LIDAR is to self-driving what solar is to energy: a technological dead end. Nuclear is the only viable path forward. When self-driving cars were getting going, there wasn't enough compute and AI sucked too much to just use cameras. Every expert in the world screamed that LIDAR was the future and would be the necessary step to get to self-driving. Tesla saw it differently and invested heavily into cameras, compute, and AI. LIDAR costs a lot and has a whole host of issues (like not being able to see color lol). Tesla cars on the other hand are able to be self-driving at any price point while looking sleek and beautiful. It's obvious looking back, but wasn't obvious looking forward. This is the situation we find ourselves in with solar today. Prices are plummeting, a lot of production is being built, and countries keep flaunting how much of their daily energy use is from solar. Solar has so much momentum. However, this is a complete waste of time. Even if solar panels were 100% efficient and needed minimum maintenance, they are a dead-end technology because *we need to increase our energy consumption by 2-3 orders of magnitude.* This would require covering large swaths of the earth in ugly solar panels and would actually help destroy the environment that we're working so hard to preserve. We should have unlimited clean water. We should travel around the globe in an hour. We should suck carbon from the air and trap it underground. We should put all our garbage on spaceships and yeet it into the sun. We should have swarms of robots repairing our infrastructure, doing dangerous jobs, clearing old landmines fields, and tending to our crops. We should have the most powerful AI imaginable constantly making the world and our lives better. We should create whatever element we desire out of the ones we have plenty of. We should dream big again, and to do so, we need energy. So much of it that it is hard to fathom how we'd even use it. The only reason we're doing solar is because regulations have killed nuclear. @NRCgov, @realDonaldTrump, and @JDVance - please remediate this. Give America Power!