Amazon one-hour delivery service reaches Garner & Clayton

Want something like paper towels or milk or even a new computer? Don't want to leave the house but still want to get that shopping item in an hour? You can now. Amazon on Thursday launched its "Prime Now" service in Raleigh.

Read more at http://wraltechwire.com/amazon-laun...m_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=wraltechwire

 

I am a firm believer that if I need something that fast, I don't need it. Few exceptions: like an ambulance.

 

can you save me now

 

The only thing I think is sillier is to send a drone to deliver your Lays Potato-chips and beer!

 

Yes, packing that missle with beer would really make a mess when it impacted and all of the chips would be broken too .....

 

Who has used this service so far?

 

Since 2 hour delivery is free for prime members, I thought I would try it out sometime this week. They have my dogs' food available on PrimeNow, so I thought I would order a bag of that and see how it goes.

 

My drug dealer uses a drone. It works out well.

 

If I order a drone how will they deliver it?

 

This is where the word 'convenience' begins to kill us. Logistically speaking, companies will move heaven and earth to get whatever you need to you right away. Nevermind the cost and by 'cost' I mean to the environment, infrastructure, our culture, health, etc. This is a little preachy (a lot, actually), but when is enough going to be enough? Some fat, lazy slob sitting on their couch wants a box of Ho-Hos right now, so some company is going to build up the infrastructure and logistics capability to do it for him? Let's skip this step and move on to teleportation already.

 

It's closer than you think. http://phys.org/news/2016-01-physicists-scheme-teleport-memory.html

Give it another 20 years or so.

 

Nah, the energy requirements alone would be prohibitive. You are totally converting mass to energy at one location and totally converting energy to mass in an equal amount in another location. Of course there is going to be some loss during all of this conversion and even a small percentage is a huge amount of energy.

 

I'm afraid that Teleportation is something lazy Sci-Fi writers in the '60's used in their storylines because filming a model shuttlecraft flying to the surface of a planet was proving too expensive to create. In reality, it would be tough enough to transport "stuff", but to transport living, sentient beings atom by atom and expect them come out intact and unaltered on the other side...?

Not bloody likely, no matter how much energy you had at your disposal!

 

A very very small start:

http://www.cnet.com/news/scientists-achieve-reliable-quantum-teleportation-for-the-first-time/#!

Physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, part of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, report that they sent quantum data concerning the spin state of an electron to another electron about 10 feet away. Quantum teleportation has been recorded in the past, but the results in this study have an unprecedented replication rate of 100 percent at the current distance, the team said.

Thanks to the strange properties of entanglement, this allows for that data -- only quantum data, not classical information like messages or even simple bits -- to be teleported seemingly faster than the speed of light. The news was reported first by The New York Times on Thursday, following the publication of a paper in the journal Science.

 

Fusion Reactors will fix that. Lockheed hopes to have a "small" 100 Megawatt Fusion reactor working in the next 2 years, big ones would be in the mid to high Gigawatt range a decade or two later. Makes Shearon Harris look like a joke.

 

Still the total amount of energy involved in the total conversion of mass or production of mass will be staggering

Remember the formula: E/m = c2 = (299792458 m/s)2 = 89875517873681764 J/kg (≈ 9.0 × 1016 joules per kilogram).

The energy equivalent of one gram (1/1000 of a kilogram) of mass is equivalent to: 89.9 terajoules or 25.0 million kilowatt-hours (≈ 25 GW-h)

 

Given the average US house used ~11,500 KW-h per year that 1 gram would use about the same energy as ~2175 houses in a year or ~26,000 houses for a month, or ~780,000 houses for a day or ~19,000,000 for an hour. One gram only.

The waste of 0.01% would be enough to power a couple of thousand houses on each side of the transfer .....

 

Nerds.

 

Still thinking small, think commercial, IT industry specifically. for reference the building I work in uses about 17-20 GWh per year, that's a small building. The larger buildings on campus use about 100-150 GWh per year. We use about 10 times what we used 20 years ago.

Extrapolate that out another 10-20 years. We could easily see single buildings needing close to 1 PWh per year.

 

And what waterway would it be on? Most Reactors are on/beside water for cooling and other reasons.