I don’t know how much of a factor the cost of the components themselves were in the ballooning costs of the JWST, but if COTS could represent a major savings in cost without compromising the performance of the spacecraft and risking catastrophic equipment failure in the harsh environment of deep space, I’m all for it.

You know now that I think about it, I wonder how many M-rated games were released on the Game Boy/DS systems. I know some of the obvious ones would be id Software ports (like the Wolfenstein 3D seen in the picture) and the GTA games (both the GBA one from the mid 00s and Chinatown Wars from later), but other than those I can’t imagine the list is a very large one, especially considering most of the people who would have been playing on those systems at the time would have been kids and teens.

Edit: after a quick google search, it looks like there were a grand total of 9 M-rated GBA games released, most of them being not very good ports of more popular console/PC games (though an exception apparetly goes to Max Payne, which managed to successfully convert the original third person shooter into an isometric game). Similarly, only 11 M-rated games were released on the DS, the best and most well known of them being Chinatown Wars.

I’m not confident that huge flashy megaprojects and big foreign investments are really doing much to prepare Saudi Arabia for a post-oil future. But at least Saudi Arabia hasn’t alienated itself from its most crucial customers and engaging in a real-time act of self-destruction.

If sonic booms could be reduced to a quieter level, I wonder how it would affect the design and operation of future military aircraft, whether they would feel like they were more free to fly at supersonic speeds over populated areas and whether they would fly supersonic more frequently (this could be doubtful because it would use up more fuel and create more wear on aircraft components, driving up fuel and maintenance costs).

One of the most encouraging stories of the last 15 years has been the dramatic fall in cost of renewable energy and its emergence as a real competitor to existing non-renewable energy sources.

Wind and Solar power are obviously not without their own problems, the largest is that they are intermittent power sources and there is a need to store the energy for days which are cloudy or windless; there is ongoing research in improving battery storage technology for grid-level use and creating carbon-neutral fuels that can be made using renewable energy to meet this need.

But the fact that solar and wind power are so cheap and easily scalable, especially compared to other methods of generating power, is a positive development in the ongoing effort to de-carbonize the energy sector worldwide, although there is still a long way to go before we as a species are truly finished with our dependency on non-renewable energy.

It may not matter for us but gathering the data is still important even if it will not be really useful for generations to come.

A saying about old men planting trees that they won’t live long enough to rest under comes to mind.

Realistically speaking, most space exploration in our future will be done mostly the same as how its done today: through automated telescopes, probes and landers given instructions from Earth (and it will be a very long time before there is any serious effort to send even automated probes to locations beyond the solar system). I could see most space economic activities, such as mining, construction and satellite/station servicing, also being almost completely automated with minimal human presence, except for a few people sitting at computers monitoring it all.

The big changes in the future might be smarter automated machines that can handle doing more on their own, or even for instance machines able to do some rudimentary self-replication in order to establish an industrial presence.

Supporting Humans in Outer Space is very difficult, and years of data from the ISS have shown that lengthy human presence in microgravity is harmful to human health, not to mention that the level of background radiation exposure in deep space is much higher than it is on the surface of the Earth. We would need artificial gravity and radiation shielding to counter these, but this does not solve the other problem, which is that humans need large quantities of breathable air, water and food as the bare minimum requirements of survival in space, and this is before we get to other problems, such as people being enclosed in isolated spaces with only a handful of other people for up to years at a time.

For most of us, Earth will remain our only home for the foreseeable future.

I kind of wish there was more emphasis on making the best out of what is currently possible instead of waiting around for scientific and technological breakthroughs that will take an indeterminably long period to come to fruition, if they do at all.

I guess I’m so used to hearing about distant solutions to present-day problems and I never hear much about how these problems could be addressed today (although in some cases, like with climate change, this inevitably involves things like lifestyle changes and societal restructuring, which themselves can seem equally like hopium).

What would be really be a game changer in this regard is either a Space Elevator type system (which would be really difficult and expensive to build even if we did have suitable materials to do it) or a Reusable Single-Stage To Orbit rocket (even the mighty Starship rocket is two stages, so this is also very difficult to achieve).

As for actual travel in space, faster is better (both in the sense that it limits exposure to cosmic radiation and microgravity, two things proven harmful to human health; and also that it reduces the need to carry a large amount of provisions onboard for a long trip), so it helps for instance to have in-orbit refuelling capability (so you can actually use your rocket engine to propel you faster) or different engines such as nuclear propulsion engines that have better performance than existing chemical rockets.