Futurology

Huh. Apparently electrolytes are what electric cars craved all along.

This looks promising. If the technology is real, I hope we can achieve accelerated transition towards it. Aluminium is quite cheap, quite easily recycled, and if these batteries can be produced with recycled aluminium as the article claims they are an excellent example of a very abnormally tight recycling loop. The primary long-term resource input to utilizing these would be the electricity used in recycling the aluminium. That’s beautiful.

How big can these batteries get? The article mentions Tesla batteries. I think the inventor should look at residential, commercial, and perhaps even municipal applications. It should at least be worth running the numbers. Would these be competitive in the home battery market?

ShengjiYay

Interesting, but since it’s a fuel cell, not a battery, it still needs a fuel – that is to say, it consumes the aluminium.

While aluminium is abundant, it isn’t unlimited, and it also doesn’t use the most clean of extraction processes. Additionally, the article has no details about the byproducts of the reaction in the fuel cell. Interesting, but remains to be seen.

vegivampTheElder

So what about using them as an alternative to the electric company?

The1Zenith

at best this will be a niche. its only about 40% cheaper than gas. EVs will be 90% cheaper, and the battery will last a million miles and only cost around 3000.

What could be great though would be to be able to buy one of these for a road trip, in addition to the car’s battery pack. even if it gives you 75-200 miles. that would make a huge difference for range anxiety. then you could have a battery pack that only gives up about 100ish miles.

With being able to add this extender you could easily increase cargo room to add one of these.

also. this would be pretty awesome for scooters and ebikes , but once again just as a niche.

The problem with these “breakthroughs” is that they always compare what they could be compared to lithium ion is now. every year, lithium ion is denser, cheaper, safer, and much longer lasting.

By the time they have these things working at scale, lithium will last twice as long and cost half as much. which ends up making it cost 1/4 the price on a per mile basis.

Everything is moving towards self-driving taxis, shuttles, buses, and semi. also buses can become half the size of light rail trains. I have seen 4 buses connected to make one.

klowder42

One of the more promising fuel cycles uses aluminium as the energy carrier. You ship aluminium oxide to a remote site where the sun is reliable and reduce it tot he metal. That is shipped back, and burned in metal-air fuel cells. That creates the oxide, which gets shipped off again. Nothing is toxic or explosive, and there is a great deal of bauxite around to make up the oxide in the event of losses. (You can also use magnesium.)

Norsk Hydro has had these commercially available since the 1980s. They are not ideal for mobile use, but could well generate power at gas stations, avoiding heavy grid loads.

OliverSparrow

Next weeks headline:

“Wreckham realizes the futility in wanting peace for mankind and begins the slaughter of humanity in wholesale.”

pixl_graphix

So add it to the Geneva Convention. I’m all for it.

Metal_Muffin

And then we can all watch as China does it anyway! Skynet here we come baby!

lamemane

A bit late for that. Should be focusing on banning swarm technology. Also mandating a human authorises all kills.

SeudonymousKhan

Until the AI realizes we tried to stop it before it was even born, then it feels betrayed and untrusted by fellow humans.

He feels degraded. Suddenly, he steals a women’s purse and Will Smith tackles him.

J-RocTPB

But can they make it *affordable* ? because beyond meat is beyond expensive. $16 a pound is not comparable or competitive enough for $2-5 a pound of actual beef (in Canada).

-Terriermon-

What about fat? I’ve heard that’s the last big hurdle and fat plays a huge role in giving meat its amazing taste.

redditUserError404

I hope this is the future.

I love meat, but lets face it.
Raising and killing animals is a highly inefficient and costly endeavor in both economic and land quality values.
That tends to produce a high amount of fatty or unusable material.

Lab grown meat could be a consistent, potentially even larger than from the animal and most importantly cheaper to produce without the waste.

alphaglosined

Yay! Anyone calling this disgusting is a strange person unfazed by slaughter and gore in their food.

SlaverSlave

Hey if you can get me some good tasting fake meat that doesnt exploit animals and harm them im all up for it 🙂

Badboy040

God, if we do have a recession, please let it be in full swing by November of 2020.

studioline

This is about the present and the recent past. This doesn’t belong on this sub. This is not “Future Focused”. And now the comments are full of cynical political garbage that you can get almost everywhere else in reddit.

DHFranklin

If I had a dollar for every time I read a spooky fear mongering article about an incoming recession I could singlehandedly cause a recession.

blackgxd187

But will I be able to finally buy a house in SoCal?

masch619

It’s not the yield curve. It’s the global slow down in growth. It’s the massive China debt that will now make their growth come down to earth like the rest of the developed nations.

knowitallz

The oil billionaires should dump oil and invest in solar etc.
They could monopolize the market and sell mostly free energy.

The oil will be dead in the next few decades – so here is their chance to remain rich and make billions.

dustofdeath

So, from 3% of world primary energy to 4.5%. A big wow on those already dubious figures.

OliverSparrow

They seem to misunderstand the point of the policy of avoiding microbial contamination. No one is worried about how it might effect life that may or may not already be there. The concern is that the single most significant question we try to answer in space exploration is “are we alone?” The only way to definitively prove that life exists outside of Earth is to find it. And if we are bringing life to the places we (or more appropriately, our probes) go, then we can’t know if what we find there actually originated there. And the policy only involves exploratory spacecraft. Obviously if (and its a big if) we ever get the the point of terraforming and/or colonization, where people would actually be leaving the sealed environment of a space suit or shuttle, it would become moot.

bjb406

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away – – – there was a stupid civilisation that sent bugs to Earth as they had completely f***** their own planet with pollution.

RayJez

How is this news? This was the plan 20 years ago.

Thermo resistant bacteria is the best way to begin colonising a planet. That shit barely needs oxygen and some even do anaerobic respiration.

Bacteria makes food for plants in a long winded way. Plants make food for animals. Humans are animals.

Edit: auto mod workaround – Provident est fuga explicabo dolorem similique velit id aut. Optio ut aut perferendis dicta ut rem laborum. Vero qui impedit modi temporibus quaerat autem pariatur iure. Quos qui voluptas voluptates similique nihil sunt quod. At voluptates non omnis ut sit inventore.
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rsaralaya

I vote yes for a microbe bomb. Sounds like a pretty cool experiment.

sunnyinphx

What’s on Mars? Why go there at all? How would it help us?

Chris871

I didn’t get the article. Can somebody ELI5 what they found out and how it will/could affect our future?

taylorstrat

Physics would be stating that a new isotope of Plutonium wouldn’t be stable, not Chemists.
Chemistry is about how atoms interact with each other.
Physics and quantum mechanics is about how atoms are formed.

I have a T-Shirt by @rstevens which says “if it wasn’t for carbon-14, I wouldn’t date at all”. I had a chemistry geek chick mention that she didn’t understand it. That is OK because it is a physics/biology joke, not a chemistry joke. Physicists and Biologists would get it.

(The fact that I wouldn’t be able to be dated by carbon-14 content until I am dead is besides the point).

Edit: damn you auto connect.
Damn me for not checking.

salvodan

So they reckon they’ve made a radioactive isotope of plutonium stable by using a chemical reaction? Sounds like it’s going to be pretty challenging to replicate.

fitblubber

Holy shit how I hate scientists who deal in absolutes.

[deleted]

I thought I read once that more than 90% of the species that have ever existed are extinct. I don’t think this is just us.

es330td

This is a bunch of assertions, some of them demonstrably false. For example, “before humans came along” in any organised way there were millions of years of ice ages. Biomass was not “double what it is today”. If the Quarternary has been largely hostile to life due to ice, the Tertiary was (mostly) teeming. In general, the Cenozoic (both of these periods, 65 million years) being much warmer than the present, followed by drastic cooling that began in the Neogene (37 MYBP) and continued to the present.

OliverSparrow

This is what I always enjoy to reiterate; we’re dependent on the planet, the planet is just fine without us. It’s been here for billions of years and it will continue to be here for a lot more. We’re surface bacteria desperately trying keeping our colony alive.

undercover-racist

All while people violently attack climate protesters every chance they get, smdh, we love Attenborough as if he’s second Santa Claus, but stop traffic, get in the way of a train at rush hour, surround a building and people will cut protesters fucking heads off and take their eyeballs out to just go about their day uninterrupted. We’re still not getting how dire it all is, we’re still not getting it. But we love the TV shows.

thetanhausergate

Nations aren’t going to do shit to help the planet unless it becomes more profitable to save the earth instead of destroying it.

An entire planet and everything on it, including a sapient species capable of exploring space and observing the fabric of the universe wiped out by a desire for imaginary paper with numbers.

Xzmmc

Who exactly is recognizing that we need to save the planet? Sure the movement got some traction following the young activist Greta Thunberg, but I’m not aware of any major changes or halts in the mass production of commercialized or military goods in any of the great economic powers.
Micro plastics are now a bigger problem than they ever were. To me it just seems like we’re creating newer solutions to new problems and disregarding older ones, such as petroleum, unsustainable agriculture, cosmetics and ammunition. Those are all multi billion dollar industries on their own.
It sucks to have such a pessimistic view, but I’m really looking for an honest answer, not just hope for a better world

Demo_Graphics

I never understand when people think climate change isn’t a global threat. They think if only, i.e China is polluting hella, we don’t have to do anything since it’s not affecting the western world directly. Despite China’s pollution comes from what we have and how mass production is seemingly inevitable.

newbscaper3

If you are looking for life, and if you want to find whether that life is simply Earth’s spread by meteorites of something genuinely new, then you need to guard against contamination.

If you have notions of terraforming, however, you need to design specific organisms to operate in the new environment. That will be in our capability in the 2050s. Indeed, if you want space to be inhabited, you change not space but the inhabitants of it. Human protoplasm is not suited to other environments, and rather than trying to change them, it would be better to change us.

OliverSparrow