Hydrogen has often been called the champagne of fuels, because it’s so expensive and most likely will be for the foreseeable future. So I don’t think we’ll ever have a “hydrogen economy” in the sense that most things are powered by hydrogen like they now are by fossil fuels.

Electrifying things directly will always be cheaper and much more efficient, even if you have to use batteries. I’m sure hydrogen will play a role somewhere, but it will always be a niche fuel.

That being said, the world uses gigantic amounts of hydrogen already as a chemical substance for industries such as fertilizer production or hydrocarbon cracking. This hydrogen is almost completely made from fossil fuels and this causes huge amounts of carbon dioxide emissions (more than the entire country of Germany). The first thing we should do is to replace this fossil hydrogen with green hydrogen, because it will directly cause lower CO2 emissions. Once we’ve done that and we still have the option to produce more hydrogen, we can start looking for other application such as flight, shipping or energy storage.

I came here due to the reddit drama and I’m definitely staying. Just like you, I like it here. The hardest part was actually making the switch, creating an account and finding communities to join. Now that that’s out of the way, I really have no reason to go back. Reddit has become a hostile place, admins are actively fighting users and especially mods and I just don’t feel comfortable there anymore.

It’s like going to a restaurant where the owner is hitting the waiters and some of the guests. Doesn’t matter how good the food is, doesn’t matter if they’re hitting me or not, I’m never going back to that place.

It depends on whether you mean by weight or by volume.

By weight, hydrogen has an almost unbeatable energy density. It’s much higher than methanol or even gasoline.

By volume, hydrogen has a horrible energy density, several orders of magnitude lower than any modern type of battery, for example.

So if you have infinite space, hydrogen is great. But a plane does not have infinite space. So you try to compress the hydrogen or cool it down to increase the energy density. However, this will still come out at much worse than gasoline or jet fuel.

Eh, it’s an issue and it may get worse than it is today, but it will never be as big of a deal as cancer.

The nightmare scenario of antibiotics one day becoming useless because all bacteria are resistant to them is just not realistic. First of all, antibiotics aren’t new. Many of them weren’t invented, they were discovered. Which means they existed in fungi or other bacteria for millions of years and were used to fight unwanted bacteria. Penicillin is named after the Penicillium mold, for example.

Antibiotic resistance is a survival strategy for bacteria that are under a lot of stress from antibiotics. This happens in hospitals, nursing homes or farms where antibiotics are used en masse. In these places, resistant bacteria have a clear advantage over normal ones, so they can quickly replicate without much competition. But as soon as you take away the antibiotics, that advantage disappears and suddenly they have to compete with the normal bacteria again. Plus, maintaining the antibiotic resistance is effort. They have to produce special proteins or change the ones they normally use, which can make them less efficient.

So most likely, antibiotic resistance will continue to be a problem mainly in places where lots of antibiotics are used all the time. As soon as we reduce usage, resistance will go down. There are certain antibiotics that haven’t been used in decades due to side effects, such as Colistin, which can now be used to treat multi-drug-resistant bacteria because they haven’t been exposed to it for so long. Other antibiotics like quinolones are currently falling out of favor, so they may be the magic bullet of the future.

One more aspect is that antibiotics don’t make a lot of money for pharmaceutical companies, because they’re usually only taken for days or a few weeks, while other drugs such as heart medication are taken lifelong. That’s why there’s not a lot of (private) money going into antibiotic research. But if the situation gets bad enough, this may change and it will likely mean that a lot more new antibiotics are developed.