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Energy economics and rocket science with Casey Handmer

Casey and I discuss solar energy economics, learning curves, the triumphs and foibles of the space industry, and more.

Military aircraft can be substantially more expensive(stealth bomber: ~$4 billion apiece in current dollars) and, due to quirks in how procurement works, the number quoted upfront is very rarely the price the taxpayer ends up paying once the program is delivered a few decades later.] 400 million units sounds like a lot, but that's roughly comparable to the number of cars and light trucks that are manufactured every year on earth — and those machines in many ways are much more complicated than what we are doing, so I pat myself on the back or like reassure myself: what we're doing is, is crazy, stupid, ambitious, but at the same time, it's not completely unprecedented. Patrick: People say that they don’t break down over like huge timescales — and that's an excellent property for an engineered artifact to have, because, like you said, if we ever decide that there is an arbitrary large amount of plastics that are far past their utility to humanity, you dig a big hole and put them in the bottom of it and forget about them for forever.

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