The original Moon mission was masterminded by a literal card-carrying ex-member of the Nazi party (Wernher von Braun) and the American public back then didn't seem to mind.
All rocketry was, back then. You wanted ballistic telemetry? If you didn't know someone who worked on the V-2, you had to launch your own sounding rockets.
I think the parent's point stands. There's a lot more pragmatic concern with the damage SpaceX could do in 2026, versus the damage Nazis could do in the 1960s.
"Satellites have to be boosted all the time because of drag."
On Low Earth Orbits (LEOs), sure, but the traces of atmosphere that cause the drag disappear quite fast with increasing altitude. At 1000 km, you will stay up for decades.
Looking at the Russo-Ukrainian war, battery-powered drones seem to be more important than tanks right now. Russia, famously, had a lot of tanks; now, Oryx has a lot of their metal carcasses. Gone are the days of mass T-34 attacks that decided entire wars.
I will concede your point on heavier aircraft, though.
Everyone with any military training has been laughing at how bad Russia was using their tanks, thus allowing them to be destroyed. Losing some tanks in battle is a given, but it is generally believed that if Russia was using tanks according to the Soviet doctrine they knew well they would not have lost near as many - as proof of that Thesis, Ukraine has been using the Soviet doctrine and not lost nearly as many tanks. (Ukraine lacks enough artillery to apply the Soviet doctrine of war which is why they are using drones - they have now developed new styles of fighting that uses the drones they have, but tanks are still an important part of war)
Tanks are the heavy cavalry of the modern era, their main use is to break defensive lines.
Or rather, was. Neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians, operating diverse tanks on the bases of different doctrines, managed to do much breaking with them. The battlefield of today is just too different and much more hostile to anything that moves in the open and is big and slow enough to get hit.
Between zero fossil and full fossil there's a world of nuances, too often ignored. How much oil are those heavier aircraft using, as percentage of the whole country usage? The difference is the answer needed.
It is not just oil, but the necessity to keep up the entire separate infrastructure for its refining, processing, storage and distribution.
Imagine a world where the railroad, for some reason, is still stuck with steam engines and black coal. Everything else moved on, but they cannot, thus keeping the mines open etc. Very uncomfortable and far from optimal.
We still have coal mines open, what do you mean? For less and less uses, yes, but they still have their uses, and we are not (nor should be) judging them for that.
The last coal mine in my country just closed a few days ago, 244 years after mining started. I am a bit influenced by this, because I live in that region.
Yes, moderation here is better than elsewhere and the usual bad actors cannot do more than "drive-by downvotes", which are annoying, but nowhere near as disruptive.
The voting seems to work a lot better than the flagging mechanism, for what it’s worth. It’s rare that the top-rated comment is nonsense, or that a bottom-rated comment for more than a few minutes isn’t close to a waste of time.
That is true, but I would say that transnational units of, say, 1 billion people and more, should at least strive to be as resilient to blackmail as possible.
The current situation is such that if China and the US decide to sanction any third party at the same time (be it India or the EU or Russia or Saudi or whoever), the targeted party will suffer like hell.
Sure, as of 2026, this sort of coordinated action between current Chinese and American leaders seems unlikely. But leaders change. Sometimes in the most unlikely way.
That’s majorly moving the goalposts. Other than Saudi Arabia, I can’t think of any country in the world today that has more energy independence that you would get if you ran on renewables + battery + nuclear. You’d have years and years of buffer, compared to the US strategic oil reserve which has maybe a few months of buffer.
The US is currently a net oil exporter, and has been for a few years.
Now of course that's not the whole picture, but if push came to shove, the US could achieve energy independence (at least technologically, if not poitically).
True, the US could supply all of its energy needs through great effort and by making its population pay much higher energy prices. In contrast, if a country were to build around e.g. solar, and then all countries that made the panels embargoed them, the price of electricity would merely stop falling.
I think whether the economies of scale and profit incentives get fucked up depends on the size of the before and after markets we are talking about.
For these to collapse, I believe we would need the international market for US oil specifically to be substantially larger than the entire domestic market for any oil. Is that true?
Czechia is quite nuclear-friendly and yet we ran into a problem with nuclear fuel supply; you don't feed raw uranium into the reactor, you need specially designed fuel rods. Switching from Russian to American ones for our nuclear power plants took several years. We just finished doing so, and now there is a conflict between the US and the rest of the world as well. Lovely.
All solvable, all better than just running out of oil, but I wouldn't call the situation "independence", just "having a better buffer".
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