Dry Ice Fire Fighting Drone

Countries that allocate billions of dollars to armaments have stock pile of weapons stored waiting to be used. I propose them stock pile dry ice bombs as well. It serves dual purpose. The main goal is to fight against the fire. Dry ice by its cold temperature cools down the fire. The heated dry ice change from solid to gaseous carbon dioxide which is heavier than oxygen isolates the burning material from oxygen in the atmosphere. The result is a very effective way of putting out the fire. The dry ice bomb may include a small explosive in the center to disperse the dry ice to a wider area. The bomb would be dropped from autonomous drones and planes. The bombs would be just an environmentally friendly seal, dry ice and a small explosive in the center. The second benefit of the bomb is, it's a storage medium for the carbon dioxide. Coal power plants would produce these bombs as a byproduct and emit much less carbon to the atmosphere.

RoboMining

Traditional mining is mainly opening tunnels following the ore vein and excavating the ore to the surface. My proposition is to use very long warm like robots that is modular and expands for a long distance. Some of the sections are: drilling bits with motor shaft, XRF analyzer and flexible section connector.  After a potential mining site is found, the mining robot will be send to drill the ground. As the robot drills down the ground the drilling screw skin will push the drilled rocks to the surface like an Archimedes screw. XRF analyzers build on the robot sections will detect the composition of the rock being drilled and direct the robot to drill in the ore vein direction. When a vein ends, the robot would reverse the drilling direction and move back to the surface and search other directions. Depending on the mining field's size more than one robot can be deployed.

The mining robot will work with electricity generated by renewable sources established on site.

XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence) analyzers are used to identify presence of a wide range of elements, namely every single element that is located between sodium and uranium in periodic table.

A Mad Approach to Solve the Global Warming

The source of heat on Earth is the Sun. Therefore, if Earth orbits farther away from the Sun, it would be cooler. The Sun loses a total of 4 million tons of mass via Einstein's E = mc² every second. The loss of this mass causes the Earth's orbit to out spiral by 1.5 cm per year. If we increase this distance a little bit more to compensate for the global warming, the problem would be solved as a whole :)

An approach to achieve this goal comes from the ancient times.

"Give me a lever long enough and a firm place on which to stand and I will move the earth." Archimedes 

Low-Bypass Solid Rocket Booster

An idea came to my mind when I thought about replacing the Turbofan engines with the solid rocket boosters for my Stage Zero design. Turbofan engines are fuel efficient because they utilize the bypass air in their total thrust. Why don't we add a casing around the solid rocket booster like the one around a turbofan engine. The casing will collect and force the air to pass around the rocket's nozzle. Unlike a turbofan engine there wouldn't be a fan to compress the air. Therefore, it's effect would be minimal at lower speeds, but as the plane speeds up it would add up to the total thrust. This design would only work on Stage Zero solid rocket boosters. It wouldn't work on a Space Rocket launched at high altitude due to lack of air.

Stage Zero and Solid Rockets for Space Conquer

Stage Zero is a plane that utilizes the lifting power of air to reduce the fuel consumption. Additionally, takeoff and landing of a plane is a mature and easy technology compared to a reusable liquid propulsion rocket stage. The plane should be able to lift a planetary rocket to an altitude of 50km or above. Therefore, it's fuselage should be able to hold a Saturn V rocket. Its fuselage diameter would be 12 meters and length 140 meters. These dimensions allow space telescopes to be launched unfolded, large Space Station Modules and multiple satellite launch rockets to be carried at once. Maximum payload would be 3000 tones (Saturn V 2800 tones).  A multiplane design would be ideal for such a plane. Multiple distributed wings allow even lifting and multiple rockets distribute the thrust evenly. Also, multi wings increase the strength of the wings. The propulsion would be accomplished by solid rockets. Therefore, the plane will not have fuel on its wings or fuselage. The rockets would be fired in succession to increase the specific impulse time. At its peak altitude Stage Zero will release the Space Rocket and will return to ground and land like a glider.  Some rockets maybe reserved to be fired on landing. Space rocket or rockets will than fire their first stage. The advantage of this approach is to simplify the space rocket design. When launched at a very high altitude the rocket would experience much less air drag and would not require expensive heat shields. Also, you can launch the rocket at way North, no need to approach the Equator. I also propose the Space Rocket to fully utilize solid rocket boosters. Therefore, the rockets, including the plane can be launched in short notice. No need for expensive liquid rocket research and manufacturing needed. Liquid rocket designs slow down the advancements in space. Space Launch System (SLS) had so many delays and ate up a lot of budget and we are still waiting. Countries heavily invest in military and need to build as many missiles as possible when needed. When you establish high capacity fully automated solid rocket production infrastructure you can build rockets to launch your satellites frequently and if needed divert the production to produce missiles in mass. It would both decrease the military expenditure and lower the cost of space launch.

My Stage Zero and Solid Rocket approach is scalable. One can build a much smaller version of the plane and make improvements on the design before scaling up. This approach requires minimum new technology. The results can be seen within a year. Finally, it would surpass all the liquid rocket alternatives within a couple of years.

2025 - 2049

The second quarter of the 21ˢᵗ century has just began. The first quarter was dominated with some of the follow brands and companies. How many will still continue after the second quarter and how many new will be added to this list.  We will see... 

Google, YouTube, Android, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iOS, Tesla, SpaceX, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, Netflix, ChatGPT

If We Don't Use It, We Lose It

Geoffrey Hinton after receiving the Nobel Prize, he called for urgent research into AI safety to figure out how to control AI systems smarter than humans.

Human beings are lazy by nature. As the machines do more for the humans, humans become lazier and do much less. If we don't use our muscle like in zero gravity we lose them. Our brain is similar, if we don't use it, we lose it.

That is the biggest problem of the humanity in the second quarter of the century.