I like numbers. Especially big ones. Unless they’re written in red ink on my bank statement. Other than that, bigger the better. And today’s scientific breakthrough is a new laser. They’re building it to try and activate protons to make them dance. So they can initiate nuclear fusion to provide us with 2 million years of carbon-free, cost-free electricity at NO RISK, unlike the current ‘fission’ models like at Windscale, Chernobyl…

This laser is ‘powerful’. Think Superman. Then make him the size of Jupiter. The laser produces a pulse of light. ***NUMBER ALERT!!!*** A trillion, trillion times brighter than sunlight on a summer’s day. Not a cloudy day. Possibly in Spain. So if that sunny day has a brightness of ‘1’, this laser’s brightness is 1 followed by 24 zeroes. Definitely need some cool sunglasses for that. To make its pulse, it uses more power than the entire national grid, but it lasts for one trillionth of a second. Not long enough to get an even suntan.

Also, and not as spectacularly numberish, but really wonderful, we’re all going to be travelling by ‘air-taxis’ really soon. They’re built, they’re tested, they’re 1000 times safer than helicopters and they’re vertical take off and landing, so they can pick you from outside your house. If it’s a wide road. With no cars parked.

But this is the stuff of science fiction made real. In the 5th Element Bruce Willis played a taxi driver, but of these kind of things. Flying taxis. And so now we’re aspiring to a dystopian future-world where the traffic chaos, insanity and mayhem can move in 3 dimensions instead of two. And I love that. No traffic lights in the air, nor pedestrians. Nor old men on electric bikes getting in everyone’s way.

They’re basically big versions of drones. Which carry 5 people. Original drones were made so that the Ukrainians could spy on the attacking Russians and so that you could watch women on the 19th floor of a tower block taking a shower. And now they’ve evolved into this. It’s just brilliant. Stockholm are having them first, and if not too many Swedes die in the trials, we’ll get them by 2028.

Other than that, nothing’s happening in the world.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx