No, that's more than napkin math but I feel the numbers stand for themselves that we can't really do better than decades. A few km/s won't change that.
Those shitty modems were infamous. IIRC they were also the sound card on the box and had serious issues with interrupt conflicts. It took three wizards and a dead chicken to get Doom to run stably in an online deathmatch.
Historically panels are generally considered to be exhausted after 30 years of service, although even that means they're down to 80% of their original capacity.
The more failure prone component is the inverter, by a huge margin.
That is a problem. The only way it could be worse is if your technology required a constant supply of input from a foreign country...
From a geopolitical standpoint running a country on locally produced renewable power is obviously the least risky approach, even if you get cut off from further expansion of your renewable production.
Buildings get torn down. Roof needs a replacement and the owner doesn't feel like it is worthwhile to redo the solar install for panels that only have 5 years of warranty left, or maybe they want to replace them with higher power models with a fresh warranty. There are any number of reasons why someone might need to offload otherwise functional solar panels.
Currently used solar panels are a hot commodity, with many groups selling them by the pallet, because 10 year old solar panels are still efficient enough to easily pay for themselves. Very few installations will care about specifically how many panels they want, they just want a nameplate output per dollar figure.
Old inverters might not have a second life though.
I mean it makes sense that the sand is made of the same stuff as your local rocks, that's where it came from. Sure it washes around a bit in the surf but it's not like it's floating around the world on the ocean currents, at least not in massive quantities. I'm sure there are bits stuck in driftwood or whatnot but the vast majority should sink to the bottom.
I mean he had to invent a decent amount of magic technology (the radiation proof tent material for just one example) and purposely not do the math on other parts to make his story work.
IMHO the biggest tell that Elon has never been serious about Mars is that he has been completely focused on the rocket and has severely neglected the actual hard part of the problem: The self sustained habitat for the people to live in. There should be experimental habitats dotting the SpaceX campus with engineers and researchers working hand in hand to solve the problem of scaling up a terrarium to people size. It is not easy. Previous attempts have ended in expensive failures. And those efforts didn't have to be launched on a rocket and landed on a low gravity planet with a very thin atmosphere. Until Elon starts to tackle this problem I know that all of the talk of Mars habitats is just blowing smoke up the asses of investors.
I'm as big of an Elon-hater as you'll find, but I kind of have to disagree. Working on the habitat before the rocket is cart before horse. The rocket is a prerequisite to even an experimental trip to Mars.
If we ever do actually colonize Mars, the progression would look something like:
1. Experimental missions
2. Small but permanent settlement made out of Starships cobbled together
3. New construction with increasing proportion of in-situ resources until fully independent
IMHO, to achieve anything close to the timelines Elon has publicly stated you need to do both at once. The habitats are a decade long development effort at a minimum. The capacity and dimensions of the launch vehicle are known, there is no reason to not be working on the prototypes now.
There is so much foundational technology that has to be developed first to even make them a possibility. Even your step 2 requires them to be fully developed and reliable, because there is no flying in spares from Earth if something breaks down. If I were to give Elon the benefit of the doubt this would be one of the factors in the refocus on the Moon base, but even that is dubious. I still think the "make humanity multi-planetary" talk is a diversion.
Why did you feel the need to add this statement before saying something which might be taken as agreeing with something the man said? Why does it always have to come down to who said something instead of what that person said? Just say you agree with the statement, don't mention who said it. If the knee-jerk-downvote brigade comes to punish you just eat the downvotes in the knowledge that the downvoters just can't cope with dissenting opinions.
Maybe there are but I see far more sufferers from MDS who just have to let everyone know they really, really don't like the man. I don't know him so I don't know whether I'd like him or not. I do know he's achieved a number of remarkable things but he also seems to have a tendency to overestimate what can be achieved within a given time frame and budget which seems to make him promise more than he can deliver. There's plenty of business people who promise more than they can deliver though while there aren't that many who have managed to initiate large-scale pie-in-the-sky projects which more or less turned fantasy into reality like he's done. When it comes to things like space exploration I think it is a good thing that someone with some vision of what can be and the means to make it work is set on achieving his goal of going to ... well, whether it be Mars in the end or a permanent lunar base we'll see. Out into space at least. I think we need new frontiers to explore, something to look forward to instead of the nihilistic doom and gloom 'humans bad, they destroy the planet' narrative which has been pushed for far too long.
Tesla also went to a 48v wiring harness in some of their vehicles to allow them to power more equipment with less copper. It might be one reason why they use nonstandard connectors, so people don't attempt to hook 12v equipment to the system and also the higher voltages might require connectors rated for it.
Now they just have to take the next step and have everything in the vehicle running on PoE.
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