Tag: images

Mauled Tourist

wolf packs have survived and even thrived in New York’s labyrinthine tunnels, emerging in local parks only on occasion to hunt in the moonlight for live prey. In fact, the NYPD chalks up the majority of missing tourist reports each year to the city’s subterranean canine inhabitants. Today, The Ed Koch Wolf Foundation in partnership with the NYC Fellowship is erecting monuments in city parks to serve as cautionary reminders to out-of-town visitors. When in NYC, visit our many beautiful green districts. Just let these stunning statues remind you as to why we close our parks at night.

Airlines gone by 2060

Starting around 2030, SpaceX reusable Starship rockets will start providing a replacement for long international flights. The speed will be increased 20x. It will be anywhere in the world in 1 hour. SpaceX will be able to have 1000 people in reclined seating arrangements. The cost will be about $500-1000 per seat per flight. The key enabling factor is increasing the safety of rockets.

SpaceX success in this area would cripple the main financial strength of existing airlines. Business travel and first-class travel and international flights will be replaced with reusable rockets.

A bit more detail:

The reality of SpaceX mass production rockets is unfolding before our eyes. SpaceX Starships will cost over 10x less than current cargo planes, have over 2x the range and will be 30x faster. These massive advantages will give SpaceX dominance of the cargo business.

Not only that, they may also become price competitive by weight. Air freight is 1-5$ per KG, Starship could get to 10$ / KG to LEO, presumably less for ballistic flights. With airlines struggling in general, this could be a huge opening, and remodel the world economy for true just in time delivery.

America’s aerospace industry is regenerating:

If there ever was an example of Schumpeter’s creative destruction, this is it. Traditional aerospace companies have a hoard of capital and talent, providing poor returns to customers. Startups are siphoning the best talent and raising money. Market potential and technology are converging to create an ecosystem that looks more like the aerospace industry pre-1970, including the exploding prototypes, crazy ideas, and swarms of new companies. That aerospace industry took us from the first flight to the moon in ~65 years. The latest batch yearns to take us further.

2022-04-15: If airlines survive, here’s a look at the state of hypersonic flight.

High-speed flight is no longer a game of national prestige, subject to the whims of politics. It’s become the domain of private industry, where the technology is mature enough that entrepreneurs can focus on designs that reduce business risk. In the next decade we anticipate commercial high-speed flight will return to the market, regulations around overland sonic boom will be changed thanks to NASA’s X-59 program, and hypersonic technologies will transition from military to civilian flight. The future is faster!

AR Tabletop

Tilt5’s approach to AR is quite different from the others you’ve seen. The glasses require you place an inexpensive sheet of retroreflector on a surface (table, wall or stand) and it can display anything in 3D where that surface is. Real world objects can then be placed on the table and mix with the virtual ones. This may seem quite limiting, it doesn’t try to paint things on top of the arbitrary world like Magic Leap, but it has some big advantages because of this method:

Burning Man traces

Burning Man bills itself as the biggest “Leave No Trace” event in the world. This means that after revelers have dismantled the geodesic domes, giant duckies, and steampunk ships that form their temporary city in Nevada, they get down on their hands and knees to scour the white alkaline sand for every last cigarette butt and sequin. But in the end, 80k people still leave a mark. “Sure, by October, there’s no trash left on the surface of the Black Rock Desert. But boy, are there a lot of traces.”

Europa mission

NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will conduct detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter’s moon Europa to see whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life. The mission will carry a highly capable, radiation-tolerant spacecraft that will perform repeated close flybys of the icy moon from a long, looping orbit around Jupiter. The payload of selected science instruments includes cameras and spectrometers to produce high-resolution images of Europa’s surface and determine its composition. An ice penetrating radar will determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and search for subsurface lakes similar to those beneath Antarctica. The mission also will carry a magnetometer to measure strength and direction of the moon’s magnetic field, which will allow scientists to determine the depth and salinity of its ocean.

The Greening Earth

The earth is getting greener, in large part due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Surprisingly, however, another driver is programs in China to increase and conserve forests and more intensive use of cropland in India.

2022-07-21: While Amazon deforestation continues, in other places it is reforestation.

England has 2x the amount of forestland in the past 150 years, and now has as much land dedicated to forests as the year 1350.

Life sciences progress

Academia has a lot of problems and it could work much better. However, these problems are not as catastrophic as an outside perspective would suggest. My (contrarian, I guess) intuition is that scientific progress in biology is not slowing down. Specific parts of academia that seem to be problematic: rigid, punishing for deviation, career progression; peer review; need to constantly fundraise for professors. Parts that seem to be less of a problem than I initially thought: short-termism; lack of funding for young scientists.

2022-06-02: A contrarian perspective

Stepping back, I’m claiming that science is getting harder, in the sense that it is increasingly challenging to make discoveries that have comparable impact to the ones in the past. Diverse groups – the Nobel nominators, contemporary surveyed scientists, academics, and inventors – all seem to have an increasing preference for the work of the past, relative to the present. And looking at growth in the number of topics covered by scientists also suggests it has become harder to make forward progress.