Hmm, going by Googling the weight of a Tesla (1600 - 2000kg), and going by the 100W camping solar panel I have that ways 3kg...

I could maybe fit 6 of these rectangles on the roof of a car, so 18kg for 600W. 600W would generate 3kWh/sunny day.

So we've increased the weight by 1%, and get about 5% extra range per sunny day.

Seems like a decent trade off? You could probably even offset the weight by reducing battery size a little, as you need to carry less charge if you can top up power as you go?

Self charging from solar allays the fear that if you can't charge your car you won't be completely stranded. Fitting solar charging stations everywhere is a different use case really.

Yeah I went off Google's estimate of electric cars tend to get 3-4 miles per kWh (which I guess will actually vary massively)

And the car panel will be less optimal as the panels will be flat. Although unlike roof panels you could potentially move the car around to stay in the sun for longer.

For me, this would actually be an ideal car. I need a car for where I live, but I only use it a couple of times a week and almost always journeys of 5-6 miles or less. I'd only need to charge the car from mains in the depths of winter!

Thinking about the maths of it, I reckon a car with current level solar panels built into the roof would be a serious suppliment to the energy required.

I'm in the north of England and the 2.5kW, suboptimal panels on my roof generate about 15kWh on a sunny day.

Going by the size of the panel, I reckon at leat 1kW of capacity could be embedded on the average car roof, boot and bonet.

So a sunny day would then provide 5-6kW. So that's like 15-20 miles of driving?

Obviously the car would need external energy for the most part, but I don't think that's an insignificant amount of energy. And considering a concern for electric cars is still range and availability of charge points, knowing that you can get free mileage just by parking in an unshaded location for a few hours would be a big selling point to me.

I imagine the electrics of it are the most difficult part though.

I think this is very country dependant :) I live in the countryside of Nottinghamshire in the UK, and UK countryside is very different from US countriside!

More crowded, for a start!

I mean, we're from completely different parts of the world so I get we are coming from different view points. But the key factor I'm considering is that cows need a certain amount of calories. Those calories either come from low density area (like you describe) or high density crop.

I guess I should have said how much of the world's beef comes from low density crop lands in the USA?

And another thing I'd wonder about, do those cattle live entirely off the land? In the UK we have "grass fed" cows, which are premium and reared entirely off the land, but they require huge amounts of land in order to have enough food available to them, plus higher calory supplements to actually put on weight. So unless you actually know a small hold farmer, in Europe, any meat/dairy you get is from "unnatural" means, with cows being reared more intensively than the land would allow. That intensity comes from other land, elsewhere, being used as well. I know the same applies in Australia and much of South Africa, but I can't comment on the Western US.

And, to be fair, I haven't focused on land use exclucively. My point was that we are actively destroying many biomes in order to produce food for livestock. If we stopped eating as much meat and dairy (reduce it to the recommended amounts medically, in the US and Europe) that would take off a huge amount of pressure from biomes we are destroying.

To go back to my original point, if people treated meat and dairy like a luxury, that would probably just leave cows in the habitats you describe (although that's just a wild guess)

I think you are making the mistake of taking one biome that has cows in and which cows aren't the worst option, and assuming all biomes are like that. What percentage of the world's agricultural land is what you describe?

I'm talking about things like deforested tropical and temperate forest/rainforest. Like, the Amazon isn't being cleared just for kicks. England isn't kept as rolling green fields just for the postcards (and has a similar thing to the US cattle with sheep, which are relatively self sustaining and low impact suited to a lot of the UKs more rugged areas, like for cows how you describe).

I'd agree that animals raised in ways like that aren't the worst. But there's 1.5billion cows in the world and most of them are gorged on high calorie food grown on fertilised fields that would have been - if not for human intervention - something completely different.

(Plus, if you want to live off food like that, you basically have to become a vegan on steroids with how rigourously you study ingredients. Vegans can just look at a packet of chips and be like "damn, it's got milk in, guess I'll get a different brand". People who only want to eat meat from natural farming processes have to either reach the same conclusion, or go on a lengthy research journey to try and figure out if Lays use milk they find acceptable - which inevitably they don't. Sorry for the tangent!)

It is high! I was surprised too!

You are correct, I meant to say growing food for livestock and rearing livestock. Basically, 80% of land is to make meat and dairy and it only produces 20% of our food. The other 20% of our land use is for plants, and that produces 80% of our food.

All other human land use is about 1% of habitable land - a rounding error compared to farming

It's always worth pointing out that 80% of humanities land use is purely for growing food for, and rearing, livestock. This only produces about 20% of humanities food.

There's plenty of room for people :) it's the 60 billion odd animals (especially the cows and other mammals!) that are the problem.

If people treated red meat and dairy like a luxury, (say, reduced consumption to once every two weeks) it would more than half humanities land use! It would also be cheaper, and better for their health so they'd live longer with a higher quality of love.

If I said,

• "On day one I give you A
• On day two I give you A and B."

Then you would have 2A and 1B.

​

Otherwise I would say

• "On Day one I give you A.
• On Day two I give you B."

Then you would have 1A and 1B.

​

>Why would anyone think that, regardless of how I write it down?

Because words have largely agreed upon meanings and if you deviate from that meaning massively people don't understand you.

If you said to someone:

"On day one, I'm giving my gf a puppy, and on day 2 I'm giving her a puppy and a ring"

Then I'm certain almost all native English speakers would understand that you have given her a puppy on day one, and then another puppy and a ring on day two.

I don't know enough about sheep social dynamics to care but... In my experience humans also work like this in friend/family groups.

Families and friendships groups usually have one or two "leaders" who do most of the social "admin" (eg, arranging gatherings between the friends) but the actual "lead" of the group is flexible and situational. People defer to the trusted person who has most experience with a particular problem, and unorganised decisions happen organically (like, when it's time to leave).

I only ever see it on a really small scale though, like maybe a dozen people? Sheep flocks are bigger, but then is guess their social dynamics are much simpler so the same mechanism can be used over larger group. And since they have no way of improving their methodology, groups that get too big to work by this method will break up into manageable groups again.

That's about 10x the size of mine, so actually not too surprised it's 10x the price!

To have that much solar power on my house in the UK I think I would need to register as a power station, if I wanted to also connect and input to the grid! (Don't hold me to that, it's just anything up to 5kW has a really simplifying process and no planning permissions or needed or anything).

In the UK average houses only really need 2-3kW system, which would basically meet all needs in the summer but not really touch the sides of usage in winter - we get so little sunlight in the winter it's not even worth trying.

It's very, very rare for a residential property to have above a 5kW system.

But then, we don't really use cooling and we tend to use natural gas for heating. So while we only use 10-15kwH of electricity per day, we use a lot more in natural gas for heating over the winter.

For an amount comparable to 2.2kWh!? That's insane!

I figured this out after talking to a few people on hear who seemed really angry that solar was crazy unaffordable. From my perspective it's expensive, but the panels are the cheapest part and the reduction in energy means they should pay themselves back double over their life time.

I got 2.2kW worth of panels added to my roof. The panels cost about £700 ($750). The inverter and other equipment was another £1500. The scaffolding was £700, and the installation was £1200.

£4200 total ($4500) and halved our energy bill!

I think this too.

Humanoid robots only useful function is to look cool to humans. Besides that, there are so many better forms than the human-form for pretty much anything, including navigating a human environment.

The only places that will actually translate into revenue is theme parks, like Disney animatronics. And I guess sex bots.