Merit as a musician can only take you so far. In any creative career, the big famous artists aren’t just good at doing their craft, they’re also very good at making business deals to sell them. And even that’s not always enough to become a superstar, you also need luck - your breakout/masterpiece needs to coincide with the latest trend, and preferably early in your career - a one-hit-wonder might be enough, but maybe not.

Superconducting magnets don’t heat up naturally, not without breaking. All we’d need to do, is engineer an isolated environment for the magnet, and there’ll be no chance of it heating up, except maybe for an intense solar storm overwhelming it’s magnetic shield.

Unlike earth, where there are multiple potential sources of heat, in space the only one of note is the sun. So yes, you can’t remove heat via conduction or convection, but that also means that you can’t gain heat from it. If anything, that simplifies the design.

The energy requirements for keeping a magnet out of the sun at all times, is probably considerably less than powering a conventional electromagnet for the equivalent duration.

We’ve already achieved this on the extreme end via the new horizons probe, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about.

We could maybe make superconducting magnets strong enough to create a field to reduce the charged particles, but then you have to keep them powered

The superconducting magnets you describe, do not require ongoing power, only ongoing cooling. Which in space, is more manageable.

LCDs are designed to filter out extremely specific types of light, and in a specific direction.

It’s true that the changing optical properties of each crystal could affect the albedo, but whether white or black is more effective is beyond my knowledge. It might even be neither, but green instead.

No, and not because the effect is in any way small.

It is because a phone screen producing white light, looks white because it is actively generating white looking light. Compared to white paint, which looks white not because it generates its own light, but reflects other light, these are two different mechanisms for making things look ‘white’.

Your phone has a brightness setting, to keep ‘white’ the exact same shade of white despite whatever viewing condition you have. A white paint does not, and as a result, looks different depending on the amount of light in the room.

So in your hypothetical, a white phone screen won’t reflect less light as you presuppose - it’ll generate more heat internally - unless you cover the screen with white paint.

Interesting concept, but not very scalable. It’s basically a reversed dam - when it’s full, there’s 0m head of water. Then with excess energy, you lower the level inside, storing the energy in the water outside. E.g -2m head. Water then flows in to equalise head, and doing so, regenerates electricity. Adding depth to supercharge pressure differentials is a good idea, although I wonder how they limit the flow rate, or otherwise prevent cavitation shocks each cycle.

Could be useful as a private industrial battery, but a dam would still be better on an infrastructural level.

The comic is out for preorder now as a hard copy too! (it’s already available free online)