Make the model scale to be 10000000 (10 million). The sun is a chunky 139 meters in diameter. Earth is 15 km (9 miles) away. Pluto is 587 km (365 miles) away. The speed of light is 107 kph (67 mph).
Alpha Centauri is 4.1 million km (2.5 million miles) away... that is 10 times the earth moon distance.
Another comparison... Voyager 1 is moving at 30 light minutes per year. (Andromeda galaxy is approaching the Milky Way at 3.2 light hours per year)
At Voyager 1's velocity, it would take ~456 million years to reach the heart of the Milky Way (Sagittarius A*), some ~26,000 light-years away. That's roughly the same amount of time that has passed since the Ordovician–Silurian extinction, when volcanic eruptions released enough carbon dioxide to heat up the planet and deoxygenate the oceans, resulting in the asphyxiation of aquatic species (about 85% of all life was snuffed out). The oceans remained deoxygenated for more than three million years.
I believe there's a semi-common sci-fi construct to send probes containing human brain dumps running on silicon to these far away star systems. Just hit pause until a week before arrival :).
If you can figure out a way to apply thrust that doesn't require you to lug mass with you and throw it out the back of your spacecraft you will open up the stars to exploration. If not the rocket equation will wreck your plans every time.
>If you can figure out a way to apply thrust that doesn't require you to lug mass with you and throw it out the back of your spacecraft you will open up the stars to exploration
This is also called "Everything we know about physics is so radically wrong that it shouldn't be possible for us to make the predictions we do"
Reactionless drives are not physical, or if they are physically possible, will have such unique quirks and constraints as to be meaningless outside of some insane laboratory setup.
For example, making very high weight new atoms that have never existed in the universe before is physically possible, but the realities of making those atoms and their nuclear instability means it doesn't matter even if a super heavy element has some crazy properties that we would like to exploit, because there will never be enough of that element to make anything out of. The "rules" of atoms should still work well above 180 protons, but other physics makes that meaningless.
Without reactionless drives, interstellar travel is so physically difficult to be essentially impossible, and no amount of engineering or cleverness can change that.
If there are creatures who could live longer than that, perhaps by hibernating or just having really long lifetimes, space exploration is feasible with slow craft.
75k years of reliable operation for complex machines operating in a hostile environment is a different story. This includes organic life. You can't just bottle everything up and wake up thousands of years in the future, you will be under constant bombardment by high energy particles, micrometeorites, and the relentless cold vacuum of space with no access to new raw material or energy for almost the entire trip.
If you can make that kind of trip the question becomes why bother? You could have used the same technology (actually a much easier version of the tech since you will have access to external resources and don't need to attach enormous engines to get it moving and then stopping at the destination) to use the almost unlimited space in your home solar system instead.
Unless your sun is literally about to explode it is hard to make the argument for the incredibly difficult and long journey to a neighboring solar system.
Waste is inherently problematic, regardless of how we manage it. While burning plastic for energy might seem like a solution, it's not ideal. We can generate clean electricity through other means that are cheaper and less polluting. Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change. Ultimately, the best approach is to minimize waste generation in the first place, as this prevents both environmental harm and the need for costly and imperfect solutions.
> Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change
This is not axiomatic. The gases from the incineration can be put into productive use (cf. Vienna heating and providing hot water off of their incinerator), and the harmful stuff can be filtered (cf. Vienna where the incinerator is in a dense urban area, and an architectural masterpiece).
Yes they exist and they work. However to build them requires stringent regulations to make them a viable cost solution.
If it is ok to blow out the toxic smoke the high end solution will not be built.
The best thing is still avoiding waste.
> However to build them requires stringent regulations to make them a viable cost solution
In the US, the EPA has had regulations around this since the late 70's; it's a cost of doing business at this point, not a wild new theoretical rule framework.
It does seem like we are producing an unnecessarily large amount of waste, but the last sentence does not come of as constructive to me, because it doesn't offer any concrete action we can take towards a goal of reducing waste. Instead if comes of as sidestepping the issue of dealing with the waste we have.
I'll pitch in. Standardize on a strict set of allowed mixtures of plastics (and possibly even colors!). Not just "PP", "ABS" and so on, but exact formulas.
Also, keep the set of allowed formules small.
This will serve two purposes, first, allow plastics to be actually recycled to a greater extent. Now, plastics are very much "mystery" items.
Second, it will reduce the amount of harmful and toxic additives in plastics.
Somehow we also need to stop producing so much junk, electronics which is not durable, packing material within packing material and so on. The externalised costs of so many things are huge, we need to somehow de-externalise the costs.
Prohibit importing non-compliant goods. Do compliance checking in ports and punish local importers, both companies and their owners/executives, for noncompliance.
I don't think the political will to do this exists. From the perspective of the state we care way more about drugs than we do about plastics, but people have been ordering asthma drugs, psychedelics, stimulants, steroids, and retinoids from Indian pharmacies successfully for at least a decade now, which makes me think that it's a hard problem to solve at scale.
I don't think the political will exists do much of anything which is hard, definitely not to coördinate laws on plastics. But to compare import of stimulants to plastics... I don't think it's the same thing. Nobody is going to gray import a plastic toothbrush from China just to get that extra cadmium.
It comes down to the 3 Rs: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. There's a reason Recycle is the last word in that mantra. It's the most expensive of the three things a person can do. The other two are about habits, and those really are things you have to just decide you want to change.
However what I couldn't find was how much overall waste consumers create vs other sources, just this:
And it seems to imply that consumer behavior has little direct effect on the overall amount of waste we humans produce. Like, how many people would have to stop drinking canned beverages to see a decrease in bauxite tailings? Probably an unrealistic amount.
Another way of looking at it, is that your vision is not constructive, because you wave away the real solution as "not actionable". Parent does not propose concrete action, but neither do you. We can have meaningful discussion without everything having to be accompanied by a five-step plan.
For actionable reduction of waste, just look at how Europe has a comparable life style as the US, whilst using less resources and emitting less GHG equivalent. Not placing the EU on a pedestal. Just saying that reduction is not just possible, it's being done, as we speak. But it requires changes and is for sure a harder sell than "no need to change any habits, technology will save us".
Many if not all "large" (50k) cities in Sweden burn their trash for district heating, we filter most bad stuff out with filters, it still releases CO2, but burning it means it won't start producing methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas.
Europe also doesn't tax "light trucks" as if they were bicycles nor force people into cars to survive.
The American mindset "I do what I do and you do what you do" worked in the 60s and 70s when people were unaware they're fucking the planet (as hard as they are), but I can't help but look down on wasteful people, they're subsidized by people doing their part (or continents doing their part)
No not trust it google maps either. There is a crossroads that is wrong in Google near my house and it is right in OSM. In fact... I did fix it but I will not report about the error to Google ;-)
I am not a Google employee. Why should I work to fix their product? I prefer to help potentially thousands of people by helping a non-profit like openstreemaps
Podman v3 is compatible with docker-compose (but not yet swarm mode, FWIU), has a socket and a daemon that services it.
Buildah (`podman buildx`, `buildah bud --arch arm64`) just gained multiarch build support; so also building arm64 containers from the same Dockerfile is easy now.
https://github.com/containers/buildah/issues/1590
IDK what BuildKit features should be added to Buildah, too?
