You want a telescope in each hemisphere to get full sky coverage.

The physical construction will be by a variety of suppliers, everything from basic excavation and concrete to very fancy optics. It won't be just one company. It also won't start for years, as they haven't even settled where to build it. In the mean time you can work on other telescopes currently under construction.

The original bitcoin was intended to be a proof-of-concept experiment. It deliberately had a finite circulation to prevent inflation, and a declining block reward (which is where new bitcoins come from) to encourage early miners to participate and secure the blockchain.

New and improved versions were supposed to remedy whatever problems were exposed by the original. For example, a 1 MB block size turned out to be too restrictive once many people started using it.

New cryptocoins do exist, but way too many of them. 80% of the crypto market is represented by 6 coins, and the other 23,000 account for 20%. Most of them don't do anything new and improved, so we called them "shitcoins" because they "don't do shit" for users.

The so-called "stablecoins", whose value is closely tied to the US dollar, now account for 84% of total crypto trading volume. They are now the currency that people are using day-to-day. The original bitcoin and a few of the others are the "store of value" coins, like gold or real estate for everyone else. Not something you spend now, but hold for later. In fact, I never spent any of the bitcoins I mined. I held them for about 7 years and then sold them at a profit, not unlike I did with various homes and other property during my life.

NOTE: Despite my good experiences with Bitcoin, I now warn people away from crypto as a whole because it has too many scams and losses from hacks.

> "what are the use cases for this that don't include serious money getting involved?"

What people were trying to do back then was get it accepted as an alternate currency. It would be used for things like international money transfer, where the fees are very high, or online purchases, which wasn't near as developed as it is today. I used it as fundraising for my project, like GoFundMe but without fees.

Another proposed use was microtransactions, since bitcoins are divisible to 8 decimal places (0.01 microbitcoins). That would be for things like reading one article, without subscribing to an entire newspaper or magazine.

It was also assumed back then that the original Bitcoin was in no way "production software". It was supposed to be a rough proof-of-concept of a distributed time-stamp and record-keeping ledger (the blockchain). As it turned out, it became the dominant cryptocoin and the code never evolved much. All the evolution since then came from " altcoins" (other cryptocoins).

> "uh, I dunno, something something revolution?"

You either have never seen or are making fun of the forums where all of this was discussed, including several subreddits on this site.

It was a max structural load test, so it wasn't supposed to fail. Could be anything from a popped valve to crushed soda can. We need more details.

It wasn't at the start. I was an early bitcoin miner (2011), and people were exploring the uses of digital currency. But it rapidly attracted scams and fraud once serious money was involved, due to transactions being hard to trace and irreversible. So it ended up like this

Why fly when you can just use a 3D Zoom booth? That's a cubicle size device that uses multiple cameras and projectors to provide a 3D experience.

They have a contract to study the use of their Starship rocket for fast wartime logistics. Studies are way less expensive than doing what you are studying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQzH_j1-FjE

None of that is going to happen. Renewables will take over because the profit motive is the most powerful force in our modern world.

And you are wrong about battery plants. Look up the Moss Landing plant in California. They replaced 5 of 7 natural gas units with two battery farms (one in the turbine hall, and the other in what was the parking lot). The two most efficient NG units were kept as backup/peaker units.

> Which would've worked had this happened a decade or two ago.

Imagining an alternate past is a waste of time, unless you have a time machine. The future is all we can affect.

The Vogtle plant expansion in Georgia (from 2 to 4 reactors), is costing three times as much per delivered kWh as solar. That's why there's no new nuclear planned in the US.

New nuclear, like small modular reactors, will have to prove they are cheaper, not promise it, because nuclear promises have all failed to come in at budget.

> Last I checked, and it wasn't that long ago, we were still adding fossil fuel burning over and above what we were burning before.

Coal, oil, and natural gas were about level between 2018 and 2021. Solar and wind increased about 50% in those years, but they are still relatively small (4.3% of global energy in '21)

> The silicon is downcycled to steel alloying or similar industrial use.

There is no need to do that. Used solar cells are purer silicon than what comes out of carbothermal reduction of quartz sand to 98.5% pure silicon metal. So you can throw them into the process at that point. The reduction to metal is very energy intensive, so recycling will reduce the energy to make new panels.

They probably are not doing it yet because the volume is so low. Silicon steel is used in transformers and motors, and is even less picky about impurities. So they would just throw the old cells in.

Nearly all of silicon solar panels can be recycled. The main materials are aluminum, glass, sometimes plastic, silicon metal, and copper. The effective life of a panel is 100 years, but none of them are that old yet. 99.9% are less than 22 years old, and 50% are less than 3 years old. So few are being recycled because they aren't old enough yet.

Because these things take time. For example, over the last 12 years, solar and wind have been squeezing out coal and gas as far as new power plants. But there were already a lot of old power plants, and not all of them have been shut down yet.

> Not this slow plodding shit.

You are not describing reality. Solar energy doubled from 2016 to 2019, and doubled again by 2022. That's not plodding, it is exponential growth.

Since 1992 solar increased by a factor of 10,000. It just took time to get the prices down and production up. Right now, solar manufacturers are building up their supply chain for another doubling of production rate.

We are close to the turning point. In a few years, new fossil-powered vehicle production will fall below old fossil vehicle retirement. That means the total fossil fleet will start shrinking.

It takes a while to ramp up production of new technology, but we are getting there.

> We need to add batteries.

Funny thing, that. New US storage increased from 4.9 to 8.9 GW over the past 12 months. Old storage is pumped hydro, which stayed the same at 23 GW

Texas has the most wind and solar of any state in the US. One reason is they have been set up to lease property for oil and gas for a long time. Switching to leasing for wind and solar is straightforward. The land-owners only care that their lease checks clear.

"Other Energy Storage" i.e not pumped hydro, which has been around for decades, reached nearly 9 GW this January. That's nearly double what it was 12 months earlier. To the extent regular hydro is available, it can act as storage by saving the water behind the dam when other renewables are running. The US also has nuclear supplying around 19% of utility power.

The first iron-air (reversible rust) battery plant has started construction in West Virginia. I ron is much cheaper than lithium, but also much heavier. So these will be stationary batteries. The first version is designed for 100 hour run time, vs. about 4 hours for Lithium-ion.

It will still take work to break our fossil fuel addiction, but there are solutions coming along in the near future.

Even low-grade hobby telescopes are polished to 1/16 micron (2.5 millionths of an inch). Serious telescopes are several times more accurate. Optics inherently have to be very precise.

...and pick up any germs from the last hundred people to touch it. I prefer to boop my credit card if it can do wireless payment.

Save the Internet Archive - to your hard drive :-). I've done thousands of books that way in the course of my personal research.

The popular "pirate" sites are better at new and popular stuff, while the IA is better at old and obscure material. They are not the same.

Unknown. This asteroid was only discovered a month ago. To make long-term predictions you need to know the current orbit precisely. It hasn't been watched long enough to do that yet. The close pass will help. They can use radar to get some very good measurements

> And we'll definitely not find ones in time without a better search and detection program.

There are already dedicated telescopes like Atlas. A much bigger survey telescope is under construction, the Rubin Observatory. It is expected to increase discoveries by a factor of 10.