Planck time, or the amount of time it takes light to travel one Planck length.

How fast is a Planck time? Planck time is roughly 10^−44 seconds

Depends on the walls of the container.

Essentially, you are describing a compressor or something like a bike pump.

In a rigid container you will get a pressure change, but not a volume change.

Example: you have a shipping container and inside is a balloon that is plumbed through the floor into an external air pipe. Suck all the air out of the container. It's full of space (or another way to put it, there is almost zero particles of anything inside the container. For ease of numbers, lets say the pressure in the container is about 10^-4 Torr. Now, pump air into the balloon to expand. You will be compressing the tiny amount of particles inside the container. The walls won't expand, so all you are doing is increasing the pressure in the "empty space". So maybe the pressure goes up to 10^-3 Torr by filling up the volume inside your container with something else.

Not even close.

Even Einstein got his Nobel prize for discovering the law of the photoelectric effect - not this theory of relativity or quantum mechanics.

Example: almost all quantum physic

Any scientific field is advanced by many eminent thinkers making incremental improvements. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" is the wonderful catch-phrase.

Anytime we look at a list of Nobel prize winners - we tend to find a lot of very clever and hardworking people who have lots of time and experience in their field. They had to work very hard to get lucky.

You also tend to find a larger number of equally skilled people who found the same lucky break just a little bit later, or their work went left on step 47 when the current author went right. They both did really great for the first 46 steps!

The limit is twofold: funding and the public desire to continue that funding.

Interesting thought experiment. It's usually positioned as how much area of solar panels are required to move a train.

At the moment, it seems impossible to build an electric container ship to replace current shipping methods. The goal has moved to building smaller electric boats with batteries that get swapped out at the port. They also make more stops than current ships, which presents an interesting problem with shipping queues at ports...

Panamax style ships have engines about 80 MW in size. Crudely, the batteries required for the duration of the voyage would weigh more than the carrying capacity of the boat. Batteries are really inefficient with poor energy density when compared to almost any liquid/gas fuel.

On-board generation of even 5% of that required energy is 400kW. Plug that into any calculator for roof top solar and you will find the area required is massive.

You also want the solar panel to be angled correctly towards the sun. That's going to decrease the solar efficiency even further. For instance, your sail is probably going to be positioned roughly vertically, instead of the more ideal angled towards the sun or position on a tracking system to orient to the best angle.

Naturally occuring chytridiomycosis is a species of fungus that has made extinct about 90 species of frog within the last few decades.

That's about 1 in 16 known types of frog - now extinct.