Seret

I always considered this the part they'd be most likely to get sorted. Mars One is highly likely to result in a TV programme, but highly unlikely to result in anything going to Mars IMO. They're long on hype and short on spaceflight experience, but the hype part works just fine for making TV.

Likely to be highly unpopular with the troops.

Even that definition fails in some cases though, plenty of civilised societies lacked writing. Take the Zulus and other southern African cultures, or the Polynesians of Hawaii or New Zealand. These were highly organised, well stratified feudal societies with specialised labour and organised warfare. The problem with all the definitions is we're working retroactively. We have an idea of the cultures we consider "civilised" (normally due to the similarity or direct lineage to ourselves) and we search for a common denominator to link them all. If you're looking for a really archaic or even non-human civilisation then a definition based on proximity or similarity to ourselves becomes less useful IMO.

Because the yardsticks are a bit arbitrary. If you pick the ones I mentioned, they are civilised. The point isn't really to try and make the case for ant civilisation, but to point how vague the definition of civilisation is. It's a description that we've made up, we use it to congratulate ourselves at how different and special we are.

Not really a problem Aghanim. For a start nobody has anywhere near the level of installed PV where that could become a problem. Second of all grids can manage variability of supply just as easily as they can manage variability of demand. If was a large amount of solar power other large generators could be taken offline. If it was due to embedded generation that the grid couldn't control then the individual inverters would simply drop offline once the frequency went out of range.

Civilisation is hard to define exactly, advanced civilisation is impossible because the term advanced is entirely subjective. The only sensible definition to run with would be one that is roughly comparable to ours. Personally what I'd call advanced is a culture that had cities with infrastructure (roads and sewers), agriculture, an administrative class, writing and technology. Technology I would define as the use of tools to make other tools.

They have, at least as a concept car: Jaguar C-X75

Common misconception. The queens aren't in command of anything. Their only job is to produce eggs. Ants don't have a command structure, they're a superorganism. There aren't any individuals that are responsible for processing information and making decisions, no single ant is capable of that kind of thinking. Sure, it's fine to describe their behaviour. But ascribing concepts like sacrifice and revenge to instinctive behaviour is anthropomorphising. The older sicker ants don't sacrifice themselves because they understand the concept of sacrifice, they do it because they're genetically programmed to. This in fact is the whole problem with trying to pin civilisation on ants, as pretty much by definition civilisation is the point where you're no longer behaving strictly on an instinctive subsistence level.

Normally they're not. Hub motors are cool, but they have problems with ride quality due to the high unsprung mass. Series hybrids (the kind you're talking about) like the Honda Insight still only use one electric motor and a normal final drive. Most (all?) hybrids on the road do still use a transmission, too.

I'm with you on the general idea. Some of the most common yardsticks of early civilisation are agriculture, communal living, and specialisation of labour; by those standards ants are indeed civilised. However I do disagree with some of your points: ants don't have a leadership structure, there are no ants that are in command of the others. It's also highly dubious they have any concept of sacrifice and revenge (they don't seem to have any awareness of individuality that would make sacrifice relevant). Tool use is also going a bit far IMO.

Right before the oil price shocks starting in '73, ouch. Bet they lost huge money on that. There's an oil-fired station near me too, but I've never once seen it running. AFAIK the only reason it's still open is because it's got OCGTs, so could black-start. The EU directives on fossil fuel plants effectively mean almost all the remaining old ones will be shutting down next year.

Just to put some numbers on it, assuming your phone uses about 1W, to get five years of life out of it you're looking at about 45kWh (160-ish MJ). If you limit yourself to about 100g for your storage system you need something with an energy density of about 1600MJ kg-1. Power is low enough we don't need to worry about power density. Looking at tables of energy densities (such as this and this) then all battery technologies and all known liquid fuels are out the window. You'd need to either radically reduce power consumption or you're looking at nuclear fuels to hit your energy density target, and miniaturising those seems a bit implausible.

They are electronics grade silicon, but I stand corrected about the payback time. Fraunhofer Institute is a credible source. Very few PV systems use batteries. The vast majority of PV is grid-tied, they use the grid as "storage", exporting when there's an excess and importing to make up any shortfall. There's demand for practical energy storage systems for on-grid, but the bottom line is that none of the available technologies are cheaper than just using the grid. Some people do store their excess PV as heat, diverting it to an immersion heater for DHW. It's really only folks that are completely off-grid that use batteries.

England's actually pretty flat, the Salisbury plain where Stonehenge especially so. Low rolling hills at the worst. Tbh, I'd be surprised if they didn't move the stones by water as much as they could. From where the bluestones were quarried in Wales they could have brought them up across the Bristol channel and up the Avon. I can certainly see neolithic builders being able to move them by river at least, the sea might be stretching it a bit.

The problem is that it's hard to imagine any situation where walking around on it would be of any use to us. Even if you invoke magical future-tech with advanced capabilities that just means that the same technology could be applied to a robot that would make it even more capable than a human for less cost and risk.

How exactly does one make something thousands of degrees below zero?

We've also built some things out of natural materials in geologically stable areas. The Mount Rushmore monument in the U.S., for example. That's going to be there for a long, long time.

You may well do, but if so it would make you somewhat atypical. Of Canada's 560ish TWh of annual electricity production, only about 2.3 TWh is generated from fuel oil. That's about 0.5%, which is even lower than the overall world figure of 5%.

As an engineer myself, I highly doubt that. A lot of the so-called problems with the pyramids' construction methods go away when you ask an engineer instead of an archaeologist to look at it. Archaeologists are researchers, they have a different skill set. I saw a doco a while back where they challenged an engineering class from an Egyptian university to crack some of the problems vexing the Egyptologists, such as how to position the roof slabs of a burial chamber. The students nailed it, just by applying an engineering mindset to the problems. And these were just kids, not even experienced civil engineers. There are a whole range of pyramids from different eras that demonstrate increasing sophistication in methods. At no point do they make any unfathomable leaps. They also make numerous huge blunders due to their lack of predictive theories the materials and forces involved. A lot of it was just trial and error. There's nothing mystical about the Egyptian pyramids. They're impressive works, but there's no reason to think they were built using technology more advanced than what we know they had.

Go find a giant creature and run through its legs. Bonus points if you can jump onto its back and ride around on it.

Oil fired plants aren't really economical or clean enough, it's not something we'll be doing in the future. If you want to burn a fossil fuel gas is the least bad option, it burns much cleaner, the efficiency of the plants is higher and the fuel is cheaper. Oil-fired electricity generation is a dinosaur, the only countries using it in any great quantities are the gulf states that have a surplus of cheap oil.

For gaming you always want to run on the bare metal. VMs may include some support for 3D graphics these days, but the performance hit is a big issue. VMs are great for desktop apps, but still suck for gaming. Luckily a dual boot is actually even easier to set up than a VM. If you're new to Linux I'd recommend Ubuntu. KSP runs on it without any issues, and it's really widely supported. Why make life difficult for yourself if you're only interested in using it as a platform for one game?

I know, I was just making the point that running an internal combustion engine on CNG was pretty trivial, whether it's part of a hybrid drivetrain or not.

Whatever you feel confident piloting! Personally I would just use main engines. Target the destination and use the navball. Minmus is pretty forgiving for wonky landings, and there's no reason you couldn't do several tentative little hops to get there.

That's actually not a novel business model in the EV space, Renault sell all their (non-swap) EVs with leased batteries. Better Place was always a bit of a long shot. Fundamental infrastructure changes like that need a lot of support from manufacturers and government to get traction. A lot of alternative vehicle propulsion systems like this fail because of the chicken-and-egg infrastructure problem. That's not to say it's impossible, some countries have healthy CNG, LPG or ethanol infrastructures, so there's no reason a hydrogen or battery swap infrastructure is out of the question. It's just really risky for the pioneers, as Better Place showed. Absolutely. Dual-fuel ICE vehicles that can switch on the fly from petrol to CNG or LPG are also common in some places.