Cultured meat[0] has the potential to upend the farming industry. This isn't near meat, it's actual meat and it's already here. We're simply waiting for the cost to come down from $10,000/kg or whatever crazy price it's currently at.
wish I remembered what podcast I was listening to... it was someone running a company developing synthetic milk and eggs explaining why meat will never scale up, the problem is the growth medium for muscle is also the perfect environment for bacteria, and we basically need to reinvent immune systems before you're going to get a cubed inch of healthy chicken to grow without contamination
This is probably not the one you're referring to, but Pat Brown, co-founder of Impossible, also has quite a strong opinion on cultured meat. If somebody figures out how to grow animal parts artifically and reliably, there are much more interesting applications than to eat it. Such as medicinal applications.
I think the main point here is not that we will never figure it out, but that it will take a long time. Time, that we don't have with the imminent climate and biodiversity crises.
It makes much more sense to create meat directly from plant proteins than to try to grow it artifically. Brands like Impossible make damn great burger patties, chicken nuggets, and what not. I'm pretty most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference to animal meat in a blind test.
So someone whose subsistence depends on plant-based meat substitutes says their competitor are not good enough? Not much to see here.
I'm not necessarily saying they're wrong, only that they're not a reliable source for that information.
> I'm pretty most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference to animal meat in a blind test.
Perhaps not burger and nuggets, since those are heavily processed and seasoned anyway, but try to give them a plant based steak or ribs and I doubt anyone would fail to tell the difference.
> Perhaps not burger and nuggets, since those are heavily processed and seasoned anyway, but try to give them a plant based steak or ribs and I doubt anyone would fail to tell the difference.
I'm sure people said exactly this about burger patties before amazing plant-based burger patties existed. There's no physical reason this is not possible. And don't forget that making a steak is also much harder with cultured meat, that's why they're also starting with burger patties and chicken nuggets.
From a higher-level view, most meat that's consumed is not in the form of steaks. It's in the form of ground meat. If enough people switch to plant-based meats for let's say 80% of their meat needs, animal-based meat won't be able to compete anymore with the price of plant-based meats. So, for Impossible to reach their goal of getting rid of the animal based food system, they don't even need to be able to make steaks. Sure, there will always be meat, but it will be an expensive luxury and rarity that we will frown upon as society (e.g. like wearing fur coats today or hunting dolphins and whales).
> So someone whose subsistence depends on plant-based meat substitutes says their competitor are not good enough?
Fair point. But also consider why they started a plant-based meat company in the first place and not a cultured meat one? He had the experience, expertise and funds to do either.
> I'm sure people said exactly this about burger patties before amazing plant-based burger patties existed. There's no physical reason this is not possible.
I'm not too sure, but time will tell. Are plant-based steaks going to be at least as healthy as their animal counterparts though? Plant burgers tend to be on par or worse, which is not great since beef burgers are not the healthiest to begin with.
> most meat that's consumed is not in the form of steaks
Do you have data to back this up? I'm not saying you're wrong but I come from a culture where most of our meat is in the form of grilled steaks or barbecued chunks of fresh meat, seasoned with salt only. Burgers are not necessarily uncommon but are generally seen as what they are - a fast food treat to be had infrequently.
> consider why they started a plant-based meat company in the first place and not a cultured meat one?
To consider this, I'd have to actually know their reasons. :) It could just have been that they thought burgers would have more acceptance for the reasons I stated - they're easier to mimick since their animal-based counterpart is already heavily seasoned and processed, and doesn't actually taste that much like the actual meat.
As a last note, you have my upvote for a thoughtful and thought-provoking response. Thank you! :)
He'd also have 'quite a strong' interest in not having it succceed - Impossible, Beyond, et al. don't want to have to fight 'ours isn't pretend meat' advertising campaigns, or be relegated to being Quorn et al. competitors (which of course they are really, but currently seem to be succeeding as being seen as meat competitors).
Thermodynamically it doesn't even seem like cultured meat should be any better than traditional meat. Sure you are making more stuff than just meat, but like nearly 100% of the animal ends up being used in some capacity for different sources that now all need a synthetic alternative developed that happens to be better for the environment than the old way of using a cow. Call me incredulous but I feel like it would be better to just figure out how to lower the environmental costs of having the cow. You have this sytem that already works fine to generate meat and a host of other products from known inputs. Why reinvent the wheel? Just make a better wheel. Capture the methane. Farm feedcrops in sustainable ways. Treat the animal with respect over its life.
it is a localized problem to places where there are too many people and agriculture for the available water budget, especially as you look out and fear climate change.
I'm not as worried, believing in the spirit of human ingenuity. Desalination and piping it from the oceans (like we do for oil) will be fine. We just need the wherewithal to implement real solutions and invest in the sciences rather than regulate behavior.
I keep reading about these future "water wars" and can't help but wonder how much of the prediction is realistic and how much is coloured by Silicon Valley types extrapolating globally from what they see locally.
I live in northern Britain and, even at the height of summer, it's rare for a week to go by, without at least one day of heavy rainfall.
Maybe it's me who's extrapolating globally from what I'm seeing locally. But I don't get any sense at all that the world is getting drier.
Still, if the 'water wars' predictions do turn out to be true, maybe we'll have an interesting reversal of fortunes in the future, where damp, wet, soggy countries become fabulously wealthy, like the OPEC nations today --through exporting tankers full of their spare rainwater.
Let's see how the Arabs like queuing up at the pumps to fill their drinking vessels at £2/litre!
Just because water is nearby doesn't mean you have infrastructure to make use of it. For example the great lakes region has had droughts before that affected agriculture. This might surprise you because on a map, there is a huge body of freshwater to draw from nearby. However, to draw from that body, one needs to build pumping infrastructure sufficient to draw from it and to have this infrastructure go to where it needs to be, likely inland uphill from the great lakes requiring more pumping and reservoirs and other infrastructure. Reservoirs in particular are often dependent on having good natural conditions. It also needs to be overbuilt such to work in a drought, and therefore most of its costs will be wasted in times when its not needed. All of this costs money and political will to improve things, both of which the great lakes region is short of in recent history.
The Met Office says England has had its dryest July since 1935, and some parts of England the dryest on record [1]
Whilst we havent had wars, there have certainly been water conflicts even _within_ the UK. Consider Treweryn [2]. This was a town rich with Welsh culture and the Welsh language. It was flooded to become a reservoir to supply water to Liverpool in 1965. The decision to flood the town was made by UK Parliament, without gaining consent from Wales. The plans triggered mass opposition and protests, but they were ignored and the plan went ahead. The story of Treweryn acts as a beacon for the Welsh independence movement to this day [3]
Interestingly, the remains of the town became visible for the first time in decades a few years ago. Possibly a further sign of things getting dryer.
Clean Energy, Water Desalination, Nigeria's crackdown on anonymous SIM cards, Monkeypox, Separation of Church & State in a post-Roe world, Computer chips made out of light, The managed decline of Britain, Crackdowns on E2E encrypted messaging apps, Quantum-resistant cryptography, Tesla cars charged by burning coal.
No disrespect to anything on this list, but I would wager most of this stuff won't matter to the average person. I can't see how my life will change with respect to anything of these. I just don't think we can speak to these as the next big thing. For example: iPhone was clearly a big thing.
> Nigerian here, also an opponent of the present government, but why would a crackdown on anonymous SIM cards be an issue for debate ?
It's a very authoritarian move to threaten privacy and prevent people having free access to the internet. It hurts people at a minimum and causes the deaths of the most vulnerable in society at worst. Definitely up for debate and probably not one the Nigerian government can win in a fair debate.
According to Prof. Hoffman, this model of the universe is highly parsimonious in that it can model data from the Large Hadron Collider using a single parameter, while the best incumbent (Quantum Field Theory) needs millions.
The implication is that everything we see and experience are not fundamental, including space and time itself. The fundamental unit of reality is consciousness.
This has far reaching implications into every other scientific and non-scientific human endeavor, from neuroscience to philosophy. It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history.
Even Albert Einstein appears to have intuited this when he wrote:
"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."
Yes, that's exactly my question too. "Consciousness" is often ill-defined for experimental purposes and notorious for being abused through vague "deep-ities" to make unsupported assertions about "the meaning of everything."
It's a good question, and as a layman I don't have the answer. However, since it's able to model experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, I would assume that it makes predictions about the positions and velocities of high energy particles.
In any case, Dr. Hoffman's theories are mathematically rigorous. I think it's worth listening to the podcast before dismissing.
> In any case, Dr. Hoffman's theories are mathematically rigorous. I think it's worth listening to the podcast before dismissing.
I can't really comment on that as 1) I only skimmed a couple sections of the paper and 2) my field is more applied math than pure. I'm not attacking or dismissing anything, just asking how the claims made are substantiated.
> However, since it's able to model experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, I would assume that it makes predictions about the positions and velocities of high energy particles.
Do those models cover experiments which have yet to be run, and more importantly are they predictions which differ from those of the standard model?
There are a lot of neat theories which model experimental work we already have results for, the problem is using said theories to make falsifiable predictions which are both realistic in terms of actually finding a way to do experimental verification and are different from predictions made by the standard model. Nobody really loves the state of physics as-is, but moving on to something else requires meeting those two conditions which has been an insurmountable hurdle as of yet.
> There are a lot of neat theories which model experimental work we already have results for, the problem is using said theories to make falsifiable predictions which are both realistic in terms of actually finding a way to do experimental verification and are different from predictions made by the standard model.
Ideally yes. But if you have two theories which make the same predictions, and one requires orders of magnitude fewer parameters than the other, then the former is, if nothing else, a valuable new perspective.
The analogy that comes to mind is the elaborate system of epicycles in the geocentric model of the solar system. These were quite accurate -- even more accurate than the first heliocentric model (if I recall correctly). But the heliocentric model was far simpler in that it required fewer parameters (and as we know it turned out to be the correct one).
It's still early days for the cosmological polytope. It's right to be skeptical, but the greatest scientific advances are usually considered ludicrous at first by the broader community. It's those who allow for the possibility that the new theory may be correct that will design and carry out experiments to provide evidence either way.
As for that lack of a falsifiable claim, agree, not only that, but one that would allow for a preponderance of evidence.
Donald Hoffman was interviewed and topic of falsifiable observations came up and as far as I am able to tell he avoided the topic; search for “falsifiable” in this link:
yes, while it is gaining adoption, there are still a couple of major tasks before it really takes off, namely dependency management and structural sharing.
It's about as necessary as your comment stating facts about the future. :)
In any case, I apologise - my comment was indeed unnecessary and didn't bring any value to the discussion. Had it been made to me I might not have been as good a sport as you have so kudos to you!
Many heavy hitting tech companies have developers using and exploring it, mainly because it augments rather than replaces. It's very easy to add validation while not changing anything else. Lots of users around Kubernetes applications.
Didn't realize people still used Wikipedia for things besides for "facts" since its descent into the political / opinion battlegrounds. It's been years since I used it
Again, who's actually using it? All I see is Salesforce and two no name companies. It's supported by Netlify which is something, but I wouldn't say "hard hitting companies". Netflix and Amazon are hard hitting.
If it doesn't have a Wikipedia article, there's a very good chance it isn't very popular in the industry. At least in terms of open source standard technology, which this appears to be reaching for.
Google, Amazon, Tesla, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance are in the list, not all are on a website. It's not like a company mandate, mainly individual contributors checking it out and building things.
It's not widespread because it is just starting to get going, but it is definitely popular (well liked) among its users.
I’ve used CUE a bit and I’m underwhelmed by it. In most cases it’s just another unneeded level of abstraction, it also doesn’t go far enough, most API based tools need to support imperative methods
You don't want computability in your config, and CUE is useful beyond APIs.
You can already use CUE within other programs when you need imperative, there is also the scripting layer where this is possible. There is also a plan to support a WASM runtime so you can have imperative subroutines in the scripting layer, written in any other language.
My problem is generally the config is a part of a larger data model, which often needs to define imperative methods on resources. Having stuff in Cue means yet another layer and language I have to learn and use for this part of my API, and then copy that into a full API language.
How are you defining that model and methods today? Are they already in the tech / lang you use or are you using some translation like protobuf or openapi?
(curiosity as I'm building a tool on top of CUE that combines it with notions of data models and code gen, and I'm always keen to learn more about the things people do today)
I believe the next big thing will be the productization of building a home anywhere, without requiring municipal infrastructure. There is still a ways to go in terms of technology to make it all happen and make it affordable. But at some point, it will really reconfigure where and how we all live.
I mean, I grew up with a well and septic tank and my life was literally no different than living in an apartment in the city. It’s not like a radical off-the-grid thing millions of homes are this way.
I just installed incineration toilet at my cabin. Works great and burns the shit to ashes. Works with a gass balloon and a 12V battery. 220V option being available.
This is something I have been think about for the past 10 year as well. If we can get enough cheap power production, incinerating toilets seem interesting. And the growth satellite internet is a big win for this area.
And then we have companies like Space Mobile trying to essentially put cell phone towers in low earth orbit which will (hopefully) enable 4G/5G coverage all over the globe.
Fixed wing drones are becoming super cheap, and are far simpler than their copter-classed counterparts. While handover needs smoothing out, delivery will thus be easy for items of daily use. Less so for furniture, appliances, etc. However, if you are willing to deal with foam furniture, earth building or felling a couple of trees on site, robotics could still have you covered.
I'm convinced that fixed wing drones will dominate the drone delivery market. The payload capacity difference for size and cost is just too large. Barring some truly revolutionary step change in power storage density, any battery improvements that benefit the multirotors will benefit fixed wings even more.
It's a tradeoff. The problems with fixed wing are difficulties maneuvering in crowded low-altitude urban airspace, energy and space required for takeoff, higher speed and mass thus force of impact, and at the point of delivery there's no easy way to hover without going hybrid and the alternative of simply dropping people's goods to the ground with parachutes doesn't result in an ideal delivery experience. This is often fudged with extra packaging, which is environmentally irresponsible as well as spatially constraining for payloads on already limited airframes. Copters are roughly superior in all these regards, but can't go very far due to energy inefficiency and tend to be noisier. I think copters will dominate urban/precision/high value or theft risk, and locally sourced retail such as food, whereas fixed wing will be suburban/semi-rural/rural/industrial/low precision/low value or theft risk, and further sources retail such as hardware, commercial and industrial supplies. It's been somewhat amusing to see the huge amount of money in the space and watch the strategic directions of Amazon Prime Air (hexacopter; 5lbs max payload; 'drop' strategy), Google Wing (hybrid + 'lower on a cord' strategy; numerous designs), Manna (quadcopter), Zipline (fixed wing + 'parachute' strategy; larger payload).
I agree with your breakdown of which model dominates which segments, though I expect that in-city drone never takes off except for extremely time sensitive/high value missions (organ delivery or something similarly extreme) because figuring out things like where to land tons of drones in downtown Manhattan just so I can get shake shack slightly faster without leaving my apt. My bet is that drone delivery will really shine when it provides next day for areas that have week-long lead times which is going to have to be fixed wing (or a really good hybrid) because of the ranges inherently involved.
I'm a huge fan of Zipline, I imagine they'll refine the parachute element of the operation.
I really hope that this will happen, but I'm skeptical. The push to cluster around big cities is still accelerating and land scarcity around big metro areas is what is driving out affordability. Utilities connection constitutes a small and almost insignificant cost of total urban residential construction. If a global pandemic couldn't stop this trend, then I don't think we will ever live in an affordable distributed civilization.
Interesting, what about whole villages or modules of a town. Kickstarter, where if everyone commits a certain cost a whole new concept village or town is built somewhere.
Cities at sea may need something like this to get going.
A company wanting to build a plant next to a resource they need could acquire a town for its workforce.
Just guessing, but: machine learning based off of algorithmic information theory / Solomonoff induction rather than neural networks, satellite internet (well-known in tech circles but perhaps not the general public), rapid advancements in computational quantum chemistry that start to replace lab-based experimentation to produce real world value. And I agree with the other commenter about a massive fight related to water allocation over the next few decades.
Climate migration. What happens Europe now/since 2015 is nothing that will come in the next couple of years. And the individual countries and so as the EU is pretty much unprepared. I'd even say that will be one of the cause of downfall of the union.
I agree, but I don't think the "few people talk about it" criterion applies. It's not that it doesn't come up in debates, it's that nothing much comes of it (yet).
Nothing comes of it because we're regressed into a hyper-sensitive society where topics that remotely involve race can't be discussed anymore for fear of someone's feelings getting hurt. Empires have collapsed in the past because of migrations of peoples, this is potentially no exception.
I am under the impression that instead of preparing for climate immigration, EU citizens are actually slowly but surely mutually brainwashing themselves into increasing hate towards immigrants as a whole. From what I read and understood about climate change, a tsunami of immigrants from southern hemisphere countries towards northern hemisphere countries is to be expected.
I would rather have my elected ones work on a framework that will govern how this immigration could occur and how to make it work in everyone's bests interests. But it seems that people will mostly vote for whoever tells them he or she will make the country impenetrable.
Europe's population is aging drastically, we make less children and our workforce is shrinking. We produce less people that can offer social/medical/health care to the elders, less people who can pay taxes, and also less people who can defend the territory in case of armed conflict. Retirement planning is a catastrophy (younger generations are privileging individualized financial planning mechanisms instead of State protected and tax deducible solutions, and conversion rates for pension funds are also diminishing year after year). Finally, "non-white" immigrants seem to be perceived by locals as posing a security threat and nothing more.
Whether I look at my family, my friends or my colleagues, I feel surrounded by people who refuse to engage in the thought experiment further than "we should reinforce our borders".
Am I in denial when I acknowledge that both a mass immigration will occur towards the northern hemisphere, whether smoothly, or by force, and that any economy needs to preserve a strong workforce to keep florishing?
Europeans would rather go Japan - ie. keep their national identity and downsize, than America - healthy demographics, but constant cultural clashes and crime waves.
In full honesty, I fail to see how crime waves in the USA could be explained by immigration or racial/cultural diversity. From what I understand, it is mostly a consequence of families living through precarious jobs (and poverty), limited access to good education and a general lack of trust in the government, which they either perceive as powerless, or extremely unfair/brutal.
If I acknowledge that some communities are more likely to live their daily lives under these three factors altogether, it could explain why these communities may be more vulnerable to daily life challenges, and more easily resort to violence. Still, that doesn't give me a causal link between racial/cultural diversity and violence, far from it, but I can understand why those who prefer taking shortcuts may end up reaching this conclusion.
This shortcut is also very comfortable for the peace of mind: once I attribute violence to racial/cultural diversity, I can also safely conclude that I will never be part of the problem (if I consider myself as being part of the "good" racial/cultural group)...
I have lived in some of the poorest areas in Brazil, United States, Colombia, and Mexico. I have also lived in Moldova, and some really shitty parts of south St. Petersburg in Russia, and Kyiv.
I have noticed a very very very strong correlation of how dangerous it can be just to walk outside alone, or at night, or walk in public with your cellphone. I believe there is a link between violence and race and culture.
I am sorry to ask but I have the feeling that something is missing in your comment. You said you have lived in poor areas and observed violence, or did you mean that you witnessed violence only in a subset of the areas you listed?
I have experienced violent muggings myself, witnessed violence/assaults, sometimes even without reason or purpose, in Brazil, specifically Rio/Sao Paolo, Oakland/South Berkeley(during the early/mid 2000s before the tech hit), Bogota, and Medellin. I lived years in Mexico(CDMX/tlalnapantla) and experienced all but the most opportunist crimes, like pickpockets, and nonviolent crimes.
Contrast that with living in a very poor neighborhood in Chisinau, in Moldova. Iasi, in Romania, Kiev, and Saint petersburg. I never really felt in danger at all, I could walk home at whatever hour, go on a walk, take out my cellphone. The closest to being dangerous was desperate drug addicts in St. Petersburg.
These places/slums in eastern europe are just as poor, have the same problems with the same drugs. But the level of random violence in 'diverse' places just doesn't exist. I know it sounds fucked up like I am a fox news anchor, or something, but it is just something I have noticed.
It seems the more monoculture a society is the more safe it is in the poor areas. Specifically Europe, Asia, and the middle east. I don't know how to explain it without sounding like a racist so I wont.
Outside observer, but my understanding is that a big concern is that people from more illiberal cultures will make the nation more illiberal. There is also concern that making low skilled labor more plentiful will be harmful to the prospects of existing low skilled labor. A third concern would be that if the immigrants express an ethnic preference for their own community, this will cause increasing difficulty for existing residents. If you want to convince people that immigration will be in their best interest, I'd start by finding ways to ameliorate those concerns.
Agreed. It seems to me e.g. Germany is very open to immigration in all forms, IF, immigrants are willing integrate sufficiently into the EU value system concerning equality of sexes, blindess towards ethnicity, freedom of religion etc. They're not brainwashed at all, they want to keep their culture free of brainwashing.
The EU can mostly integrate migrants from within the EU, conflicts because of East to West migration aside (see Brexit). It can also integrate migrants from other countries with shared cultural values like the US, Australia, Japan, etc. Basically other democracies and allies.
It has consistently failed to integrate other migrants, especially from the MENA countries. At this point, experience has proven that such large integrations are and will be out of reach for the EU.
The only logical conclusion is therefore that the EU has to prepare to reject further migration. Even hopeless cases like Sweden are starting to take action in that direction.
its beeter to develop Marshall like plans for the affected areas (MENA + WESTERN AFRICA); them will generate stability,jobs,commerce and returns for investors. the problem is local political leadership which will want "tailored kickbacks" even at their countries stake (or will cry to go on China lap). but Necessity like the "green wall" could create an example to wich plan future project and garner support at alls levels. Btw Europe doesnt need migrants, its mostly overpopulated and economies are more about outputs than unskilled workforce. Paying pensions will be a problem, solvable with bankruptcies that could maybe cure the fetish for welfare socialism of PIGS+France. nations cant absorb generally speaking more than a low percentage of immigrants/settlers before creating problems/attritions.
its better to develop Marshall like plans for the affected areas (MENA + WESTERN AFRICA); them will generate stability,jobs,commerce and returns for investors. the problem is local political leadership which will want "tailored kickbacks" even at their countries stake (or will cry to go on China lap). but Necessities like the "green wall" could create an example on wich plan future project and garner support at alls levels. Btw Europe doesnt need migrants, its mostly overpopulated and economies are more about outputs than unskilled workforce. Paying pensions will be a problem, solvable with bankruptcies that could maybe cure the fetish for welfare socialism of PIGS+France. nations cant absorb generally speaking more than a low percentage of immigrants/settlers before creating problems/attritions.
While I can see you try to be nuanced you're only achieving depicting the situation in a moralistic view.
You're postulating many things that are not necessarily true (by definition) :
- that massive immigration to the EU will succeed
- that EU needs more unskilled labor
So "serious" politicians shouldn't promise one thing or its opposite but have a global view of the best interests of THEIR electors and act accordingly.
I will hence have to take the antithesis to balance it overall :
- with automation and the current unemployed people ("natives" or not) already in the EU, more unskilled labor is not what is needed
- a cohesive society is not solely based on its productive capacity
One narrow interpretation is that one particular study that you did not cite got it wrong.
One broad interpretation is that we should not pay attention or give credence to the good faith estimates offered at the time.
I get tired of snarky one-liners that don't say what they mean. They do not promote useful discussion. My comment here would not be necessary if you took a few minutes to elaborate about what you meant.
Lastly: Estimates change. No model is perfect but some are useful.
I was born in the 70s, and my entire life I've been hearing climate alarmism - the end of the world is nigh (or just around the corner). No, really, this time it's for real! Donate here to stop it.
Most of the "solutions" I've seen are worse than the problem. Recycling was a major con that no one wants to talk about.
Carbon offset credits? Really?
With the amount of alarmism and blatant opportunism in the space, it's pretty hard to sift through and focus on real, meaningful change. Like not wasting precious aquifer water on lawns.
Simple stuff that would have real impact. Taxing the hell out of single use plastic water bottles.
We've done it before. The anti CFC thing was a huge success. Seems like that should be a model to follow.
Instead of pearl-clutching global alarmism, we should narrowly focus on concrete problems with real, measurable solutions, and address them one by one.
CFC's had a more or less drop-in replacement. Sadly we lack this for fossil fuels.
And my entire life I've been hearing predictions of climate change that would start getting serious... right about now. And here we are. A bit ahead of schedule, really.
Sea level rise? The rate of increase hasn't changed. Actually it was highest during Lincoln's presidency.
Droughts? Actually less severe and less frequent than 100 years ago.
Severe weather? Wild fires? Also, pretty much unchanged or slightly decreased.
Global temperatures? Sure, seem to be increasing moderately, but there's a ton of complication there. And we don't really know what the impact will be.
I think it's better to stop handwringing over pessimistic alarmist models and to focus on solving real, concrete, addressable ecological problems.
In Australia, we've experienced all of the above within the last couple years. Worst droughts in 20+ years, biggest bushfire season ever, and now record breaking flooding.
This is not correct and proves the point made in the parent's comment.
Australia had much more severe bush fires in the 70s [0].
Note that many Australian plants are have evolved to adapt to bush fires, which means they must have been a staple of Australian ecology for many millions of years.
> It's pretty strange how all of those metrics start at 1960, no?
No, "all of those metrics" on the many pages linked from the EPA page do not start at 1960.
Stop making false statements. Doing so hurts your credibility and wastes our time.
Try slowing down and reminding yourself of your preconceived biases. Double check what you are seeing. Look for things that don't confirm what you already believe.
A bunch of them do. Heat waves, river floods, etc...
For the heat wave chart, the stated reason for this is that it's the date where most urban areas started keeping careful records.
They also, as a footnote[1] include an image going back much farther [2] which completely changes the picture and analysis.
However the text description is all about the increase since 1960, only barely mentioning that it was much worse in the 1930s.
How is it possible to look at this and not question it?
Making false statements? Slowing down and reminding myself?
I've spent countless hours looking at original noaa data related to climate change. I've seen a very clear distortion of data in reporting.
> Double check what you are seeing. Look for things that don't confirm what you already believe.
That's great advice, maybe we should both take it? [3] [4]
I don't need to go through every single measure here, it's pretty easy to discover for yourself if you take a real look at the data.
The severity and frequency of things like droughts, severe weather, heat waves are flat, if not in decline when you look across a broader window.
Sea level rise is pretty linear for as long as it's been measured [5]
NOAA data is pretty clear on this.
Arctic sea ice? It has a well known oscillation that generally runs close to 180 degrees out of phase with antarctic sea ice. Again, super easy to learn about if you dig in. Did you know that Arctic sea ice actually increased from 1979 to 2015? [6]
Also, measuring sea ice is notoriously difficult and error prone, and satellite data doesn't do a very good job of it. Also easy to learn about.
My overall point, which for some strange reason gathers a ton of open hostility, is that we're much better off focusing on concrete ecological issues that can be solved today (not draining aquifers, better agriculture practices, elimination of weird farm bill subsidies to harmful crops, etc...).
It's amazing how just pointing that out garners the sort of personal attacks that you leveled at me. Slowing down sounds like good advice!
> It's pretty strange how all of those metrics start at 1960, no?
Is quite different from this:
> A bunch of them do. Heat waves, river floods, etc...
You can't have it both ways.
> Making false statements?
Yes. I've demonstrated clearly that you wrote a false statement by saying "all". Then you shifted your position to say "a bunch of them".
Why not acknowledge your mistake?
> Slowing down and reminding myself?
Yes. When was the last time you actually said to yourself, e.g. "I have a tendency to get annoyed by how reporters cover climate change. I should not let my annoyance spill over into other trains of thought, such as the claim 'climate change models are alarmist'".
Adjust as needed to suit your situation and thought patterns. If you try it, I think you'll find benefit.
> It's amazing how just pointing that out garners the sort of personal attacks that you leveled at me. Slowing down sounds like good advice!
Please show me the personal attack.
Here is what I wrote:
> No, "all of those metrics" on the many pages linked from the EPA page do not start at 1960. / Stop making false statements. Doing so hurts your credibility and wastes our time. / Try slowing down and reminding yourself of your preconceived biases. Double check what you are seeing. Look for things that don't confirm what you already believe.
I said you made a false statement. You did. I did not call you names; e.g. I did not call you a liar.
Claiming there is a personal attack when there is none is not acceptable. I can criticize your ideas -- that is fair game.
It is understandable to feel hurt when ideas you hold are criticized. You may consider these ideas to be part of your identity. But these are not personal attacks.
I respect that you have researched the climate change data. I likely would agree with some of your conclusions.
> My overall point, which for some strange reason gathers a ton of open hostility ...
I asked many questions about your overall point. I would not use the word "hostile" to characterize tough questions.
Yes, you are getting pushback. I can't speak to others, but I've found your core arguments to be too vague to be useful. I don't think it is "strange" when some people to question what you write.
> It's amazing how just pointing that out
Well, you "aren't just pointing that out". There is context. My many comments around this thread show that I've engaged and tried to make sense of what you mean, in terms of concrete examples.
Also, I hope you can recognize that some of your language resembles climate-denial language. With this in mind, you would do well to be mindful of how you are coming across.
Also, another observation. The language you are using matches the language of "I'm the victim here". I don't know if you intended this. That kind of language is regularly used to deflect.
Please reply to my other comments. I am willing to consider your arguments -- probably more so than many people here on HN who read your comment and probably thought it wasn't worth their time to respond. But I'd prefer to read them coming from a published source. Why? I'd like to read not only the content, but also about the authors, the funding, and the counter-responses.
This is the kernel of your thinking I've been waiting for. You've seen what you call a "very clear distortion of data in reporting". Emphasis mine. (A suggestion: if you would lead with this sentence this up-front, these kinds of online conversations can be much more productive.)
Now, if one makes a claim that there is a "very clear distortion", it is incumbent upon you to show the analysis -- or to cite it. You are the one making the claim; don't ask someone else to do it. A credible analysis must be statistical, not anecdotal.
> My overall point ... is that we're much better off focusing on concrete ecological issues that can be solved today (not draining aquifers, better agriculture practices, elimination of weird farm bill subsidies to harmful crops, etc...).
Thank you for giving some concrete examples of what you mean.
However, I'm still not convinced by the "that can be solved today" criteria. One key problem with such criteria is that someone can say "that can't be solved today" in order to avoid taking action. What is your response?
In my other comment, I offered a very high level summary of how science, technology, governance, economics, and finance relate w.r.t. climate change. I was hoping to see your response. Your response these very much connects to the "that can be solved today" criteria.
Sustained investment in research and development is important because science and technology can expand the solution space. In parallel, more public awareness can increase the political will for increasing the budget for action. (Of course, there are many other components necessary for humanity to address the situation.)
A meta-comment. You are getting a lot of pushback because it seems to me that you are moving the goal posts. Here is what I mean.
You wrote "alarmist" but did not explain what you meant. I asked detailed questions so that we could get on the same page. No response, right? Or did I miss it?
You give specific examples that fall into the category of, e.g. (paraphrased) "if look at X data over a sufficiently long time frame, it does not show a clear trend." Yes, this is correct for some cases. And these are pointed out in the EPA descriptions. So this does not support your alarmist claim.
You complain of being personally attacked.
In summary, this trajectory looks a lot like moving the goal posts away from explaining what is alarmist about climate change models.
If you've changed your mind about what claims you want to make, please do so. But I have not seen good argumentation or explanation for what seemed to be your core argument.
> I think it's better to stop handwringing over pessimistic alarmist models ...
Which climate models are pessimistic in your view?
Which models are alarmist? Please define alarmist as you are using it. What exactly are you measuring when you say "alarmist"? Is there a threshold?
Let's get some common footing. Here's a thought experiment and question: Let's say Organization X finds in 90% of model runs, the global climate is disrupted to the point that the USA will face between $400B and $800B of additional costs starting in 2040 and increasing somewhere around 1% to 3% per year.
* Is summarizing this finding alarmist? Of course not -- it is only describing a model's prediction.
* Is the model alarmist? What would make it alarmist? If the assumptions are unrealistic? But all models are imperfect. So how unrealistic must they be?
On the flip side, What models do you recommend? Please share how your favorite models are funded.
> ... and to focus on solving real, concrete, addressable ecological problems.
According to your definitions of "real", "concrete", and "addressable".
Do you think NASA's writing on climate change does not reflect reality? That is is not concrete? That the problems are not addressable? So is NASA alarmist w.r.t. climate change?
What about the reinsurance industry? Let's take Swiss Re. Are they alarmist?
Please point us to some solid writing (such as a credible report) that summarizes your views.
Two final questions: have you studied economics? built predictive models? I'd like to get a sense of good ways to have this discussion. Perhaps we can cut through a bunch of preliminaries and cut to the chase.
Do you agree that the following framing is a useful way to think about our response to climate change? Technological constraints define what levers can be pulled and at what cost, in the short-run at least. Political decisions drive how governments spend money. Economic factors constrain financial and monetary options. Over the medium-term, investments in science and technology tend to increase expand the option space.
We can't talk about a point being valid or otherwise if it is not clear. Saying vague statements such as 'but they predicted X and it didn't happen ...' is nearly useless when it comes to understanding and predicting X.
> Instead of pearl-clutching global alarmism, we should narrowly focus on concrete problems with real, measurable solutions, and address them one by one.
Many neoclassical economists would argue against this approach. Fix the incentives, they would say, and things will work out.
We'll most probably increase the handouts to the autocrats bordering us, so that they'll do the dirty job in our place. See Erdogan, see how what was basically a State coup went almost unnoticed in Tunisia.
Just to be contrary, I feel it's worth considering that as solar overtakes wind as the cheapest electrical source and keeps dropping, and everything electrifies, even fertiliser and methane production, the migration might go in the other direction.
Sun too hot for agriculture? Stick some PV over it as shade.
Not enough water, stick some PV over it for shade, use it to power trickle irrigation of desalinated water.
If carbon offsets are used to install PV in such nations, it's a win-win-win-win.
Another post talks about a new generation buying battery EV RVs to live in. If they did, where would they tend to go? Somewhere where the climate provides cheap solar power and low heating needs.
Managing APIs like dependencies, with a package manager-like developer experience. (npm for APIs). The number of APIs is continuously growing. It's going to be impossible to manually manage API dependencies in the future. I wrote about our approach to solve the problem here: https://docs.wundergraph.com/docs/architecture/manage-api-de... I'm curious what others think of this problem space.
I've been thinking about this from a slightly different angle (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof), but I think we are both getting at a higher level of reuse and dependency management. I just don't think we need to limit the idea to APIs, there are different granularities, both bigger and smaller, where the ideas are useful.
This is a small thing, but one of the first sentences in the documentation you linked is "At least I have never thought about API dependencies before building WunderGraph." It makes the problem seem small, as if you can get away with not thinking about it.
>It's going to be impossible to manually manage API dependencies in the future.
This feels like a significantly important assumption to truly prove out with target customers before relying on this assumption to build a product or business.
I'd love to hear more on what's changing in the future that may make this statement partially or fully true.
Creating an API documentation and (decentralized micro)payment standard might be worthwhile. The hug library made a great impression on me: https://www.hug.rest/
Energy? I feel like it's been talked about a lot but maybe not?
Solar panels are dropping in cost at an exponential rate [0]. As of this writing, consumer "new" panels are $0.75/W and used are at around $0.30/W right now (I won't give a link as a Google search will do).
Battery technology is also dropping at an exponential rate. I believe, with a little effort, one can purchase batteries at about $0.08/Wh.
Taken together, one can purchase a 30KWh (daily) solar panel and battery storage system for about $4,200 (not including labor and extra hardware/electronics), which puts the return on investment (ROI) at about 3.5 years if we consider the average house spends around $1200 (in the USA).
Dropping costs will quickly put that in the 2 year ROI range which, in my opinion, is the inflection point where it effectively becomes too good to pass up for the average consumer.
The dropping price of energy comes with all sorts of side effects, like a potentially decentralized energy grid, use cases for excess energy (eg bitcoin mining, carbon capture, hydrogen production, etc.), novel power storage systems etc., which is maybe the "novel" part that I haven't heard too much talk about.
Tangentially related, there are a bunch of calculators out there for ROI on installing solar, but there doesn't seem to be one that will take into account the opportunity cost of installing solar now instead of waiting until it's cheaper. I would love to see one for that.
I've been thinking about this a lot with the current congressional action. I need a new roof ~now. But I have a lingering fear that huge product improvement will happen in the next 18 months due to added government money. I don't know enough about the industry to weight in that possibility.
I'd absolutely do it now. The price of solar has been beneath that of racks, mounts, wiring and installation for a while now. Even assuming a major breakthrough your costs probably wont change that much because panel cost isnt a big % of what your costs will be anyway.
There's also a risk that supply chain bottlenecks/cold war with china will drive up the cost & your electric bill is only gonna go up.
Agreed, do it now. The cost of panels in Australia is already going up due to supply issues thanks to covid, and I don't think you'll see prices come down again for a few years even with that investment.
Something about this cannot be right, surely?
You are saying one can invest in a solar setup and have 7+ years of free electricity, and all that starting after 3.5 years?
One reason is that this will make it a matter of survival for energy companies and governments to mandate connection to the grid and buying of electricity, for fear of having these critical companies fail.
Because this is not going to make all energy cheaper. It's going to massively increase the cost of "legacy" energy while making some types of energy free.
Perhaps they will use a "social" cost-sharing, or ... well I don't know, but essentially the time will come when living in the countryside will come with "free" energy (not unlimited though), and cities will come with punitively expensive energy.
Of course they will, but energy companies have a larger minimum capital expenditure than a household looking to invest in generation. And the energy company will likely still carry the full cost of transporting energy, which becomes more expensive with more energy sources connecting to the grid.
It would be a change in the dynamics of economies of scale vs small and nimble, greater lobbying power is one thing economies of scale still have a big advantage in so GP's comment seems plausible.
Exactly. There will be no need for "legacy" energy. Companies that are too invested in fossil energy can die and be replaced with companies that invested in solar.
Taxation of energy is a big revenue stream for the governments. What happens when people start putting independent energy sources to power themselves and it causes significant revenue drop ? Would the government tax them for putting up solar on their property ? Couple this with electrification of transportation and you have another taxation source (fossil fuels) losing revenue. This would lead to a disruption in the social power dynamics in a country.
Yes, energy companies can invest in these too, but why would I buy from them if I have my own generation ?
Fuel tax will definitely be replaced with some other form of car tax, at least in most of Europe. I don't see any way around that.
But I don't quite see how free countryside electricity would mean expensive electricity in cities? Large scale wind and solar will decrease grid prices too, and most people live in cities anyway so the people dropping off grid doesn't seem like an issue for electricity transfer costs. Plus off-grid won't happen anywhere with a real winter, so most of Europe is excluded already.
PV can scale down pretty far, yeah, but it can also scale up. Having guys crawl around on rooftops trying not to damage your shingles is a lot more expensive than just setting up some panels in a field. The majority of PV getting installed is utility-scale, not household-scale, so you can buy cheap PV energy and live half a block from a supermarket and half a block from a chichi cafe.
As for costs, there's been concern for more than a decade about the "utility death spiral" scenario: some users disconnecting from a grid would spread the fixed costs of things like transmission and black start over a smaller number of remaining users, leading more of them to disconnect, and so on. So far it hasn't materialized anywhere, but as far as I know it could. I don't think the same scenario is likely with "legacy energy" like gasoline and natural gas, because the fixed costs are so low.
It's not wildly far off but I think his battery costs are a stretch. In fact double that would be a challenge to have a quality and reliable system. But it is definitely lass than 3x. Right now the best value for batteries I'm getting is 0.18 per w/h. To get 0.08 you would have to doing something like recycling small cell or ev batteries which isn't necessarily scalable and comes with some risks.
Panel costs are accurate and the additional electronic expense is not super high. $1000 should be enough for most setups.
For most people the issue is space. This is going to be another thing where the poor are taxed. A significant amount of single family residences dropping off the grid will cause prices to go up for the people that don't have the luxury of 4000 sq ft to fill with solar panels.
The $0.08wh is something that you have to hunt around for.
Just a cursory look on Aliexpress gives $0.12wh for LiFePo4 batteries [0] [1].
Looking on Alibaba, I see some potential sellers that might get below that $0.12 but it takes looking around and potentially talking with sellers. I do think it's possible but it requires some hunting, especially in the 'consumer' quantities we're talking about (sub qty 100).
I have been living fully off solar (and some wind here and there) for 10 years. Its amazing. Never do I stress powerlines going down, brownouts, etc.
You can run a fridge, lights and a laptop 24.7 on about $300 of solar. You can add panels as your needs and budget increases. The biggest cost is the battery.
Do you have a writeup of your setup? Do you use lead acid for your batteries?
Besides the money issue, the biggest concern I have are balancing the batteries, getting the right inverters, keeping the panels clear and figuring out what inefficiencies are during the non-summer seasons.
I'd check out Lithium Solar on youtube - he's got a fairly comprehensive set of videos on almost every topic regarding batteries, inverters and general setup.
I'd be curious what your wind setup looks like. I have some land off grid which gets good wind, and I'm trying to decide whether that could be a reasonable alternative to solar. I don't see nearly as much information about residential wind turbines as I do solar.
I'd love to learn more about your setup. I'm very interested in investing in a solar + battery self-sufficient setup for myself, but without electrical engineering experience it's quite intimidating.
Sorry, but no. If anything solar gear has got cheaper in recent times. Secondhand Solar Panels are almost free at present. And the price of batteries is dropping fast.
Likewise, I have been living off-grid with solar for well over 20 years.
My batteries have always been lead-acid, simply because L.A. is still much cheaper than Lithium and alternatives.
I've recently taken my first set of Lead-Acid batteries out of service. They powered a small fridge, etc, via 200W of solar panels for over 20 years with essentially zero maintenance, except for occasional top-up of distilled water.
Inverters were a problem at first. I had a series of Inverters die over the years, until I started buying Victron products. Have had zero problems since. Rule one, is "don't buy cheap inverters".
The best part is that secondhand solar panels are now very cheap. The reason is that Gov regulations for grid-tie prohibits the use of second-hand panels, so people doing upgrades will basically throw away their old panels.
My setup runs a conventional fridge/freezer, and a large computer which is on-line for most of the day, as well as my workshop full of electrical tools. I do have a large generator, but the only time it gets run is when I have some welding to do. I don't even gave a battery charger hooked to it.
There are so many myths about solar: Lead-Acid batteries don't last as they are destroyed by deep-cycles. Yes, but when you size the system, you should aim for a deep discharge maybe once a month. This still should result in twenty years life or so. I live in a wet and cloudy part of Australia, and this winter my batteries have never been as low as 80% capacity, and it is rare if the batteries haven't returned to 100% charge by 10:00am each day.
Probably the main problem with solar is that people are stupid. One of my neighbours installed a modest solar system, only to have it regularly fail due to low battery voltage. Long story short: The supplier fitted a Watt meter which tracked the consumption at each outlet. It showed that that the problem was in his daughter's bedroom. A quick search revealed a huge radiator under her bed that she was running each night. Problem solved.
I would be very suspicious around claims from people trying to sell you solar panels. There are a lot of incentives in the US such as tax credits. This is good but a lot of people in green energy industry include that into calculations, which is fine except its under the assumption that the incentive will persist. Even Tesla shows you "net effective" price of their car by calculating the gas savings (e.g. Model 3 purchase price is 47k but they "potential savings" price is 38k which include potential incentives and gas savings of $8,600)
There are other gotchas like PACE loans being senior to your mortgage. So if you get a PACE loan, the loan is transferred to the person buying the home and is senior to your mortgage.
I'm also suspicious around the maintenance and longevity claims. For instance, from my experience, the energy efficient light bulbs do not live up to to their claims. I changed about half of my lightbulbs within three years and they supposedly have a 20+ year lifespan. It's fine that they don't have a crazy lifespan, but it just shows the industry is okay with outright false claims.
Overall I think the industry is so juiced by incentives and manipulated by regulations that it attracts shady players.
LED bulbs can last 20 years if they're designed to. Most of what is sold is generally very low quality, with poor heat management, low quality power
circuitry and excessive load on the LEDs, which all result in shortened life. It's a shame. Some of the first bulbs I got were good quality and I still have them in frequent use 10+ years later. Many others have been quickly failing junk.
I'm not sure about the US as installation costs there are very expensive, but in my part of Europe I had 10kW of roof mount solar installed for €10,800 at the end of last year.
The calculations I did for it in 2020 were that the payback period would be 7 years, or 6 with government incentives. That was when electricity was 15c/kWh though... if energy prices stay at the current level I will break even in less than 4 years. I generate around 8000kWh a year, which at current prices is €3200.
The panels should last forever (assuming no physical damage from hail storms etc), they just decrease in efficiency. The inverter should last at least 10 years, but that's easy to replace as it's not on the roof.
I did qualify that this was not including labor and the other hardware and electronics needed for such a system.
The (relatively) high cost is most likely because of labor and (in my opinion) inflated hardware costs of battery and solar panels.
Labor is a massive expense and can't be discounted but one could imagine a solar panel "kit" that just includes the hardware that you can install yourself.
One could also imagine that the costs of labor being subsumed by a larger entity that can take advantage of economies of scale and provide solar energy like a "classic" energy company. I believe something like that is already happening in the region where I live (upstate New York, USA).
For places where labor might be cheaper, then total costs would also come closer to raw hardware costs.
> Labor is a massive expense and can't be discounted but one could imagine a solar panel "kit" that just includes the hardware that you can install yourself.
Installing high-wattage DC lines without any training at all is a great way to get house fires.
Also, I haven't got whole lot of un-shaded roof space.
I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?
Was in a mega rental house and my wife burned her hand on the wall. Someone prior had done some diy electric work. The diy gas lines is what got us in the end.
Land is expensive. I am actually surprised why the companies don't lease home solar panel kits, e.g. you sign up and they install at minimal cost, and you pay for the electricity generated by the solar panels, but at a reduced rate compared to the grid. The ownership of the panels stay with the company leases them.
Those structures do exist, but they're not normally popular. Look for "power purchase agreement" solar plans. Normally those involve some pretty long contracts that are hard to get out of, contracts transfer to the new owner of the house so it can make your house less desirable, often require you to buy all the power they generate even if you don't need it all, need to call their contractors to remove the panels whenever you need roofing work done, you've got a lot of equipment in your house that isn't yours.
I wouldn't do it. I don't need yet another interested party when trying to sell my house eventually, and I don't want to scare off would-be buyers with potentially complicated contract terms.
People do all sorts of home renovation with lighting, fuse boxes, outlets and the like. I don't want to dismiss safety concerns but at the same time this is well within scope of many home owners.
> I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?
I think this is a really good question and I don't know the answer to it.
My not-very-well-informed opinion is that there are a confluence of factors involved:
* Infrastructure buildout, especially in the USA where the infrastructure projects take massive amounts of effort and the population is spread out over a large area of land, takes a lot of time, effort and money.
* The prices involved aren't as lucrative yet as they could be. When the price per MWh is 1/10 that of coal, then we'll see huge rollout (in my opinion).
* Adoption/rollout is happening but, in some places at least, there's government capture preventing widespread rollout/adoption (Pennsylvania?)
* Aging infrastructure prevents large scale energy injection at random points.
To the last point, here in New York state, I've heard one has to pay to first do a survey if the site where you want to build a solar array can actually inject that much more energy into the grid (at a cost of $10k+ or more) and even then, you're limited by what the aging energy infrastructure can support, capping the amount of energy available.
As someone who does lots of home renovation solar is not even close to in the same league as other types of work. Speaking as someone who has put in new circuits into a live panel.
First off you need roofing skills, which 99% of homeowners have no idea how to do safely, often needs specialized equipment, and you run the risk of falling off and basically paralyzing yourself for life. Then you have the issue of having run conduit correctly, grounding everything to code, having disconnects installed in the right places, which is going to vary from state to state and even city to city based on what the laws are.
If you don't electrocute yourself, and manage to not fall off the roof and die, and somehow connect everything correctly, there is approximately 0% chance the local utility agrees to connect your system without a licensed electrician who is willing to vouch for the work you did.
I absolutely appreciate all these risks. I have seen ads tho for diy solar where companies give you a kit and help you work through the permitting process. Also a couple YouTubers documenting the process.
This is something that I think has basically flown under the radar of mainstream understanding: you can now live "off the grid" and have many of the perks that used to be the domain of grid-connected living.
Not all of them... but "off grid" no longer means living like Ted Kaczynski. The popular understanding has yet to catch up.
You can have artificial lighting all night long (thanks to LEDs and batteries), computers (ideally you want to avoid the DC -> AC -> DC conversion), Internet access (although most satellite systems aren't really optimized for low power yet), running water (solar-powered pumps, cheap large-capacity plastic storage totes), etc.
The items that are still hard to get, because of their inherently energy-intensive nature, are hot water out of the tap on demand, and interior climate control (space heating especially). You need a pretty big solar array and battery system to run even a fairly efficient (AC or heat pump) climate control system. Lots of people get around this by siting their off-grid cabins in places that don't require AC, and making the interior volume small enough to heat with a small biofuel furnace (like a modern, efficient wood stove) that can burn locally-obtained fuel.
I would like to see a more in depth treatment than what I've seen (or what I've thought about).
Certainly cross country electric lines aren't going to needed as much because the energy can be produced by a relatively clean factory. With coal, we want it very far away enough away from consumers so as not to cause health concerns. Decentralized energy, at the very least, means we can create solar power plants next to larger cities and towns.
In terms of the wires in urban centers, I don't have a good sense. I can see where you might be right but at the same time, that infrastructure is already there and there are efficiencies to be gained by not transporting electricity over many miles of copper.
I also agree that the social aspect but there's a large pressure to find solutions because energy costs are going to be dropping by an order of magnitude or more.
> Certainly cross country electric lines aren't going to needed as much because the energy can be produced by a relatively clean factory. With coal, we want it very far away enough away from consumers so as not to cause health concerns. Decentralized energy, at the very least, means we can create solar power plants next to larger cities and towns.
Your going to need very long electric lines, to send clean energy from places where its sunny to places where it cloudy, or from places where its windy, to places where its currently calm.
Sorry, I'm not quite sure I understand your point.
There are places that have so much cloud cover year round that it makes solar adoption there effectively impossible? The frequency of these places is such that their energy needs requires the infrastructure remain in place?
It was created as a decentralized network, but is it now? It may be in some technical sense, but for all practical purposes, it's collectively centralized.
One interesting documentary on this topic is Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Every Loving Grace.
$4,200 is _very_ optimistic for the panel/battery cost for a 30kWh system. The GP comment also conveniently excluded "labor and extra hardware/electronics". There's a lot more that goes into a solar power system (especially one that has to manage batteries) than just slapping the panels on the roof and dropping the batteries off in the garage. Inverters, chargers, grid integration equipment, etc.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "just" labor. You're talking about a critical system, that has the possibility of seriously injuring someone (including folks outside your house) or causing extensive property damage if not installed correctly. That seems like a thing where skilled (and fairly compensated) installers and some degree of regulation is very appropriate.
I saw an article recently (here maybe?) that the world could switch to 100% green energy and make the investment back in 6 years. I haven't looked at the math behind it, and actually getting that many solar panels up is going to take some time too, but it really seems to me like this is the main thing we should all be focusing on right now. Because of high fossil energy prices, getting rid of Russian gas, and of course because of climate change. Three very big reasons to go all out on clean energy.
That just another "study" of Jacobson, the Stanford professor that sue other scientists when they criticise one of its study and make Stanford pay for the lost lawsuit. Anyway his work is just not very good, unrealistic assumption everywhere, there a better energy modeler out there, look at the work of Jessie Jenkins, Tom Brown, NREL, Clack....
Hopefully the other pieces get cheap enough to enable some revolution in the wiring side of it. Falling costs enable some acceptable loss of efficiency, so you can blow 100W on unnecessary power conversion and another 100W or whatever on losses due to smaller cabling.
It badly needs to be standardized in a consumer-friendly way...like power-over-ethernet in reverse. Field-installable, hot-pluggable, fool proof connectors. You can get 90W over some variations of network cabling...bump that up a couple sizes so you can handle 400W.
So you buy a bunch of solar panels and some patch cables, and plug those in to a one or more "power switches" on the roof top. Then run a QSFP+ equivalent "power backhaul" down into utility room where you have your "power aggregation switch" which has a bunch of (power)QSFP+ ports and plug batteries in to a few of those. And of course a couple big QSFP28 ports to an inverter to power legacy 120V loads, which maybe someday you don't need any more as household things move to using PoLE (power over large ethernet).
This is actually talked about on every HN energy thread and it’s now incorrect, particularly about batteries.
Solar has supply bottlenecks at the moment that are stopping further price declines- hopefully they will get solved.
But there’s a lithium shortage that is already showing up in the price of lithium going up 5x. Analysts predict that by around 2025 lithium will limit the battery market that is trying to grow 40x to meet electrification demands [1]. Note that opening a new lithium mine takes a minimum of 7 years. sodium based batteries are coming to help this situation, but they are a new technology that will take time to productionize and ramp up.
Over the course of 10-15 years, I don't think you're correct. Solar is (in my opinion conservatively) expected to drop by 34% by 2030 [0] and, though I'm having trouble finding anything that spells it outright, demand and production of batteries is projected to increase dramatically that will, in my opinion, most likely allow for production efficiencies to reduce cost.
Even the video you link claims to be 'bullish' on production. I didn't see any claims about price in the future, just production, though I might have missed it.
In my opinion, we're seeing a lot of 'whiplash' effects from the supply chain issues but, as the pandemic recedes, these should resolve in the next couple of years.
I am quite bullish on long-term battery production as well. But I recognize that we are heading for some pain in the near-term where supply will not keep up with demand.
I like that solar analysis, but I also think it is possible that the high demand for solar and high commodity (energy, etc) costs could continue to stop solar prices from dropping for much of this decade just as we have seen recently.
The temporary whiplash concept for inflation hasn't panned out yet. I follow Lyn Alden's economic analysis closely and she has been predicting this decade to be inflationary. These predictions started over a year ago when the Fed kept saying that inflation was temporary.
Panels are dropping but installation costs have not. Now more than have of the cost is installation. The real impact will be with the utility size installations. We need a way to reduce cost for all the other costs outside the panels.
Pity it's not possible to open-source execution. So many good ideas fail due to poor execution (these days, quite possibly a larger number are killed by birth by bigco's - that's still a 'failure to execute' though, in a certain sense).
To be fair, there is a lot more information and educational material out there on how to build new products more effectively, the last 10 years or so. It still takes time to learn even the basics.
Planetary defense against civilization-ending-level threats.
There was a movie about it recently and precisely one organization developing a realistic hedge (not counting NASA's DART test mission) and pretty much still nobody cares.
DC home electricity. If your future home has solar and local storage, and your domestic usage is mostly in appliances which convert back down to DC immediately behind the plug socket (most of us have this) then at some point we're going to start wanting to power our homes like houseboats or camper vans.
Yes, this won't help for (eg) appliances with heating elements, I'm probably talking about a second discrete wiring loop rather than a total replacement, and it's hard right now to find a TV with the DC transformer on the outside.
But it'd be quite a lot more efficient for almost everything else most of us do. Look around the room you're in now and count how many things use more than 19V DC internally. Where I'm sitting right now, it's None.
Sure, all my things may work with 12DC internally, but they expect 120AC (or w/e depending on country) at the plug, so I wouldn't be able to use them if I switch.
Yes, it causes issues today. But tomorrow, I'm expecting that the transformer will be outside the device (as now with wall warts and most laptops) rather than inside (as with your TV). And that minority who are handy enough with tools can patch past the internal transformer with a soldering iron and a screwdriver in the meantime.
The idea being that consumer items will, more and more, be able to take DC directly instead of expecting AC.
For example, any device that takes in USB power with a 120VAC "wall wart" plug can just be used with a buck convert plug instead or being powered directly from the DC current.
LED lighting is taking in AC then converting to DC to power the LEDs. Your phone is taking in AC then converting to DC to power it. Your laptop is taking in AC then converting to DC to power it.
There are some household machines which will require some heavy duty power draw but much of the consumer products we use is powered off of DC to begin with. Powering directly off of DC would be cutting out the "middle man" of AC.
I"m not sure I'm really the person to answer this but I would guess inverter and/or buck/boost converters are in the 90%-95% range. So, chaining DC -> AC -> DC gives about anywhere from 15% to 30% losses.
I think the better argument is one for reduced 'hardware complexity'. Instead of having an inverter that then goes through a rectifier, all you need is a buck converter.
Power conversion efficiency is at best the 3rd or 4th important factor here.
The first factor would be the hodgepodge of wall dongles one needs to own and maintain (plus the cost of buying a dongle for each device that doesn't have one, or multiple of them per device in case you want to charge your phone/laptop/etc in more than one location at home).
The second factor is the "smoothness" of your DC sources. Most of the common LED lamps have a pretty ugly signal shape, and not at all close to a DC flat line. This is mostly unavoidable as AC->Smooth DC conversion is more expensive than AC-> DC + a ton of 120Hz, 240Hz,... on top of it. So, common LED lights tend to opt for cheaper "electronics". People notice the flickery LED lights to various degrees (some get headaches, some outright see the flickers, some claim to be totally oblivious to the difference). The DC "quality" also affects some fairly sensitive electronic devices, so some AC->DC adaptors are fairly sophisticated. A central high quality AC->DC convertor (combined with DC wiring) has better scalability when you need to care about smoothness (it can be a basic quality of life matter for some people).
The third and fourth factors are power discipation and conversion efficiency. They are the same thing, with two remedies: more $ to remedy the inefficiency (which is really small these days, if you go for switching convertors), and plans for heat to discipate properly (devices end up with pretty hot adaptors).
It varies pretty wildly, often efficiency ends up being dependent on the load since power supplies usually get optimized for a certain load range. Individually, the numbers might not look too bad, but when you think about how many individual AC->DC supplies you have, the losses can add up.
I've been involved in a side project developing a consumer-friendly rating of "power quality" for AC devices and AC->DC power supplies which summarizes efficiency over a range of loads, as well as incorporating power factor measurements. We've been testing common devices such as USB power supplies for phones and such, as well as things like laptop power supplies, due to how numerous they are. We've had a few surprises, for example, Apple power supplies generally don't fare that well.
Power Quality Score: https://pqs.app/
Detailed test data is public for some devices but not all, since we're trying to find paths to revenue starting with subscriptions for full test results. Let us know if you have feedback.
You might also be interested in the Youtube channel of my friend/PQS collaborator, where he's done some "deep dive" videos of testing some of the devices in the PQS database- particularly AC->DC USB power supplies due to how ubiquitous they are now- https://www.youtube.com/c/AllThingsOnePlace/ .
(Sorry, replying to myself but by way of example I recently discovered that "old"-style UK plugs -- BS546 ones -- are still rated for DC domestic supply. So in at least one or two corners of the world this whole notion is already supported with a semi-familiar interface.)
Ooh, fascinating. AC is better for long distance transmission, which solar + local storage obviates. Do you happen to know of the efficiency we might stand to gain from switching appliances to DC?
Being honest it's not a massive amount of loss if your entire supply is coming from the grid. But if you're generating and storing energy at home, then it's much more significant because you add the transformer's losses to the additional losses spent in your inverter.
So you've two competing losses: transformers and voltage drops over long DC circuits.
When I was last looking into this myself -- and lamenting you couldn't find PoE LED lights for love or money -- it sounded like (IANAEE) voltage drops start becoming a thing you have to care about around 50 or 100 feet, depending on the gauge; wiring a house with DC isn't impossible but it might require a little bit of care or some thought.
LDx HVDC has a small set of use cases where it is more efficient than HVAC. But yes, in some cases it can work better over distances of hundreds of km.
You need to move to higher voltage DC which will present some challenges you don't get with AC, for example if you get an arc in a switch or a circuit breaker with AC it normally extinguishes quickly at the zero voltage crossing, whereas DC will just keep arcing until stuff starts to burn.
> and your domestic usage is mostly in appliances which convert back down to DC immediately behind the plug socket (most of us have this) then at some point we're going to start wanting to power our homes like houseboats or camper vans.
Most of these appliances use low voltage which travels poorly over long distances. Your car, camper van, and boat all use ultra-thick cables to move 12 volts. This is quite uneconomical for anything larger than a small studio apartment. (Copper isn't cheap.)
Furthermore, note that I said "12 volts," which is what cars and capers use. (Not sure about boats.) Some DC appliances need 5 volts, some need 20... They'll all need converters.
So how are both of those problems solved? You'll probably send 100-200 volts, DC, though the wall! The big question is, does this really simplify anything? The big advantage with AC is that it's super-easy to change voltage with a simple transformer. What do we gain by going DC in the walls? Are there any real advantages in simplifying voltage conversion at appliances? Is it worth the added complexity of a whole-house AC-DC converter; or the complexity of a DC grid?
My thoughts exactly. A/C has some important electromagnetic characteristics that make it a lot easier to transport. Particularly for long distance lines, high voltage is critical and transformers make it trivial to modify voltage levels, such as to get to 120V for the house. it's also a lot easier to convert AC to DC than the other way around. If we start transporting with DC, we take on a number of problems/challenges that we don't deal with now.
I could see a point in time where there are AC outlets and DC outlets in a house depending on where the power comes from (power lines vs. solar panels/battery), but unless we radically decentralize (which I don't see happening) it seems unlikely to me that we switch to DC for long-distance power transmission.
> it's also a lot easier to convert AC to DC than the other way around. If we start transporting with DC, we take on a number of problems/challenges that we don't deal with now.
Which brings up a very good point: What happens when grid-scale battery storage is common? Does a DC grid make a lot more sense then?
Would it make sense to think about upping the line frequency ? IIRC Engineering 101 said that 50~60 Hz are frequencies most dangerous to humans; choosing a higher line frequency would be safer to work with and would (natch!) permit the use of thinner conductors.
Isn’t there also a marginal safety advantage for AC in that because it’s an alternating current, you can let go of whatever is live you’ve grabbed and is shocking you? Whereas with DC, your muscles stay contracted and you can’t let go.
> I'm probably talking about a second discrete wiring loop rather than a total replacement
I have considered this sort of thing for the basics around the house (in my head at least). A seperate lighting loop in each room + outside, comms cupboard and some usb/usb-c ports. Could be all powered by a couple of car batteries and not a lot of solar panels.
100% would do this sort of setup if I built a home office shed, but otherwise the plans remain in my head.
It seems that other than a few power hungry appliances (oven, kettle, washing machine, heat pump, water heater, gaming PC) the rest are low-power digital devices that need up to about 200W (PS5 gaming console peak reported usage, even large TVs use much less than that).
I would love to see a comprehensive study of a home that would be designed and built around the concept of using two energy sources: AC and 48V DC, backed by battery storage and power grid in case of smaller installations or northern climate.
Would it make sense to do that on a large scale? Having smaller, energy efficient house should limit the need for long copper cables, we would also exclude all those AC-DC converters from today's devices - leaving us with something similar to a USB-C PD (working in the range 5-48V, which of course still is a converter but could be a standardized DC-DC one).
If I am correct then the main advantages would also include not running solar inverter all the time but only when there is a need for a lot of power (where it should be much more efficient) thus also extending its lifespan.
Having said that I do not have enough knowledge to judge whether possible gains would warrant going into this direction for future home installations. I would very much appreciate all comments and maybe some further reading material.
Technology wise merging backend and frontend into a seamless framework seems like the next big thing. A lot of progress has been made this year on this with liveview, et al but haven't seen any mass adoption yet as only few people are talking about it.
But i reckon once these frameworks mature enough they have the power to disrupt the whole way we think about building websites and frontend back-end coding.
When asking this question it's worth considering that historically, the hit rate of such predictions is quite low - even when made by experts based on reasonable-seeming extrapolations. Prior experience indicates predictions more than a decade out should be heavily discounted.
The likely shutdown of all Russian gas to Germany this winter, resulting in a) 5-10X rise in home heating costs, and b) complete shutdown of many industries, resulting in a c) depression in the German (and thus European) economy
I feel OP is welcoming Germany’s demise as the Economic Powerhouse of Europe rather than suffering of people. Tho, both are linked because Germany is a net-importer of human capital and many will be forced to move back East, thus further pushing East Europe back into poverty.
No. I'm welcoming Germany's [and on a wider level, the EU's] demise as their just desserts for acting as the US's poodle for the past several decades, instead of seizing the opportunity to create an independent and non-aligned Europe as a force for good in the world.
But, yes, my remarks are aimed at nations and what they stand for, rather than people.
You do realize that we live in a globalized economy and that a collapse of the German economy would have significant consequences for the world at large?
Yeah I feel like somehow the market has ignored that possibility. Although maybe that’s why the 10 year bond is down so low and the market is fighting the fed
The rough polygon of Idaho - California - Arizona becoming less habitable every year. Mass migration to the east, water wars between wealthy landowners using most of dwindling water supply for agriculture and the rest of the population for drinking.
I'm not expecting some doomer apocalyptic scenario. But every year, it'll get 1% worse. People will struggle 1%, there will be 1% more resentment between race/class/demographics, 1% more people leaving, and so on. It'll just get worse.
There's an easy thing we can do to start fixing: ban ag exports. We been subsidizing it for too long and literally shipping our water overseas. We reduce our own ag production to feed just us, even those uses of water are probably doable.
Buy land in Rustbelt cities. I’m convinced a warmer Buffalo with unlimited water is a very appealing option for people on water rations in a 128f Phoenix.
Tooling for developing real-time collaborative remote working environments is about to take of dramatically.
CRDTs [0], while complex to work with untill recently, are now so much easer for developers to use with toolkits such as Yjs[1] and AutoMerge[2]. SAAS and PAAS companies proving tooling around these, enabling developers to easily build collaborative tools for specific niches and verticals are going to explode into the market.
Every 5-ish years there is a big “new” database tech that receives massive investment for both enterprise and small business. Real time CRDT based data stores are the “next big thing” - in my view.
CRDTs are often only talked about in relation to rich text editing, but “generic” CRDTs that represent “standard” data types (think JSON), and basic operations to them (inset, edit, remove) are able to represent so much more. You can use them for building so many CRUD type business apps, and by using a CRDT as your base data representation you get conflict free collaborative (and offline) editing for free.
The nice thing about both Yjs and AutoMerge is that they provide both Rich Text and JSON-like data types, covering 95% of what people would need for building business apps.
Did this 20 years ago in an FMMS. It's not worth it. It's better to have an arbiter source of truth that can guarantee ACID principles with transactions rather than introduce merge conflicts or lose transactions for lack of synchronization. The internet is almost everywhere, so use that rather than provide academic features that cause more headaches than they solve. SQL databases with transactions and row locks are invaluable inventions.
Also, if you want to collaborate, synergize, innovate, and revolutionize consider OTs. They're a known quantity. Handling merges of data is fraught with landmines.
You can't sell 2 of something to the same person offline and know if they wanted 1 or 2. Plus, giving an end user the ability to resolve merge conflicts is asking for theft and fraud.
i don’t want to realtime collab. i want to concentrate and get my shit done. slack is a nightmare for example. there is always a fool constantly interrupting your flow.
Agreed. I chunk slack messaging the same way I do email. I have two channels that I'll take realtime notifications on, but if someone raises those flags without very.good.reason, they'll hear about it. I generally won't see anything on those channels more than once a month.
For special 'war room' projects I'll set up a special channel that I'll pay attention to for real time colab, but those are very unusual situations with a well defined end date.
You might be missing the point. Some examples of realtime collaboration in the world of remote work can be: google docs / sheets, project boards (trello, miro), whiteboarding (jamboard, zoom), design/drawing, or even coding (VS code sharing).
Collaborative content creation in tools like Miro/Lucid can work well, especially when on an audio call at the same time. It’s the best execution of the whiteboard experience in a remote working environment that I have experienced so far.
The same technology that makes realtime collaboration (e.g., figma) go is the technology that makes it possible to build high performance single-user apps that you can open on your phone and desktop at the same time (e.g., roam). It's collaboration whether it's two users or two devices from the same user.
The web will go multiplayer because it's the only way to make high performance UIs that are multi-device without locking. The multi-user realtime collaboration bit just comes along for the ride.
Sync work process is inefficient. 80% of the time I would define work process to be asynchronous e.g. with git branch, pull request, docs, backlogs. This is efficient collaboration.
Real-time collaborative tool is a thing but not going to be big.
Pair designing could happen while meeting where there's not only approval process but also some tweaks here and there. In normal workflow, work should be done as single responsibility (feature) per designer. Synchronous workflow within tool is not that better than it's done by talking (letting 1 person doing it)
Drone tech is going to get tiny. It’ll have microphones and cameras and it’ll probably be untraceable. It’ll spy on you arbitrarily and the equivalent of 4chan will have access to it in abundance. You will never again have any form of privacy unless you buy expensive countermeasures for your home and office. Fortunately deepfakes will be so good you can blame it all on that.
Yes, I watched some drone light-show/fireworks displays recently, and thought, 'wait till the drones are the size of flies, these shows will be happening in restaurants, bars, in your living room'. Imagine walking into a room full of fireflies that move around you as you walk, etc.
Bottleneck has been and continues to be energy density. But eventually there will be a breakthrough in battery tech and we will reach new heights of utopia/dystopia.
The drone swarm wars will be crazy. One of the current strategies is to crash your swarm into the enemy swarm and hope you take them all out with what you got
I was recently caught up in a very good friend's divorce, who suspected either her apartment or her car had been placed under surveillance (her husband constantly had knowledge of her whereabouts). For some reason I cannot expand here, she assumed I could help her "check" her apartment.
This brought me into looking for solutions on how to detect electronic surveillance. I discovered the term "bugsweep", and rapidly came to the conclusion that I could either:
1) Recommend her to hire government contractors at a price she would never be able to afford.
2) Buy cheap stuff on Amazon without any knowledge whatsoever on what works or not.
It felt like there was no middle ground.
I also happen to stay in hotels for both work and while on holidays, and although I don't particularly aim to hide myself from government surveillance, I don't like the idea that any moron or stalker could buy some recording equipment online and put me under surveillance. I would appreciate being able to check my surroundings for obvious / cheap recording equipment when I feel the need.
If anyone has some good pointers/recommendations on this topic, I think it could interest more than just me.
Thanks for the share. I clicked the source cited in the page, it seems to be quite an overkill/invasive method (and dangerous for the person doing the detection), no? It seems to not be accessible to civilians...
I'd rather expect drone tech to be increasingly regulated or banned. We're going to start seeing it used as a weapon more and more. You can see simple forms of it happening the Ukraine conflict now.
I don't know about "big" in terms of a viral hit, but in terms of what will change in our day-to-day experience... Here are some wild guesses, mostly along the theme of a societal conversation about and re-thinking of "sustainability" on nearly all levels.
* Robotic carts that follow you around when shopping in dense, pedestrian oriented areas and/or stores. Might go hand in hand with the rapid normalization of e-bikes.
* An increase in eco-villages, apartment buildings with permacultured gardens growing their own food, etc.
* Some sort of push for groves of large trees in urban areas to provide shade, possibly in roundabouts, to reduce the heat-island effect.
* Somewhat decentralized water cisterns and filtration on a municipal level. Possibly including creating small holes in the bottom of drainage infrastructure to re-charge the groundwater.
* Constructing new clothes out of semi-recycled fabric cut out of items that would be thrown away?
* Short-hop electric plane taxi things.
* Energy generating windows ("transparent solar panels") and fabrics.
* The wide-spread use of plastic-alternatives: fully compostable packaging made out of mushrooms, etc.
The NSF SBIR funded projects page is a cool source for this sort of prediction.
Also:
* Much better voice interfaces. At some point in the next 10 years, it will be common to have primarily voice-controlled computer applications. There might be a huge role for this to play in hospitals.
Especially given that the time to plant the trees is now rather than when they are really going to be needed. There is likely a way to do it / provide shade with native plants too, that would require less up-keep...
> Much better voice interfaces. At some point in the next 10 years, it will be common to have primarily voice-controlled computer applications. There might be a huge role for this to play in hospitals.
Doctor: "Quickly! Give patient 100 milligrams of epinephrine!"
Computer: "Giving patient 400 milligrams of epinephrine. Say 'yes' to confirm"
>apartment buildings with permacultured gardens growing their own food
This has been tried (and proved wrong) countless times. The issue is that it needs a huge footprint, and space is something you don't have at large in apartment buildings.
Good point. I would guess that if electric bikes and other mobility options come online, maybe there will be less need for parking lots to be as large as they are now?
Even if apartment buildings are too dense, I still think we will see an increase in eco-village type arrangements.
Thought it was more to have a pleasant place to hang out and the odd fresh tomato, etc.. I hope nobody seriously thinks you can feed an apartment building from the roof.
Most estimates say if you want to do permaculture/homestead living and provide your own calories you need a good acre per person and a taste for sweet potatoes...
One person needs about 5 hectares of land to be self-sufficient (i.e. to cover all its food needs, including protein). If you can afford your own 432 Park Avenue (Cost: ~$1BUSD, Floor area: ~4ha) for that, then the answer is yes.
But also, with that same $1BUSD you could buy around 100,000 hectares of land in rural US, close to the size of Qatar; you can see how relatively inefficient vertical farming is in economic terms.
Was not aware these projects were trying to be self-sufficient! Yeah, that's pretty wild. I assumed from your comment they just wanted to have their own tomatoes or something.
Disclaimer: I am also very skeptical of the whole concept of vertical farming, but...
That 5 hectares of land per person metric is totally inapplicable here. Sort of the entire point of vertical farming is to be (in theory) vastly more efficient per unit of land. If you believe the claims it's somewhere between a 10 and 50 times reduction in land usage for same output.
5 hectares is also on the very high end for estimates of that metric. It also drops hugely if you're not relying on animal products.
I don't think vertical farming in apartments is the future, but I think your calculations here are also way, way off.
> Research in the 1970s by John Jeavons and the Ecology Action Organization found that 4000 square feet (about 370 square metres) of growing space was enough land to sustain one person on a vegetarian diet for a year, with about another 4000 square feet (370 square meters) for access paths and storage – so that’s a plot around 80 feet x 100 feet (24m x 30m).
That’s about a fifth of an acre, and other caveats apply like climate and the amount of labor during the growing season. If vertical farming works, and can also reduce the labor required (I have no idea if that’s one of its goals), it starts to look more plausible as something that could take off. Still won’t fit on a rooftop though, and as Jayne would say, “I smell a lotta ‘if’ coming off that plan.”
Also, I'm sure that if humanity had put enough resources to this we would already have really efficient solutions around this. It tech that needs to (and hopefully will) be developed.
1,214 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] thread[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat
I think the main point here is not that we will never figure it out, but that it will take a long time. Time, that we don't have with the imminent climate and biodiversity crises.
It makes much more sense to create meat directly from plant proteins than to try to grow it artifically. Brands like Impossible make damn great burger patties, chicken nuggets, and what not. I'm pretty most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference to animal meat in a blind test.
I'm not necessarily saying they're wrong, only that they're not a reliable source for that information.
> I'm pretty most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference to animal meat in a blind test.
Perhaps not burger and nuggets, since those are heavily processed and seasoned anyway, but try to give them a plant based steak or ribs and I doubt anyone would fail to tell the difference.
I'm sure people said exactly this about burger patties before amazing plant-based burger patties existed. There's no physical reason this is not possible. And don't forget that making a steak is also much harder with cultured meat, that's why they're also starting with burger patties and chicken nuggets.
From a higher-level view, most meat that's consumed is not in the form of steaks. It's in the form of ground meat. If enough people switch to plant-based meats for let's say 80% of their meat needs, animal-based meat won't be able to compete anymore with the price of plant-based meats. So, for Impossible to reach their goal of getting rid of the animal based food system, they don't even need to be able to make steaks. Sure, there will always be meat, but it will be an expensive luxury and rarity that we will frown upon as society (e.g. like wearing fur coats today or hunting dolphins and whales).
> So someone whose subsistence depends on plant-based meat substitutes says their competitor are not good enough?
Fair point. But also consider why they started a plant-based meat company in the first place and not a cultured meat one? He had the experience, expertise and funds to do either.
I'm not too sure, but time will tell. Are plant-based steaks going to be at least as healthy as their animal counterparts though? Plant burgers tend to be on par or worse, which is not great since beef burgers are not the healthiest to begin with.
> most meat that's consumed is not in the form of steaks
Do you have data to back this up? I'm not saying you're wrong but I come from a culture where most of our meat is in the form of grilled steaks or barbecued chunks of fresh meat, seasoned with salt only. Burgers are not necessarily uncommon but are generally seen as what they are - a fast food treat to be had infrequently.
> consider why they started a plant-based meat company in the first place and not a cultured meat one?
To consider this, I'd have to actually know their reasons. :) It could just have been that they thought burgers would have more acceptance for the reasons I stated - they're easier to mimick since their animal-based counterpart is already heavily seasoned and processed, and doesn't actually taste that much like the actual meat.
As a last note, you have my upvote for a thoughtful and thought-provoking response. Thank you! :)
I'm not as worried, believing in the spirit of human ingenuity. Desalination and piping it from the oceans (like we do for oil) will be fine. We just need the wherewithal to implement real solutions and invest in the sciences rather than regulate behavior.
I live in northern Britain and, even at the height of summer, it's rare for a week to go by, without at least one day of heavy rainfall.
Maybe it's me who's extrapolating globally from what I'm seeing locally. But I don't get any sense at all that the world is getting drier.
Still, if the 'water wars' predictions do turn out to be true, maybe we'll have an interesting reversal of fortunes in the future, where damp, wet, soggy countries become fabulously wealthy, like the OPEC nations today --through exporting tankers full of their spare rainwater.
Let's see how the Arabs like queuing up at the pumps to fill their drinking vessels at £2/litre!
I also think that water wars seem unlikely as if you have energy, you can get water.
But it is not the type of war that we fight over oil or gas. But instead very localised conflicts over rivers. Think of Nile and Kashmir.
There is no point of conquering other countries for lakes or ground water. The transport is just too expensive.
Whilst we havent had wars, there have certainly been water conflicts even _within_ the UK. Consider Treweryn [2]. This was a town rich with Welsh culture and the Welsh language. It was flooded to become a reservoir to supply water to Liverpool in 1965. The decision to flood the town was made by UK Parliament, without gaining consent from Wales. The plans triggered mass opposition and protests, but they were ignored and the plan went ahead. The story of Treweryn acts as a beacon for the Welsh independence movement to this day [3]
Interestingly, the remains of the town became visible for the first time in decades a few years ago. Possibly a further sign of things getting dryer.
[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weat...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llyn_Celyn
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cofiwch_Dryweryn
Nigerian here, also an opponent of the present government, but why would a crackdown on anonymous SIM cards be an issue for debate ?
It's a very authoritarian move to threaten privacy and prevent people having free access to the internet. It hurts people at a minimum and causes the deaths of the most vulnerable in society at worst. Definitely up for debate and probably not one the Nigerian government can win in a fair debate.
Tell me you're an American without telling me you're an American.
While I don't diminish the impact it could have over there, that's irrelevant to the daily lives of literally the rest of the world.
Tesla cars are burning slate
Crackdowns on encrypted talk
Britain shock
We don't want the MONKEYPOX!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYdQYZ9Rj4
https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02813
According to Prof. Hoffman, this model of the universe is highly parsimonious in that it can model data from the Large Hadron Collider using a single parameter, while the best incumbent (Quantum Field Theory) needs millions.
The implication is that everything we see and experience are not fundamental, including space and time itself. The fundamental unit of reality is consciousness.
This has far reaching implications into every other scientific and non-scientific human endeavor, from neuroscience to philosophy. It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history.
Even Albert Einstein appears to have intuited this when he wrote:
"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."
In any case, Dr. Hoffman's theories are mathematically rigorous. I think it's worth listening to the podcast before dismissing.
I can't really comment on that as 1) I only skimmed a couple sections of the paper and 2) my field is more applied math than pure. I'm not attacking or dismissing anything, just asking how the claims made are substantiated.
> However, since it's able to model experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, I would assume that it makes predictions about the positions and velocities of high energy particles.
Do those models cover experiments which have yet to be run, and more importantly are they predictions which differ from those of the standard model?
There are a lot of neat theories which model experimental work we already have results for, the problem is using said theories to make falsifiable predictions which are both realistic in terms of actually finding a way to do experimental verification and are different from predictions made by the standard model. Nobody really loves the state of physics as-is, but moving on to something else requires meeting those two conditions which has been an insurmountable hurdle as of yet.
Ideally yes. But if you have two theories which make the same predictions, and one requires orders of magnitude fewer parameters than the other, then the former is, if nothing else, a valuable new perspective.
The analogy that comes to mind is the elaborate system of epicycles in the geocentric model of the solar system. These were quite accurate -- even more accurate than the first heliocentric model (if I recall correctly). But the heliocentric model was far simpler in that it required fewer parameters (and as we know it turned out to be the correct one).
It's still early days for the cosmological polytope. It's right to be skeptical, but the greatest scientific advances are usually considered ludicrous at first by the broader community. It's those who allow for the possibility that the new theory may be correct that will design and carry out experiments to provide evidence either way.
My favorite HN comment ever.
__
As for that lack of a falsifiable claim, agree, not only that, but one that would allow for a preponderance of evidence.
Donald Hoffman was interviewed and topic of falsifiable observations came up and as far as I am able to tell he avoided the topic; search for “falsifiable” in this link:
https://tim.blog/2022/04/18/donald-hoffman-transcript/amp/
___
On same topic, this paper provides overview of possible different approaches testing to quantum gravity with cosmology:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01597
> from neuroscience to philosophy
> It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history.
The Buddha, and every other enlightened person since, only beat him by ~5000 years
Though I do appreciate you recognizing my track record ;]
In any case, I apologise - my comment was indeed unnecessary and didn't bring any value to the discussion. Had it been made to me I might not have been as good a sport as you have so kudos to you!
Didn't realize people still used Wikipedia for things besides for "facts" since its descent into the political / opinion battlegrounds. It's been years since I used it
If it doesn't have a Wikipedia article, there's a very good chance it isn't very popular in the industry. At least in terms of open source standard technology, which this appears to be reaching for.
It's not widespread because it is just starting to get going, but it is definitely popular (well liked) among its users.
You can already use CUE within other programs when you need imperative, there is also the scripting layer where this is possible. There is also a plan to support a WASM runtime so you can have imperative subroutines in the scripting layer, written in any other language.
(curiosity as I'm building a tool on top of CUE that combines it with notions of data models and code gen, and I'm always keen to learn more about the things people do today)
I'm apparently CUE's biggest fan too :]
I can envision local electricity generation and wireless communication. But not every home can support a well and septic system.
I'm a huge fan of Zipline, I imagine they'll refine the parachute element of the operation.
Cities at sea may need something like this to get going.
A company wanting to build a plant next to a resource they need could acquire a town for its workforce.
I would rather have my elected ones work on a framework that will govern how this immigration could occur and how to make it work in everyone's bests interests. But it seems that people will mostly vote for whoever tells them he or she will make the country impenetrable.
Europe's population is aging drastically, we make less children and our workforce is shrinking. We produce less people that can offer social/medical/health care to the elders, less people who can pay taxes, and also less people who can defend the territory in case of armed conflict. Retirement planning is a catastrophy (younger generations are privileging individualized financial planning mechanisms instead of State protected and tax deducible solutions, and conversion rates for pension funds are also diminishing year after year). Finally, "non-white" immigrants seem to be perceived by locals as posing a security threat and nothing more.
Whether I look at my family, my friends or my colleagues, I feel surrounded by people who refuse to engage in the thought experiment further than "we should reinforce our borders".
Am I in denial when I acknowledge that both a mass immigration will occur towards the northern hemisphere, whether smoothly, or by force, and that any economy needs to preserve a strong workforce to keep florishing?
What am I missing here?
If I acknowledge that some communities are more likely to live their daily lives under these three factors altogether, it could explain why these communities may be more vulnerable to daily life challenges, and more easily resort to violence. Still, that doesn't give me a causal link between racial/cultural diversity and violence, far from it, but I can understand why those who prefer taking shortcuts may end up reaching this conclusion.
This shortcut is also very comfortable for the peace of mind: once I attribute violence to racial/cultural diversity, I can also safely conclude that I will never be part of the problem (if I consider myself as being part of the "good" racial/cultural group)...
I have noticed a very very very strong correlation of how dangerous it can be just to walk outside alone, or at night, or walk in public with your cellphone. I believe there is a link between violence and race and culture.
I am sorry to ask but I have the feeling that something is missing in your comment. You said you have lived in poor areas and observed violence, or did you mean that you witnessed violence only in a subset of the areas you listed?
Contrast that with living in a very poor neighborhood in Chisinau, in Moldova. Iasi, in Romania, Kiev, and Saint petersburg. I never really felt in danger at all, I could walk home at whatever hour, go on a walk, take out my cellphone. The closest to being dangerous was desperate drug addicts in St. Petersburg.
These places/slums in eastern europe are just as poor, have the same problems with the same drugs. But the level of random violence in 'diverse' places just doesn't exist. I know it sounds fucked up like I am a fox news anchor, or something, but it is just something I have noticed.
It seems the more monoculture a society is the more safe it is in the poor areas. Specifically Europe, Asia, and the middle east. I don't know how to explain it without sounding like a racist so I wont.
It has consistently failed to integrate other migrants, especially from the MENA countries. At this point, experience has proven that such large integrations are and will be out of reach for the EU.
The only logical conclusion is therefore that the EU has to prepare to reject further migration. Even hopeless cases like Sweden are starting to take action in that direction.
You're postulating many things that are not necessarily true (by definition) : - that massive immigration to the EU will succeed - that EU needs more unskilled labor
So "serious" politicians shouldn't promise one thing or its opposite but have a global view of the best interests of THEIR electors and act accordingly.
I will hence have to take the antithesis to balance it overall : - with automation and the current unemployed people ("natives" or not) already in the EU, more unskilled labor is not what is needed - a cohesive society is not solely based on its productive capacity
One narrow interpretation is that one particular study that you did not cite got it wrong.
One broad interpretation is that we should not pay attention or give credence to the good faith estimates offered at the time.
I get tired of snarky one-liners that don't say what they mean. They do not promote useful discussion. My comment here would not be necessary if you took a few minutes to elaborate about what you meant.
Lastly: Estimates change. No model is perfect but some are useful.
I was born in the 70s, and my entire life I've been hearing climate alarmism - the end of the world is nigh (or just around the corner). No, really, this time it's for real! Donate here to stop it.
Most of the "solutions" I've seen are worse than the problem. Recycling was a major con that no one wants to talk about.
Carbon offset credits? Really?
With the amount of alarmism and blatant opportunism in the space, it's pretty hard to sift through and focus on real, meaningful change. Like not wasting precious aquifer water on lawns.
Simple stuff that would have real impact. Taxing the hell out of single use plastic water bottles.
We've done it before. The anti CFC thing was a huge success. Seems like that should be a model to follow.
Instead of pearl-clutching global alarmism, we should narrowly focus on concrete problems with real, measurable solutions, and address them one by one.
And my entire life I've been hearing predictions of climate change that would start getting serious... right about now. And here we are. A bit ahead of schedule, really.
Sea level rise? The rate of increase hasn't changed. Actually it was highest during Lincoln's presidency.
Droughts? Actually less severe and less frequent than 100 years ago.
Severe weather? Wild fires? Also, pretty much unchanged or slightly decreased.
Global temperatures? Sure, seem to be increasing moderately, but there's a ton of complication there. And we don't really know what the impact will be.
I think it's better to stop handwringing over pessimistic alarmist models and to focus on solving real, concrete, addressable ecological problems.
Australia had much more severe bush fires in the 70s [0].
Note that many Australian plants are have evolved to adapt to bush fires, which means they must have been a staple of Australian ecology for many millions of years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974%E2%80%9375_Australian_bus... in 1974, 290m acres burned vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus... in 2020 which has a highest estimate of about 86m acres burned.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators
When you expand the window, the picture changes.
Droughts and heat waves in the 1800s and 1930s were devastating killers, and some of the most severe in recorded history.
> It's pretty strange how all of those metrics start at 1960, no?
No, "all of those metrics" on the many pages linked from the EPA page do not start at 1960.
Stop making false statements. Doing so hurts your credibility and wastes our time.
Try slowing down and reminding yourself of your preconceived biases. Double check what you are seeing. Look for things that don't confirm what you already believe.
For the heat wave chart, the stated reason for this is that it's the date where most urban areas started keeping careful records.
They also, as a footnote[1] include an image going back much farther [2] which completely changes the picture and analysis.
However the text description is all about the increase since 1960, only barely mentioning that it was much worse in the 1930s.
How is it possible to look at this and not question it?
Making false statements? Slowing down and reminding myself?
I've spent countless hours looking at original noaa data related to climate change. I've seen a very clear distortion of data in reporting.
> Double check what you are seeing. Look for things that don't confirm what you already believe.
That's great advice, maybe we should both take it? [3] [4]
I don't need to go through every single measure here, it's pretty easy to discover for yourself if you take a real look at the data.
The severity and frequency of things like droughts, severe weather, heat waves are flat, if not in decline when you look across a broader window.
Sea level rise is pretty linear for as long as it's been measured [5]
NOAA data is pretty clear on this.
Arctic sea ice? It has a well known oscillation that generally runs close to 180 degrees out of phase with antarctic sea ice. Again, super easy to learn about if you dig in. Did you know that Arctic sea ice actually increased from 1979 to 2015? [6]
Also, measuring sea ice is notoriously difficult and error prone, and satellite data doesn't do a very good job of it. Also easy to learn about.
My overall point, which for some strange reason gathers a ton of open hostility, is that we're much better off focusing on concrete ecological issues that can be solved today (not draining aquifers, better agriculture practices, elimination of weird farm bill subsidies to harmful crops, etc...).
It's amazing how just pointing that out garners the sort of personal attacks that you leveled at me. Slowing down sounds like good advice!
[1] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
[2] https://www.epa.gov/system/files/styles/small/private/images...
[3] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
[4] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
[5] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S20959...
I'll point it out again. This:
> It's pretty strange how all of those metrics start at 1960, no?
Is quite different from this:
> A bunch of them do. Heat waves, river floods, etc...
You can't have it both ways.
> Making false statements?
Yes. I've demonstrated clearly that you wrote a false statement by saying "all". Then you shifted your position to say "a bunch of them".
Why not acknowledge your mistake?
> Slowing down and reminding myself?
Yes. When was the last time you actually said to yourself, e.g. "I have a tendency to get annoyed by how reporters cover climate change. I should not let my annoyance spill over into other trains of thought, such as the claim 'climate change models are alarmist'".
Adjust as needed to suit your situation and thought patterns. If you try it, I think you'll find benefit.
This kind of deflection does not reflect well on you. On the other hand, you could accept and acknowledge that you spoke/wrote incorrectly.
Please show me the personal attack.
Here is what I wrote:
> No, "all of those metrics" on the many pages linked from the EPA page do not start at 1960. / Stop making false statements. Doing so hurts your credibility and wastes our time. / Try slowing down and reminding yourself of your preconceived biases. Double check what you are seeing. Look for things that don't confirm what you already believe.
I said you made a false statement. You did. I did not call you names; e.g. I did not call you a liar.
Claiming there is a personal attack when there is none is not acceptable. I can criticize your ideas -- that is fair game.
It is understandable to feel hurt when ideas you hold are criticized. You may consider these ideas to be part of your identity. But these are not personal attacks.
I respect that you have researched the climate change data. I likely would agree with some of your conclusions.
How does the data referenced map to your understanding of climate change?
I asked many questions about your overall point. I would not use the word "hostile" to characterize tough questions.
Yes, you are getting pushback. I can't speak to others, but I've found your core arguments to be too vague to be useful. I don't think it is "strange" when some people to question what you write.
> It's amazing how just pointing that out
Well, you "aren't just pointing that out". There is context. My many comments around this thread show that I've engaged and tried to make sense of what you mean, in terms of concrete examples.
Also, I hope you can recognize that some of your language resembles climate-denial language. With this in mind, you would do well to be mindful of how you are coming across.
Also, another observation. The language you are using matches the language of "I'm the victim here". I don't know if you intended this. That kind of language is regularly used to deflect.
Please reply to my other comments. I am willing to consider your arguments -- probably more so than many people here on HN who read your comment and probably thought it wasn't worth their time to respond. But I'd prefer to read them coming from a published source. Why? I'd like to read not only the content, but also about the authors, the funding, and the counter-responses.
I'm old enough to remember when being skeptical of authority was actively encouraged in liberal thought.
Sorry for the snarky response, you seem like a genuinely decent person.
I think, like a lot of folks who engage in this topic, that it's just exhausting.
It seems like any opinion apart from "we're all gonna die!" is just mercilessly attacked.
The data is all there, it's pretty easy to follow.
I'm just sort of over the whole "we must radically restructure civilization because of these climate models" stuff.
I don't think it's warranted based on the data I've seen.
Well, what you see depends on where you look. Where are you looking?
Perhaps it is time for you to look elsewhere?
> I'm old enough to remember when being skeptical of authority was actively encouraged in liberal thought.
Your response is a redirection. Try again to answer the question. I'm probing to see if you have some self-awareness.
Now, if one makes a claim that there is a "very clear distortion", it is incumbent upon you to show the analysis -- or to cite it. You are the one making the claim; don't ask someone else to do it. A credible analysis must be statistical, not anecdotal.
Thank you for giving some concrete examples of what you mean.
However, I'm still not convinced by the "that can be solved today" criteria. One key problem with such criteria is that someone can say "that can't be solved today" in order to avoid taking action. What is your response?
In my other comment, I offered a very high level summary of how science, technology, governance, economics, and finance relate w.r.t. climate change. I was hoping to see your response. Your response these very much connects to the "that can be solved today" criteria.
Sustained investment in research and development is important because science and technology can expand the solution space. In parallel, more public awareness can increase the political will for increasing the budget for action. (Of course, there are many other components necessary for humanity to address the situation.)
You wrote "alarmist" but did not explain what you meant. I asked detailed questions so that we could get on the same page. No response, right? Or did I miss it?
You give specific examples that fall into the category of, e.g. (paraphrased) "if look at X data over a sufficiently long time frame, it does not show a clear trend." Yes, this is correct for some cases. And these are pointed out in the EPA descriptions. So this does not support your alarmist claim.
You complain of being personally attacked.
In summary, this trajectory looks a lot like moving the goal posts away from explaining what is alarmist about climate change models.
If you've changed your mind about what claims you want to make, please do so. But I have not seen good argumentation or explanation for what seemed to be your core argument.
> I think it's better to stop handwringing over pessimistic alarmist models ...
Which climate models are pessimistic in your view?
Which models are alarmist? Please define alarmist as you are using it. What exactly are you measuring when you say "alarmist"? Is there a threshold?
Let's get some common footing. Here's a thought experiment and question: Let's say Organization X finds in 90% of model runs, the global climate is disrupted to the point that the USA will face between $400B and $800B of additional costs starting in 2040 and increasing somewhere around 1% to 3% per year.
* Is summarizing this finding alarmist? Of course not -- it is only describing a model's prediction.
* Is the model alarmist? What would make it alarmist? If the assumptions are unrealistic? But all models are imperfect. So how unrealistic must they be?
On the flip side, What models do you recommend? Please share how your favorite models are funded.
> ... and to focus on solving real, concrete, addressable ecological problems.
According to your definitions of "real", "concrete", and "addressable".
Do you think NASA's writing on climate change does not reflect reality? That is is not concrete? That the problems are not addressable? So is NASA alarmist w.r.t. climate change?
What about the reinsurance industry? Let's take Swiss Re. Are they alarmist?
Please point us to some solid writing (such as a credible report) that summarizes your views.
Two final questions: have you studied economics? built predictive models? I'd like to get a sense of good ways to have this discussion. Perhaps we can cut through a bunch of preliminaries and cut to the chase.
Do you agree that the following framing is a useful way to think about our response to climate change? Technological constraints define what levers can be pulled and at what cost, in the short-run at least. Political decisions drive how governments spend money. Economic factors constrain financial and monetary options. Over the medium-term, investments in science and technology tend to increase expand the option space.
Many neoclassical economists would argue against this approach. Fix the incentives, they would say, and things will work out.
Your argument is incredulity? Give your reasons. I don't want a vapid rant.
Except for all the people who take climate change seriously, like the EU and China:
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-ramp-up-recycling-...
(1) expensive
(2) difficult to manage administratively
(3) imbalanced across programs
(4) unresponsive as conditions or impacts change
(5) corruptible, since special interests could focus their efforts to carve out irrational and unfair exceptions for themselves
(6) overly politicized during budgetary decisions
... compared to addressing common causes more broadly.
IPCC, see summary of Q3.9 on p9 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar3/syr/
Sun too hot for agriculture? Stick some PV over it as shade.
Not enough water, stick some PV over it for shade, use it to power trickle irrigation of desalinated water.
If carbon offsets are used to install PV in such nations, it's a win-win-win-win.
Another post talks about a new generation buying battery EV RVs to live in. If they did, where would they tend to go? Somewhere where the climate provides cheap solar power and low heating needs.
You might also find the Thema project by Grafana interesting (https://github.com/grafana/thema)
Some APIs today are literal one-liners, I wouldn't change that for another abstraction layer in between that requires me to write 1K of boilerplate.
I think it's a good idea, just work on making the user feel like it's actually easier to do the same stuff with wunder.
This feels like a significantly important assumption to truly prove out with target customers before relying on this assumption to build a product or business.
I'd love to hear more on what's changing in the future that may make this statement partially or fully true.
https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/1
https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/2
Solar panels are dropping in cost at an exponential rate [0]. As of this writing, consumer "new" panels are $0.75/W and used are at around $0.30/W right now (I won't give a link as a Google search will do).
Battery technology is also dropping at an exponential rate. I believe, with a little effort, one can purchase batteries at about $0.08/Wh.
Taken together, one can purchase a 30KWh (daily) solar panel and battery storage system for about $4,200 (not including labor and extra hardware/electronics), which puts the return on investment (ROI) at about 3.5 years if we consider the average house spends around $1200 (in the USA).
Dropping costs will quickly put that in the 2 year ROI range which, in my opinion, is the inflection point where it effectively becomes too good to pass up for the average consumer.
The dropping price of energy comes with all sorts of side effects, like a potentially decentralized energy grid, use cases for excess energy (eg bitcoin mining, carbon capture, hydrogen production, etc.), novel power storage systems etc., which is maybe the "novel" part that I haven't heard too much talk about.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law
The dropping price puts the rollout/adoption within the next 10-15 years.
So it's not just a matter of 'if' but we have a guess as to when as well.
There's also a risk that supply chain bottlenecks/cold war with china will drive up the cost & your electric bill is only gonna go up.
That is what is called inflation. If people have an extra 7500 to buy solar, then solar becomes up to 7500 more expensive.
Not for nothing but there are solar bitcoin farms that are popping up for precisely this reason.
In the region where I live (upstate New York, USA), there are solar panel fields where just five years ago there was nothing.
Because this is not going to make all energy cheaper. It's going to massively increase the cost of "legacy" energy while making some types of energy free.
Perhaps they will use a "social" cost-sharing, or ... well I don't know, but essentially the time will come when living in the countryside will come with "free" energy (not unlimited though), and cities will come with punitively expensive energy.
It would be a change in the dynamics of economies of scale vs small and nimble, greater lobbying power is one thing economies of scale still have a big advantage in so GP's comment seems plausible.
Taxation of energy is a big revenue stream for the governments. What happens when people start putting independent energy sources to power themselves and it causes significant revenue drop ? Would the government tax them for putting up solar on their property ? Couple this with electrification of transportation and you have another taxation source (fossil fuels) losing revenue. This would lead to a disruption in the social power dynamics in a country.
Yes, energy companies can invest in these too, but why would I buy from them if I have my own generation ?
But I don't quite see how free countryside electricity would mean expensive electricity in cities? Large scale wind and solar will decrease grid prices too, and most people live in cities anyway so the people dropping off grid doesn't seem like an issue for electricity transfer costs. Plus off-grid won't happen anywhere with a real winter, so most of Europe is excluded already.
As for costs, there's been concern for more than a decade about the "utility death spiral" scenario: some users disconnecting from a grid would spread the fixed costs of things like transmission and black start over a smaller number of remaining users, leading more of them to disconnect, and so on. So far it hasn't materialized anywhere, but as far as I know it could. I don't think the same scenario is likely with "legacy energy" like gasoline and natural gas, because the fixed costs are so low.
Panel costs are accurate and the additional electronic expense is not super high. $1000 should be enough for most setups.
For most people the issue is space. This is going to be another thing where the poor are taxed. A significant amount of single family residences dropping off the grid will cause prices to go up for the people that don't have the luxury of 4000 sq ft to fill with solar panels.
Just a cursory look on Aliexpress gives $0.12wh for LiFePo4 batteries [0] [1].
Looking on Alibaba, I see some potential sellers that might get below that $0.12 but it takes looking around and potentially talking with sellers. I do think it's possible but it requires some hunting, especially in the 'consumer' quantities we're talking about (sub qty 100).
[0] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256803821576908.html?spm=a2...
[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256803518663847.html?spm=a2...
You can run a fridge, lights and a laptop 24.7 on about $300 of solar. You can add panels as your needs and budget increases. The biggest cost is the battery.
Besides the money issue, the biggest concern I have are balancing the batteries, getting the right inverters, keeping the panels clear and figuring out what inefficiencies are during the non-summer seasons.
My batteries have always been lead-acid, simply because L.A. is still much cheaper than Lithium and alternatives.
I've recently taken my first set of Lead-Acid batteries out of service. They powered a small fridge, etc, via 200W of solar panels for over 20 years with essentially zero maintenance, except for occasional top-up of distilled water.
Inverters were a problem at first. I had a series of Inverters die over the years, until I started buying Victron products. Have had zero problems since. Rule one, is "don't buy cheap inverters".
The best part is that secondhand solar panels are now very cheap. The reason is that Gov regulations for grid-tie prohibits the use of second-hand panels, so people doing upgrades will basically throw away their old panels.
My setup runs a conventional fridge/freezer, and a large computer which is on-line for most of the day, as well as my workshop full of electrical tools. I do have a large generator, but the only time it gets run is when I have some welding to do. I don't even gave a battery charger hooked to it.
There are so many myths about solar: Lead-Acid batteries don't last as they are destroyed by deep-cycles. Yes, but when you size the system, you should aim for a deep discharge maybe once a month. This still should result in twenty years life or so. I live in a wet and cloudy part of Australia, and this winter my batteries have never been as low as 80% capacity, and it is rare if the batteries haven't returned to 100% charge by 10:00am each day.
Probably the main problem with solar is that people are stupid. One of my neighbours installed a modest solar system, only to have it regularly fail due to low battery voltage. Long story short: The supplier fitted a Watt meter which tracked the consumption at each outlet. It showed that that the problem was in his daughter's bedroom. A quick search revealed a huge radiator under her bed that she was running each night. Problem solved.
There are other gotchas like PACE loans being senior to your mortgage. So if you get a PACE loan, the loan is transferred to the person buying the home and is senior to your mortgage.
I'm also suspicious around the maintenance and longevity claims. For instance, from my experience, the energy efficient light bulbs do not live up to to their claims. I changed about half of my lightbulbs within three years and they supposedly have a 20+ year lifespan. It's fine that they don't have a crazy lifespan, but it just shows the industry is okay with outright false claims.
Overall I think the industry is so juiced by incentives and manipulated by regulations that it attracts shady players.
The calculations I did for it in 2020 were that the payback period would be 7 years, or 6 with government incentives. That was when electricity was 15c/kWh though... if energy prices stay at the current level I will break even in less than 4 years. I generate around 8000kWh a year, which at current prices is €3200.
The panels should last forever (assuming no physical damage from hail storms etc), they just decrease in efficiency. The inverter should last at least 10 years, but that's easy to replace as it's not on the roof.
The (relatively) high cost is most likely because of labor and (in my opinion) inflated hardware costs of battery and solar panels.
Labor is a massive expense and can't be discounted but one could imagine a solar panel "kit" that just includes the hardware that you can install yourself.
One could also imagine that the costs of labor being subsumed by a larger entity that can take advantage of economies of scale and provide solar energy like a "classic" energy company. I believe something like that is already happening in the region where I live (upstate New York, USA).
For places where labor might be cheaper, then total costs would also come closer to raw hardware costs.
Installing high-wattage DC lines without any training at all is a great way to get house fires.
Also, I haven't got whole lot of un-shaded roof space.
I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?
I wouldn't do it. I don't need yet another interested party when trying to sell my house eventually, and I don't want to scare off would-be buyers with potentially complicated contract terms.
> I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?
I think this is a really good question and I don't know the answer to it.
My not-very-well-informed opinion is that there are a confluence of factors involved:
* Infrastructure buildout, especially in the USA where the infrastructure projects take massive amounts of effort and the population is spread out over a large area of land, takes a lot of time, effort and money.
* The prices involved aren't as lucrative yet as they could be. When the price per MWh is 1/10 that of coal, then we'll see huge rollout (in my opinion).
* Adoption/rollout is happening but, in some places at least, there's government capture preventing widespread rollout/adoption (Pennsylvania?)
* Aging infrastructure prevents large scale energy injection at random points.
To the last point, here in New York state, I've heard one has to pay to first do a survey if the site where you want to build a solar array can actually inject that much more energy into the grid (at a cost of $10k+ or more) and even then, you're limited by what the aging energy infrastructure can support, capping the amount of energy available.
First off you need roofing skills, which 99% of homeowners have no idea how to do safely, often needs specialized equipment, and you run the risk of falling off and basically paralyzing yourself for life. Then you have the issue of having run conduit correctly, grounding everything to code, having disconnects installed in the right places, which is going to vary from state to state and even city to city based on what the laws are.
If you don't electrocute yourself, and manage to not fall off the roof and die, and somehow connect everything correctly, there is approximately 0% chance the local utility agrees to connect your system without a licensed electrician who is willing to vouch for the work you did.
A cursory look on YouTube gives many results [0] [1] [2].
There are fields of ground mounted solar panels in the country side where I live.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t4hGBWLtxM
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzar3xqCb6k
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc-wgpGfbtA
More energy sources means more power lines all over the place.
Few things get NIMBYs worked up like power lines.
The social aspect will be harder to solve than the engineering.
Not all of them... but "off grid" no longer means living like Ted Kaczynski. The popular understanding has yet to catch up.
You can have artificial lighting all night long (thanks to LEDs and batteries), computers (ideally you want to avoid the DC -> AC -> DC conversion), Internet access (although most satellite systems aren't really optimized for low power yet), running water (solar-powered pumps, cheap large-capacity plastic storage totes), etc.
The items that are still hard to get, because of their inherently energy-intensive nature, are hot water out of the tap on demand, and interior climate control (space heating especially). You need a pretty big solar array and battery system to run even a fairly efficient (AC or heat pump) climate control system. Lots of people get around this by siting their off-grid cabins in places that don't require AC, and making the interior volume small enough to heat with a small biofuel furnace (like a modern, efficient wood stove) that can burn locally-obtained fuel.
Certainly cross country electric lines aren't going to needed as much because the energy can be produced by a relatively clean factory. With coal, we want it very far away enough away from consumers so as not to cause health concerns. Decentralized energy, at the very least, means we can create solar power plants next to larger cities and towns.
In terms of the wires in urban centers, I don't have a good sense. I can see where you might be right but at the same time, that infrastructure is already there and there are efficiencies to be gained by not transporting electricity over many miles of copper.
I also agree that the social aspect but there's a large pressure to find solutions because energy costs are going to be dropping by an order of magnitude or more.
Your going to need very long electric lines, to send clean energy from places where its sunny to places where it cloudy, or from places where its windy, to places where its currently calm.
There are places that have so much cloud cover year round that it makes solar adoption there effectively impossible? The frequency of these places is such that their energy needs requires the infrastructure remain in place?
One interesting documentary on this topic is Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Every Loving Grace.
I haven’t researched it but I feel like I’d have pay 20-40K for such a system. What gives?
Is it all just labor and regulations? Why can’t we solve that?
Maybe this is the next big thing.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "just" labor. You're talking about a critical system, that has the possibility of seriously injuring someone (including folks outside your house) or causing extensive property damage if not installed correctly. That seems like a thing where skilled (and fairly compensated) installers and some degree of regulation is very appropriate.
It badly needs to be standardized in a consumer-friendly way...like power-over-ethernet in reverse. Field-installable, hot-pluggable, fool proof connectors. You can get 90W over some variations of network cabling...bump that up a couple sizes so you can handle 400W.
So you buy a bunch of solar panels and some patch cables, and plug those in to a one or more "power switches" on the roof top. Then run a QSFP+ equivalent "power backhaul" down into utility room where you have your "power aggregation switch" which has a bunch of (power)QSFP+ ports and plug batteries in to a few of those. And of course a couple big QSFP28 ports to an inverter to power legacy 120V loads, which maybe someday you don't need any more as household things move to using PoLE (power over large ethernet).
Solar has supply bottlenecks at the moment that are stopping further price declines- hopefully they will get solved.
But there’s a lithium shortage that is already showing up in the price of lithium going up 5x. Analysts predict that by around 2025 lithium will limit the battery market that is trying to grow 40x to meet electrification demands [1]. Note that opening a new lithium mine takes a minimum of 7 years. sodium based batteries are coming to help this situation, but they are a new technology that will take time to productionize and ramp up.
[1] https://youtu.be/5v-DTS-ibow
Even the video you link claims to be 'bullish' on production. I didn't see any claims about price in the future, just production, though I might have missed it.
In my opinion, we're seeing a lot of 'whiplash' effects from the supply chain issues but, as the pandemic recedes, these should resolve in the next couple of years.
[0] https://www.thesolarnerd.com/blog/will-solar-get-cheaper/
I like that solar analysis, but I also think it is possible that the high demand for solar and high commodity (energy, etc) costs could continue to stop solar prices from dropping for much of this decade just as we have seen recently.
The temporary whiplash concept for inflation hasn't panned out yet. I follow Lyn Alden's economic analysis closely and she has been predicting this decade to be inflationary. These predictions started over a year ago when the Fed kept saying that inflation was temporary.
Fyi, that's time to break even. ROI is measured in % (annualized, usually).
- Quantum Computing and WFH
- Crypto and Micronuclear Power
- Metaverse and Biohacking
Have fun!
I first interpreted this as pertaining to the death penalty.
There was a movie about it recently and precisely one organization developing a realistic hedge (not counting NASA's DART test mission) and pretty much still nobody cares.
n = 1. We have no backups whatsoever.
Yes, this won't help for (eg) appliances with heating elements, I'm probably talking about a second discrete wiring loop rather than a total replacement, and it's hard right now to find a TV with the DC transformer on the outside.
But it'd be quite a lot more efficient for almost everything else most of us do. Look around the room you're in now and count how many things use more than 19V DC internally. Where I'm sitting right now, it's None.
Sure, all my things may work with 12DC internally, but they expect 120AC (or w/e depending on country) at the plug, so I wouldn't be able to use them if I switch.
For example, any device that takes in USB power with a 120VAC "wall wart" plug can just be used with a buck convert plug instead or being powered directly from the DC current.
LED lighting is taking in AC then converting to DC to power the LEDs. Your phone is taking in AC then converting to DC to power it. Your laptop is taking in AC then converting to DC to power it.
There are some household machines which will require some heavy duty power draw but much of the consumer products we use is powered off of DC to begin with. Powering directly off of DC would be cutting out the "middle man" of AC.
I think the better argument is one for reduced 'hardware complexity'. Instead of having an inverter that then goes through a rectifier, all you need is a buck converter.
The first factor would be the hodgepodge of wall dongles one needs to own and maintain (plus the cost of buying a dongle for each device that doesn't have one, or multiple of them per device in case you want to charge your phone/laptop/etc in more than one location at home).
The second factor is the "smoothness" of your DC sources. Most of the common LED lamps have a pretty ugly signal shape, and not at all close to a DC flat line. This is mostly unavoidable as AC->Smooth DC conversion is more expensive than AC-> DC + a ton of 120Hz, 240Hz,... on top of it. So, common LED lights tend to opt for cheaper "electronics". People notice the flickery LED lights to various degrees (some get headaches, some outright see the flickers, some claim to be totally oblivious to the difference). The DC "quality" also affects some fairly sensitive electronic devices, so some AC->DC adaptors are fairly sophisticated. A central high quality AC->DC convertor (combined with DC wiring) has better scalability when you need to care about smoothness (it can be a basic quality of life matter for some people).
The third and fourth factors are power discipation and conversion efficiency. They are the same thing, with two remedies: more $ to remedy the inefficiency (which is really small these days, if you go for switching convertors), and plans for heat to discipate properly (devices end up with pretty hot adaptors).
I've been involved in a side project developing a consumer-friendly rating of "power quality" for AC devices and AC->DC power supplies which summarizes efficiency over a range of loads, as well as incorporating power factor measurements. We've been testing common devices such as USB power supplies for phones and such, as well as things like laptop power supplies, due to how numerous they are. We've had a few surprises, for example, Apple power supplies generally don't fare that well.
Power Quality Score: https://pqs.app/ Detailed test data is public for some devices but not all, since we're trying to find paths to revenue starting with subscriptions for full test results. Let us know if you have feedback.
You might also be interested in the Youtube channel of my friend/PQS collaborator, where he's done some "deep dive" videos of testing some of the devices in the PQS database- particularly AC->DC USB power supplies due to how ubiquitous they are now- https://www.youtube.com/c/AllThingsOnePlace/ .
When I was last looking into this myself -- and lamenting you couldn't find PoE LED lights for love or money -- it sounded like (IANAEE) voltage drops start becoming a thing you have to care about around 50 or 100 feet, depending on the gauge; wiring a house with DC isn't impossible but it might require a little bit of care or some thought.
[0]- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HVDC_Europe_annotated-2...
Most of these appliances use low voltage which travels poorly over long distances. Your car, camper van, and boat all use ultra-thick cables to move 12 volts. This is quite uneconomical for anything larger than a small studio apartment. (Copper isn't cheap.)
Furthermore, note that I said "12 volts," which is what cars and capers use. (Not sure about boats.) Some DC appliances need 5 volts, some need 20... They'll all need converters.
So how are both of those problems solved? You'll probably send 100-200 volts, DC, though the wall! The big question is, does this really simplify anything? The big advantage with AC is that it's super-easy to change voltage with a simple transformer. What do we gain by going DC in the walls? Are there any real advantages in simplifying voltage conversion at appliances? Is it worth the added complexity of a whole-house AC-DC converter; or the complexity of a DC grid?
I could see a point in time where there are AC outlets and DC outlets in a house depending on where the power comes from (power lines vs. solar panels/battery), but unless we radically decentralize (which I don't see happening) it seems unlikely to me that we switch to DC for long-distance power transmission.
Which brings up a very good point: What happens when grid-scale battery storage is common? Does a DC grid make a lot more sense then?
Your PC running at ~500W only needs a conductor capable of transmitting 4.2A with conventional 120V.
If you switch to a 12V source, that same 500W now needs a 42A conductor.
It's just not practical.
I have considered this sort of thing for the basics around the house (in my head at least). A seperate lighting loop in each room + outside, comms cupboard and some usb/usb-c ports. Could be all powered by a couple of car batteries and not a lot of solar panels.
100% would do this sort of setup if I built a home office shed, but otherwise the plans remain in my head.
I would love to see a comprehensive study of a home that would be designed and built around the concept of using two energy sources: AC and 48V DC, backed by battery storage and power grid in case of smaller installations or northern climate.
Would it make sense to do that on a large scale? Having smaller, energy efficient house should limit the need for long copper cables, we would also exclude all those AC-DC converters from today's devices - leaving us with something similar to a USB-C PD (working in the range 5-48V, which of course still is a converter but could be a standardized DC-DC one).
If I am correct then the main advantages would also include not running solar inverter all the time but only when there is a need for a lot of power (where it should be much more efficient) thus also extending its lifespan.
Having said that I do not have enough knowledge to judge whether possible gains would warrant going into this direction for future home installations. I would very much appreciate all comments and maybe some further reading material.
But i reckon once these frameworks mature enough they have the power to disrupt the whole way we think about building websites and frontend back-end coding.
But, yes, my remarks are aimed at nations and what they stand for, rather than people.
I'm not expecting some doomer apocalyptic scenario. But every year, it'll get 1% worse. People will struggle 1%, there will be 1% more resentment between race/class/demographics, 1% more people leaving, and so on. It'll just get worse.
CRDTs [0], while complex to work with untill recently, are now so much easer for developers to use with toolkits such as Yjs[1] and AutoMerge[2]. SAAS and PAAS companies proving tooling around these, enabling developers to easily build collaborative tools for specific niches and verticals are going to explode into the market.
Every 5-ish years there is a big “new” database tech that receives massive investment for both enterprise and small business. Real time CRDT based data stores are the “next big thing” - in my view.
CRDTs are often only talked about in relation to rich text editing, but “generic” CRDTs that represent “standard” data types (think JSON), and basic operations to them (inset, edit, remove) are able to represent so much more. You can use them for building so many CRUD type business apps, and by using a CRDT as your base data representation you get conflict free collaborative (and offline) editing for free.
The nice thing about both Yjs and AutoMerge is that they provide both Rich Text and JSON-like data types, covering 95% of what people would need for building business apps.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_dat...
1: https://github.com/yjs/yjs
2: https://github.com/automerge/automerge
Also, if you want to collaborate, synergize, innovate, and revolutionize consider OTs. They're a known quantity. Handling merges of data is fraught with landmines.
You can't sell 2 of something to the same person offline and know if they wanted 1 or 2. Plus, giving an end user the ability to resolve merge conflicts is asking for theft and fraud.
> The CRDT concept was formally defined in 2011 by Marc Shapiro, Nuno Preguiça, Carlos Baquero and Marek Zawirski.
Now, that’s not to say the gp wasn’t referring to using some of the CRDT concepts before they were defined collectively under that banner.
For special 'war room' projects I'll set up a special channel that I'll pay attention to for real time colab, but those are very unusual situations with a well defined end date.
Damn that sounds terrible. I'll give points for google docs, but i am unconvinced by the rest.
The web will go multiplayer because it's the only way to make high performance UIs that are multi-device without locking. The multi-user realtime collaboration bit just comes along for the ride.
Real-time collaborative tool is a thing but not going to be big.
Ideally, I would go 100% async work if possible.
This brought me into looking for solutions on how to detect electronic surveillance. I discovered the term "bugsweep", and rapidly came to the conclusion that I could either: 1) Recommend her to hire government contractors at a price she would never be able to afford. 2) Buy cheap stuff on Amazon without any knowledge whatsoever on what works or not.
It felt like there was no middle ground.
I also happen to stay in hotels for both work and while on holidays, and although I don't particularly aim to hide myself from government surveillance, I don't like the idea that any moron or stalker could buy some recording equipment online and put me under surveillance. I would appreciate being able to check my surroundings for obvious / cheap recording equipment when I feel the need.
If anyone has some good pointers/recommendations on this topic, I think it could interest more than just me.
Doesn't work for shielded electronics, and there may be false positives, but this is one way to detect circuitry.
Hassle/cost wise that might be in-between the two extremes.
But they don't need drones, actually, these criminals already have access to Microwave Weaponry and Electromagnetic Surveillance.
* Robotic carts that follow you around when shopping in dense, pedestrian oriented areas and/or stores. Might go hand in hand with the rapid normalization of e-bikes.
* An increase in eco-villages, apartment buildings with permacultured gardens growing their own food, etc.
* Some sort of push for groves of large trees in urban areas to provide shade, possibly in roundabouts, to reduce the heat-island effect.
* Somewhat decentralized water cisterns and filtration on a municipal level. Possibly including creating small holes in the bottom of drainage infrastructure to re-charge the groundwater.
* Constructing new clothes out of semi-recycled fabric cut out of items that would be thrown away?
* Short-hop electric plane taxi things.
* Energy generating windows ("transparent solar panels") and fabrics.
* The wide-spread use of plastic-alternatives: fully compostable packaging made out of mushrooms, etc.
The NSF SBIR funded projects page is a cool source for this sort of prediction.
Also:
* Much better voice interfaces. At some point in the next 10 years, it will be common to have primarily voice-controlled computer applications. There might be a huge role for this to play in hospitals.
It shocks me how slow municipalities are to adopt this. How many sidewalks and paths in hot sunny climates have zero shade. And it is so cheap!
Also, how about how many kids playgrounds, or school yards have zero shade?
Doctor: "Quickly! Give patient 100 milligrams of epinephrine!"
Computer: "Giving patient 400 milligrams of epinephrine. Say 'yes' to confirm"
Doctor: "No. 100."
Computer: "Patient received 400 milligrams"
This has been tried (and proved wrong) countless times. The issue is that it needs a huge footprint, and space is something you don't have at large in apartment buildings.
Even if apartment buildings are too dense, I still think we will see an increase in eco-village type arrangements.
Most estimates say if you want to do permaculture/homestead living and provide your own calories you need a good acre per person and a taste for sweet potatoes...
One person needs about 5 hectares of land to be self-sufficient (i.e. to cover all its food needs, including protein). If you can afford your own 432 Park Avenue (Cost: ~$1BUSD, Floor area: ~4ha) for that, then the answer is yes.
But also, with that same $1BUSD you could buy around 100,000 hectares of land in rural US, close to the size of Qatar; you can see how relatively inefficient vertical farming is in economic terms.
That 5 hectares of land per person metric is totally inapplicable here. Sort of the entire point of vertical farming is to be (in theory) vastly more efficient per unit of land. If you believe the claims it's somewhere between a 10 and 50 times reduction in land usage for same output.
5 hectares is also on the very high end for estimates of that metric. It also drops hugely if you're not relying on animal products.
I don't think vertical farming in apartments is the future, but I think your calculations here are also way, way off.
That’s about a fifth of an acre, and other caveats apply like climate and the amount of labor during the growing season. If vertical farming works, and can also reduce the labor required (I have no idea if that’s one of its goals), it starts to look more plausible as something that could take off. Still won’t fit on a rooftop though, and as Jayne would say, “I smell a lotta ‘if’ coming off that plan.”
https://www.growveg.com/guides/growing-enough-food-to-feed-a...
Also, I'm sure that if humanity had put enough resources to this we would already have really efficient solutions around this. It tech that needs to (and hopefully will) be developed.
I'm now imagining these following you around like The Luggage follows Rincewind around.