How to be impactful

Every person has a finite amount of time to move their bodies and speak words and that's true for the richest and the poorest. It's our job to use that ability to make an impact. If you serve on many committees and do many things you are diluting your ability to have a big impact.

Push a pin vs push a coin, putting all your attention on a single goal.

Because most people in the world are focused on themselves or otherwise everyone is working at cross-purposes so through that fog of disinterest it's often possible to push a very single-minded agenda through and get a surprisingly large thing accomplished, but only IF you spend all your very finite amount of body movement on a narrow goal (and/or rally others around you towards that same goal).

Orders of magnitude

It is a cliché to observe that the space between objects in outer space is much, much larger than our intuition might expect. But there are several levels of structure:

...

0. people

1. planets/moons/stars 10^3 - 10^5 km (diameter of earth or jupiter)

2. stars 10^6-10^7 (sun or supergiant)

2. solar systems 10^9 km (distance to Pluto)

3. oort clouds 10^13 km (200k AU)

3. galaxies 10^17 (100k ly)

4. galaxy clusters 10^20 (30m ly

It's true that the orders of magnitude stretch on, but the biggest magnitudes are the ones:

between nucleus of atom and the electron shell diamater

AND

between distance between planets and distance between stars.

the other distances are actually not too bad.

nucleus of atom is 2 × 10 -15 m

diameter of atom is 1 x 10 - 10 m (5 orders of mag!!!)

diameter of sun vs diameter of pluto orbit (boost 3 orders of mag)

distance between planets: 10^8 to 10^9 km

distance between stars: 10^12 to 10^13 km (boost 3 orders of mag)

distance between galaxies relative to size of galaxy:

(100k ly vs 3m ly is only 1 order of mag!)

More nuclear

Shouldn't adding additional reactors to already-approved nuclear power plants be a great idea? then you avoid the costly permit process and you can presumably take advantage of some of the existing infrasturcture, at the very least the security perimeter, etc. is it a matter of the expense of building out additional transmission capacity out of the plant that makes this not feasible?

We should be aiming to make electricity 10x cheaper and consume 10x more electricity while using nuclear for most of the base load and solar just for peaking where it makes sense (in desert locations or decentralized applications like on remote homes)

The "Tree Cover" trope

Something I frequently notice in movies and TV shows that is totally unrealistic: two characters having a conversation, or one character doing something, and another character watches, listens, but is otherwise not in view of the others.

In real life, when you are outside doing something, another person can't be 10 metres away and you are not aware of them. People are not that unobservant.

Also, in real life, people do not have a lot of conversations out in public where anyone can listen. Especially super important business conversations.

The worst show for this was Damages - I remember every episode featured like 10 scenes of this.

viz. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TreeCover

Billionaires and senescence research

As a billionaire, your only scarce resource is time. So surely I would make investments in immortality - surely all the tech billionaires, especially the old ones, would be making huge crash investments into mind uploading technology such as plastination, because it's their only hope and they have a realistic prospect of moving the needle with all their funds... so there are perhaps two explanations:

1) maybe they really DO do this but keep it secret because they think it seems vain (they would rather discuss their charity work)

2) maybe they have bought into the convenient lie (like almost all people do) that aging and death is natural and desirable