Because they don’t need warp drive and tritanium…

Maybe instead of giving in to your prejudices, (like you think only your parents do), why … don’t you look it up?

How’s that coming along?

https://eepower.com/news/pge-start-up-solaren-corp-plan-to-beam-solar-power-from-space/

Oh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaren

" Solaren has since announced that the contract with PG&E has been forgone"

This is just Space Nuttery. Never, ever, EVER, going to work. Strictly sci-fi.

Electrical, yes. Oil is a feedstock for pretty much anything you can see in your house.

Please fertilize modern agri-business with electricity.

I’ll wait.

In the meantime, try the trick of flying across the Atlantic in 6 hours with batteries.

No doubt we’ll have electricity for as long as we can, but… the underlying civilization that uses it will not look a thing like what we have now.

Do you not already see housing supply issues, inflation, war everywhere?

So does the apostrophe. That wasn’t it.

Yup, the fossil fuel foundation that enabled us to reach 10 billion is going away. Sunshine and puppies won’t sustain 10 billion eaters.

The carrying capacity of a renewable energy system is not the same as a system that uses massive amounts of surplus energy coming from the ground.

It’s lower. Far far lower. And getting there will be ugly, and your time frame is correct IMO.

I just wanted to generate a simple pulse from a switch press. Needless to say since I needed a breadboard anyway, I just popped in a 74LS123 with a resistor and a capacitor. I couldn’t even begin to understand what I needed to get that pulse from an Arduino. And I used to program PICs bare metal. It’s like the complexity traded places. On the PIC, the tools and process are dead simple. But writing the code for the little monsters required understanding every opcode and peripheral and how they interact. It looks like on the Arduino, I can just type sleep(5000) but to set up the whole thing to get there is where the complexity lies.

I tried to get into the whole Arduino thing as a Gen Xer. I couldn’t believe the complexity and back story you need to know before getting started. Totally baffled by the whole thing. Just give me a processor, some memory and a serial port. Why do I need an IDE, drivers, a bootloader, fifteen different kinds of whatevers I don’t understand, yes, I am burned out, where are the Doritos?

Which means the powers-that-be have been using it for years already. Remember when people called us paranoid for believing in Echelon in the '80s?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

Maybe it’s the one with multiple beams? Although I can see that for reading but not writing.

Ever have a hard drive with the head stepper motor visible outside?

Well they’re going to suddenly see a lot of transexual porn streaming through Antarctica starting… >click!< NOW.

I’ve got one called the Porn Loopback Hole, wanna see?

I fed AI all my Lemmy posts and asked it for a portrait of the artist. Not bad, down to my 6 fingers.

Well I agree that there have been great advances in materials. But nothing like sci-fi materials like “plasteel” or dilithium or various magical materials.

The periodic table of elements is it. There’s nothing else. Electromagnetic forces and electron orbitals. That’s it.

For example, re-reading some Larry Niven ARM stories, one of the police officers works in the asteroid belt in some hollowed out large asteroid. Various magical technologies like fusion drives are just assumed to be simple and easy, and there are so many people mining asteroids they’re starting their own civilization.

In the meantime there’s one computer handling the police files and it’s in the basement, as the police talk to each other on analog radios I guess.

In the rah-rah 1960s Space Age, it was assumed that the whole horse->car->airplane->rocket->Moon chain of events that had just happened was going to keep going. Instead it very much stopped and something else kept getting better.

Why? It’s quite simple, it’s about energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

In other words, we can’t keep going up on the energy scale. It stopped with kerosene in jet engines and uranium in nuclear reactors.

Information, however, requires a trivial amount of energy to manipulate, and our entire progress in the last 50 years was about going DOWN on the energy scale by shrinking transistors by factors of millions.

And of course, the math that goes with being able to make sense of the structures that you can make with millions and billions of transistors on a single chip.

In conclusion, no one is going anywhere, and space is a dead, radiation-blasted hell with nothing in it. No space colonies, no Moon bases, no asteroid mining. The future is here, on this planet.

Thank you for your attention to this vital topic.

Shut up and get me my burger.

Old sci-fi assumed progress in the physical world, of endless progress in speed or materials.

Instead we got near endless progress in the processing of information while we live in houses made of trees, drive cars on rubber tires, and eat animals. Much like before. Sure, we have jets, but even they work pretty much the same way as 50 years ago. Incremental progress, sure, but no warp drive, eh?

Doctors try to save everyone, even the 0.01%. Hell, the 0.01% are actually a huge focu**s.

BULLSHIT

And you’re about as dense as neutronium if you don’t get it.

Not sure what the problem is with that approach, I’m looking for a kitchen cabinet, not a personal expression of the artist’s lived experience as a trans-disabled Iberian who grew up as the only rich kid in the holler in the Appalachians, just build me a kitchen cabinet.