I can't believe that the most important discovery of my lifetime is surrounded by this cloud of uncertainty.
At the same time, having watched Oppenheimer recently, when humanity discovered how to split the atom was chaotic too and met with a lot of scepticism.
The first thing I recommend is to think hard about the other parts of your life.
These are the questions I always ask myself to check where my restlessness is coming from:
- Do I fill fulfilment in my life outside work?
- Am I satisfied with my activities before I start working and after I'm done?
- Do I strive to do any specific thing while at work?
If I get three positive answers, I shift those questions to be work-related:
- Do I fill fulfilment in my work life?
- Am I satisfied with my work at the end of the day?
- Am I eager to work on something the next day? (I don't want to think about work when I get home, so I try not to think about it).
This is just a tool to see if I'm not satisfied with the current state of my life, and I'm looking for the easiest change I can make to make it more fun. I've changed cities, jobs and fields of education a lot of times just because I wasn't satisfied with the current state of my life and wanted to change anything at any cost. Those questions help me think more clearly if it's the city I am in, the job I'm currently doing, or if anything I'm studying at the moment is making my life miserable. Most of the time, it's just me going with the flow and not taking hold of my time properly.
I agree that the goal needs to take car traffic off the streets, that would be the dream. I don't own a car and I don't plan to do so because on my city I can pretty much do anything I need to without it.
I wish it was as straightforward as adding 2 outlets on each street light pole but the government will still need to charge people for using it and well, if each pole could charge 4 vehicles at the same time, it could even work on my street.
On one side of my street there are 4 streetlights and 16 cars parked almost at all times (At least from September to July, the only time you can find a parking space is early morning).
Would that be enough? The streetlights are LED so I don't think they use too much electricity to justify a massive cable that could charge 16 cars
I'm not opposing electric vehicles, I'm just trying to show a different reality here.
In Spain you need a permit for almost anything and one of the reasons we don't have more chargers is just because of bureaucracy.
Right now, if I had a car and it was electric, the only option I would have to charge it is running an extension cord from my balcony to the car (Supposing I parked right in front of my apartment).
This is a real challenge and I wish the government would focus on the infra needed to: Assemble batteries in the country, create more and more charging points (As I said before, 3 streets had a cost of 200k€, and they are not even covered completely) and remove taxes from electric vehicles. I think that's what works but here they chose to make life difficult for everyone with a gasoline-powered vehicle.
At least the government is investing in public transport
So, here in Spain, electric cars can't be the solution for the vehicles and having hydrogen cars would certainly be the way to go, it seems.
We can use already built infrastructure and we don't need a charger on every single street.
In Spain, 70% of the vehicles stays on the street overnight[1], that means a charger every roughly 10 meters. Imagine the amount of copper necessary to cover that.
At the same time, having watched Oppenheimer recently, when humanity discovered how to split the atom was chaotic too and met with a lot of scepticism.
I guess that's how we work as humans.