Posted by Brajeshwar 9/13/2025
Every big invention depends on hundreds or thousands of other ones you don't hear as much about.
Didn’t lighting cause power generation and distribution?
The first arc lights were made in early 19th century - not long after the invention of voltaic pile made electric power readily obtainable in a lab. But it wasn't until late 19th century that arc lights began to be used as street lights. Why?
Because dynamos and alternators didn't exist in early 19th century. They only became usable for industrial power generation in the late 19th century.
Only when both power generators and arc lights were viable, electric lighting became practical. And electric lighting becoming practical has, in turn, caused electric power to be deployed at an ever-increasing scales, and spurned further investment into electric light, generators and transmission line technology. The invention of incandecent lights fit for household use and the war of the currents were both downstream from better power generation technology.
Possible objection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendera_light#Fringe_interpret...
The hearthstone house demonstrated the value of a central power source homes could draw from. The electric lights at the time were not much better than candles in terms of output, but it generated interest enough to get more people on board.
Now, electric lighting is present everywhere, and a practical solution for all but mass agriculture (where the sun remains more efficient).
There are a ton of apartments in China, Hong Kong and Singapore exceeding 10–20 floors or more without a single functional elevator. Skyscrapers have more to do with steel framing technology than peoplemoving. Regardless, elevators have existed from 200BC and you can see one in the movie Gladiator
>you can't have practical automobiles without inventing the windshield wiper
Streetcars operated for 20+ years at speeds up to 30mph with no wipers. You would just open one half of the windshield. Or use water-repellent glass coatings (similar to today)
I've traveled a lot and stayed in many old buildings in Asia, but I've never seen one with more than 6-7 floors without an elevator.
Citation needed. Chinese building codes require elevators for any residential building taller than 6 stories [0]. Hong Kong and Singapore certainly have similar regulations. Unless you're implying that elevators are frequently broken in these countries? Perhaps in poor, rural parts of China, but I'm doubtful this is the case in a wealthy country like Singapore. Indeed, local regulations in both Singapore [1] and Hong Kong [2] require validated monthly maintenance schedules of elevators.
[0] https://codeofchina.com/standard/GB50096-2011.html
[1] https://www1.bca.gov.sg/regulatory-info/lifts-escalators/lif...
[2] https://bestpractice.emsd.gov.hk/en/lift-and-escalator-insta...
This enables people to stay in their own homes in old age. The lift is external to the building, making it relatively easy to install. The balconies, presumably built for mostly clothes-drying purposes in ye-olden-days, provide the access.
I don't know if this goes to 10-20 storeys, I am just chiming in because, yes, there were many high rise buildings without lifts and our ever-inventive Chinese friends have worked out a solution.
In sunny Scotland we have what non-Scottish people call 'apartment blocks' (closes) and some of these go up six storeys with no lifts. Moving house into one of these is fun, as you can imagine. You can get your steps in carrying 25Kg+ for half of your steps, to feel like you have just completed some type of marathon. On the positive side, you are unlikely to be robbed of everything, once you have moved in.
As for fire, this means lots of doors. You might have four doors to work with, two sets on the ground floor and two more on your own floor. These doors make the effort truly Herculean since you can't wedge them all open.
More generally, what amazes me about lifts in the UK is that there is a general lack of redundancy. Recently I had to go across the country by train with a bicycle and two massive rucksacks full of stuff. There were four connecting trains I needed to get. This would have been 'easy enough' if the lifts had been working. They were not working. Had there been two lifts per station then one could be out for maintenance, but no.
Streetcars aren't really what I would think of as a "practical" automobile today since you can only take them on predefined routes.
It's science and inventions all the way down ;-)
Sure, but remember that some wipers were "hand activated".
A diagram comparing it to the 747s and oil tankers mentioned in the text would have been appreciated.
OK, looked it up. 108m v 72m. Kvikk diagram, pretty much to scale:
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What about the asymmetry of the blades? You can't have two blades from the same wind turbine as one would have the leading edge facing backwards. Every second wind turbine would have to rotate in the opposite direction for this to work.
It would probably work as well as da Vinci's helicopter but it's an interesting thought experiment.
Which then leads to.... Why not a giant helicopter? Then you don't need to worry about the symmetry.
If you installed small props at the tips of the blades, you wouldn't need any torque rotor. I don't know if you still need the variable pitch mechanism or could you lock the blades to one pitch for spin-transport.
Helicopter efficiency is quite terrible though so long distance travel would require constant aerial refueling. I guess you could have a probe in the hub. What could go wrong?
bonus points that mainstream LLM’s can trivially train on them and produce them. =)
Kvikk Norwegian
Kvick Swedish
Kvik Danish
Kvikur Faroese
Kvikur Icelandic
Kwiek Dutch
Quick German
Kwik Frisian
Quick EnglishIn Dutch (which I happen to be fluent in) Kwiek is sometimes used in writing but I've never heard it spoken.
Maybe wind turbines will cause larger planes which will cause an A380 come back ;)
the article mentions that 3d printing is a no-go due to the facility needed to print the blade in -- seems like it'd be better to pursue an unfolding container factory with a printer in it and how to transport that thing with conventional craft than to go all-in on a new unproven airframe made for very specific parts.
plus that way the length of the product isn't set in stone, either.
I say this as a total layman -- i'm just taking the articles stated reason for no 3d printing and running with it.
The rest of the plane is the pillar of course.
They are lift-producing devices; but I wonder how the inability to change the lift according to flight regime with leading and trailing edge devices would affect the viability of the solution.
I wish I could source it, it someone told a story of a contract no one could meet for dropping in either some heavy equipment to a site or maybe windmill parts? It was a small site and it seemed impossible to land them take off... The winning bidder for the contract just landed the plane then abandoned it. Not sure what else you'd do if your blades are your plane!
https://www.untappedcities.com/the-200-ton-tunnel-boring-mac...
Seems like if this idea really makes sense, it's exactly the kind of thing the EU would subsidize Airbus to do.
A while back, we had a whiteout on the highway by the local airport. Someone wrote in to propose - in apparent seriousness - planting trees at the end of the runway to ensure it wouldn't happen again.
I expect these guys had 'trees' on their risk register, and have suggested to the site owners to purchase a chainsaw / rent an excavator for a day or two.
Either way, I'm pretty confident on a project the size we're talking here - somewhere upwards of USD $5 billion? - they've probably spent a couple of afternoons pondering logistics.
They put them in farm fields, you just rent the whole field for the year from the farmer, land the planes, and next year it is framed again. (the farmer will likely be allowed to plant hay in the field and work with you to cut that)
There is a bunch of very energetic windturbine collapses captured on video. In each case someone standing at the wrong spot could have been crushed by falling debris. (Altough i also must admit an overspeeding turbine looks so plainly obviously deadly that anyone with a healthy dose of self preservation would evacuate the danger zone. At least in the cases where we have video of the collapse. There might be a bias to that of course, because nobody would think of filming an unexpected sudden collapse.)
A particularly well documented one is the Hornslet wind turbine collapse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornslet_wind-turbine_collap...
https://youtu.be/jvHBUSSAzyw?si=NDpN-ZgXqPrTavvk
There was this one in Oklahoma: https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-turbine-collapses-on-calm-d...
This i believe happened in Italy: https://youtu.be/af9Mm5nkNAQ?si=wajCXTCpN19z9okJ
Just a few days ago there was a collapse in Perth: https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/5330408/blades-perth-av...
There is also a widely shared very dramatic video with horses running away from the turbine just before it collapses. But because i can’t figure out where it happened, and if it even happened, i’m reluctant to include here.
I wonder how big is the danger zone. The blades seem to come off all at the same time, some to the sides, some up/down. There's quite a lot of kinetic energy there...
Citation needed. I toured a wind farm a few months ago, and they were barely audible at ground level.
That seems like the logical solution. Given the complexities involved overall, a step for "don't build over this patch of dirt" seems relatively achievable.
Seriously, some kind of VTOL craft that could deploy the blades directly to the site seems necessary. Then there's ground transport from some airport out into the hinterlands.
It's been a long time since my physics classes, but wouldn't the require 4864 megajoules of energy [0] while raising the temperature of the gas from something like 20C -> 113C?
Spreading that energy-use over 15 minutes, maybe 5 megawatts dedicated to compression.
[0] https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/thermodynamic-process...
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/thermodynamic-process...
The article briefly mentions this, and that the off-shore blades are over twice the length of the blades this airplane is designed for, but it doesn't look at all at the economics of either option.
On shore is a problem - there is a lot of the world where people live that isn't close to a sea. Iowa has more than 6000 despite being hundreds of miles from the nearest sea. (most aren't even close to the Mississippi river)