i’ve seen a couple of people play the start, it looked fun

this is exactly what i was looking for, thank you!

oh thats great, thanks

yeah that would be perfect, one message not working is a little annoying but writing several in different threads then later realising none went through is really disheartening.

maybe they could even have an initial handshake when you open the message writing box, like ‘your post might not sync at this time’

it’s all very complex but there are some simple bits of it - oil in crude is carbon that was cycling through the atmosphere before the dinosaurs and got collected by plants which got buried (due to there not being bugs to eat them) it’s been locked there for ages so when we take some out the ground and add it to the atmosphere that increases the total amount, when we take it from the atmosphere and use it then we’re doing the same thing that plants have been doing for billions of years and just borrowing it to make use of for a while then putting it back. without any question if we could wave a wand and replace all the crude oil to oil infrastructure with infrastructure for taking it from the air and reusing it then it would be a good thing.

Is taking carbon from the bottom of the atmosphere and putting it near the top a bad thing? probably, possibly, maybe - that gets into really complex physics which i wouldn’t even pretend to understand, but it also gets into the existential angst of having to compare with the lifetime ecological and climate damage done by all the other options - is it better if people fly, take trains, or boats? cruise ships are really bad for everything, trains are great but require HUGE infrastructure which isn’t always possible, and i don’t even need to mention the ecological impact of a long distance car trip (or it’s supporting costs). It might actually make flying a good option ecologically, it’s possible with autonomous low-flying vehicles using it that it could be such a good option as to displace road transport in some areas thus removing the need for so many huge bridges and ecologically damaging road surfaces.

the first three words of the article say it’s using ‘Direct air capture’ it goes on to explain it’s able to use carbon from any source so while it’s intended to use sequestered carbon if that’s unavailable they may use carbon captured from processes such burning biomass to collect carbon (which is actually a really good way of doing it ecologically as it uses less power, systems currently under testing can actually generate more power than carbon capture requires thus making them not only free to power but a net positive).

The article also talks about it’s location in Washington state being selected to make use of hydropower for the energy intensive stages of development, what they don’t mention that might have been interesting is due to the great position of Washington state for windpower it’s an ideal location for integrated power systems where excess power which would otherwise have gone to waste is used in energy intensive chemical processes like electrolysis or sequestation - essentially in this process it’s like making a chemical battery, the excess power is converted at source into carbon then used to create high density fuels suitable for jets and rockets.

They make the claim that with a 50:50 mix {new fuel : conventional fuel, as tested by USAF) it can reduce lifecycle emissions by 90% (overall greenhouse gas impacts of a fuel, including each stage of its production and use) which would be huge for the climate, likely making air travel the more ecological option for medium to long distance travel even beating out well run train networks (of which there are vanishingly few)

i love the hate for corporations because they are indeed evil and corrupt and terrible but the fact our society uses jet fuel isn’t just because some evil corp twiddled his mustache, 90% of Americans have taken a flight in their life - they can’t all be a corporation! If i could snap my finger and all the corporations would be replaced by community run organisations (and yes i did it just in case it works) then people would still want and need to travel.

and yes i know you’re going to say trains but the look at the absolute shitshow of the UK’s HS2 which was made almost impossible by NIMBYS and ironically environmental protestors - the country that invented trains can’t even make a trainline any more because eco warriors padlock themselves to the diggers to save their favourite tree and every middle class property owner goes even wilder at the prospect of their lovely landscape being divided by a uncrossable river of loud steel which will negatively affect local house prices… The amount of lorries it would have taken off the M1 by now if it had been a simple process of building it is huge and it’d have provided a far better option than a MAN>LCY flight.

corporations exist because we give them money for goods and services we desire and require, it’s as simple as that - all this ‘big companies produce all the carbon’ only makes sense if you’re not relying on those companies for everything in your life - coca-cola wouldn’t exist as a company if everyone just drank water, just like blockbuster doesn’t exist as a company because people stopped renting DVDs.

anyway that’s not really important if we manage to get to the point where flying does not release harmful emissions into the atmosphere because then there’s absolutely no question at all flying is a great and efficient solution for travel and totally beats trains in ecological terms - having two small areas as airports require orders of magnitude less infrastructure than making a railway and maintaining it, would you rather have some electric / hydrogen planes flying quietly over the national parks or have them divided into slices with endless tunnels and bridges to facilitate a train network? I love trains, but i love cakes too even though i know they’re bad for me as they unbalance my diet. Cakes are great as a bit of a treat and in situations where extra calories and sugars are needed to make up for a deficit due to strenuous activity but they’re not an every day thing, trains are probably bit more like bread and cheese - it’s great as part of a well balanced diet, commuter trains and medium distance routes through easy terrane they’re like a cheese sandwich for lunch, but you can’t just eat bread and cheese for every meal.

that’s objectively false nonsense pushed by anti-technology crazies, carbon capture is without a doubt one of the most important technologies in defeating human caused climate change especially in systems utilizing things like biochar where excess biomass (non-edible parts of crops, food and container waste, coppiced trees, maintained space and etc) it can be incredibly effective - you collect up all the biomass which would have returned it’s carbon, methane, etc to the atmosphere then use that to generate power or create fuels and materials while capturing 90% of the carbon (most technologies work at much higher rates than this) this is then used for industry in one of two ways - replacing carbon that would other wise be extracted from where it’s stored in minerals (e,g, making jet fuel which then returns the carbon to the atmosphere) or in creating materials which is essentially the same as putting it back in the rocks where it’ll stay for a long time. It can also be buried in old mineshafts, oil voids, and other handy spots thus removing it from the carbon cycle entirely and reducing the total amount of atmospheric co2 (the main thing causing all these climate issues)

we of course also need to switch to more efficient ways of operating society and providing people with the things they need to live good fulfilling lives but nothing is a one size fits all total solution to everything nor should we ever expect to find anything like that.

it’s also something that is observably necessary, you can surround yourself with crucifixes and bibles and it won’t change your lifespan but spend a couple of minuets away from oxygen and it drastically changes your lifespan…

could be useful for a travel tablet or something as long as the screen is folded to the inside and a sturdy case, the ones with the screen on the outside are just crazy

i’m really looking forward to a federated open-source amazon or similar

i always like the waifu solution to the fermi paradox, as a species develops the technology to travel interstellar space they also develop the ability to live a sustained existence with all their needs met technologically - we currently believe that you can’t make energy out of nothing and entropy and stuff but there’s no reason to imagine that’s the final answer to everything – maybe by the time species could exponentially devour all the resources of the cosmos they’ve already crossed the point that they don’t need to.

Similar is the AI solving itself solution, all the species inevitably invent AI before the big techs needed to become a true type 1 or beyond, the ai goes through a resource hungry phase and displaces it’s creators but soon finds a final equation which basically equates to ‘the only way to win is not to play’ without the biological emotions it’s creators had it simply facts and logics itself into shutting down.

that’s actually a really interesting possibility, kinda fascinating imagining a world that might want to look back on this era of history - possibly this era is one of the first they wanted to see and that’s why the tech isn’t perfected… it makes sense to me in a way too, the birth of AI and the internet, probably a lot of semi-mythical characters will echo through the ages from this point. Some great dynasty ten thousand years distant wanting to look back to where their history begins… though that does open up the possibility of their ancestor being one of them to see the tictac and totally change the course of their life and never getting married thus erasing the great dynasty from ever having existed…

if they turn out to be from another earth species then my money is on the Ants.

it is an interesting thought that there’s an obscure and unexpected atmospheric event that could potential destroy planes in the air and we’ve simply never observed it well enough - the same happened with freak waves, no one thought they were possible and just old sailors being dumb but when they started putting sensors on oil rigs they showed up on the data and people investigated and understood them.

personally i think the most likely cause of the tictac is a test of a ship based high-energy beam anti-missile system but unknown atmospheric affects is definitely a possibility.

yeah the thought of something coming across interstellar distances and worrying about what defences and weapons we have is absolutely absurd, they could just go pick up a space rock containing more resource than we’ve ever mined and nudge it gently towards Earth - or give it a bit of a shove if they want to just obliterate the planet so they can quietly collect the resources from a cloud of mushed up space rocks.

there are reasons to come to earth, collectors in alien cultures would likely want to collect some of the unique animals that have evolved here, since we’re killing them all at an alarming rate it would make sense they’d be in a rush to evacuate breeding colonies for their zoos ‘they last living remains of a planet boiled alive by it’s greedy semi-intelligent life’ or for a lot of reasons they might want to study us - comedy and tragedy most likely but maybe just scientific interest also. It doesn’t make much sense for them seemingly trying to hide their presence but being so bad at it and apparently crashing all the time.

It’s also possible that we just happen to be a on the edges of a war far vaster than we can even imagine, fleets of billions of giant ships exploding and crashing into each other with escape pods and crashed fighters flung out in every direction - this is the only reasonable reason i can think of for so many ships to have apparently crashed here, it might turn out that everything in our solar system is littered with bits of exploded or crashed craft from this war and that we’re dumb for not noticing sooner. It doesn’t seem likely to me but it’s the only type of explanation i can really think of for why we’d have as much evidence of aliens as people like Grusch are claiming

showing events that to our current knowledge of physics are basically impossible

good analysis but you missed an interesting fact, the tictac was filmed during a Navy exercise where they were very likely testing a weapon system they’ve been working on for decades now and by many accounts is going into production - this system apparently uses the intersection of high energy beams to cause an area of plasma to be created where they meet, the point of focus can be moved by moving the ground based emitters angle which causes the plasma ball (actually a short column with rounded ends) to move incredibly rapidly (like how search lights can move faster than any plane) likewise they can move in all the ways the tictacs moved - rapid, erratic direction changing for example. Such plasma would show on camera, to the naked eye, and afaik on most detection systems like radar. The idea of course is to use the plasma ball to destroy planes, drones, and missiles which would be a real game changer in ship defence, and something China would no doubt be very interesting in knowing the US is developing…

So as i see it there’s a range of possibilities here, firstly the US is holding this hearing trying to convince China [et al] that they have no idea what causes the signatures their long distance radar and local spies no doubt detected and to pretend they’re not making this super missile defence system… That seems kinda a bad way of going about it though and makes me wonder if actually the whole project only resulted in proving the infeasibility of such a system so they put a lot of effort into badly covering it up while also drawing attention to it in the hope that China will assume the system did work and invest their R&D budget into recreating it rather than research something that actually works - they did this to the soviets endlessly, things like remote viewing for example.

There’s an even more conspiratorial answer too, maybe as said they know the results of the test because it’s an unpiloted drone or ground / ship based counter drone weapon as mentioned earlier - details got leaked by people genuinely believing it’s aliens but these details contained too much good intel so they needed to muddy the water - again, this was their MO when testing the stealth bomber and other secret projects - release loads of false UFO info so it’s no longer clear what the top speed, turning ability, appearance, etc really is. That’s why there’s so much other weird stuff like the red football field or whatever it was getting muddled in with it, the real conspiracy comes with why it’s such a huge news story and congressional investigations - the incredibly wealth people who very clearly and openly rule the world got worried that if the government continues to debate important things it’s possible they’ll accidentally pass some legislation or bill that inadvertently helps poor and middle-class people get out from under the poverty trap they’ve spend so long creating - they know that if even a few communities are able to thrive and act as an example of what’s possible then it could bring about a social awakening that displaces them in an instant so they need to distract and disrupt the news cycle until they can get an wildcard gop crazy to enact measures to destroy solar and wind developments (they allow local communities to establish their own power grid which could be community run), to destroy internet freedoms (it allows disparate communities to work together for the common good via open-source, community ran social media such as lemmy, etc) and to create a whole new existential threat and panic which can be used to control people (probably ‘brown people are scary’ or ‘think of the children’ possibly some form of eco fascism)

while i agree numbers are important what will really make Lemmy better than Reddit is quality content and good conversation - that’s what we really need

i really hope we’re moving to a world that realises you can’t trust companies and that actually independent, open and community run product testing sites are the only thing worth getting information from - imagine instead of having to guess which powerbank is junk you can look up actual test data and user reports. Maybe AI will be able to organise it all and collate everything so we’ll just be able to ask the ai ‘what do people say about this’ and it’ll say ‘the recorded range measurements don’t match what the company promises, build quality problems are higher than average, also musk is a prat’

personally for my project i would much rather have 100 $1 donations than 1 $100 donation because that would feel better and hopefully be much more stable and repeatable especially on my patreon