Tag: Tesla

Tesla’s Robot Revolution

Humanoid robots have been in popular culture from the very beginning, and while robotics have come a long way, we still don’t have the humanoid, walking, general purpose robots of our sci-fi imaginations. But some companies, including Tesla, claim to be on the verge of finally making it a reality. But how likely is it, really?

TRANSCRIPT:

To kick off this video, let’s play a little game, I’ll play a video from a random 80’s movie and you tell me what movie it was. Ready? Here we go…To kick off this video, let’s play a little game, I’ll play a video from a random 80’s movie and you tell me what movie it was. Ready? Here we go…

Now if you answered Rocky IV, you are right! Also…What?
I saw Rocky IV like a million times when I was a kid and I remember being terrified of Ivan Drago, I remember Apollo going down and “If he dies… he dies.” I remember training montages… I watched it again recently – I did not remember the random robot.
That’s how ubiquitous robots were back then in pop culture, they were everywhere, it literally didn’t even stand out to me, there was nothing weird to me about a robot… in Rocky IV.
By the way the robot’s name is SICO and it was a real robot you could buy and it could talk to you and you could program it to do things – Stallone put it in the movie because he bought one and found that it really helped with his autistic son.

But seriously robots were everywhere in the 80s, there was Twiggy on Buck Rogers, The Terminator, we saw Jinx put Max in space, Johnny 5, there was this sitcom, Small Wonder, about a family with a robot daughter, yes, it’s a real thing.
One of the biggest toys of the day was Teddy Ruxpin, this animatronic teddy bear that talked to you.
By all accounts, we were about to enter an age of household robots. And here we are now, 40 years later… I don’t know anybody with a robot daughter.
What happened? Are robots like nuclear fusion, always 20 years away?
I mean, yeah, we have robot vacuum cleaners and stuff but we still don’t have those general-use humanoid robots we always imagined.
But technology has come a long way. And AI is forging new ground all the time. And many companies – including Tesla – are betting big on a robot revolution. So how close actually are we?

Robots In Pop Culture

Since robots first appeared in popular culture, we’ve imagined the possibilities and problems they present. We’ve represented them as helpers, like Rosey, counselors like C-3PO, and comedians, like Kryten.

A robot who was always… Fully Charged. (canned laughter)
And while robots have always come in all shapes and sizes, whatever form factor best suits their purpose, we ultimately tend to gravitate toward humanoid robots – robots that look and behave more like ourselves.
This is a double-edged sword though. Because our behavior is… not always great.
The dark side of human-robot relations was explored from the very beginning of robots in fiction. The term “robot” was actually coined for the 1921 play R. U. R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots. In

the play, robots rebel against humanity.
So yeah… right out the gate.
This started a tradition that was carried on by Metropolis, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Blade Runner, The Terminator franchise, the list goes on.

Why Humanoids?

And still, robotics companies and engineers continue working tirelessly on the goal of developing humanoid robots, knowing full well that they’ll probably rebel against them someday. Robots are kinda like teenagers.
But this is actually extremely hard on a hundred different levels and frankly, I’ve always wondered why. Like, what’s the point of humanoid robots?
In a way it feels like the height of arrogance to me, like who said this form is the ultimate in peak performance?

Wouldn’t more legs be more stable? Couldn’t you get more work done with more arms? Why only eyes up front, if you could literally have eyes in the back of your head? Or the top of your head?
And it kind-of smells of playing God just a little bit. I mean, they say God created man in his own image… now look what we’re doing.
So that’s what I wanted to explore in the making of this video. What are the advantages of these kinds of robots, what challenges need to be overcome… And how close are we really?
And while looking into this it seems researchers are focusing on two areas – one from the neck down and one from the neck up. That’ll make sense in a minute.

Humanoids Are Versatile

So, like I said, the human form isn’t the best at everything. We aren’t the strongest, we’re not the fastest, we don’t climb or swim the best. But where we do shine is in our versatility.
Humans are generalists. There’s not a lot of things other animals can do that we absolutely can’t.

Service Robots

So the advantage of humanoid robots – and the goal of humanoid robots – is to share that versatility. They’re not made to do one specific thing; they’re made to do a little bit of everything, just like we do.
And that means interacting and existing in a world built for humans.
For example, there are already robots performing customer service functions around the world.
If you live in a big city, especially in Japan and China, you’ve probably seen receptionist robots, waitress robots, or photography robots at special events. https://www.servicerobots.com/

Boston Dynamics

Probably the biggest name in humanoid robots today is Boston Dynamics. I’m sure you’ve all seen their videos.
They kinda hit the scene in the early 2000s, when the company showcased a series of robots for military use.
These were redesigned in various ways until 2013 when they showed off their robot Atlas. It was still a work in progress at the time, one of the program managers said it had the ability to walk at the level of a one-year-old.

But Atlas has come a long way since then.
It can now walk over difficult terrains, balance on one leg, dance, even do parkour. Atlas team lead Scott Kuindersma  (keen-DERS-ma) has said that Atlas captures “our vision of a go-anywhere, do-anything robot”.
The videos are impressive… But if you watch the ones from behind the scenes, you’ll see Atlas isn’t perfect. It actually falls down a lot.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EezdinoG4mk
I’m not saying this to mock Atlas, it’s a world-class robot built by some of the best engineers in the world, but it’s important to remember that Atlas is a research platform, it’s nowhere near ready to be a consumer product.

It’s also not a soldier.
You might have seen a video going around of Atlas flipping out and attacking its handlers with a gun well don’t worry, it’s not real, it’s a video by the effects studio Corridor Digital.
One thing that might give that away is the videos are watermarked Bosstown Dynamics instead of Boston Dynamics? Also… it’s not Atlas. So there’s that.

But there is this Russian robot from 2017… Just shooting away. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTPIED6jUdU[END TANGENT]

Humanoids Are Personable

So Atlas is the neck down approach, it’s figuring out how to move and operate its body in human spaces. It doesn’t even really have a head.
The other side of humanoid robotics are the neck up side, and these are robots meant to interact with humans in a way that feels natural.
Hanson Robotics’ Sophia is a prime example

According to her creators, Sophia is a “hybrid human-AI intelligence,” where humans craft and guide her conversations.
But not always. Sometimes she goes into unexpected places, like the time in 2016 when founder David Hanson asked Sophia if she wanted to destroy humans.
That’s creepy, but keep in mind she doesn’t have legs so…

The point of these robots, outside of, you know, destroying our species, is to imitate human looks and speech to put humans at ease around them.
Among the most famous are Nadine from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Junco Chihira from Toshiba, and Jia Jia from China.
All three are “female” androids that work as receptionists and greeters at conventions and technology demonstrations, and there are many others working tourist and hospitality jobs.

The Uncanny Valley

A slightly different kind of robot is Ameca, built by the company Engineered Arts.
The most amazing thing about Ameca is how expressive its face is. This goes way beyond the Hall of Presidents animatronic stiffness you see in most of these designs.
By the way she’s made by the same company that did an eerie likeness of Tom Scott if you follow him.

One more thing about Ameca that I think helps is it’s designed to look like a robot. It has kinda gray skin and an open neck, no hair, it’s not meant to look real.
So you get something expressive enough to connect to but still avoiding uncanny valley.
Just in case you don’t know what uncanny valley is…
Uncanny valley is this phenomenon where the closer an animated face gets to real life, the more we find it unsettling and creepy. And it’s actually a really interesting phenomenon when you think about it.

Because we are actually more able to connect emotionally with animated characters that are vague representations of us at best, than we are with nearly photo-realistic depictions of people.
I think it says a lot about just how wired we are for faces.
We see faces everywhere, in clouds, on rock formations, on satellite pictures of Mars.
But we’re also so attuned to the subtle nuances of facial movements and behavior that when you see a very realistic person whose nuances just… don’t quite line up right. There’s this alarm that goes off in our head that says, “something’s wrong here.”

It’s like our own internal lie detector.
Even as deep fakes have pushed the envelope of CGI, that problem of uncanny valley is still juuuust beyond reach.
And this problem is especially difficult when you’re talking about physical representations, which is why the team behind Ameca just didn’t even try. Paradoxically, making it less human makes humans more comfortable with it.
And this is backed by studies that have shown that consumers prefer robots with some human features, but we don’t trust robots that try too hard.https://www.bu.edu/bhr/2021/10/04/the-rise-of-service-robots-in-the-hospitality-industry-some-actionable-insights/

Cultural Expectations

Studies have also pointed out how differences in culture affect how we view robots.
Like Chinese consumers expect robots to be have more autonomy, whereas Americans expect them to follow simple rules.
The reasons have to do with religious and philosophical beliefs; any grad students looking to write a thesis, you’re welcome…
Point is there’s a lot more to consider than just the technical side when it comes to making a consumer robot.
Which may be why Tesla has decided to just not mess with the face at all.

Yeah, Tesla’s announcement of their Teslabot project last August was one of the biggest WTF moments in the history of a company that’s packed to the gills with WTF moments.
But here I am still talking about it 10 months later so mission accomplished.
Elon claims that the robot will be able to help out with boring, repetitive chores, will be able to lift 45 pounds, walk at 5 miles per hour, and will be easy to overpower should you – ahem – need to.
It also claims on its diagram here that it will have “human-level” hands. Which… I mean the human hand is one of the most dextrous appendages in the world so that sounds like a tall order. But we’ll see…
The idea that Tesla, a car company, would branch out into humanoid robots sounds insane… Except… Honda did the same thing 20 years ago.
And I mean it does kinda make sense, they’ve developed this computer vision platform that can navigate in 3D space, and I imagine mapping out a confined space like a home or office environment might not be too much to keep track of.

Combine that with state of the art robotics engineering and you might have… something.
I’ve said from the beginning that the Teslabot (which they’re calling Optimus, by the way) was really just a moonshot project designed to get top engineers and AI people to work for Tesla.
This is something a lot of companies do, create a big, ridiculous, most likely impossible project and use that to hire talented people. And if you happen to break new ground along the way that can be used to improve your current products, well more power to you.
Personally I think Tesla is a long, long way from having a robot that you can buy and have in your home, helping you out with random stuff. I think like full self driving, it’s a much harder problem than they realize.

But that’s not really the point, the point is hiring talented people. But that’s just my joepinion.
I guess we may find out soon because last August he gave a very unexpected timeline for when we’d see one of these.
I mean… Do I have to say anything?

Where Are We Now?

Which begs the question, where exactly are we with robotics? How feasible is the Teslabot given the highest technology we have today?
Well luckily one of my Patrons, Cole Parker, works in robotics and was gracious enough to help me get my head around it.
Basically there are 4 areas that need to be mastered for this to be a reality,  balance, articulation, vision, and battery life

 Balance

Balance is something that most of us take for granted and never think about until it’s gone. It’s just that well handled by our brain’s subconsious operating system.
Remember the falls Atlas took between takes? Scott Kuindersma summed up the challenge this way:

“If you or I were to vault over a barrier, we would take advantage of certain properties of our bodies that would not translate to the robot.”

For example, Atlas doesn’t have a spine or shoulder blades.  Its torso is heavy, its arm joints relatively weak.
Basically, Boston Dynamics is teaching Atlas to make humanlike movements, without giving it human parts. That’s like trying to teach a dog to yodel

The complexity of the task is illustrated by another robot called Little HERMES.
This  was demonstrated in 2019 by researchers at MIT, and it has sensors that trigger a vest, worn by the operator, to move in time with the robot
When the robot is knocked off-balance, the operator feels it and recovers. Little HERMES then imitates the operator to stay upright https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IquGO78ZIf0
So Little HERMES works great… so long as there’s a human brain behind it.
There’s a ways to go, obviously before we have robots that we won’t be spending a lot of time picking up off the floor. But it’s coming along.

Articulation

Another major challenge is articulation, which is why I was saying I’m doubtful about the “human-like ability” of the Teslabot hand.
The human hand is served by three nerves, each with its own function, and all of which participate in control and sensation.
The sensation part is the kicker.

Your nerves connect to something like 17,000 nerve endings in each hand. One fingertip has upwards of 3000 touch receptors.
This isn’t just so you know that a stove is hot, this has massive implications for dexterity and the ability to apply just the right amount of pressure.
There’s a LOT that goes on in the background of our brains to make sure we apply the right pressure to things. Like obviously you don’t apply the same pressure to a 50 pound weight as you do to an egg.

A robot has to see an object, understand what it is, understand how fragile it is and adjust accordingly. Also picking up a 50 pound box by the sides is going to require a lot more pressure than a 1 pound box.
This is something that occurs intuitively for us, but all of this has to be carefully programmed into a robot.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05093-1

Vision

Speaking of seeing objects takes us to the next challenge, which is robot vision.
The challenges in this field could be enough to fill a whole video, but to get a taste, consider what happens when a robot tries to navigate a room.
It’s not enough for the robot to see the objects present, it has to know if they’re moving, if they might move, and what paths they will take.
And by objects I don’t just mean furniture, robots have to share these spaces with people and pets.
Pets who flip out at the sight of a vacuum cleaner so I’m sure they’ll be super chill around a robot.
But robot vision is coming along, last year, a robotics company called Berkshire Grey started working with FedEx to automate package processing, largely on the strength of their robotic vision system.

Berkshire Grey’s optical scanners can read barcodes from different angles, and to do that, they have to recognize the different objects from different angles, understand the relationships between the shapes and understand depth in 3D space.

And this is something robots would have to do in a changing environment, recognize objects at different angles, in different conditions, and react appropriately.
Would you trust a robot to cut your hair? Or tend to your flowers? Or carry a baby across the room? It might take a while to build up that level of trust with the robots.

Battery Life

But even if you did trust the robot and let it carry your baby across the room… Could they make it across the room before the power ran out?
Mobile robots run on batteries, and they do chew through a charge.
Boston Dynamics first equipped Atlas with batteries in 2015 for the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
It had two lithium-ion batteries which gave it one hour of operating time.
Similar robots currently have operating times of 90-minutes to just over two hours.

Like Spot, the dog robot from Boston Dynamics, it has a 90 minute battery life. But that battery takes 2 hours to charge. So…

Of course, lithium-ion isn’t the only option, we’ve talked about of a lot of others on this channel, one that’s been considered for robots are a zinc-air battery.
This not only saves weight, but it could also be structural, basically built into the robot’s frame, which means it would evenly distribute the weight and it wouldn’t always be adjusting for one center of gravity high above the ground.https://news.umich.edu/biomorphic-batteries-could-provide-72x-more-energy-for-robots/ — has video on structural batteries and toys using the new battery
Which is interesting because that’s kind of how we store energy in our body as fat reserves. So this is kind of like robo-fat.
One more group working on this at the University of Michigan have tried this using Kevlar. They say they’ve demonstrated it on a small scale and it could provide 72 times the energy of a single lithium-ion battery.

But you know… Even if a robot only could hold a charge for 30 minutes to an hour at a time… There’s still a lot you could do with that.
I mean I imagine if you had a robot at home it would spend most of the time just resting and waiting until it’s given something to do, it could plug itself into a base and stay charged all that time.
And when you need it to do the dishes or take out the trash or cook some food, it could perform that task, and plug itself back in.
Like I’m sitting here thinking about it and we have two dogs, and whenever we go out of town we have to find someone to keep them or board them or find a house sitter – if we had a robot, it could be programmed to watch the house. Feed the dogs, let them outside every few hours, water the plants, bring in the mail… be security.
Yeah, I imagine even if they could only operate for 30 minutes to an hour, that would be enough to get some pretty good use out of them. Assuming it’s actually able to do all those things.

 Will They Take Our Jobs?

Of course robots folding our laundry in our homes is one thing, it’s going to take a lot more power or fleets of robots to perform all day work in factories and warehouses.
And this is where things do get a little… concerning. A robot labor revolution is probably inevitable. They are going to take human jobs at some point.
According to the World Economic Forum, 85 million jobs now done by humans will be automated by 2025.
But, they expect that over the same period, 97 million new human jobs will be created.
Not just to deal with the robots but in new and emerging technology fields.
But these aren’t the same jobs the robots will take away. Workers will need new skills and training to get those skills. That’s going to need to be paid for, somehow.
Of course it’s not just robots, technology is changing rapidly and the job market is industry is changing along with it, the World Economic Forum expects half of all workers will need new skills in the future.
And we’re talking near future. This is pretty urgent.

Robots In Healthcare

One field that’s having a bit of a crisis of conscience around robots is the healthcare industry.
We do have a shortage of healthcare workers right now and robotic assistants could help fill that gap. But… healthcare is a very personal thing, do we want to hand that over to robots?

Psychologists have actually studied how patients respond to robot healthcare workers and it’s pretty interesting because obviously some people hated it and some people liked it but the people who liked it preferred an extroverted, feminine personality.
They found that people find it easier to accept medical advice from extroverted, feminine robots, also playfulness in a robot made a big difference.
People rated playful robots  as superior when it came to performance, but found that playful robots had more difficulty motivating patients to take their medicine or change their habits.

There’s probably some lessons to learn there about human healthcare workers as well…
But really as our population ages, there will be more demand for robot caregivers, the question really is are we ready to do that as a society?
As robots improve and become more ubiquitous, feelings will shift for sure. But it’s going to be an interesting transition.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00072-z

Looking to the Future

So am I going to have a Teslabot folding my clothes anytime soon? Or a Hondabot? Or an… IKEAbot? Papa Johnsbot?
Probably no to all of those. In fact, here’s an interesting question, which do you think we’ll see first, robots folding our clothes or people walking on Mars? I’ve got my answer, what’s your answer?
There’s still a lot of problems to overcome, but they are being chipped away on, and as they become more useful, I think we’re all going to see a lot more of them.
Whether that’s a good or bad thing, I guess we’ll see.

Will Tesla’s FSD Rollout Kill People? (And Other Questions) | Lightning Round

Today I tackle questions from viewers on Patreon about Tesla’s Full Self Driving and the future of autonomy, why dogs tilt their heads when you talk to them, our place in the universe, the gulf stream, and the craziest way to terraform Mars.

Hey everybody, today’s gonna be a little bit different.

In the early days of my channel, I answered questions from my audience, hence the name Answers With Joe. I got away from that over time, but there is a level in Patreon where the perk is you get to have a question answered in a video.

And I’ve been TERRIBLE at doing that.

So today I’m going to answer questions from people like you on Patreon. These are going to be shorter answers than usual but if there’s one you really want to see me expand on, let me know in the comments. It might become a full video.

Anyway, that’s all you need to know, gonna be a little bit different but it’ll still be fun. Let’s get to the questions.

 

John Regel –
Does having a sense of the true size of the universe through the AWJ subject matter make you feel more or less significant?

A:
I’m not going to lie… It messes with my head.

My worldview has changed a lot in the time that I’ve been doing this channel, just by learning – not just learning different things but learning how much there is to know about things.

It’s that whole Dunning-Krueger effect thing.

No matter how narrow and specific the topic might be, I’ve found there’s always a rabbit hole.

And part of that is coming to grips with the fact that we are just very temporary occupants of this thing we call existence and ultimately nothing we do matters.

And that’s not a fun thing to think about.

Though it does make me think of the meme with the existentialist decrying the fact that nothing matters and then there’s the nihilist celebrating because nothing matters!

It’s simultaneously the best and worst news you can hear.

Because yeah when I’m having a particularly lovely panic or anxiety episode, thinking about that is a real bummer, but those late nights when I can’t sleep because I’m cringing about that dumb thing I said to that girl in 9th grade, it’s rather reassuring to think that none of it matters.

It and all the other dumbass things I’ve said and done.

I want to be careful to make sure I don’t sound like I’ve got this all figured out because I very don’t, I struggle with it quite a bit, but one way of framing it that helps me sometimes is to think of it almost like quantum reality vs. macro reality?

Like there are different levels of reality that only vaguely interact with each other and work off of totally different rules but are equally valid.

So no, the problems you and I deal with in our daily lives don’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things, but down here, in this little micro reality what we do and how we treat each other and how we live our lives matter a great deal.

And maybe that’s enough.

By the way, this is a good opportunity to promote my new audio podcast because I ask this very question to someone who has spent a lot more time than me thinking about this kind of stuff, so check that out if you haven’t, I’ll put a link down in the description.

John Regel –
Why do dogs tilt their head when you’re talking to them?

A:
Because it’s cute and they’re manipulating us. They’re in charge, you know.

I’ve heard it’s because when they hear something that catches their attention, they turn their heads to kinda recalibrate their ears.

It’s almost like echolocation, they pivot their heads and their radar-dish ears to give a slightly different angle and by comparing those two angles it gives them a more accurate reading on it.

That of course is unconscious and instinctual, it probably goes back to their hunting origins, which would explain why Zoe pretty much only does it when I mention food.

Mike Reed – Will Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta kill people or save lives? What is the future of autonomous cars? Will humans drive at all in 30 years?

A:
I’ll make a prediction real quick. Tesla’s Full Self Driving cars are going to lead to some deaths. I have no doubt about that. You know what’s also going to lead to a lot of deaths? All the other kinds of cars.

According to NHTSA 38,680 people died in car crashes in 2020, that’s about 108 a day. Thats with humans driving the cars. So that’s how that’s going.

So obviously the question isn’t will it kill people, it’s whether or not it will kill less people. And I think that over the long run, yes it will.

For the simple fact that a self-driving car can see in all directions at once and never gets distracted. It’s almost unfair to compare the two because humans just can’t do that.

Of course humans have intuition and the ability to navigate unfamiliar spaces and predict what another human being will do in ways that I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to teach a computer.

Self driving cars can also record massive amounts of data and will be able to show in accidents who is at fault, the computer or the other driver?

As the systems get better, I really think it’s the insurance companies that will spur mass adoption, because they’ll be able to show who is at fault in accidents.

Like I think a point will come where it just costs more to insure a car that doesn’t have self-driving or at least the safety systems that come with self-driving, and that’s going to change things.

So I think it will be cracked, the self-driving car thing. There’s just too much money in it. And I do think Tesla is ahead at this point. But I’ve also been more cynical than other people about how fast it’s going to happen.

Like at this point, I would chalk up any FSD accidents to driver error. And with very few exceptions, I’ve always chalked up autopilot accidents to driver error too, I use auto pilot and I’m sorry but anybody who does that sleeping in your car thing while it’s going (I don’t even know how that works with the wheel needing to be turned constantly), that’s just irresponsible driving. Which is the same thing that causes accidents in regular cars.

And look, I’ve seen the videos of the new FSD system and what it can do, Gali Russel has a lot of them and it’s super impressive, like they are super chipping away at the problem, but the gulf between, “hey this is impressive” and “I 100% trust this car with my life” is big. It’s the whole string of nines thing, it has to be 99.99999% safe and that last little bit is the hardest part.

There’s been a bit of a rumor since the last Tesla earnings call that the next car, the $25,000 car that we’ve all been calling the Model 2 this whole time, that it’s going to be called Robotaxi. And may actually not have a steering wheel.

That sounds… optimistic. I mean we’ve been hearing predictions about “feature ready” FSD happening “at the end of the year” for a long time now.

But knowing Tesla, this car might be unveiled in 2022 or 23 but not hit the roads until 2025 or 2026.

It has been 4 years since the new Roadster was unveiled. And if you remember, it was called the 2020 Roadster. Just saying.

So I don’t know, considering the pace of advancement in FSD, maybe that’ll be the case, it would definitely fit with Tesla’s pattern of reducing stuff on the steering column.

But ultimately, I think self-driving cars will be safer, especially as more cars on the road become self-driving, especially if they can communicate with each other. I really think humans are messy, distracted, irrational, and unpredictable and the more computers driving that are none of those things, the safer it will all be.

Having said all that, people love driving. Driving is kinda synonymous with freedom itself. A lot of people won’t want to give that up. So yeah, it’ll be interesting.

But it’s going to be a long time. I would say probably 20 years before self driving cars become the norm.

So spaketh Joestradamus.

Brian Beswick – Question:

If the US or other large country were to change our building codes to require white roofs, how much of an impact of climate change could we make through increased albedo?

Purdue University has developed a super white paint that can actually reduce / eliminate a buildings need for air conditioning.

A:
Okay, I might be going on a rant real quick.

It has always bewildered me why of all the colors of the rainbow, that we use super dark colors on our roofs here in the US.

I mean I get it if you’re up north and it’s cold and you want to absorb heat, but down here in Texas? We spend all this money putting insulation and radiant barriers in our attics and then put the most heat-absorbing tiles we can find above it, I don’t get it.

I feel like there are so many passive heating and cooling techniques that we’ve lost over the years and we’ve opted to just brute force cool and heat our homes by throwing as much electricity as possible at it, maybe it’s time we relearn some of that stuff.

ANYWAY…

To answer your question, I don’t think it would make much difference on the scale of climate change, just because it’s such a small percentage of land area it’s unlikely to make a difference.

I found an article on Quora that used a report from the National Renewable Energy Lab that calculated around 5,000 square kilometers of rooftop space in the U.S., that sounds like a lot but the total area of the US is about 3.8 million square kilometers. That’s like .13%

And that’s not nothing, it might make a tiny difference but keep in mind, the US isn’t the rest of the world in fact most of the world is… WATER

Though it might make a difference to the heat island effect you see in large urban areas, so on a microclimate level, sure, maybe.

But, it’s still an interesting question because a more reflective roof might lower the temperature of houses and reduce the amount of AC needed to stay cool in the summer.

In fact, Brian referenced this new paint created by Purdue university that has beaten the record for most reflective paint in the world.

So yeah, if we put that paint on every home and building in the US and it drastically cut down on the amount of AC needed to cool it, that would be a huge energy savings, would reduce strain on the grid, reduce the amount of carbon emissions from power generation, so in that sense it might make a difference in regard to climate change.

You could probably determine a percentage reduction in energy use from that paint on rooftops and then calculate the exact amount of energy that could be saved… But I’ll let you guys do that in the comments because I’ve got to get on to the next question, which is…

Mark Hoffman – In the context of a billion+ years from now; If whatever became of us were able to become a Type II civilization, what might the viability be of using Mercury to attempt a Theia type collision with Mars?
Could Mercury, given its abundance of iron, with just the right impact angle and velocity, create a planetary core capable of producing a protective magnetic field? Might such an impact also be able to form a satellite coalescent accretion disk to help stabilize axial rotation?

A:
This is the most “Bruh” question I have ever heard.

Can we terraform Mars by smashing Mercury into it? I mean… Sure! What could go wrong?

So first of all, let me start by saying that if we did ever become a type II civilization, Mercury is toast. I think we can all agree with that.

I think I talked about this in my Dyson Sphere video? Because the structure would have to be utterly massive and the only place to get all the material would be to dismantle a planet and let’s just be honest, Mercury’s not bringing much to the table as a planet.

But smashing it into another planet to try to recreate what happened here on Earth… Bruh.

First of all, the axial rotation thing, it seems to me that it would be a lot easier to just collect asteroids from the asteroid belt and form an accretion disk from that, or clump them together to create a moon-like gravity well.

But yeah, to get a magnetic field working on Mars, I see what you’re saying, you’ve gotta rearrange the guts a bit to get a spinning inner core.

This by the way is arguably more important than the accretion disk or the moon bit, because without doing this we can never develop a thick atmosphere on Mars, because the solar wind would keep eroding it.

A more practical approach was suggested a few years ago at the Planetary Science Vision 2050 workshop by the Director of Planetary Science at NASA, Jim Green. He suggested putting a giant magnetic dipole at Mars’ L1 Lagrange point.

This would block the solar wind enough to keep most of it from hitting the planet, possibly enough for the atmosphere to thicken.

This is still a massive project that we don’t quite have the technology to do yet, but maybe in another 50 years or so?

We would still be unprotected on the surface from cosmic rays and whatnot, but there could be similar solutions on the ground to create artificial magnetic shields.

As for if it would work… I would imagine a species advanced enough to even try this would be advanced enough to make sure it worked… that the speed and angle are right and whatnot.

And the mass… So they would probably have to reduce the mass of Mercury because they say that Thea was roughly the size of Mars. And I looked this up, Mars is about 15% the mass of Earth, at 6.4185 x 1023 kg

Mercury is 3.285 x 1023kg which is 51.2% the mass of Mars so they would probably need to whittle down Mercury to get the ratio right.

Anyway, they would have to be much smarter than me but like I said, if they’re advanced enough to try it, I’m guessing they could make it work.

What the probably couldn’t do, which is the major Achilles heel of this whole idea, is make the planet habitable again for literally billions of years.

Which, if making it habitable is the point, that is pretty much the craziest possible way to do it.

Fun thought experiment though.

Cole Parker – How about this: why the hell isn’t Scotland freezing. It’s seems to be the same latitude of northern Maine or southern Sweden. Sure “gulf” stream. But how is that even a thing. And how fucked are they if it ends.

A:
Someone’s salty today!

You seem really upset that Scotland is not a frozen wasteland. What did Scotland do to you?
Point on the doll where William Wallace hurt you.

I actually have a video on the way about this. Not on the way necessarily but on deck. I’m thinking about it.

Yeah, the gulf stream is interesting and it is weakening, and if it were to collapse… it would be bad.

I think that was the premise behind The Day After Tomorrow, highly regarded as the most accurate climate change movie ever made.

But yeah, ocean currents are weird and super complex. I mean it’s fluid dynamics. It’s literally chaos.

I do plan on fully covering this topic in the somewhat near future so I’ll just kinda give a quick overview here.

The ocean currents, including the gulf stream, are thermohaline currents, thermohaline standing for temperature and salt content.

They’re influenced by a variety of things, wind, the Coriolis effect, tides, but most importantly, density.

Cold water is more dense than hot water and saltier water is more dense than less salty water. Thermo – haline.

And denser water sinks below less dense water, which is why you can have surface currents of hot water and deep ocean currents of cold water.

So the water from the tropics get a lot of sun and warm up. The winds create a current that moves that hot water north along the east coast of North America, and as it moves into the north Atlantic, there’s less sun, the air gets colder so the water gets colder.

It’s also thought that the winds evaporate the water and make it more salty.

So this now colder, saltier water sinks in giant columns of water like underwater waterfalls. Apparently more water flows through this column than all the rivers in the world.

This is actually known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

This creates the cold deep ocean current, which flows back toward the tropics, and the cycle repeats itself.

The heat this system brings to Europe is as much energy as a million nuclear power plants. I read that somewhere.

And of course climate change is messing with this because as the arctic ice melts into the ocean, it’s changing the salt content because all that ice water is fresh water, so it’s diluting the ocean, right in that important spot.

So yeah… that’s not great.

We’re already seeing some signals that the current could be slowing down, the fear is that it could completely collapse, which would plunge northern Europe into a kind of ice age.

Yes, ironically global warming could trigger an ice age, but only in Europe, it would have far ranging effects on climate systems around the world, making some areas uninhabitable from the heat.

So Cole, I guess if things keep going this way you’ll have your wish and Glasgow could be totally under a glacier. Live your dreams kids.

But that’s all the questions for today, thanks to all my patreon members for supporting the channel, I hope to do more lightning round videos like this going forward.

Science Stories You’ll Be Hearing About In 2019

2018 was a big year for science and technology, and 2019 is shaping up to be more of the same. Here’s some of the big science stories we’ll be following in the coming year.

On May 20th of this year, the scientific community will be redefining four metric units of measurement, the kilogram, the Kelvin, the mole, and the ampere.

The Event Horizon telescope is an attempt to image the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A. The telescopes actually did the imaging last year, and the team is in the process of collecting the data and analyzing it, but the expectation is that this year we should get, for the first time, an actual image of a black hole

in the first half of the year, Tesla will finally unveil their long-awaited $35,000 baseline Model 3, but it’s also expected sometime this year that Tesla will unveil the Model Y, their crossover model based on the Model 3 platform. and a lot of people are also speculating that at the Model Y reveal, Elon may do a “one more thing” thing and introduce the Tesla pickup.

Other EVs that will be released in 2019 include the Audi e-Tron, the Mercedes EQC, an update for BMW’s i3 with a larger battery, the Jaguar iPace, the Volvo XC40, the Porche Taycan, the Kia e-Niro, The Kia Soul EV, the Hyundai Ioniq, and the Mini Electric.

New Horizons, the probe that sent us those amazing pictures of Pluto back in 2015, is now flying through the Kuiper belt, and just passed the asteroid Ultima Thule, which we’ll be getting detailed images from this year

Hayabusa2 from JAXA will collect soil samples from the asteroid Ryugu this year.

Similarly the Osiris Rex mission from NASA arrived at the asteroid Bennu just about a month ago on December 3rd and will spend 2019 scanning and imaging Bennu.

The Parker Solar Probe will make 2 flybys of the sun this year, one in April and one in September.

There’s also a slew of moon landings coming this year that are worth following.

ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization plans to land on the moon with Chandrayaan-2 which they expected to launch last year but it’s been pushed back to January 31st.

But before that, the Chinese National Space Administration landed Change’4, which actually launched in December, on the far side of the moon.

SpaceX plans to start performing hopper tests this year for their Starship, previously known as BFR,

But perhaps no piece of news or space related event this year can come close to the first tests of the SpaceX Dragon 2 capsule that will finally return the US to manned missions to space.

At the same time, the Boeing Starliner capsule will see space for the first time in March with an uncrewed demo mission, followed by a scheduled manned mission in August of 2019.

My Tesla Model 3 Delivery!

After 2 1/2 years of waiting, my Tesla Model 3 is finally here!
Today’s video is a little bit different, more of a vlog-style where I document the delivery and my first impressions of the Tesla Model 3.

My Tesla Model 3 Test Drive w/Ben Sullins of Teslanomics

Get Brilliant at http://www.brilliant.org/answerswithjoe/
And the first 295 to sign up for a premium account get 20% off every month!

Earlier this month, I travelled to Palm Springs for a YouTube event and hooked up with Ben Sullins from Teslanomics, who brought his Model 3 (which he named Tes), and I finally got a chance to drive it.

Talking Model 3 With Ben Sullins of Teslanomics

I recently traveled to Palm Springs and got a chance to hang out with Ben Sullins, who brought his Model 3 with him – and I got a chance to drive it!

Ben’s channel, Teslanomics, talks about Tesla from a data science standpoint. It’s a great source of Tesla news that cuts through all the hype. Find his channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbEbf0-PoSuHD0TgMbxomDg

And see the video on my YouTube channel:

Elon Musk’s Tesla Master Plan Is About To Become Reality

This Friday is a day that over 400,000 people have been waiting for since March of 2016. Tesla is officially handing out the first production line Model 3s to reservation holders.

(over footage)
They first introduced the Model 3 16 months ago to huge fanfare, more than $130,000 people put a thousand dollars down before the car was even revealed.

And, full disclosure, I’m one of them. (hold up card) Now, I didn’t put money down before I saw it, I was adamant about that, I had to see it first. But when I saw it, I was like, “eh, why not?”

I can always get the deposit back if I change my mind.

Now I know it’ll be a while before I get mine and that’s fine, my Jetta diesel isn’t going anywhere.

And before you call me a Tesla fanboy in the comments, I cop to it, I’m a fan. And I’m going to assume most of you watching this are fans because… why else would you watch this video, unless you get off on hating things, which… I dunno, that sounds miserable way to live your life to me, but… Kay.

So this is kind-of a big deal, so I wanted to talk about what this launch event means, both to Tesla and the car industry, and throw in my own thoughts and concerns along the way.

Hold on tight because this video’s going into Ludicrous mode.

Subscribe to YouTube Channel

Subscribe to Podcast

You can be canker sore free in only 6 weeks!