Hacker News Reader

Comment by joker_minmax | Hacker News Reader

I feel like we keep hearing about technologies like this that are going to change the world but none of them ever actually get implemented... just me?

View on HN

There are already stuff like this that has been deployed - John Todd’s Eco-Machines: https://youtu.be/SeQotnmhO5I

These projects have not made it to the media, but they are there. We’re talking about EPA-funded works, and other sites around the world.

The guy designing and deploying says it is simple enough that students can construct a small scale version.

"business people" will pretty much only allocate resources to endeavors that are financially profitable for themselves and these same people quite often provide financial incentives to politicians who promise to advocate for policies that result in additional profitability for the business people regardless of the environmental or social consequences. Those elected politicians need to be replaced and the capacity for the "business people" to influence elected officials with financial contributions should be limited and involve mandatory transparency. No more unlimited dark money pools.

the above solution is silly expensive.

Expensive doesn’t mean that somebody is greedy, it means that it takes a lot of effort from a lot of people - effort that could probably be spent more effectively.

Equating expensive with valuable, while very much in line with rules coming from Economics 101, is very questionable in real life in my experience.

If talking about costs bothers you, just think of it in terms of time efficiency. We have a limited number of humans and time available to clean up the planet. What's the most effective way to use them?

This isn't.

As with just about everything else, it's a whole lot easier to build a proof-of-concept prototype than it is to solve the problem at scale. New technologies often have either inherent limitations that make it infeasible for them to scale up (e.g. use of fragile or hard-to-manufacture materials, square-cube issues, outsized cleaning/maintenance requirements) or would simply have a staggering cost at any scale that makes a practical difference.

If it's just tech, it's always too expensive, it has to be bacteria or alage or some other bio stuff that multiplies by itself to be useful.

I mean, this is like the moon landing — private companies can build the technology, but it's not going to get deployed at scale unless a government sponsors it, because there's not a clear path to profit.

And like, is congress going to spend $10B deploying this at scale? That would be great, but they can't even pass a budget.

Not just you. Just sensationalist headlines (:

See also the dramatic groundbreaking new battery technologies that have keep getting reported for the last 30+ years. [1]

Not only is there a long lead time between proof-of-concept and scalable production even in the best case, but frequently these nascent technologies have serious drawbacks that aren't mentioned in the article.

[1] "Revolutionary battery checklist": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930

also: https://xkcd.com/882/ and https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1623

Reply on news.ycombinator.com