Honestly fusion isn’t worth talking about. The closest fusion has gotten to a viable power plant is Quaise, the geothermal startup that uses a maser (microwave laser) for drilling.
Speaking of which, geothermal might well be the main baseload power plant.
It’s more efficient than a sail of the same size, or they would’ve just installed a sail of the same size to reduce the moving parts.
AFAICT it’s more efficient because it acts like a plane wing/turbine blade with suction instead of literally just being blown on - basically, a turbine blade gets its speed from 1) being pushed sideways by the wind hitting the 45° plane, but also 2) the wind goes mostly over the rear of the wing, meaning there’s a high pressure at the back of the wing and a low pressure in front of the wing, which sucks the wing forward.
So this rotor sail uses the same suction trick, where the wind goes faster along the side that’s spinning with the wind and slower along the side that’s spinning against the wind, and the faster wind will have lower air pressure than the slower wind, thus sucking the rotor sail towards the faster wind side. But since the rotor sail is fixed to the ship, it sucks the entire ship forward.
The 30% fuel savings are pretty trivial, I could make it 80% if you give me a day and a sledgehammer to make the engine’s efficiency even worse. Maybe it’s running a two-stroke engine (not a marine two-stroke, just a regular two-stroke).
Two seconds worth of googling gives me 15.6 million tons of CO2 from private flights, vs 3.35 billion tons from cars.
Minor nitpick: don’t compare millions to billions if you can afford it. Say something like “16 million VS 3350 million tons of CO2”. The meat of your point is 16 vs 3350, so highlight it!
Basically because sails don’t scale for large ships (and large ships have less drag per volume due to the cube-square law, so shipping is less expensive - not to mention the crew requirements grow more slowly), and (traditional sails) also interfere with cranes for shipping containers, and they also take money and take up cargo space, while saving money on fuel which has traditionally been fairly cheap.
It’s coming back because essentially 1) climate/sulfur emissions are starting to be enforced, and 2) battery-electric shipping makes it make more sense. See this amazing article on battery cargo ships (it doesn’t mention sails tho).
Okay let’s tone it back a bit.
The medievil age, or dark age
Historians don’t call it that. The “dark ages” were called that because we didn’t have good records of the period, i.e. it was obscured to us or “dark” to us. That’s not the same as the ages being regressed or evil in any fashion. Also, “medieval” doesn’t have anything to do with “evil” (I don’t know whether you’re implying that or it’s just a typo, TBF), it literally just means “middle ages” - “medi” >> middle, “ev” >> ages (or period), “-al” >> “of the” (just the normal suffix used in english).
Because of the insane misconceptions, medieval historians tend to avoid using the terms “dark age” or for that matter “feudalism” (feudalism is a vague term that usually implies vassalism, serfdom, and manorialism, and lots of places didn’t even have all 3 during the “feudal ages” let alone during all the periods described of as “feudal”).
When humans used to burn women because of superstition and persecuted scientists as heretics.
This is overblown. The classic example of ‘persecuted scientists’ is Galileo, who was mostly ‘persecuted’ because he talked mad shit about the pope (he (indirectly, but very transparently) called the pope an idiot and stuff, in italian (so he was saying it to normal people, not just in academic discussion)), made explicit statements that weren’t even backed up by his evidence (you could say “well this evidence seems to suggest heliocentrism pretty strongly” and the church wouldn’t do shit, but IIRC Galileo explicitly said “the world is heliocentric and the evidence proved it”, except his evidence didn’t actually prove it (Foucault’s Pendulum did, but that was ~1850 not ~1660).
Similarly, when witch burnings did happen, it tended to be in the more ignorant obscure villages, not cities. The Church hated it, because… witches aren’t real. You can’t make a deal with the devil to gain magic powers, that’s heretical nonsense. Witch burnings were the antivax movement of the day.
When disease killed a quarter or so of a population. When people died due to a bad tooth or a broken limb.
Yarp.
When education was based a century’s old fiction book.
Narp.
No really, education was based on all sorts of stuff, like Euclid’s Elements. If a library had a disproportionate amount of religious literature, it was probably because the only people keeping the books alive was the Church - old books would wear out and have to be manually transcribed onto new papyrus/etc before it became unreadable, which meant if you didn’t have scholars actively maintaining a library then all the books would be lost. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, those scholars were mainly priests.
In fact, a lot of books being lost was actually caused by parchment - a new type of ‘paper’ that was made from animal skin instead of reeds. Far longer lasting, but also far more expensive. So a lot of books weren’t rewritten onto parchment (but also weren’t rewritten onto papyrus because they put their money into the parchment for other books) and thus those books were lost (they might have been codexes etc not technically books, but whatever). Thus the “dark ages” due to all the lost writings.
It took many curious and courageous lifes to establish the scientific method.
No, the basics of science existed during the medieval period, and in fact scientific development and refining of the core concepts of science during the medieval period was a necessary part of eventually establishing the scientific method!
The other necessary part was improving the precision of tools (that includes things like improving our glass for test tubes) so as to make scientific experiments physically repeatable in the first place. Same problem as for automated production via machine tools, in fact.
This scientific method enabled us to go from riding horses to flying to the moon. To have pocket sized computers, that connect and enterntain us.
It wasn’t sufficient but it was definitely necessary.
Although to be a bit needlessly contrarian, people were still riding horses for commercial reasons during the space race, for practical reasons - if you’re a veggie seller selling veggies via essentially the “ice-cream truck business model” (i.e. rolling down the street and ringing a bell that indicates people can come out and buy vegetables from you now), you don’t need a truck to do that (you’re stopping and starting whenever someone comes and buys vegetables so you don’t benefit a lot from 40MPH,60KM/h), and a horse-cart can carry quite a lot of vegetables without needing to constantly drink oil. Also, the horse is self-driving, and maybe will cheekily start walking before the vegetable-sale has completed, because the horse isn’t stupid and knows it’s about to be told to start walking anyway. And in the 1960s, a truck is still quite expensive so if you live in a rural town selling veggies, you might pay more on the mortgage/lost interest than you gain in productivity anyway.
Honestly a lot of cars/trucking is completely stupid and should have been replaced by an “electric horse” (i.e. a low-speed vehicle, think horse-walking-speed and definitely sub-20MPH,30KM/h, which could thus be electric without much loss of performance) with most long-distance transport done via rail. And forget Elon Musk, we could reap a lot of the benefits of self-driving cars by simply deploying trained corgi chauffeurs (i.e. a less fuel-intensive alternative to a horse, which has more than ~1 horsepower since it’s driving an electric vehicle).
I believe, there’s a way to gas pigs that just makes them sleepy and then pass out. I think, it was by using nitrogen. But yeah, that’s not commonly done.
IIRC, it’s literally any other gas except CO2 - the human body detects suffocation not by the lack of oxygen in blood, but the presence of carbonic acid (which is acidic). Since every other gas doesn’t create carbonic acid (except maybe some gases that contain carbon?), they all silently/painlessly kill.
Nitrogen, argon, or hydrogen would all work and be fairly cheap. Hydrogen would be explosively flammable though, so you could combine two steps into one!
It’s not greenwashing, it’s just improving the specs. As Electrek says in the article, the quest for improved efficiency and cost reduction among commercial fleet managers knows no political ideology.