Yeah, sorry to be so pedantic. I recently learned that fact about copper mining in North America and it blew my mind a little so I had to comment.

People have been mining and using copper in the Americas for like 8000 years though.

There is no great filter. There is a multitude of smaller filters. The universe is just extremely dangerous and so the likely hood of technological civilizations living long enough to become interstellar is very very low. People like to oversimplify things. There is not one thing that can kill our civilization, there are many. Asteroids and comets, giant solar flares, AI, viruses, nuclear war, gamma ray bursts, super volcanoes etc. these are just the things we know about that could send us back to the Stone Age. The chance of one of these things crippling civilization in the next thousand years is pretty high. Then it might take us 5000 years to rebuild civilization. It is just so unlikely that single celled organisms will evolve to become an interstellar species. It might happen once per galaxy, and probably only in galaxies that are suitable.

We already have ASI it is just somewhat narrow. Computers are already better than humans at a small number of things, like mathematical calculations, chess, GO, etc. It looks to me like they are going to surpass humans at things like language processing in the next couple of years. The question is how general will that intelligence become.

Nope. I live where it gets really hot in the summer and really cold with snow and ice in the winter. I want to be able to put full blast heat on my windshield sometimes, either recirculating air or pulling it from outside depending on whether there is ice on the outside or fog on the inside. In the summer I want full blast AC. In the spring and fall I generally just want air circulating from outside the car.

This is super exciting. We absolutely need nuclear propulsion if we are really gonna start colonizing the solar system, mining asteroids etc.

How hard is hard? I mean how fast does artificial super intelligence (ASI) have to appear to be a hard takeoff? Within 1 year? 1 month? 1 day? I think its also possible to have a somewhat narrow ASI, like an AI that is super smart at most things but still very limited at other tasks that humans do. In fact I think that is the likely scenario and we actually already have very limited versions of that.

I don't think we will have a super hard takeoff, like a godlike ASI that appears almost instantly. I think the rate of advancement could be super quick though. Like we have really impressive but not completely general AI within the next year or two and then over the next few years advancements are mind blowing and world changing, but there will be no god like AI that appears overnight and suddenly rules the world.

That may also be true, but what I said is correct.

The SP500 is the 500 largest businesses. If large companies start to fail and others take their place, the failing companies will drop off the SP500 and be replaced by the successful ones.

If you ignore media hysteria and read the actual reports from actual scientists, global warming isn’t even going to be that bad. The world will warm by a few degrees and we will deal with it because we will be richer and have more technology. There are way bigger concerns than global warming.

“The introduction of the Wind Challenger is expected to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by about 5% on a Japan-Australia voyage and by 8% on a Japan-North America West Coast voyage, compared to a conventional vessel of the same type” I wonder if that is even worth it. Like how much do the “sails” cost and how much fossil fuels do they take to produce?

I don't know a whole lot about this mission but I am actually an engineer working on a component that will fly aboard Europa. Super exciting to see what it will find.

You just have to launch the spent batteries out of the back of the airplane.

I agree with most of this. But I don’t think we need single stage to orbit space planes. If you have a reusable two stage system (like starship), what’s the problem with that?

I agree. But if they can sell a useful humanoid robot for a reasonable price by the end of the decade then that is a huge success. That will be world changing.