Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "Curious Droid" channel.

  1. Wasn't that place a recreation made by a historical society? I remember there was a sign or something.
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  2. Thank you for making this video! Curious Droid is one of the very best channels on YouTube. I love how you discuss the possibility of giant space guns in a systematic, logical way and aren't just going for dramatic effect like many other channels. (5 crazy ways to get into space!)
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  3. I think a lot of the naivete is because they truly felt they were in a race with "the other side" where the winner would survive and the loser would eventually be conquered. Something like residual radioactivity was judged to be of small importance when weighed against the speed of nuclear assisted construction.
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  4. Of course we should have stayed on the Moon, or at least we should have kept getting better at going back to it. If we'd tried to build some kind of permanent base (maybe an international collaboration) twenty years ago, we'd have so much more data now on how to actually survive long-term in space. That data still needs to be collected if we're ever going to reach Mars or build permanent space stations in orbit (or build completely self sufficient structures on Earth), but now we have to begin collecting it almost from zero instead of having a two or three decade head start.
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  5. Thank you for another great video! This channel is wonderful. I remember the excitement in the air when the Delta Clipper was being tested. It felt like the first private attempt to do one better than NASA, at a time when the Shuttle was clearly on its last legs. (Even though it was completely funded by government, the Sci-Fi community felt close to the project because of Jerry Pournelle.) We'd hear about the latest tests and see short videos of the flights at science fiction conventions.
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  6. Thank you for making this video! For anyone interested in the human exploration of space, this is the limiting factor. It's simply the biggest problem we need to deal with, after the problems involved with physically getting there and back. Wouldn't it be nice if we could mine water on the Moon? That would make Mars missions much easier.
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  7. If wonder if microwaves could be used to melt some of the dust around a Lunar base, just to keep it from being a problem.
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  8. Thanks for another great video! I wonder what kind of batteries would be needed to keep a big passenger plane in the air, especially in really cold conditions like we get in my country.
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  9. I'd say that at a minimum we need to find ways to harden our electrical grids and communications systems against radiation. It seems that one way or another we're inevitably going to experience greater radiation on the Earth's surface. Either massively and suddenly thanks to a flare, or more low grade and permanently thanks to a pole reversal. We need to prepare for these situations now, while we still can. Imagine a near future Earth that's experiencing both the effects of climate change and confusion and intermittent damage from solar flares thanks to a pole reversal event. It would be a much more difficult and costly environment in which to maintain the giant global networks we need for modern civilization to function. You might only get electricity on alternate years, or you could order something from China and it arrives weeks late because the cargo ship got confused when its GPS system stopped working, and the compass pointed towards a false North Pole...
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  10. I don't think it's possible to say when either event will happen. Coronal mass ejections like the Carrington Event may be somewhat predictable months in advance thanks to observation of the Sun, but even with that we nearly got hit by another one in 2012. As for a pole reversal, it doesn't look like anyone knows when it will happen. Like the video says, we're hundreds of thousands of years "overdue," but that means nothing on a scale measured in human lifetimes. The poles might start to reverse tomorrow, or maybe it won't happen for ten thousand years. But it will happen. I think the more predicable likelihood of solar flares is reason enough to design a more robust infrastructure for our society. In the past we've only done this kind of thing as preparation for wars, but now science is giving us a greater understanding of phenomena we need to watch out for, we should prepare for other eventualities as well.
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  11. mytmousemalibu wrote: "Right now our best option is already being explored, biofuels. From synthetic to plant based and even fuels derived from algae are being tested now." This does seem like the most realistic option to replace aviation fuel. At least it has the benefit of being carbon neutral.
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  12. This is a really good video. You have a very natural lecturing style, asking the same questions the audience is wondering about and then answering them.
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  13. You summed up the problem well. We can create all the rules we want here on Earth, but so long as nobody is up there on the Moon to enforce them we'll have to settle for the good will of the organizations that do go there. If we're thinking really long term, maybe they could set up some kind of perimeter with security cameras (maybe even live streaming to Earth) so no one could sneak into a historical site.
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  14. Really great video! Hydrogen certainly looks like the future fuel for a decarbonized economy, both in airplanes and in any other application where batteries alone won't do. But before that happens, couldn't we replace aviation kerosene with carbon neutral fuels made from carbon capture technologies? I mean, we have to remove countless billions of tons of C02 anyway, so why not develop markets for the byproducts of that process. They could use the existing infrastructure and wouldn't require retooling everything, so they'd be cheaper to utilize than hydrogen.
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  15. Ah, the F-104 Starfighter, I remember those! In my country it was the CF-104. There's one permanently mothballed at a museum not too far from my house. That awful airplane killed more Canadian pilots than the Soviet Air Force ever did. (Way more than zero, that is.) But we went all-in on those things and flew them until they fell apart. Imagine an alternate history where Britain made the SR-177 and we had the same licensing deal with them. Probably would have been a lot fewer crashes, even if there wasn't really a need to counter Soviet bombers.
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  16. Thank you for another great video! The clips you use are amazing. But I watched this one with a sense of growing dread, certain that Stapp would go too far. Thank goodness he survived! But he probably would have been killed if his superiors hadn't stopped him from further tests. It seemed like he was willing to keep risking his life in more and more dangerous ways until something terrible happened.
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  17. Thanks! It's been too long since I saw that show.
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  18. Solar power stations are a great idea. They've always been a great idea, ever since that Isaac Asimov story came out. (Great job on the sourcing, btw.) And for those of us that love rockets and space travel, solar power stations provide an economical reason to have lots of people and infrastructure in space. It's win/win for everybody. The problem is that huge learning and experience curve we have to get over first, because solar power stations would be the most ambitious thing humanity has ever done in space. It would be a massive engineering project. I hope the Japanese have great success in their program, because they're putting in the hard work doing something that could benefit us all.
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  19. Wish I could upvote you more than once.
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  20. That's a really good point, Ari Takalo.
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  21. Love these videos!
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  22. Wow, what a fascinating story! I've never heard any of it before. With all the names and politics this is a little harder to follow than a typical Curious Droid video (which is usually about more straightforward subjects like engineering), so I think I'll watch it again. Really interesting stuff!
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  23. What a great video! Thank you for making it! I love this channel.
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  24. The subject matter and presentation of the video itself is awesome and fascinating as always, but there seems to be some problems in the first half with everything (including the host) looking really blocky and low resolution.
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  25. Wow, what a great video! Thank you for making it!
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  26. I don't think weather control will ever be a real thing, except in the very broadest sense where we try to alter the climate by doing things like removing CO2 or planting trees.
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