No, there isn’t any atmosphere to keep in the water. If you heat up the ice, it will sublimate directly into gas. Since the gravity is so low, it will stream out and create a trail all around the orbit. The solar wind would blow it away from there.

There’s more to having liquid water than just temperature, pressure is needed as well.

Also Ceres might be small for a planet/moon, but it’s still huge. The amount of energy needed would also be huge. And without an atmosphere you’d also be losing a lot of energy due to it radiating out into space. I’m not a 100% sure, but I think Earth is actually an iceball from where it’s located in the solar system. It’s only due to the atmosphere it’s mostly non frozen (and if we keep pumping the CO2 and methane like we are, in the near future it won’t be frozen at all).

One of the most important ones that a lot of people use every day are the huge advancements that have been made in creating modern chips. It might not be something new and exciting, but it actually involves very groundbreaking work and huge breakthroughs. Not just the crazy machines that ASML makes, thought to be breaking the laws of physics just years ago. But also advancements in manufacturing, being able to create super advanced 3D structures and large scale manufacturing at a very high level, yet with a surprising consistency in quality and low cost. Not just for ever bigger, more efficient and faster chips, but also things like MEMS at tiny sizes and low cost.

Often it’s taken for granted what we have. People saying stuff to the sentiment that this isn’t the future, everything is boring, we haven’t got flying cars or people living on Mars. But the fact we all got this ultra powerful computer, with a high resolution high framerate self emitting screen, no active cooling, a bunch of sensors, lots of memory and storage and hyper connected to all sorts of networks, all powered by a high capacity high power low wear battery should be mind blowing. And not just that, but it fits in our pockets and they are so cheap everyone has at least one. Just because we’ve chosen to spec our tech tree into the small stuff instead of the large stuff, doesn’t mean we haven’t come a long way.

I think people look at the past at new “inventions” and think that’s the way progress is. New revolutionary stuff. It’s why people often invest in crowd funding of obvious scam products. They want something that changes the game. In reality it’s a lot of little steps that create a big change over time. And imho this has always been the case. We always hear about the Wright brothers “inventing” the airplane. Like they had some magic sauce and thought of something nobody else thought of before. Then made it and bam the world was changed. In reality they didn’t invent anything, they developed it. They made prototypes and iterative refinements. And they were far from the only ones working on the exact same concept. If they didn’t finish first, someone else would have within the same time frame. But the romantic story of two American blokes with the right stuff changing the world all on their own just sounds good.

So let’s also celebrate the thousands of smaller breakthroughs that got us where we are today.

Trans rights are human rights!

3060 TI was a midrange card when it released, I wouldn’t expect it to still be viable. You might have bought it 3 years ago, but it released at the end of 2020. So almost 5 years old at this point. With GPU development rates being what they are, that’s a long time.

If you still want to get the most out of it: Lower the resolution, this helps a lot. Running at 1080p should probably work just fine. Also check out your memory bandwidth, that is usually the bottleneck for getting the most out of an 5600x. Overclock it if you can, the higher the memory clock, the better it will be.

For the future, my experience is the 70 TI holds up a little bit better than the 60 TI. But this can differ per gen of course. And because of “AI” GPU prices have gone through the roof, so fuck AI.

Your mom’s so fat, she pushes the barycenter of the solar system outside of the diameter of the Sun

Looked up the invoice for you (rounded the numbers for simplicity):

Panels (8x) including micro inverters, all of the mounting hardware, cables etc. - $2500 Hardware for upgrading the electrical panel - $400 Labour, various items, delivery costs - $600

IIRC it was 3 dudes for about half a day. Two dudes for the panels and an electrician that checked what the panel dudes did on the roof and upgraded my electrical panel.

I felt like it was a pretty good deal. Panels could have been cheaper, but I wanted the full black ones. And a single inverter would have been cheaper than micro inverters, but the panels are partly shaded a lot of the time due to a tree. Calculations I did showed the extra price of the micro inverters would be worth it to get the most out of the panels.

Well yes and no. It’s a giant piece of silicon, but it’s also exposed to high energy rays all the time. Panels can suffer from water ingress and then crack when it freezes. They are exposed to all sorts of animals, both big and small that can cause damage. Have their top surfaces get more opaque due to normal erosion. Experience huge swings in temperature every day. Those things can either outright break the panel, or slowly make it less efficient. UV rays alone cause a degradation of around 1% every year. However modern more efficient compact panels suffer more from this than the older kind. So old panels might still be going strong, but give a modern panel the same amount of ageing and it might do a lot worse.

$21K for 6KW? Holy shit…

I had a 3KW system installed in 2022, total costs were around $3.5K (including some changes to my electrical setup to fit it in). Looking up current pricing around here, the same setup would be cheaper still.

6KW is obviously bigger and your situation may be more complex, but anything above $10K seems like a ripoff for me.

I highly doubt space elevators for Earth are decades away, more like centuries if they are even possible at all. Even if technically possible (which is a big if), they also need to be environmentally, politically, culturally and economically possible.

It’s a cool concept, but it ain’t going to happen on Earth. Maybe on the Moon or some other place perhaps.