Belgian police guarding the meeting between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin had some heavy-duty anti-drone weapons.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/decades-in-the-making-russias-nauka-module-to-finally-take-flight/
Eighty years ago, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210621-hitler-s-war-of-annihilation-operation-barbarossa-80-years-on
China won’t invade Taiwan partly because the island’s de facto independent status is too politically valuable to China’s leaders.
https://supchina.com/2021/06/07/no-china-will-not-invade-taiwan/
As U.S. removes its troops from Afghanistan ahead of its 9/11/2021 deadline to end the war there, the Taliban have been rapidly reconquering the country. U.S. intelligence believes the democratic government could collapse as little as six months after the U.S. withdrawal.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghan-government-could-collapse-six-months-after-u-s-withdrawal-new-intelligence-assessment-says-11624466743
The Chilean battleship Almirante Latorre was built in Britain and had a fascinating lifetime of service.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/how-did-south-american-battleship-end-royal-navy-187486
As huge as modern cargo ships are, they will probably be more than twice as big by midcentury. There is no known engineering limit on how large a ship can be. (In the articles, note that “TEU” = “twenty-foot equivalent unit.” It refers to a rectangular shipping container that is 20′ x 8′ x 8′. A cargo ship with a capacity of 20,000 TEUs can fit 20,000 shipping containers of that size into itself.)
https://www.maritime-executive.com/editorials/50000-teu-the-future-or-not
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/travel-logistics-and-infrastructure/our-insights/how-container-shipping-could-reinvent-itself-for-the-digital-age#
Would it be cheaper to move cargo between East Asia and North America using a Bering Strait train tunnel that it is to move it via cargo ships? Considering that it’s cheaper to transfer goods between many different points in the U.S. by putting them on ships that go all the way down to the Panama Canal and back than it is to use the national railway network to move them, probably not.
https://www.maritime-executive.com/editorials/comparing-maritime-versus-railway-transportation-costs
https://blogs.voanews.com/russia-watch/2012/04/28/join-russia-and-usa-by-rail-tunnels-under-the-bering-strait/
Facebook’s market cap hit $1 trillion.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/28/tech/facebook-trillion-ftc/index.html
Microsoft’s market cap hit $2 trillion.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-22/microsoft-rallies-to-join-apple-in-exclusive-2-trillion-club
Elon Musk’s wife, “Grimes,” released a brief video explaining why AI will resurrect communism. Everything she says in it is logical, and I came to all of the same conclusions years ago. Granted, she oversimplifies it. It’s more accurate to say that, thanks to AI, humans will no longer be able to participate in the capitalist economy, so we’ll all get on welfare, paid for by our hyper-productive machines. We’ll also find that it’s much cheaper and more efficient to replace all government bureaucrats with AIs, and perhaps in the longer run to replace elected politicians with machines programmed to maximize the public good (it is actually possible for a country to be Communist and democratic at the same time, and it is also possible for a dictatorship to be both benign and more efficient than a democracy). The result would be a society that resembled Communism in many ways. All basic and intermediate needs would be paid for by the state, class and wealth differences among humans would vanish since no one would have gainful jobs anymore, the “ability” and “needs” of each human would be known and satisfied, and efficient central planning of the economy would be possible.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9649909/Grimes-goes-TikTok-rant-claiming-artificial-intelligence-key-communist-future.html
Machines are getting better at the art of debate. There’s no reason to believe AIs won’t someday be as persuasive, oratorically gifted, and manipulative as the best human debaters, lawyers, politicians, and conmen.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03215-w
Using prefabricated modules and modular building techniques, a 10-story condo building was erected in only 29 hours in China.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9716291/What-wrong-Chinese-builders-construct-ten-storey-apartment-block-29-HOURS.html
“Prestigious European grants might be biased, study suggests”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01362-8
The FDA has approved the dieting drug “Wegovy,” which reduces body weight by 15%.
https://apnews.com/article/science-obesity-lifestyle-business-health-c6f992d717c6461ef20f40e6d4ee9d25
The FDA also approved the Alzheimer’s treatment drug “Aducanumab,” even though clinical studies failed to show any clear benefits to patients. Some members of the approval body resigned in protest after the decision, and the drug will cost tens of thousands of dollars per user, per year.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/two-members-fda-panel-resign-protest-over-alzheimer-s-drug-n1270300
The alleged decline in sperm counts among European and North American men might be grossly exaggerated.
https://reason.com/2021/06/08/spermageddon-has-been-canceled-says-new-study/
“In vitro gametogenesis” (IVG) is an experimental lab technique that turns skin or blood cells from any adult into sperm or egg cells, which can then be used to create embryos. If IVG is perfected, it would effectively open the door to human genetic engineering.
https://www.freethink.com/videos/ivg-in-vitro-gametogenesis
The entire human genome has finally been sequenced. The holdouts were repetitive sections of the chromosomes that don’t code for physical traits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88_FTFWUOk
China just activated the Baihetan Dam. It’s the second-biggest dam in the world. The biggest is the Three Gorges Dam, which is also in China.
https://apnews.com/article/china-dams-business-49bd453ecd314b3b1292aaa429c91be6
‘The energy reserves in the upper 10 km of the earth’s crust are approximately 1.3 × 1027 J, which could supply the global energy use for approximately 217 million years.’
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032117310341
Between 1971 and 2013, nuclear power saved 1.8 million lives.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-1306/friday-matinee-nuclear-power-saves-lives/
In 1973, the U.S. Skylab space station experienced several malfunctions, forcing NASA to plan for a possible evacuation. Two astronauts in a modified Saturn-V rocket would have flown to the station, embarked the three others, and flown back to Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skylab_Rescue
‘The Russians have said they may pull out of the program in 2025 and build a brand-new station. So why launch a new module just a few years before exiting the station? One possibility is that the Russians are simply posturing.’
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/decades-in-the-making-russias-nauka-module-to-finally-take-flight/
Here’s a fascinating video about the Oort Cloud, a sphere of comets and meteoroids encircling our Solar System. It’s really far out and extends to a distance of 1.5 light years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4mc-alL92U
Dyson–Harrop satellites would harvest energy from the solar wind, and not from a photovoltaic effect.
https://youtu.be/CCXOmTRX7Fo
‘Dyson Sphere Impracticalities: Although the Dyson sphere can produce very high amounts of power (~4 x 1026 W) [5], its design has a number of disadvantages. If all of the matter in a solar system roughly the mass of ours is used to construct a sphere with radius of just 1 AU, the sphere would only be 8 cm thick (with an average density equal to that of steel). Additionally, it has been calculated [6] that the minimal radius of a Dyson sphere must be at least 1.66 AU in order to successfully dissipate thermal energy absorbed by the Sun in a useful fashion—a smaller sphere could suffer a cataclysmic thermal event (e.g. explosion or melting). Currently, there exist no manmade materials that can stand up to the stress that would be felt at every point along the surface of such a gargantuan structure [7].’
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/abscicon2010/pdf/5469.pdf
The recent “Chamoli disaster” involved a landslide of snow and massive rocks in India’s Himalayas. They slid down a mountainside, impacted the bottom of the river valley with the force of 15 Hiroshima atom bombs, and the pulverized debris surged down the river fast enough to destroy a dam and kill 200 people.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57446224
Around 1960, an artist named “Arthur Radebaugh” made many cartoon drawings depicting his visions of the future. Some came true, others didn’t, and still others came true “in spirit.” Regardless, his art is a cool time capsule from the childhood era of the Baby Boomers.
https://gizmodo.com/42-visions-for-tomorrow-from-the-golden-age-of-futurism-1683553063
On October 9, 1903, the New York Times published an editorial predicting that planes wouldn’t be invented for another “one million to ten million years.” The Wright Brothers’ famous flight happened nine weeks later.
https://nowiknow.com/a-million-years-give-or-take/
From 1989: ‘A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.’
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
During the second, panicky month of the pandemic, this was published. It predicted a coronavirus pandemic would kill 65 million people worldwide by now. The figure is in fact 13 million, which is terrible, but falls far short of the simulation’s estimate.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/a-simulated-coronavirus-pandemic-in-2019-killed-65-million.html
The “Delta” variant of COVID-19 originated in India and is rapidly becoming the dominant strain globally because it spreads the fastest between people. It doesn’t seem to be deadlier or more resistant to the vaccines than other strains of the virus.
https://www.politico.eu/article/delta-coronavirus-variant-doubles-risk-of-hospitalization-scottish-study/
The U.S. hit 600,000 deaths, meaning the University of Washington Model was right again. Fortunately, the death rate has sharply dropped, and the Model doesn’t forecast us hitting the 700,000 mark until sometime in 2022.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-600k-deaths-us-1ef14a0b998e6ce99281edf6e996dfbe