How do SSDs and HDDs compare to optical disks in terms of stability in storage? SSD bits can lose charge over time until a lot of 1s read as 0s, right?

Only one can likely be credited as directly causal to a human extinction, but I’d think several factors can end up contributing to keeping us grounded even if we stick around for several additional millennia. And we could to some extent experience several of them simultaneously. For example if it is necessary to successfully create one or more technically possible (unbeknownst to us) technologies, but they remain unproven for the entirety of our species span of life on Earth. And while this is attempted, we end up with shortages that make soace exploration and colonization politically impossible, as the resources are never allocated for the purpose.

In this case we’d have both problems, but solving either one of them would still not get us out there.

In another example, perhaps even the technology is proven eventually, but due to scarcity rhe window of opportunity temporarily closes, and then wars, plagues, and a few other factors set humanity back to the stone age with a small population. Perhaps some predatory animals end up very successful at hunting us to extinction. Or perhaps we’re gradually finished off by several famines.

One could maybe point one cause out as more consequential than the others, but if the problems end up being such a quagmire I’d say they all played a part in filtering out humanity from interstellar colonization.

This idiocy will end this mistake of a planet. Might be for the best, if life were to spread through the galaxy from here, we’d be contaminating it with so much war, slavery and other miseries. Good luck to whatever spawns here next.

It could, if cheap, light, efficient EVs become legal and popular in Europe.

I personally want something that would never be legal; A 4-wheeled, beefed up, 100+ km/h electric velomobile with something like CanAm Spyder tires (and track width) and a proper comfortable seat. A bit like the LCC rocket, but fully enclosed and possibly lighter.

I could get something more dangerous, like a motorcycle. While this would be in an illegal limbo between car and motorcycle.

The Renault Twizy is a too tall, simply ugly, and thoroughly nerfed version of a simile of what I wish for, and Europe will continue just vaguely trying (and complacently falling) to make speed-limited microcars for cities of type L6e and L7e the “green option” looking for adoption, but that will never reach any kind of tipping point and we all know it. Not quite designed to fail, but definitely not designed for mass adoption.

The legal limbo of what I think would be more appealing is due to both the public and the governing bodies being entirely unwilling to tolerate what safety-wise amounts to a motorcycle with a car’s stability, without reducing speed. They’d never expect to successfully lock motorcycles down to “max 45 km/h”, but the category of “motorcycle” is uniquely privileged as a traditionally recognized transport device permitted to trade away safety for other benefits. Presumably because the trade is explicit enough, as there’s no mistaking it for a car.

Anyways…

The conclusion is that no, “it” doesn’t include vehicles, and won’t any time soon. The only desirable electric cars will remain massive and heavy and expensive (but thoroughly armored), so adoption will continue to be fairly slow, and they’ll be a big drain on the grid.

I’ll end on the note that motorcycles not being popular is a huge part of why western bureaucrats (barely) tolerate them. If this was to become popular among young guys who want a cheap fast car, it’d be extremely problematic for them, and not at all worth the accelerated energy transition.

Last note, Sierra Echo is also one I’ve been keeping my eye on, but since it’s fast and light, it’s also open-air like all these things apparently have to be. Oh, and it’s also not cheap.

The screens are there to play ads sometimes, and if you get there while an ad is playing, you either have to know the store and remember which screen the thing you want is behind, or you have to wait until the ad is over. Or you can go open every door until you find what you want. I prefer the latter because it makes the company have to pay more to cool their drinks.

If enough people do it enough, maybe it’ll negate the advertising profits.

The world is changing, the golden decades of our parents’ post-war reality are over, the sun is setting once again on European soil.

I don’t know exactly what kinds of nightmares await us in the darkness, but I do know that the bloodlust of the European populace will not be sated easily.

Expect extraordinary efforts to subdue, abuse and eventually exterminate people once again. The European populace will not be a bastion of humanitarian ideology in the face of climate migration. It will instead declare war on them, and brutalize them.