around 200km/h. Orbital velocity is 7km/s or around 25200km/h.
The glue gets weaker when it’s heated. They use the same film for oven meals as well. It comes off fine when you finished heating, but it’s a pain in the arse when cold.
That’s part of the reason a moon base could be viable. The sun outputs a reasonable amount of helium 3, which is great for fusion reactions. Unfortunately it tends to sit at the top of our atmosphere and get blown away again. On the moon, it gets captured by the dust in collectable quantities.
I never said it wasn’t useful, just a very low efficiency reactor. Then again, if it was better, it would burn out faster, which would be bad for life on earth.
Apparently Romans used to do something similar in Bath. They would write prayers on lead sheets and throw them into a spring. Some of those prayers survived, which is how we now know how bitchy rich Roman women could be!
Even the core only has an output of 200-300W/m^3.
The amusing thing is that the sun is actually quite a shit fusion reactor. It’s power per unit volume is tiny. It just makes it up in sheer volume. A solar level fusion reactor would be almost completely useless to us. Instead we need to go far beyond the sun’s output to just be viable.
It’s like describing one of the mega mining dumper trucks as an “artificial mule”.
IoT can be great. The key is, as you pointed out, to actually have personal control over it.
It also has to account for WAF (wife acceptance factor). If it doesn’t fail gracefully to a dumb version of itself, it’s not to be trusted
You also need to sustain 5 atm, with no leaks for years. Where is it being stored, and who’s paying for the maintenance? All it would take would be a bit of civil unrest, or corruption, and the work could be undone in mass.
It would, but it takes more energy that gets produced total. You’re spending 300wKh to make 220kWh of electricity.
And how do you plan to keep it liquefied, on a large scale, for 100s of years? It’s currently done using pressure vessels amd chillers, that require maintenance etc.
There are 3 use cases I’ve seen.
Making fossil fuel power stations “clean”.
CO2 recovery for long term storage.
CO2 for industrial use.
It’s no good for the first, due to energy consumption. This is the main use I’ve seen it talked up for, as something that can be retrofitted to power plants.
It’s poor for the second, since the result is a gas (hard to store long term). We would want it as a solid or liquid product, which this doesn’t do.
The last has limited requirements. We only need so much CO2.
The only large scale use case I can see for this is as part of a carbon capture system. Capture and then react to solidify the carbon. However, plants are already extremely good at this, and can do it directly from atmospheric air, using sunlight.
Just checked the numbers, for those interested.
A gas power plant produces around. 200-300kWh per tonne of CO2.
Capture costs 300-900kWh per tonne captured.
So this is basically non viable using fossil fuel as the power. If you aren’t, then storage of that power is likely a lot better.
It’s also worth noting that it is still CO2 gas. Long term containment of a gas is far harder than a liquid or solid.
A van can’t deal with even remotely muddy grass. I lost count of how many vans I rescued, back when I had my pickup. They are also a lot less effective at dragging a horse trailer etc. Vans also (generally) don’t have back seats. If you’re also having to trek up and down the motorways, then the comfort of the ranger makes a big difference.
So why are you so upset with us trying to fix it?
I personally find the anti science, anti learning crowd has gone from amusing, to annoying, to terrifying.