I mean, some parts of the protocols we use for the Internet need to be in the clear to work, DNS comes to mind. If you want that kept private as well you need to use something like tor.

But regardless, what people generally actually care about keeping secret is the content, not the protocol.

It would be amazing if there were a more open source option.

It’s unfortunate that cars are so big and complex to manufacture. With a just as complex a set of regulatory systems around verifying their safety and roadworthiness. I really don’t see something more open source being a realistic expectation at any foreseeable point going forward.

Well sure, if the electricity is powering something you already need and the waste heat is beneficial, then awesome, I guess that’s free heat. But it’s actually pretty rare that people need to be using that much electricity for anything as consistently as you would need for heating a home. And if you don’t actually need to be using that electricity, there’s really no way around the fact that electric heating is really pretty expensive.

I guess if you are stuck with electric heating as your only option and a heat pump is out of your price range, then mining crypto could be a nice way to offset the cost of electric heating… But then the equipment costs would add up and you’d probably be better off with a heat pump anyway.

Well that’s all true, we don’t actually know what the real filters are, are we already past them, or are they still ahead of us? Certainly people have speculated about this for a long time, and I won’t pretend to have any more real answers than anyone else. But honestly, I’d have a hard time believing that the really rare event, that the great filter lays somewhere between the development of the brain and the development of the kind of intelligence humans have. It just seems like a relatively small jump (relative to all the other hurdles) between many of the smarter animals on earth and human beings. For example, many species use tools a whole lot actually. Only a few other species actually make tools or alter them to a large degree, but you know, give it 10 million years and see if that changes. Likewise, many species have languages, some species even give themselves names, so they can intentionally address other individuals in their social group.

If you don’t mind a bit of total speculation on my part, in my opinion, the explanation to the Fermi paradox is actually pretty simple, there really is no paradox. Intelligent life is probably relatively common in the universe, the reason we don’t see aliens all over the place is that intelligent life thrives too well for that. Once a species is capable of traveling other stars, it’s just a matter of time before they settle most of their galaxy, like within a million years (which is very quick on evolutionary scales). We’re just the first intelligent life in this galaxy, we can assume this because if there were others, they’d already have colonies right here on earth, because it’s a great planet.

To double back on the great filter though, my best guess about which events might be truly rare, my money is on Eukaryotic life and mitochondria. That feels like a real freak accident, as well as an absolutely vital requirement for complex life.

Well, I’m not sure you’ve considered the time-frames involved in that concern. We have a whole lot of time before the sun goes out on us. It took Earth about 2 billion years to develop multicellular life. It then took another 2.5 b before we got vertebrates. That was the hard part though and it’s done, I don’t think there’s any undoing it. There aren’t many things that could wipe out all forms of vertebrates on earth, so I’m confident that would be as far back as the planet could reasonably be set back by any disaster.

Just 60 million years ago, mammals were not at all a dominant form of life, yet that’s all it took for early rodent-like mammals to evolve into human beings (as well as all the other mammals we know today). So based on that timeline, if all human life on the planet were wiped out tomorrow, I’d estimate (pessimistically) it would take less than another 200 million years before another species gained a similar level of intelligence and began a new era of civilization (and perhaps as little as 10 m years, as some species are already quite intelligent). In fact, if the next species screws up, and gets themselves killed, I expect earth will get another go at it in another 10–200 million years, over and over again.

On the other side of the equation, the sun will expand into a red giant and consume the earth in about 5 billion years. That gives us a whole lot of tries to get it right.

Uh, I think it’s called the World Wide Web.

I mean, I’m joking, but I do remember buying games directly from a developers website, that’s a thing that used to happen.

Yeah, I had a similar thought. I mean nothing is set in stone with color coding, but there are some pretty clear norms.

Why would spider-man do that?!

Seriously, that pic looks like Tom Holland.

I hate to be that guy, but… Is it time to get DSL?

Yeah, I get how that’s their intended use, I’m just saying I have my doubts about that business model. If this is their pitch, I don’t think they’re gonna sell many.

The thing is, they will be expensive. And it’s not an expensive service, it’s an expensive product. A state or a nation will have to buy a bunch of these, likely for hundreds of thousands each. And then just sit on them millions of dollars worth of energy infrastructure just sitting around not generating energy… Then when it’s time for them to be deployed you have a whole bunch of government workers saying “uh, I’ve never set one of these up, where’s the user manual?”

If instead you had them in regular use, when it comes time to deploy them in an emergency, you’d have people who actually know how to use them. Plus you could be generating power with them wherever extra power might be needed.

I did catch that, I was just pointing out there are additional problems with the statement as well. But I’ve edited my statement to make that more clear.

Hmm interesting. I don’t see how it could be economical as an emergency-only power source. To build them and store them for occasional use seems pretty unappealing. Surely if you had them, you’d use them to generate electricity/passive income.

You could think of them as easily mobile power systems, available to respond to emergencies, but used wherever is convenient the rest of the time.

So yeah, they’ll still be a hazard for air traffic, but luckily we do have an established solution for that, the blinking red light. Also, controlled airspace around airfields.

Would it be possible to use heat to get it to float, instead of helium? Heat it up with electricity.

Sure, that would be possible. The generators themselves will produce some amount of heat. It’s also going to have a fair amount of passive lift, as it’s essentially a kite. So simply being able to maintain a rigid shape and effective airfoil could do a lot to produce the desired lift. If it were redesigned with that in mind, shaped more like a glider/kite/parasail, something to maximize lift, it’s possible that it could be done without a light gas, though it would also be more reliant on favorable winds.

I have to wonder though, how much the power transmission lines weigh, that seems like a serious limiting factor on maximum attainable altitude.

The transmission line question is interesting though, there’s a complex optimization problem there. Traditionally with wind, larger turbines are more efficient. As you increase the turbine blade size, the area that the blades cover (and thus power generation potential) increases more than the mass of the blades do. So the result is (generally speaking) a larger wind turbine is more efficient than a smaller one. But now factor in the transmission line… The larger the turbine the more power it generates AND the thicker (and heavier) the transmission line has to be for its entire length. To complicate things more, higher altitudes mean stronger and more reliable wind. So now how do you optimize for turbine size/cable gauge, and cable length/altitude?

It seems tricky, but like perhaps there’s just a right answer, an optimal size.

So that “10,000 meters” didn’t scale right, clearly. But you also can’t possibly call those “high altitudes”. Small planes like cessnas fly at low altitudes, like 2,000 - 5000 ft, a 747 flys at a high altitude, 40,000 ft; 1600 ft is nothing, that’s lower than some buildings.

I think I agree with Cory Doctorow’s opinion

I’d say that’s always a good position. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him come out on the wrong side of a topic.

Absolutely!

Classic!

Yeah I think I heard something along those lines. It’s important to always have a contingency plan!

It’s way easier to make something fly itself than drive itself.

That’s not entirely true…

The thing is, for something to really be a “flying car” you need to be able to park it at home. That means you need to be able to fly it around a whole lot of hazards, buildings, trees, telephone poles, unpredictable children. Yes, a modern autopilot can take off, fly a route and land all by itself, but the airfields they’re taking off and landing at have none of those hazards I just mentioned as well as air traffic controllers in the tower watching out for problems.

That said, I do think autonomous control is absolutely the way to get there. Just don’t assume it’ll be easy. We should still master self-driving on land first before we start applying it to personal aircraft.

The pilot has always been the limiting factor for flying cars.

People are always saying “it’s the future, right? Where are my jetpacks and flying cars?”. And the truth is, there have been many prototype vehicles over the years that could be called flying cars, we’ve already done it. The reason everyone doesn’t have one in their garage comes down to two factors.

1. Price. The reason cars are as affordable as they are is mass production. That is to say, still quite expensive, but within reach for most people in developed countries. With mass production you get that economy of scale, but most people simply don’t need a flying car, so it will be hard to ever reach that level of mass production.

2. Skill to operate. A “flying car” is simply an aircraft that you can park at home. It’s an airplane or a rotorcraft of some variety. As such, you’ll need a pilots license to operate it, as well as (probably) a special certification for VTOL vehicles. Obtaining a pilots license is not as simple as a driver’s license, there’s just a lot more to know and the consequences of being underprepared are more severe. This isn’t within reach for everyone, not everyone should be a pilot. That fact makes mass adoption near impossible and that exacerbates the first issue, not being able to utilize economies of scale.

The way I see it, people can’t be expected to operate flying vehicles safely in congested areas, it’s just not a realistic expectation. But I do think there is a route to this Jetsons future. When we actually master self-driving vehicles, when it’s a mature and reliable technology, an expected feature on every new car, when it’s demonstrably safer than any human driver, and when you no longer require a driver’s license to operate the vehicle, at that point we’re finally ready for flying cars; the rest of the technology is already there waiting for us.

Truth be told I have no idea what’s actually popular now, but when fentanyl hit the scene, for years it was being mixed into other drugs as a cheap filler that would also make the drug more potent, faster acting and more addictive.