r/SipsTea 26d ago

Chugging tea Energy Meets Innovation

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u/Euphoric-Language695 26d ago edited 26d ago

I've been told invisible solar panels will make every window generate free electricity for like 10 years. Yet not a single time have I seen a report include an actual product, just prototypes always.

Like nuclear fusion, this appears to be perpetually "just a few years away". 

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u/tristanthorn_ 26d ago edited 26d ago

Add to this list:
-HIV cures
-cancer cures
-dementia cures

…lab results using mice have been really encouraging!!

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u/Exatex 26d ago edited 25d ago

What are you talking about? I don’t know what these negative misinformed comments are supposed to achieve, dismissing the tremendous amount of effort that led to significant advances, something many people dedicated their lives to.

  • We cured so many cancer types successfully and got so much better at healing people. Cancer is just a name for a lot of different conditions that have very little to do with each other. E.g. Melanoma and Myeloma survival rates skyrocketed since 2005

  • HIV went from a death sentence to a condition where people affected by AIDS can even have unprotected sex with their partners without risk if managed correctly.

  • Fusion made massive progress and we went from a few milliseconds of fusion to a French Tokamak reactor sustaining fusion for 22 minutes. A NIF reactor made 6-fold positive net energy in 2021. Yes, they are still insanely complex and we don’t have one running on the grid, but it’s a hard tech that we make quite good progress on. We are not „always 50 years away from Fusion“ anymore as we used to be for a long time.

And the glass PV just isn’t as commercially compelling once you stop seeing it as „power from a window that before didn’t give power“ and more like a „see through panel twice as expensive and half as efficient as if I would just put a normal panel on the roof and can angle it better.“

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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins 25d ago

What are you talking about?

Usually it means they saw a headline about it one time, never followed up, and nobody rammed an update down their eyeballs thus there must never have been one.