> The prospect of cities with much less air pollution is wonderful.

For cities with a dense urban core (of which mine, Philly, certainly is) I'm really hoping we lean in on bikes (electric or not) moreso than electric cars. Even less carbon-intensive to produce, and in a city with this level of density it's shocking how quickly you can get around by bike. I would go so far as to say it's often faster than driving if you consider the time you spend looking for parking.

It's just that with our current car-centric infrastructure, it's way too dangerous.

Plus with some e-bikes, you can detach the battery and carry it with you indoors to charge it back up. Try that with an electric car!

In Hong Kong, a bit denser than Philly (I googled for giggles: HK is 6300 p/km2, Philly is 4500 p/km, still surprisingly high), we have, I think, reached your no-car target simply because it's unthinkable people get cars when space is so rare and expensive (people here do mortgages to buy 200k USD parkings as retirement investment when they cant buy a home).

Bicycle is non existent though, what is really different from my low density european experience is the amount and low cost of traditional taxis (Uber gave up and now is a normal taxi provider here because they cant beat their price - https://www.uber.com/en-HK/blog/introducing-uber-taxi/ ) and the insane quality of the metro and bus networks (we didnt have double deckers every 5 minutes in my city in Normandy, we were lucky if the schedule was remotely accurate)

I ve seen some other places more dense that american cities explode in little motor bikes (Taipei, Kuala Lumpur), but that depends a lot on regulation.

I think bike use would pick up if they had dedicated infrastructure in the city. They seem more popular in the suburbs (NT) where there are some dedicated lanes.

Fascinating, why are taxi prices so low in HK? Competition? I knew that public transit there is one of the best.

Taxi prices and permits are government regulated so there's no free market competition per se. The density of urban areas and the fact that people generally don't own cars help quite a bit since taxis are considered (somewhat) part of the public transport system and hence often utilized by the public (which I suppose means that taxi drivers idle less and this drives down the cost?) The cars are generally cheap (but reasonably sturdy) Toyotas, often old models, so the price of the vehicle doesn't drive up the costs. (I recall some places use luxury brands?)

Interestingly quite a few taxi drivers drive a taxi not so much for the money (it always helps) but rather to ward off boredom post-retirement (flipping properties in HK used to be almost as profitable as flipping crypto). This might be "competition" of sorts but not sure. I think drivers generally make slightly higher than median income if they work long hours, but don't know how it compares with other places.

The service level is generally shit though, some drivers literally refuse to make money if they deem your request a bit out of the ordinary (eg. refusing to take you for a short ride even if the fare per distance is higher than that of a long distance ride).

On the other hand, a bike-centric city would not be very accessible to people with disabilities. Having something in between, maybe trains or small electric buses, would be ideal IMO.

That really depends on the disability. If you use a mobility scooter for example, particularly one of the faster ones, that's going to drive much more smoothly on a bike path than on the sidewalk (where the pavement is often uneven, you have to deal with the curb every block, etc). For that matter, not everyone can drive either. Some disabilities result in your license being taken away; for example, you may not be able to drive if you're prone to seizures. But you may be able to cycle!

If bike infrastructure is done well, it should be accessible enough that those disabled people who can ride a bike are able to use it: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jan/02/cambridge-dis...

Now, you're right that people with some disabilities will not be able to cycle, or will not require a mobility scooter. (Although if you want one and can't afford it, that's also a problem, and I believe a common one here? Our healthcare system...) It's still important to have various accessible modes of transportation. Trains can be a good option here, though it's important that they have level boarding for wheelchair users and that all stations are likewise accessible. (Philly's unfortunately are not. The City Hall station reconstruction is long overdue.)

And some people may always still need a car due to their disability! In the Netherlands, they have something called the Canta, which is a microcar specifically for people with disabilities that's small enough to operate on bike paths and can be parked on the sidewalk: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canta_(vehicle)

And yes, some may need a full-sized vehicle as well; it's worth replacing some parking spaces with disabled parking spaces to accommodate that case.

My point, though, is that our car-centric city designs in the US don't accommodate everyone either! We often consider it to be the default out of inertia, but it's important to remember that not everyone can drive a car, and in a car-dependent area that's a recipe for social isolation. Our cities should be designed such that everyone is able to get around quickly and safely.

I can neither drive nor bike (safely enough) because my vision is too poor. I‘m happy to walk for a long time (anything under an hour), but any larger city should have trams imho.

However, bicyclists need to get their shit together in terms of pedestrian respect and traffic rules. I can cross a street pretty easily but crossing a busy bike path is a real challenge. I‘m sure we will figure it out in due time.

It also seems that the entire sidewalk is fair game for bicycle parking, which is a disaster for people navigating with a cane, but that can be solved with dedicated bicycle parking.

Context: I'm a cyclist that prefers no bike-specific infrastructure in downtown cores, but I think your pain is caused by (1) no dedicated bike facilities (lanes, parking, signaling, etc) and (2) inconsiderate or just ignorant cyclists. Turns out a bicycle doesn't magically transform the jerks nor the clueless into decent, aware people (I believe they do help though!)

I live in a city (Münster, Germany) that has extensive bike path infrastructure, but as far as I can tell, there is no established system for pedestrian crossings on bike paths other than "take care".

I would think that at a traffic light, bicycles should act the same as cars, but this just doesn‘t happen at all. I‘m lucky if bicyclists don‘t blast straight through a zebra crossing. It feels especially cruel for traffic lights that are placed between the bike path and street yet require a button press.

So it‘s two things: inconsiderate cyclists and and no common pedestrian crossing system on bike paths (or clarity on rules at existing street crossings).

That Canta car is pretty cool, I've never seen that before. Totally agree about car-centric problems. I grew up in the suburbs and lived near a lot of stroads. Requiring a car to do anything is such a stressful way to live.

Not Just Bikes has a nice video on the Canta and things like it if you'd like to see them in action: https://youtu.be/B9ly7JjqEb0

> Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it.

I wish to see this kind of positivity around me more often. I have worked with a colleague or two in the past who viewed problems as something that needed to be solved, and were a step or two ahead of the rest of us in terms of finding solutions. Lately, I see that the default reaction to problems is to complain. Don't get me wrong... complaining is fine if it leads to action, but isn't it rare.

I don't understand how it is possible to still have this view of the problem. All the resources I am aware of that seem backed by facts and science are currently forecasting an utter disaster. I think I'm someone with a rather positive attitude in life and as you said I always try to look at solutions rather than just complain. In fact I'm doing rather well at the personal level. But in the case of the environmental crisis (which isn't limited to a climate crisis), I honestly can't see how it's going to work. In the optimistic camp all I see so far is wishful thinking.

> Our civilization will make the transition. It will be messy and could have been much less painful but we will do it.

It's all about what this mess and pain is going to be about. If that means 99% of the world population dying in horrendous circumstances, that doesn't qualify as a success to me. The fact that a handful of privileged people will manage to get through and still have cars and smartphones isn't really a relief.

> If that means 99% of the world population dying in horrendous circumstances

Right here, here is a sign that you are reading quite extreme literature. More importantly: Unbalanced, uncriticized literature.

Scientific studies don’t only need to seem backed up by facts, they also need to be criticized to ensure the facts were not cherry-picked.

Studying science in the current political climate is like saving paintings during a revolution.

I pulled that number as an exaggeration to illustrate the fact that even if "our civilization" survives (whatever it may mean), it doesn't mean things are going to be OK. Even if you make that 50% it's still not great news in my book.

I've read Dire Predictions written by members of the IPCC, the famous Limits to Growth and I follow the works of Jancovici, a French engineer specialized in these issues (here is a talk in English he did for MIT Media Lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA ) Do those qualify as biased sources to you?

> Do those qualify as biased sources to you?

Potentially yes. Everyone can be biased. Do they share a common interest or trait? They do.

I have been a fan of Jancovici in 2006. I see through his game now. He’s the master of correlations and he’s sorely lacking causations. Because causations at global scale are hard to demonstrate, short of actually doing global-scale experiments, which we can’t do.

Another aspect is that we citizen can’t measure it, so it’s hard to discuss on something that we can’t see (It’s the Covid effect). Another is that we’re planning on literally playing chemists with the Earth’s atmosphere composition, despite just having concluded that large-scale chemical experiments are to be avoided. One last point is Janco divides emissions by the number of people on Earth, which is a heavily-loaded formula with extremely bad side effects (but has been approved by UN), such as giving advantage to countries who overpopulate, which Janco himself demonstrates is bad, but he doesn’t see that because he’s under his own ideology. The EU follows and in June it plans to vote an increase of population of 12% by 2030 (through external growth). It feel like all our efforts will reduce global emissions by 5% or 10% only to be cancelled by a population increase. So it just seems that they want us to consume less.

It’s a minefield that would be easily influenced by many parties for political gain. I’m not saying global warming doesn’t exist.

> Another aspect is that we citizen can’t measure it, so it’s hard to discuss on something that we can’t see

That was true 20 years ago but not anymore. Glaciers, ice melting on the poles, extreme weather events, air and land pollution, biodiversity collapse, primary commodity shortages... some of which we can observe ourselves and some of which is measured by scientists. And again, it's not only about climate.

> Another is that we’re planning on literally playing chemists with the Earth’s atmosphere composition, despite just having concluded that large-scale chemical experiments are to be avoided.

If you're referring to geoengineering, it sounds like a very bad idea to me as well.

> The EU follows and in June it plans to vote an increase of population of 12% by 2030 (through external growth).

I didn't really get this point about population but I'll do my research. I just hope it's not related to the "Great Replacement" theory. I find it interesting that you didn't mention nuclear power as it's one of the most frequent criticism against him (which seems like a straw man to me).

> I’m not saying global warming doesn’t exist.

OK so if I understand correctly your doubts are more about to what extent global warming is caused by human activities? Or do you agree that it's caused by human activities but you think isn't not going to be as bad as some people say?

> I just hope it's not related to the "Great Replacement" theory.

Would you not envision a hypothesis because you’re afraid of reaching the same conclusion? It’s pretty clear given the quantity of muggings/harassment in my neighborhood (formerly posh CBD) that it’s here, and 67% of French people in average think it’s happening (IPSOS 2021). The only question that raises people’s doubt is, was it intentional.

> Or do you agree it’s caused by human activities but you think it’s not going to be as bad as some people say?

I just despair that the people pushing it are constantly pushing other goals for society, goals that we didn’t approve, that have been kicked out by the main door and coming back through the window.

- Either it exists, and the complementary solution is to depopulate. Clearly the land cannot withstand so many people, and if you also have a humanist goal to offer each person a decent living, then each of them will need to emit for travels, consumption, heating. But that would be incompatible with their other goal which they also want to implement. To see whether people are ideologues using Global Climate Change (GCC) for political gains or whether they are genuinely solely fighting GCC, ask them whether they would be ok to make a concession on their ideology if it meant better fighting GCC. They don’t. They really want to overpopulate the land with people who vote for them, while asking others to do the efforts for climate. Again the only way to durably not weigh too much on this land in EU is to profit from the natural decline of population to lessen the burden on Earth.

- Either those global changes are stronger than us and independent of our atmospheric CO2, after all everything fluctuates naturally, and in 30 years, after limiting the development of the Western countries, they will tell us “We’ve solved it.” Or “You didn’t do enough”, it doesn’t matter since they won’t be here.

I have studied the science side of other similar topics and I can confirm it is possible to reach wrong scientific solutions for political gain, at a massive university/researchers scale, convincing everyone from the lowerclass to the world leaders. It wouldn’t be the first time.

So, if someone uses fear and the sense of urgency to trigger an action from you that severely hampers your life, it’s important to find its opposite and study it too.

One thing which is clear, the people currently pushing are not going to solve it.

OK, I better understand your point of view now. Thank you for the respectful conversation.

So I'm (1) all for green energy, and (2) not very knowledgeable about climate issues so I defer to experts. However, I feel skeptical about climate forecasts because there is a long (and rarely mentioned) track record of dire predictions that never came true.

In 1970, scientists predicted that we would be in a new ice age by the 21st century. In 1988, scientists predicted that rising sea levels would cover every island in the Indian ocean by 2018. In 2004, they predicted that Britain would be "plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020".

By all means, we should take meaningful steps towards cleaner energy, because it's better overall. But the idea that we're on the verge of an apocalyptic disaster...no, I just can't get behind that.

According to the IPCC, climate change will not lead to apocalyptic results. There will be discomfort and further destruction of the environment, but that's as much as is telegraphed by bulk of climate scientists.

It's still imperative that changes be made, but soothsaying is irrational and therefore unhelpful because it can easily be identified and disregarded by deniers, but also because it's more demotivating than it is motivating. If you're convinced the world is going to end, you'll just withdraw.

Quoting: 'Don't get me wrong... complaining is fine if it leads to action, but isn't it rare.'

Solved! ^^ Somehow it may be related (but OT) Comic: > //ibb.co/hXjtxLr [sings:] 'freedom!...freeedom!...' (-;

regards,

SpaceX still pales nothing to what NASA did in the height of the Cold War. Well, it's better than zero space exploration, but it's also pretty disappointing compared to what people have already achieved half a decade ago.

NASA in the 1960s ate almost half per cent of the entire US GDP. (The Manhattan project was even more expensive: see https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf).

Today, that would correspond to more than 100 billion USD a year.

SpaceX has nowhere that kind of money. They are orders of magnitude smaller, and must comply with regulations that Apollo didn't have to.

Of course Usain Bolt will overtake a well trained mouse.

I don't know where are you from, but over here landing an orbital rocket booster on its ass is pretty impressive. Something NASA didn't even bother enough to try to achieve.

I think the previous commenter was refering to the NASA of the 1960s, which returned a human from the surface of the moon before Elon Musk was born. SpaceX has more than a few kilobytes of RAM and can't really be compared to the immense achievement of the cold-war space programs.

It depends how you balance it out.

SpaceX is doing things that current nation states can't/won't do and do it on a comparative shoestring.

Yes NASA did amazing things (as did Roscosmos) with the technology they had but they had much more resources as well.

If SpaceX continues on it's current trajectory I wouldn't bet on a return to the moon and back inside a decade or so.

Also if you adjust for $/kg to LEO (and eventually Lunar orbit) then SpaceX is crushing NASA.

It's all about what metric you pick (or cherry pick if you are trying to make a point) really.

NASA is amazing, one of my favourite organisations ever back to been a kid in the 80's watching the Shuttle launches and some of the stuff they've done on pure science is amazing.

Let NASA do the pure science (which realistically has to be publicly funded) and SpaceX (and it's private competitors (when they get some..)) focus on that "$/kg to space" - we win both ways.

Also for Clarity, I'm not an Elon Musk fan, I think he's a bit of a prick.

I respect the outcomes/people who work for the companies not the man.

At the peak of the Apollo era NASA was 4.41% of US Gov spending.

For 2020 that would equate to about 264 billion dollars.

SpaceX isn't spending 264 billion dollars a year and look what they are doing!.

NASA of the 1960s was consuming 10% of America's GDP. You can do a lot with that kind of money. SpaceX does its part on a Snapchat budget.

Not even close to true.

US GDP in 1965 was $743.7 billion[0].

NASA's budget peaked in 1964–66 when it consumed roughly 4% of all federal spending. The agency was building up to the first Moon landing and the Apollo program was a top national priority, consuming more than half of NASA's budget and driving NASA's workforce to more than 34,000 employees and 375,000 contractors from industry and academia.

$5 billion is 0.67% of $743.7 billion.

[0] https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa?year=1965

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

OK I checked. NASA budget in 1965 was indeed just 60 billion, which is like only 8% of not even GDP but U.S. federal budget. Chump change, shame on you SpaceX for not landing on the Moon yet.

a VTOL rocket booster, no, but NASA has had experience with VTOL rockets. Despite their marking, SpaceX did not invent VTOL rockets.

NASA has never launched a orbital velocity VTOL rocket

no, but the Delta Clipper test flights in the 90s were the first time a rocket had landed vertically on Earth.

Half a decade? Or half a century?

Yes!

Not just electric cars but electric vehicles! Cities could be designed around electric bikes and scooters!

I have no reservations about SpaceX. SpaceX is doing what every entrepreneur wished they were doing. I want to buy stock in SpaceX. I don't even care if the stock tanks, I just want a piece of the dream.

> I just want a piece of the dream

As I said many times, space has become a religion for people who identify themselves as atheists. And Musk is the techno-utopian Pope, with stock ownership in one of his scam companies becoming a form of techno-utopian indulgence

Many of you are unfortunately too smart to keep believing in absence of evidence, unlike religious individuals who can hold a belief for their whole life.

When you'll realize that there is nothing for us up there, then disillusion and disappointment will be a tough pill to swallow.

Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there.

You need a sci-fi type discovery such as the anti-gravity equation that Cooper finds inside the Black hole Gargantua and sends back to Murph.

As an aside, yes, Interstellar is my favorite movie, but I am a practical person and also capable of separating science from sci-fi.

> When you'll realize that there is nothing for us up there

Nothing but resources, science, space to expand, copious energy and the chance to make humanity some what immune to the next asteroid.

200K years ago there was a guy sat in a cave saying "I don't know why you need to go over that horizon, we have everything we need here".

I am an atheist, I'm not dogmatic about it.

I just think that a species can have more than one goal at a time and that some goals transcend petty day to day things.

The ancillary benefits are nice as well, research and development often pays off in completely unexpected directions.

It's about what I hope the future will be and that's a humanity as partially a spaceborne civilisation.

I was born too late for Apollo (1980) and too early for whatever we are hopefully about to do but I hope to live long enough to see it the first parts.

> Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there.

You have to boost enough into space for things out of the gravity well to become mostly self-sustaining outside of the gravity well.

To do that you have to get launch costs down by orders of magnitude on what they have historically been.

We don't want to be putting 10 or 20 tonnes in space, we want to be putting 100 up on every launch with multiple launches a day, the solar system is full of raw materials and energy but to make it viable the processing has to be done without sending it down and up the well every time.

The US didn't become the economic powerhouse that is because the UK shipped everything over to the colonies, that wouldn't have worked instead we (and the other countries colonising North America/Canada) shipped over enough resources to bootstrap an economy by supplying the tools/equipment to mostly survive on local resources, then initially shipped back raw materials which allowed the colonies to expand and eventually become independent/self sufficient in their own right.

I could see a somewhat analgous thing happening in reality and it's been a trope of science fiction for quite a while (The Expanse series has an interesting take on it, the UN/Earth, Mars and the Belters).

> It's about what I hope the future

It's about time to be very clear about this. This sentiment based on hope for the future and the entertainment of seeing the rocket land on its butt is not unlike the one experienced by the fan of every crappy sport franchise putting too much hopes on their chances to win the Championship .

Said hope is based on nothing factual , but it's all based on the entertainment they feel when a player full of swagger but no technical abilities comes in to energize the team.

There is nothing noble or superior in putting up hope in stuff which has low odds of succeeding , there might be if you do so at the individual level or betting on yourself.

The moment you start evengelizing or trying to convince others to blindly believe in something impossible then it's not noble anymore. It's kinda sad actually. Profiting off it? That's pure grift.

This is true for everything, space exploration doesn't get a free pass because "it has the potential to revolutionize our specie".

Well so has mRNA and brain research and defeating cancer and winning the war against alzheimer and parkinsons. Same goes for cardiovascular diseases.

The actual killers of humans, you know? The things that will get you and me, not the abstract pipedream stuff which the used car salesmen is trying to perpetuate.

> we want to be putting 100 up on every launch

OMG 100 tons!! The human specie relies on 350mi of atmosphere above us to protect us and at least 10 miles of Earth crust below us to sustain us, that's on top of all the mass that's on the surface. We need all of that to thrive.

What's that figure divided by 100 ? How many launches you need?

Discounting the fact that you can't exactly bottle the atmosphere and pack up the crust...and on top of that you need to simulate gravity.

Again watch Interstellar. In order to provide the happy ending Chris Nolan and Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne had to cheat their way by having the hero find the anti-gravity formula inside the black hole.

Because lifting 10 billion people plus the crust and the atmosphere was never gonna be possible with present day or even future rockets.

In fact the real plan behind all the window dressing was to simply abandon everybody and send a bunch of sperm and eggs up there in some sort of hail mary attempt.

The only element in which reality suprasses fiction is that in the movie that plan is shamed and the person who conceived it is branded as an evil liar, whereas I am sure that if Musk were to propose the same thing many if not all of the space lunatics would stand to their feet and clap, telling him what a brilliant idea he had, all while they are left on Earth to die.

Many already did when he said that the first people on Mars would live a short life and die of a terrible death...again it's religion for the atheists.

Exploiting space is "impossible" because rockets can't economically lift the whole mass of the Earth's crust? Be serious. This is like pooh-poohing Apple Computer at its founding because Jobs and Wozniak couldn't personally bankroll the world's telecommunication infrastructure out of their garage.

Since you're psychologizing the optimists so hard... can you or someone else explain to me the appeal of doom?

> Exploiting space is "impossible" because rockets can't economically lift the whole mass of the Earth's crust?

Let's go smaller scale then? How many players need CCTV like surveillance down to 50m resolution from above?

How often do the satellites producing such images need to be replaced?

Who's gonna pay for the whole ordeal? It's the government as always.

Even smaller scale: How many people are isolated and need Internet via Satellite? Considering that the world is constantly moving towards urbanization is it really necessary?

Laying fiber cable from A to B will always be cheaper

The private jet crowd and private yacht crowd will maybe be interested in it.

What's the economic breakdown of the ISS? 100B thrown down the sink , just like everything space related which is not military related or weather monitoring.

> Since you're psychologizing the optimists so hard... can you or someone else explain to me the appeal of doom?

We have just witnessed a miracle with the mRNA vaccine, there are so many things to be optimistic about here on Earth. Pragmatic optimism beats pipedream type optimism every day of the week. Also only the latter can be abused for graft purposes, for sure not the former.

Just because it cannot be measured well economically, basic research does not cause money to be "thrown down the sink". Most processes that create common goods could be viewed as a financial net negative, but there is much more to existence than that. Basic research makes future developments not only economical, but possible.

Laying fiber cable will not always be cheaper. Satellites can be built and operated by fewer people - and more economically - than the hundreds of thousands of crews you'd need to connect every remote place.

> the first people on Mars would live a short life

I've often thought that the pragmatic thing to do would be to send people to Mars that already have short life expectancies. Like old people, and people with incurable diseases. They may want to do something great with their remaining time.

> and die of a terrible death

I doubt it would be worse than the terribleness of most ordinary deaths on Earth.

> I've often thought that the pragmatic thing to do would be to send people to Mars that already have short life expectancies

Great Idea! I think Musk himself should go around in hospices and hospitals to find terminally ill people to send to die 35 million miles away.

Seriously, you guys have lost your goddamn mind. And I don't mean it in a fun and exciting way, but in a Jim Jones, L.Ron Hubbard and Hitler sort of fashion.

Pragmatic, right.....

I swear, this place is becoming darker and darker by the day, I was just pissed off because I killed a mouse when with more patience I could have just shooed him away, talking about sending people to die on Mars....fucking incredible mate.

> sending people to die on Mars

It's about people wanting and choosing to do something great with what's left of their remaining time. It's not about shortening their lives.

I think there's value. Resources at the very least, be they from moons, planets or asteroids. The problem I have with space exploration is the cost.

Almost 10% of the global population still goes hungry, even though more than enough food is produced to feed the global population. That's 811 million people that starve while Bezos facilitates ego trips to space.

Starvation in the world is not due to lack of attempts to alleviate it. It is due to countries run by communists and criminals.

I'm interested to hear more about what you've done with Playwright and Puppeteer. Would you be willing to share any details?