The issue with battery-powered long-distance air travel is that you have to lug weight of those batteries with you for the entire trip.
The whole problem would be considerably more tractable if airliners could do as rockets do---jettison exhausted fuel storage as they go, especially since maximum power requirement is at takeoff. We've done the math and it absolutely works, we use our support drones to catch and reuse the jettisoned batteries.
Well, most of the time. Sorry about your cow; we'll get you a new one.
I was today years old when I realised that the reason that the intro to every youtube video sounds like setting an ad break, is that it is setting up an ad break. I've had whatever they call the no-ads subscription to google for years, and hadn't realised how awful the default experience was. How do people stand it? Where are the pitchforks?
The owner of the facility was famous. Well, Meta famous if you know what i mean. Famous for being a famous rich asshole, dedicating his twilight years to outliving all the other famous rich assholes.
Collectively the six trillionaire oligarchs who had built their burrows—each on their agreed post-apocalypse continental domains—had all hired the same experts to design those enclaves. Location: deep in the ancient stable rock of a continental craton. Supplies: Food, water and medicines to last a century, until farming could resume. Knowledge: a full archive of the Internet. Technology: every conceivable machine and the parts and tools to maintain them. Serfs: entirely separate accommodation for necessary technical staff, and hibernation for many more. Security: no, not the armed-thugs-with-shock-collars you’re thinking of; spider drones are what’s in favour with apocalypse consultants this decade.
When the Event came it blindsided even the Six. While everyone was watching the climate fall apart, the brown dwarf grazing the Oort cloud went unnoticed, obscured by the glare of the Starlink Belt. A million comets had their orbits stirred up by the visitor. It only took one, impacting in the south atlantic ocean, to tip the biosphere into chaos predicted to last three to five decades.
The balloon was up, the Six and their families executed the well rehearsed Plan Scram, and settled into their cosy bunkers to wait out the Dark Times. Serfs (sorry, “employees” in this decade) likewise. Human security personnel (unknowingly already inoculated with a delayed death sentence once their mechanoid replacements were online) set about battening down the hatches and bringing up the Evironment (2.0).
“Hey Sarge, this droid won’t boot!”
“Yeah this one too. What does ‘502 License server unreachable’ mean?”
Some historians say that the oceanic impact wasn’t the killer blow, but instead the broken off fragment that impacted an ancient site—exact location and purpose lost—known to us only as “us-east-1”. #BonusPanel
The world is unequivocally a better place since we stopped burning coal for domestic heating. However I’ve always been a little sad that Kids These Days (™) don’t get to experience soot sprites.
Then just yesterday I walked into the garage, flicked on the light, and I got that familiar scramble in the corner of my eye. They’ve evolved! My inverter has Solar Sprites!
The cheque said “AMOUNT: two dollars and forty cents BEING FOR: classified ad”, rounded block letters in green ink amid the printed prompts. My mother never wrote cursive. “Thanks Mum“ I said, “I’ll pay you back from my paper round money on Saturday”
“No need” she said, “I’m going out; if you have the ad ready I’ll post it for you.”
I folded the cheque and the form I’d clipped from the newspaper. It had been tricky writing on the newsprint with a pen “HOME COMPUTER Amstrad CPC6128 with monitor, printer and external 5.25 inch drive. Original software plus over 30 games. $425. Ph 551806”.
After Mum left I went to my room and booted up my new PC, with its Extra Beige system unit and Different Beige monitor. I patted my 6128’s screen sitting on the floor under my desk. “Sorry old girl, no room to keep you but I’ll find you a nice home”.
Before I even got Kings Quest loaded the doorbell rang.
The visitor was a woman with amazing purple hair, and cat ears. “Hi, she said, I’m Kit, here about the Amstrad”
“But…it’s not even posted yet. And I only listed a phone number!”
“Never mind that”, she smiled, bouncing on her toes “do you still have it?”
I nodded, too flabbergasted to speak
“Four twenty five, right?” she said, thrusting an envelope at me, “here’s five hundred, keep the change. Now, what I want-“
“Wait, what are these things”. I’d opened the envelope to find five slippery rectangles of plastic bearing “100” in large letters, coloured variously green and yellow with a transparent region in the middle. “These aren’t-“
“Oh shazbot!” my visitor said, snatching the envelope back. “Bee Arr Bee”. Then she vanished, with an electric ZZZZAAPP sound.
ZZZAAAPP. She was back, holding out a sheaf of five grey paper rectangles, the recently introduced but rarely seen $100 notes, thick linen paper with subtle colours - easy to photocopy and colour in with textas, I’d seen on TV. I held the note up to the sky to see the metal thread and watermark. “Are these real?”
“Trust me,” she said, “they were hard to find but totally legit.”
“Okay, uh do you want to see the computer running?”. I felt like I was running to catch up with this interaction.
“No need” she grinned. “I’m giving it to you. Box it up and stash it in Mum’s roof. You’ll be glad to have it when you’re older.”
“Wh…what?”
“Do they speak english in what?” she muttered half to herself?
“what?”
“Exactly! Right on script”. She poked me in the chest. “You’ll be alright kid. Forget about the ‘strad for a couple of decades, OK?”
She ran hand through her brilliant purple hair, vibrating like she was having the best time ever. “Oh yeah, you’ll need these”. She tugged at her cat ears and i realized they were a headband. She handed me the band with its two ears. “One last thing“—a suddenly serious look—“listentoyourdreams. You’ll know when it’s time. See ya!”
When I broke my leg in three places tripping over a fallen palm frond while walking to lunch with cow-orkers, I reasoned that the truth was far too prosaic to be allowed to propagate. Since local brewery XXXX beer was at the time featuring an animatronic elephant in their TV ads (remember TV?) I concocted a tale that a commercial-shoot at the local Royal Exchange hotel had led to an escaped elephant rampage, with my injury but the mildest of consequences.
“Excuse me”, the waitress noted in passing, “you’re on fire”.
She wasn’t being complimentary to my appearance; my encounter suit was leaking oxygen again. I hate fluorine planets.
I swatted at the flame and stepped up to the bar. “Cylinder of pure H₂O please” I asked the barkeep. “and, uh, have you seen Captain Zhang tonight? I arranged to meet her here and…” I waved away another flame and applied a quick-seal patch to the crack in my armor “…I’d rather not wait too long; no offense but your bar’s atmosphere is not really my thing”
You're doomscrolling because you're bone idle. I'm doomscrolling because I'm testing TCP keepalive code and I need to watch this tcpdump for a timed 15 minutes to make sure I see what I expect to see. We are not the same. #TwoMinutesToGo