npts2020

I would try what Phi suggests and contact a local courier or taxi service. If the service won't do it, you may be able to get one of the drivers to help (which is what I would try anyway). Not sure what you are shipping but I know NO is one of the most expensive places in the US to ship anything LTL (less than truckload) to or from, so I feel for you. It is not likely to be cheap.

Ya, water is great because of its high latency during phase change. It kind of depends on what you want. If you want speed, the engine block should be faster at discharging but will not stay charged nearly as long unless heated to a much higher temperature. From the sound of it, you will be adding the same energy regardless and discharge can be regulated as required, so it really should not matter much which method you use. Just do whatever is easiest.

This discussion is very much couched in terms of human experience. What if said aliens had a lifespan measured in millennia instead of years? Also, turning mass into energy is likely not the most efficient method of interstellar travel. One method I have not seen discussed is solar sails, using a star's output similar to the way a ship uses the wind. With much of the known universe being way older than our little corner of it, I think it is not only likely that if there are any aliens with a high degree of technology, they know about our solar system and quite possibly have visited us. Whether that has happened in the time of humans and with anywhere near the frequency of sightings, I am highly skeptical.

Logging in and going page to page is very slow. At first I thought it was my ISP but other sites seem to load at normal speed.

I wonder if slide rules and abaci had the same effect as calculators?

I don't think efficiency is much of a consideration if they aren't using outside sources for power. The competitive advantage is in cost of the medium, basically waste vs rare earth or other expensive materiel. Steam generation will substantially raise the cost (but has other advantages), which is why they didn't try it to begin with I would imagine. Please repost where I ever said or even implied that any of this, especially steam power generation, is "simple".

Which has more to do with the fact that once the steam has been produced, it is relatively easy to add energy to it for more efficient extraction than whether or not it can be done. So the guys doing this must not be serious, because they have plans to do exactly that.

Ok, how large is large? 5 cm? 20? 100? What kind of volume/pressure/flow is required? Also, they say they are building some to make steam. IMO the problems with steam are being overstated, anyway. Every plant in the world that generates power with steam, and there are a lot of them, operates with the same high temperature water constraints.

Pretty interesting method of storing energy. At 500-650C, there is plenty of energy to make steam if desired, even enough to turn a turbine. The description does lack somewhat, like, how is the medium heated with electricity? Are there electrodes running through it? Also, is the medium static or does it get hot enough to partially liquify? I would be very interested in seeing blueprints but that is probably out of the question for proprietary reasons or some such.

And CEO's who fully understand only one or two parts of the business/programming/engineering equation required. ASHRAE has technical standards for cooling. This gives a general outline but the meat of it is behind a paywall.

Ambient temperature is not the temperature at which an electronic device operates, it is always much warmer. Also, the temps at which components fail is usually significantly higher (mostly in the 150C+ range) than where their operation is being affected by things like slowing computing speeds and higher energy usage. Odds are, the difference isn't significant enough for you to notice on your devices but a data center would probably notice even a percent or two change. 20C might be the recommended AC setting but it is also where most electronic devices begin to have their operation affected so engineers have designed workarounds that allow fairly efficient operation to significantly higher temps.

It may turn out that the solution is computers that operate at higher temps but that is no trivial task at present and could turn out to be impossible to change to the degree required to significantly reduce the amount of cooling needed for operation.

Pretty much.

From what I have read, somewhere around 20C or less is where operation of a data center begins being affected negatively so you have to have a sink that's cooler than 20C. Unfortunately, it is often well above that temperature in the Utah desert, especially in the summer even at 1500+ meters like much of Box Elder County. Other than a water source, it seems to me one would have to use artificial means (A/C) to get adequate cooling. this would substantially add to the center's already large amount of energy use. The problem isn't intractable but all of the current solutions push construction costs to as much as several times that of just being able to use all of the available water.

If they can figure out some way of cooling besides water or not requiring it, the project could be worthwhile IMO but is not the only environmental issue. Providing power is a relatively trivial problem compared to the water usage issue. More solar panels, windmills, turbines or whatever can be built for power but getting sustainable sources of water in the desert has always been a difficult proposition.