Been following this movie's development for over 20 years. I give props to Morgan Freeman for trying so hard all this time to get it made. Denis Villeneuve would be a great director for this, and he could make it work.
Economics rules everything. How much does this cost vs simply planting trees, when the value of harvesting the trees is included? Since tree farms are generally profitable, and wood is expensive, it seems this method is likely to be economically less efficient.
I stopped when he flubbed the first point. No, it’s not correct users have to just hope big miners will mine their transactions.
For two reasons:
1. They pay them. Do you trust “big grocery” will provide you food, or did you start a farm in your yard?
2. If that trust were ever broken, millions of bitcoiners who can easily afford to lose $10 a month can mine them. Despite there being no such censorship happening, these uneconomic miners are already a rapidly growing group. Bitcoiners are acutely aware of the state of the mempool.
These cuts are absolutely not the ones I would make, but the reality is not as it is being portrayed.
The claim that SpaceX does not do science is false. Not only do they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts, they also do independent science, including the Polaris Dawn and FRAM 2. Along with Axiom, they put science missions on the ISS, and all the NASA science done on ISS is facilitated by SpaceX putting humans there. Finally, literally everything that SpaceX has done or built is a result of science that SpaceX has had to do, including colder than ever propellants, and life support systems, etc. The Polaris Dawn spacewalk was not a replication of the 1960s spacewalks, as it was based on new suit science, etc.
Somehow, people like to pretend that probes landing on other planets is the only form of science that is done.
And the reality is that new entrants from RKLB, SpaceX, Firefly, and a lot of smaller companies are doing exactly this kind of science as well--- but at vastly lower cost.
The inescapable reality-- and this will always be the case with political organizations like NASA-- is no matter how well meaning they cannot do science as effectively as private organizations. NASA slows science down in large part because they are hamstrung by congress.
Yes, it looks like some way too expensive projects are getting cancelled and that means some waste of money. It's not the choice I would make.
But in the next 10 years, nearly %100 of all science will be done outside of NASA.... because the NASA overhead is too much, makes things too expensive, and less reliable.
For example, it's better to blow up 1 falcon one, and 2 falcon 9s, to get 500 successful falcon 9 launches at 1/100th the cost per kilogram of mass to orbit than to have a completely successful SLS system that launches only 2-3 times a decade.
The former accelerates science, lowers the cost of all science and more science gets done per dollar than the latter.
That transition is happening whether government, the senate and congress is aboard.... or not.