They don’t want to build all the rovers, scientific instruments, one-off or low quantity satellites, space stations, surface habs, etc.

But they'll gladly take payment for it.

I mean, calling it "full self drive" probably contributes more than a little. Or the "always speed 10%" option.

I so badly want to fire a replica of one of these.

But I also really badly want my wrists unbroken.

You're right in that I used yearly numbers and wrongly used them as daily numbers. The stats are from the central statistics bureau, and unfortunately it auto translates poorly https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/83989NED

The numbers include use of gas and coal for heating and industry, which often get ignored by people (mostly because it makes us look fucking terrible in renewable power stats).

3. The assumption that you must store an entire day's worth of energy demand is ludicrous.

It is, in fact extremely generous, if you're using the solar+storage method. But let's go with this and I'll demonstrate what it means in practice.

Let's assume that we need to cover all of the electricity that is currently produced using coal, oil and natural gas. All other sources already have infrastructure supporting them, including the pre-existing solar. This amount comes to about 48% [1], so let's assume 50%.

You just made the switch from "energy used" to "electricity generated". For a country that still does most of its heating with imported gas, that's a big difference. The real amount of non-fossil energy is about 18%, call it 80% fossil.

5. Now, we need to cover 50% of 50% of 1.9 petajoules at any one time, or 475 gigajoules, at any one time.

So it's 50% of 80% of 2600/365, or 2.8 petajoules. So that's only 10 of those facilities. Not great, not terrible. But that's not the point. Nor is it important that their demo facility has a height difference twice that of the whole country.

Let's stick with the "one night of power store is plenty".

That's true, but only if you can use solar to power your whole day. In other words, to make do with only 1 night of storage, you need to generate all your power for 24 hours in December during December daylight hours. Assuming it doesn't snow, one solar panel produces about .15kwh on a december day (working off of 2% of yearly production happening in december, and 300Wattpeak panels), or 540kj.

So you're right, we only need to build 10 facilities twice the height difference of the entire country, to save one night of energy use. Unfortunately in order for that to be true, we would also need to cover about 960.000 hectares in solar panels, which is roughly twice the total built up area in the country, including roads.

And that's assuming you keep a perfectly level energy use throughout the year, and a perfectly level production during December. Neither of which is true, and generally the worst days for solar production are the worst ones for use as well.

On the bright side, if we can put down two extra cities worth of solar panels for every city, we'll probably have no issues building 600m tall hills by hand as well.

This is exactly why motion blur works in some genres, like racing or fighting games, but not in others, like FPS or strategy.

There is simply no excuse other than corruption for the fact that we don't just run a couple trains up a hill when we need to store massive amounts of solar energy.

How about basic maths? I

Scale is a huge fucking issue. The little country of the Netherlands, where I happen to live, uses 2600 petajoule per day. So let's store 1 day of power, at 100% efficiency, using the tallest Alp (the Mont Blanc).

Let's round up to 5000 meters of elevation. We need to store 2.6e18 joules, and 1 joule is 100 grams going up 1 meter. So to power a tiny little country, we need to lift roughly 5e13 kilos up the Mont Blanc. To visualize, that's 1.7 billion 40ft shipping containers, or roughly 100 per inhabitant.

Using 555m blocks of granite, you'd need 166 million of them (9 for every person in the country). Assuming a 2% slope, you'd need to build a 250.000m long railway line. And if you lined all those blocks up, with no space in between, you'd need 3328 of those lines (which then couldn't move, because they fill the entire space between the summit and sea level).

And that's just 1 small country.

Capturing all the extra carbon from the atmosphere is not as expensive as it sounds like. It can easily be done by a few rich countries in very few decades once we stop adding more there every day.

What?

For starters, carbon capture takes an insane amount of power. And to follow up: we couldn't even build the facilities is "a few decades" even if we free power and infinite money.

Do you know WHY they went over budget?

Most of those didn't involve the magic rocks, and most didn't hurt anyone.

More people die creating the building materials for a powerplant (or a windmills, or a solar panel) than ever during operation. The numbers really don't matter.

I honestly don't care what we do, as long as we stop burning coal, oil and gas. The way I see it, every nuclear plant and windmill means we all die a little later.

Although if you're deep underwater and your gun gets "wet" its probably because whatever kept you from being crushed into a pulp just failed.

Also, I'm curious if there were ever diver-on-diver firefights in any war. It seems more like a James Bond or Call of Duty thing than a real event

And why exactly are we not reacting to this?!

Not nearly enough blood.