I do think it's interesting that recent submissions use nearly the entire 50 hours. I wonder how much better people could do if faster hardware was allowed.
I wonder how long it will take for plastics to become biodegradable. Sort of like how wood was around for millions of years before microorganisms could break it down, maybe the landfills of today will create the equivalent of coal deposits millions of years from now.
I don't know everything about nuclear fusion so I have to ask: Is it actually renewable?
In other words, are the byproducts able to form back into the "fuel" at a reasonable rate with the energy input of the Sun? I know that a selling point of fusion is that there is such an abundance of fuel that this doesn't matter. But if we treat finite energy sources as infinite, exponential growth in our energy budget means that we will undoubtedly run out of energy, as is being done with forests and such.
After all, I have a feeling people at the dawn of the industrial revolution thought the amount of coal available in the world would serve their needs "practically forever," until energy consumption scaled up by thousands of times.
The traditional way to play melee is local multiplayer only, so players most players are used to the incredibly fast response of a CRT. This and the muscle memory required to play at a high level makes LCD monitors (and especially TV's) noticeable.