Mass is not a major issue for towers, but it’s a big problem for rotating parts.

Intriguing, but I find this somewhat hard to believe.

Glu-lam isn’t new technology.

If you could achieve comparable strength: weight from timber as aluminium, GFRP, or CFRP, we’d see a high timber content in aircraft, instead of near zero.

If they’re making the blades heavier to compensate, you get all kinds of runaway knock on effects. Blades are heavier, so need to be stronger, so need to be heavier… tower, bearings, foundations, mountings etc all need to be stronger.

Sort of an xkcd 808 argument.

Everything burns up regardless of size. Big things might not finish burning by the time they hit the ground.

You need either enough thrust to slow you to ~mach 2, or a heat shield to do the same by aerobraking.

It’s called aerobraking for a reason: you’re using friction to turn kinetic energy into heat to slow down, but that heat goes into the air and your heat shield instead of brake pads and rotors.

Yes, satire ‘news’ site, hence being posted to The Onion.

As with all good satire, there’s a very tiny kernel of truth at the bottom of it.

Has it occurred to you that sometimes there’s actual evidence backing up the things you ridicule?

You can go measure the acidity of rain in your back yard if you want.

The sunlight in NZ is far, far harsher than if you go a few thousand kilometres towards the equator, where it should be hotter. We have some of the world’s highest rates of skin cancer. Are you implying that crisis actors are faking having skin cancer?