>Thorium power plants are much safer than conventional nuclear plants
>Fuel is much cheaper, being as common as lead
>Can be used to safely dispose of radioactive material from conventional nuclear plants
>Can be scaled down to fit into an aircraft or even a car
>A thorium-powered car wouldn't need to refuel for 100 years and would create enough power you could plug your house into your car and run all your appliances
>Initially, thorium power was ignored in favor of uranium power because enriched uranium = nuclear bombs
>Now nobody wants thorium power because it would provide clean, cheap energy and none of the corporations producing "green" energy would get government subsidies and kickbacks
>Carbon nanotubes are used to make batteries with 10 times the battery life and a much longer service life
>Now your laptop can run for 20 hours on a single charge, and the battery doesn't go bad within just a year or two
>The new batteries cost a fraction of what conventional batteries cost to make
>You could sell the batteries that are 10 times better for 10 times as much and people would willingly pay that
>Rather than make a massive profit selling these new batteries, battery companies instead buy the technology from the people that developed it and shove it down the memory hole so they can continue selling shitty batteries
>Dr. Gerard O'Neill and a team of NASA engineers and scientists develop the O'Neill Island 3 space colony
>Big enough to house 5 million people per cylinder, colonies consist of 2 cylinders
>Self-sufficient, grow their own food, colonies have their own internal weather cycle, produce their own breathable air, produce their own power via solar power
>Can be parked near the moon, the asteroid belt, or any other planet in the solar system, allowing us to mine resources, refine them, turn them into finished products, and sell them anywhere
>Smallest near-Earth asteroid has estimated $500 billion worth of iron, more platinum than the Earth mines in a year, and a bunch more resources; there are literally millions of asteroids, and some of them are the size of countries
>Building O'Neill space colonies would solve overpopulation (move into space), separatist movements and political division (move into space with likeminded people and declare independence), world hunger (grow crops in massive greenhouse in space), energy shortages (beam solar power down in the form of microwaves), make us rich beyond our wildest dreams by putting millions of workers next to unimaginable quantities of resources, provide a huge tech boost during the R&D and construction phases, and provide literally millions of jobs for all the space miners, construction workers, rocket scientists, restaurant workers (space miners gotta eat, ya know), farmers, etc. involved
>NASA decided it could be built with technology available in the 70's
>O'Neill and NASA sat down and calculated the cost of all the raw materials, technology, rocket launches, training astronauts and workers, etc., then doubled the cost just to cover their asses when something inevitably went over budget
>Adjusting for inflation, one space colony would have cost less than what we spent on welfare in 2011, and welfare spending has gone up every year since
>Given the option of advancing all of mankind, solving serious issues plaguing humanity, giving us a home among the stars, and vastly improving the quality of life of everyone on Earth and in space with endless, cheap resources and advanced technology, or paying niggers to sit on the couch smoking crack and popping out babies, we chose to pay niggers to smoke crack instead of working
The more I learn, the more I'm convinced there are (((interests))) who want to keep both technology and society from improving.