The tower catches are great, but the payload rating has been reduced several times now[1] and with it the economic argument for how Starship will make launching much cheaper than today as well as suitability for lunar/Mars launches. For Starship to be revolutionary enough for this kind of valuation it has to not just work, but outperform current solutions.
SpaceX has basically admitted as much by promising Starship 2 & 3 with larger payloads (that Starship 1 was already supposed to deliver).
That article is two years old. In traditional space launch terms that is a very short amount of time, but in SpaceX terms that's quite a while. They've already progressed to Starship 2 since then and are going to launch Starship 3 imminently (slated this month), which has Raptor v3 engines onboard and come with the efficiency gains you are talking about.
Screens are harmful for adults too. Everyone knows this through the personal experience of doomscrolling hours of one's own life away. Why would they be any better for children?
Or do you imagine that there's a study out there that will reveal that arguing on Twitter with someone called Catturd2 is good for your mental health?
Bingo! I think in 50 years time, we will laugh at advertisements and fake addiction research these companies are funding the same way we are now laughing at how bizarre the tobacco propaganda once was
This kind of stuff faces the same problems as vegetable-based meat replacement products. While traditional vegetarian dishes like various bean dishes, Indian curries, salads, etc. can be quite healthy and require minimal processing, meat substitute products like Beyond Meat are heavily processed. This means they're often not that healthy (containing a lot of salt and added fat) despite being technically vegan while also being expensive and requiring energy-intensive industrial food processing.
Based on the findings here:
> These emotional reactions were particularly prominent for unprocessed or visually apparent insect formats, reinforcing the view that entomophagy challenges deeply anchored cultural expectations about what constitutes acceptable food. Given this barrier, product formats that conceal or process insects can reduce sensory aversion and facilitate initial acceptance.
Any kind of "insect food" is likely to go the same way resulting in heavily processed products with added sugar, salt, and fat to make them palatable. Even then it's a really tough sell given all the "live in the pod, eat the bug" memes out there.
Finally, I struggle to see how insects would be a more economical source of protein than beans or processed foods derived from beans like Beyond Meat and various soy products.
It's not even more economical than raising chickens. Just because raising relatively small batches of crickets uses less water per unit of protein (which isn't even necessarily a problem) doesn't mean that it's manageable at scale.
Moreover, as you said, bugs have to taste good for people to want to eat them. I was into entomophagy way before it became this sort of thing in the 2020s. As much as I appreciate it from a curiosity standpoint, the truth is most bugs don't taste very good. I think there's maybe one insect that I thought was truly worth eating again (sphinx moth caterpillars). Supposedly bee drone larvae taste good but I've not had them. Neither of those can be scaled for mass food production. The rest of the bugs I've had either taste extremely earthy or like nothing.
Civilization should just scale with how much food it can produce. The idea that food production should infinitely scale with civilization is backwards.
When I looked at this a decade ago, I concluded that if bugs can't get popular as a source of protein powder, they aren't getting popular in the US and Canada. Since then, not a single gym rat I've mentioned this to has liked my concept product, Pretty Fly for a White Powder.
A civilization increasing food production to feed itself is civilization scaling with food production. There is no extrinsic food production with which civilization can scale. All food production is intrinsic to the civilization.
All food must be produced by the civilization, either by gathering or farming or any other means.
Lobster and crab are both just as much a bug as a tarantula is, so the same reason that the seafood industry pushed lobster and crab into mainstream acceptance: profit.
Sure. But… why not push these foods on a population that is currently used to eating some bugs rather than one that only accidentally or unknowingly ingest them? Like there are areas of the world where insects are a thing. And the US isn’t one of them.
They were more or less remarketed as a luxury, though. Historically (at least in the US), lobster and crab were considered low class foods, if not outright fertilizer for crops. Some terrestrial bug could theoretically be given the same sort of luxury status, but lobsters have the advantage of actually tasting good. The best candidates would be snails and bee drone larvae. But what would be the point? Neither could be farmed at such a scale that they could be made food staples that are also better for the environment.
Almost every normal person sees this through the eyes of the consumer because paying the electric bill is their primary interaction with the issue. What you're describing is politically a tough sell.
So who's working on fixing it? It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature. Meanwhile you have folks seeing these three things together:
- England is 90% renewables
- Renewables are a really cheap source of energy.
- England has very high energy prices.
And the obvious conclusion is that someone is lying. It's eroding support for renewables among those that don't have time to investigate how or why the spot price of gas sets the overall energy price.
The thing is, it's nowhere near 90% in general. 90% is the generation right now, with sunlight and good wind. On the site you can see that renewables were 66% in the last 24h, 46% in the last week, and 42% in the last year. I don't think it's possible to have 90% renewable generation overall without massive energy storage.
>It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature.
It kind of is.
Gas is the only source of electricity currently which can be scaled up and down at will and on demand.
Even once grids eventually go 100% green we will probably still use (green, synthesised) stored gas as the power source of last resort on cold, windless nights after batteries and pumped storage have been depleted.
A lot of wind power is generated in Scotland, for example. The power conduits that transmit power along the country can often not deliver all of that power to the South on a windy day. There is an excess of power in the north but the wind farms cannot deliver it, they are not paid to generate power so they switch their wind turbines off, even though there is wind available to capture.
This new test means that wind farms will not switch off in such conditions and electricity prices will be allowed to fall to zero, but only for those in the local area.
It’s not the same thing. Customers on some of Octopus’ tariffs get occasional zero or negative pricing to spur demand that can help balance the grid or reduce curtailment.
This trial is different. I think the real goal is to incentivise local communities to support the construction of wind farms. If you have a wind farm nearby, surplus generation is used to supply you with free power when otherwise the turbines would have been curtailed.
Why is it that some of the most useful features in Apple products are impossible to find on your own? I recently also learned about "three finger swipe to undo" in iOS instead of shaking the damn thing like it owes me money.
SpaceX has basically admitted as much by promising Starship 2 & 3 with larger payloads (that Starship 1 was already supposed to deliver).
[1] https://www.americaspace.com/2024/04/20/starship-faces-perfo...
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