GM had record sales figures, just before they filed for bankruptcy. The problem with the car industry is that if you’re willing to sell at a loss, any level of sales can be achieved. But that is not a viable business. In reality, too many car companies are selling BEVs at a loss. This will have consequences soon.

The solution is to eliminate self-driving cars and instead invest more in mass transit and walkable neighborhoods.

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No one has ever explained how the energy is suppose to come back to Earth in a non-crazy fashion. Until then, this will always come off as an impossible idea.

Then you’ll have to deal with Lunar gravity, which may be unacceptable for long durations. Humans may have to live in giant space stations if we want to live in space. And since they can be truly massive, it may be more desirable than what some might think.

It could mirror the economic stagnation of Japan that begun in the 1990s. Very similar set of circumstances.

Yes, that’s the point. It’s far beyond the actual city of Tokyo in terms of construction difficulty and scale. But it doesn’t need any new technologies to be invented to be doable. Just the ability to build on that scale.

This is sci-fi stuff. No one is seriously saying we could build this anytime soon. It will require a radical advancement in space travel capability. But the interesting part of this is that it doesn’t any new technology. It needs only the technology that we currently have, just scaled up massively.

As it is an O’Neill cylinder, the raw material needs will be truly huge. We’re literally building a city on the scale of Tokyo but in space. So we are just assuming that someday, we can move around that amount of stuff in space.

The cheapest materials would be what can be acquired in space without having to launch from Earth. As a result, you’re going to want to build your O’Neill cylinder out of some combination of iron, aluminum, titanium, and silicon dioxide.

The last of which might be particularly useful, as it is the main ingredient of fiberglass while also being the most common substance on Moon and asteroids. As a result, you probably want to build your cylinder primarily out of fiberglass. You can get pretty decently sized cylinders, as fiberglass has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than steel. Apparently, 24km diameter is a viable figure. Scale up length the same way, and you’ll get 96km. So a 24km x 96km O’Neill cylinder made out of fiberglass.

That would be about 7238 km^2 of usable surface area. Half that to 3619 km^2 to make room for windows (as originally envisioned by O’Neill), and assuming a density comparable to New York City (about 11,300 people/km^2), you’ll get around 40 million people. Or about the population of Tokyo.

That’s seems plenty for any sensible space colonization strategy we might adopt in the future. And what’s best is that you don’t really need any fancy technology. Just use solar power to power mass drivers and deliver raw materials from the moon or asteroid via electricity. And it won’t be any special materials either. Raw regolith can be made into fiberglass, so cost can be kept surprisingly low. The only question is scaling it all up, which may unfortunately be too expensive or will take a very long time to happen. Ultimately, this is still sci-fi, albeit on the hard side of it, since no fancy new technology is require.

You’re better off spending it on stuff like mass transit and the like. It won’t just all disappear at some point in the future.

You won’t be saying that once the market crashes. You’ll realize that there are much better ways of spending that money. Like far more practical emissions reducing solutions.

Not really. It’s mainly about gaining market dominance on a technology they think is the future. They’ll build them right next to the massive coal plant alongside a million other things they’re subsidizing.

It’s the result of massive subsidies. When they stop, this market will crash like a house of cards.

Lemmy needs to move away from downvotes altogether, or make it totally pointless. Just because Reddit uses it doesn’t make it a good idea.

Itis impossible to get data that recent FYI.

Again, green hydrogen adoption is rapidly growing and is following the trajectory of wind and solar growth in the past. Your rhetoric is just mirroring the anti-wind and anti-solar rhetoric of the past. They too were always looking backwards. You will end up no different.

Wrong. You have totally fallen for fossil fuel propaganda. All of that rhetoric originated from the oil and gas industry. After all, if “both sides are equally bad” then there would be no motivation to move away from fossil fuels. Unfortunately, the battery industry, which is really just an extension of mining industry and China’s governmental policy, is adopting this type of rhetoric.

Again, you are 20 years out of date. As in more than one decade. As in literally decades out of date. You won’t even google the term and yet you think you know everything. This is Ludditism at its purist.

And you have developed Ludditism.

It is not a fantasy. In fact, the opposite is true. The problem is that you are wildly out of touch with recent events. You are still pretending like it is 2004, not realizing that that was 20 years ago. Green hydrogen is a rapidly growing market and is following the trajectory of wind and solar.

Except you’ve actually debunked your own argument.

At 9.3 kg of CO2 for one kg of H2, and assuming 110 km/kg of H2 (normal fuel economy for an FCEV), you get 84.5 grams of CO2 per km of driving.

Meanwhile, a BEV gets anywhere from 70-370 grams per km, depending on dirtiness of the grid: https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-car-emissions/

In other words, an FCEV is comparable to a BEV when it comes to emissions. You can even double the numbers for the FCEV if you want to include possibilities like upstream losses or production. The numbers would still be very comparable to BEVs running on most grids.

And this is the problem here: You’re so deep in your anti-hydrogen conspiracy theory that you failed to notice that the math works against you.

Mass layoffs is going to make it worse, not better.