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I expect some simple math based on the estimated mass and size of the universe would suggest that is not the case unless we have greatly confused some of the variables.

Estimates of the mass of the observable universe range from 3.0E+50 kilo's to 1.6E+60 kilo's. Citations.

Wikipedia has it as 8.0E+52 kilos.

A black hole with the wikipedia mass has an event horizon radius of approximately 1.9E+26 meters. Compare with the radius of the observable universe, which is umm.. approximately 1.3E+26 meters. In other worse, if the wikipedia mass is correct, then we are inside a black hole assuming that the Schwarzschild equation for calculating event horizons is correct. I think the existance of dark energy has changed the game tho, such that we certainly cont be confident of the Schwarzschild radius calculation at such large scales.

That the study was conducted at the behest of Taser International on a handful of sheep who were anesthetized (which at the very least meant that stress levels were far lower than those of conscious subjects ) gives me no cause for suspicion at all.

Not only that, but I seriously doubt that most meth addicts who get tasered have a low or controlled level of meth in their system, such as the sheep would have had. Meth addicts are much more likely to have much higher levels in their system since their body needs more of it to get high due to usage.

I think Taser got what they paid for: a good reference for mindless PR. However, I doubt this would stand-up in a credible medical journal, or even on Mythbusters for that matter. A Taser is basically a ranged defibrillator with prongs instead of paddles!

Apparently, the American Heart Association recommends a defibrillator's maximum energy output be 360J and operational voltages are in the 200V-1700V range.

A Taser, on the other hand, typically puts out 200-300kV.

Can we assume that a Taser's energy levels would be greater than 360J presuming the resistance value of the meth addict is 100M ohm, as the voltage levels of the Taser are 100 times larger than a defibrillator's? 1 J = 1 Watt-second and a Taser is active for up to 5 seconds after the trigger is pulled. Is there an electrical engineer in the house that can calculate the energy a Taser releases compared to the defibrillator's max? I presume it would be higher than the defibrillator's considering the difference in voltage levels, but the current's path is possibly not always directly through the heart.

Meth addict having a heart attack after being tased? PLAUSIBLE!

Yes. Even a magazine is too heavy, but usually you can rest it on your chair/lap until you need to turn the page. Now you have this gadget that needs lots of user input/interaction...hello gorilla arms. It isn't the ability to lift and hold the device or media, it is the need to continuously hold it and interact with it for long periods of time that becomes the problem.

I compiled some weights to compare items you hold in front of you (or don't in case of textbook):

Wii Remote / Nunchuk: 3.1oz / 2.6oz
1984 Paperback 248pgs: 5.6oz
Kindle: 10.2oz
People Magazine: 11.5oz
Kindle DX: 19oz
War and Peace paperback 1424pgs: 19oz
Ipad: 25oz
Average Physics Textbook: 58oz

It's impossible for a balloon to get that high, because there is no atmosphere at that height

FWIW, the Space Shuttle has never truly left left the Earth's atmosphere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth

highest unmanned balloon flight:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_altitude_record
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/ValerieChang.shtml

62 miles/100km is considered the practical edge of space, but you don't actually get outside of the atmosphere until you're more than halfway between here and the moon.

Google holds the weight of milk at '4.5 lbs/gallon'.

For what it is worth, milk is more than 90% water, which weighs in at about 9 pounds per gallon. The rest of milk is mostly fats and proteins, which are not drastically different in density than water.

A little searching around yields the density of milk to be around 1.02-1.06 g/cc (or kg/L). This translates to, you guessed it, about 9 pounds per gallon.

Also, any farmer could tell you that a hundredweight of milk (a touch over 100 pounds - go figure) is about 12 gallons.

So there's a factor of two (or one half) to muddle into your calculations.

If we started to use water at that rate right now, we'd exhaust the Moon's supply by sometime this summer.

That said, I would expect Moon dwellers to be more conscious of their water use, and to recycle their wastewater to a much greater extent. The population of the Moon also won't approach that of NYC any time soon.

On the other hand, it's probably not a good idea to assume that we will recover water from the Moon's surface with 100% efficiency. As well, very few New Yorkers are likely to use their tap water as a source of (for example) rocket fuel.

That's certainly a point, but if you watch the video at the top of the page, the mosquitoes are as good as dead in about 4-5 wing beats. According to this hastily gathered source, mosquito wings beat anywhere from 250 to 1000 Hz. We're talking single digit milliseconds to cook these bugs. Wiki puts their flight speed at around 1-2 km/hr.

If we accept an estimate of 10 ms to cook a bug, and a 2 km/hr flight speed, a mosquito could move as much as 5 mm (or one third of its body length) in the time it takes to zap it.

So yes, tracking could be an issue. But I can't see it being any trouble at all once you've targeted the thing.

1 atm = about 100 kilopascals

according to http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/PavelKhazron.shtml, At the centre, the pressure is about 380GPa (380,000,000,000pascal)

so pressure at earth's center is about 3.8 million atmospheres. Quite a bit shy of 40. But that's assuming the same radius and density, which are probably quite a bit off. But not by that much I don't think.

Pretty good information about high-altitude skydiving here: Speed of a Skydiver

I just did a few quick calculations. Assuming humans have 2 square meters of skin, and stood naked in direct sunlight in the best conditions for 8 hours per day, and assuming 5% efficiency for photosynthesis, we would only get enough energy to provide for 11 hours of sleep (250 BTU/hr), 7 hours of sitting still (400 BTU), 4 hours of light work (650 BTU) or 1 hour of heavy work (2400 BTU). We'd still probably need to consume 2/3 or so of our normal caloric intake from food.

Sources:
http://www.solarexpert.com/Heat-theory.html
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/IgorFridman.shtml
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/514275
http://www.ccmr.cornell.edu/education/ask/index.html?quid=1021

> freestanding or otherwise

I have regularly worked to build more than 1 mile tall structures while working on the oil rigs back then. We inserted permanent steel casing after digging the hole most of the time so the casing would constitute a taller non-freestanding permanent steel structure ;-)

While drilling in the Rockies, we were well above sea level so our steel structures would actually be standing higher than the 'Dubai Tower' which I think is is at sea level (or almost).

The deapeast holes are well above 5 miles !

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/AdamCassino.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well

This table of shell datashows some of the previous technology. I'm not convinced that by the time you build this, with a final stage rocket and guidance system, that it will be quite as cheap as implied. And the final stage needs to be really reliable, other nations would get upset if the payload didn't make it to orbit and big chunks of rocket fuel started coming down on them. And if the final stage doesn't work right, the [DESTRUCT] option might not, either.

My personal favorite is rail car to SCRAMJET ignition speed, airplane tech to get up to 50-70k ft and then one rocket stage to go to LEO. You don't need to lift the oxidizer (using air), you use aerodynamic lift initially, with a high lift to thrust efficiency, and the g-forces could be kept lower than any short duration impulse (gun) launcher.

I think we're closer to having the technology, too.

The Von Neumann-Landauer limit suggests that each bit of information lost requires ln(2)*kT of energy which is released as heat. Assuming that, as a minimum, it is necessary to flip through all the bits in the key to brute force it then a 512 bit key which requires 2^512 - 1 bit flips corresponding to an energy of 4*10^133 Joules if done at room temperature or around 6*10^121 Joules if done at the coldest temperature yet achieved which is 450 pico Kelvin. Given a universe of mass 1.6*10^55 kg Einstein's relation suggests than if this were entirely converted to energy then only 1.4*10^72 Joules would be available. So even converting the entire universe to energy and using it to run your computer you'd still fall short (by a factor of 10^49) of the energy required to brute force that 512 bit key.

It's not the rate of energy release that is an issue, but rather energy density. There's also no reason why a high density (or high capacity) battery would be any less safe than low density batteries. I mean, most people are perfectly comfortable driving around in their cars, which has far more energy stored in its fuel tank than any fully-charged laptop battery—not to mention being far more volatile as well.

Put it another way: would you be worried walking around with a piece of charcoal in your pocket? The energy density of a li-ion battery is 540 kilojoules per kilogram. The energy density of coal is 24 megajoules per kilogram. Oh, and a kilogram of fat? that's 37.7 megajoules. So batteries have quite a ways to go.

There's no reason why we can't come up with high energy density batteries that are safe, stable, and release their energy in a controlled manner. Perhaps it can't be done with li-ion technology, but I'm sure it can be done. We just need some new breakthroughs in battery technology. But these types of revolutionary technological changes can only be effected by new knowledge gained through basic research. Unfortunately, most government funding seems to go into applied research these days.

Lastly, if you're still worried about carrying "too much energy" around in your pocket in the form of an electricity, just remember that E=mc^2. So a single gram of material of any form carries 89.87 terajoules of energy. So even an uncharged 1 ounce cellphone battery possesses 2.5 petajoules of energy, or about the same amount of energy as 41 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs.

It's not the rate of energy release that is an issue, but rather energy density. There's also no reason why a high density (or high capacity) battery would be any less safe than low density batteries. I mean, most people are perfectly comfortable driving around in their cars, which has far more energy stored in its fuel tank than any fully-charged laptop battery—not to mention being far more volatile as well.

Put it another way: would you be worried walking around with a piece of charcoal in your pocket? The energy density of a li-ion battery is 540 kilojoules per kilogram. The energy density of coal is 24 megajoules per kilogram. Oh, and a kilogram of fat? that's 37.7 megajoules. So batteries have quite a ways to go.

There's no reason why we can't come up with high energy density batteries that are safe, stable, and release their energy in a controlled manner. Perhaps it can't be done with li-ion technology, but I'm sure it can be done. We just need some new breakthroughs in battery technology. But these types of revolutionary technological changes can only be effected by new knowledge gained through basic research. Unfortunately, most government funding seems to go into applied research these days.

Lastly, if you're still worried about carrying "too much energy" around in your pocket in the form of an electricity, just remember that E=mc^2. So a single gram of material of any form carries 89.87 terajoules of energy. So even an uncharged 1 ounce cellphone battery possesses 2.5 petajoules of energy, or about the same amount of energy as 41 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs.

The total mass of the oceans is about 1.4*10^21 kg. The total mass of the atmosphere is about 5*10^18 kg. That means the oceans weigh about 300 times as much as the atmosphere.

The heat capacity of water is about 4000 J * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1. The heat capacity of air is about 1 kJ * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1, or about 1000 J * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1.

So since there's 300 times as much water as there is air, and the heat capacity of water is 4 times larger, heating up the atmosphere by 1200 degree Celsius would take the same amount of energy as heating up the oceans by 1 degree Celsius. This may not prove or disprove your point, I just started thinking about numbers when you said "raising the temperature of a body of water by a few degrees".

Except we don't know exactly what raising the temperature of the oceans by one degree will do.

The total mass of the oceans is about 1.4*10^21 kg. The total mass of the atmosphere is about 5*10^18 kg. That means the oceans weigh about 300 times as much as the atmosphere.

The heat capacity of water is about 4000 J * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1. The heat capacity of air is about 1 kJ * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1, or about 1000 J * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1.

So since there's 300 times as much water as there is air, and the heat capacity of water is 4 times larger, heating up the atmosphere by 1200 degree Celsius would take the same amount of energy as heating up the oceans by 1 degree Celsius. This may not prove or disprove your point, I just started thinking about numbers when you said "raising the temperature of a body of water by a few degrees".

Except we don't know exactly what raising the temperature of the oceans by one degree will do.

The total mass of the oceans is about 1.4*10^21 kg. The total mass of the atmosphere is about 5*10^18 kg. That means the oceans weigh about 300 times as much as the atmosphere.

The heat capacity of water is about 4000 J * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1. The heat capacity of air is about 1 kJ * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1, or about 1000 J * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1.

So since there's 300 times as much water as there is air, and the heat capacity of water is 4 times larger, heating up the atmosphere by 1200 degree Celsius would take the same amount of energy as heating up the oceans by 1 degree Celsius. This may not prove or disprove your point, I just started thinking about numbers when you said "raising the temperature of a body of water by a few degrees".

The total mass of the oceans is about 1.4*10^21 kg. The total mass of the atmosphere is about 5*10^18 kg. That means the oceans weigh about 300 times as much as the atmosphere.

The heat capacity of water is about 4000 J * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1. The heat capacity of air is about 1 kJ * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1, or about 1000 J * kg ^ -1 * K ^ -1.

So since there's 300 times as much water as there is air, and the heat capacity of water is 4 times larger, heating up the atmosphere by 1200 degree Celsius would take the same amount of energy as heating up the oceans by 1 degree Celsius. This may not prove or disprove your point, I just started thinking about numbers when you said "raising the temperature of a body of water by a few degrees".

All through these comments I repeatedly see twice the surface are of texas, and 1/3 a percentage point. Yet these numbers really are for less then what is imagined. Surface area, were people measure their exitence is different then say an oceanic fish. Who isn't worried at all at the surface area. He cares about the VOLUME of the water. Where he actually lives. The Volume of the Earths oceans, 1.37 billion cubic kilometers, estimate from http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/SyedQadri.shtml. The volume of the garbage patch is near impossible to say. The average depth of the ocean is 3.8 km. Say that this microscopic debri penetrates the surface of the ocean at 3 meters, close to 10ft, highly over estimated. so you have an area, 0.33% of the surface. You will get a contaminated amount of ocean water 2.6 x 10^-4. Also written as 0.00026% of the water. So that would actually be 177000 people, of the 6.8 billion to put it in perspective. So using these numbers, if all the life in that stretch of area was contaminated and sick, it would be like having 177000 people in the world sick, at the same time! Wow this rates up there with the most significant find since they found out eggs are bad for you, or did the end saying they were good?

It rotates, very slowly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus
http://www.universetoday.com/guide-to-space/venus/how-long-is-a-day-on-venus/
http://nineplanets.org/venus.html
http://www.doub.net/Enseignement/VRML/Exemples/CyberAstronomy/Venus/HTML/index.html
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/JessicaBrodkin.shtml

Do *you* know the actual physical volume of "60,000 metric tons" of nuclear waste, offhand?

Plutonium: 19816 kg/m^3 http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Plutonium.htm
Uranium: density = 19.05 grams per cubic centimetre = 19,050 kg/m^3 http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_Weight_of_1_cubic_meter_of_uranium

60000 tons / 19 tons per cubic meter = ~ 3158 cubic meters, or approximately 1 to 3 olympic swimming pools, depending on depth. http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/JeffreyGilbert.shtml

This nuclear waste stuff redefines the meaning of the term "heavy" in heavy waste.

When I look up the total land area of the earth i get different numbers ranging from 148M sq. km to 153M sq. km.
So an average of 150.5M sq. km + or minus @2.5M sq. km or @965k sq. miles

So they're mapping to less than the margin of error for different sources as to the total land area.
But what I find interesting is that there appears to be variations equal to three times the area of Alaska (656k sq. Miles).

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/DanielChen.shtml

That's your argument against hydrogen fuel cells as an energy source? That, since the hydrogen fuel cell was discovered in 1839 it is obviously past any chance of improvement? In that case, we should have given up on fuel oils a long time ago. I mean, oil wells were dug in about 347 by the Chinese and it took till 1847 before someone successfully distilled crude into lantern oil. And EROEI? Complete bullshit metric for the situation. Yes, it is a great guide to the feasibility of a system. But we know that the EROEI for oil is going to go up, and possibly soon.

The point of portable hydrogen fuel cells is not to convert every home in the world into it's own hydrogen production station. At the moment, that would have a really horrid energy return because of the current inefficiencies in solar panels. One of the goals is to replace the internal combustion engine because we know that, at some arguable point in the future, we will not be able to get oil cheaply any more. If we move the oil demand from the end users, where the engine is not all that damn efficient any ways, to the large power plants where the scale of the operations allows it to be used more efficiently than we have just bought time to continue finding a replacement source for oil

Since you didn't feel like bringing facts to the party, allow me to do that for you. The average car requires around 20 to 200 kW to operate according to this physics book. Let's start at the low end, since the same site also says that a typical automobile only requires about 15kW to maintain a speed of 50 miles per hour. So, a 20kW engine would get a car slowly up to speed. How much would that engine cost at the absurdly high price of 73$ per kilowatt? 1460 bucks. And, a quick google search puts the price of a rebuilt combustion engine right in the same price range. Now, it would result in a slower accelerating vehicle, but that is tolerable for a technology that is still in it's relative infancy. After all, the model T's engine only produced around 15 kW. And that was, what, 86 years after the first internal combustion engine was made in 1823. How dare we push technology forwards, using concepts that were discovered decades ago. How could we ever think those technologies would mature.

Now, before you think me all snark and no thought, I offer you this. I'll retract all of my statements if you can respond with facts, and without trite statements like "The so-called hydrogen economy is a lie." Of course the "so-called hydrogen economy" is a lie, that's why it's the "so-called" one. No more priming statements like "true believers", and then we'll talk.

The point you are missing is that generally when someone is "light polluting" it is for a reason.

That's a lot of faith that things are thought through with perfect foresight. I've been thinking about how baked-in light pollution is to American infrastructure, and I've come to think it's a pretty good example of how hard sustainable infrastructure really is.

Sure, it diminishes the view, but it is probably doing something else useful like lighting a room or a path.

So why exactly do we illuminate things at night? As far as I can tell it's primarily on safety grounds. That seems pretty reasonable and a good trade, right? A little extra light and voile a dark dangerous place becomes a safe lit one.

A couple crashes on a treacherous stretch of in relatively short succession, and the public demands that something be done about the dangerous road. The road authorities respond by altering the alignment and illuminating that stretch plus some before and after for good measure. Then light comes to be considered essential for safety on roads carrying a certain volume of traffic and becomes a requirement for receiving federal highway funding. This is, not entirely coincidentally, good business for both highway contractors (a strong lobby, both locally and nationally) and local electrical utility (another strong lobby locally and nationally). The question that's hard to answer is exactly how safer is the road? If traffic volume increases and there are the same number or more accidents, does that mean the lighting didn't work? But it doesn't really mean it did work, either. Try an exercise of adding up the wattage of street lamps as you drive along a highway from one city to another. Now think about all those watts being used to pump out light when there are no cars there at all, or very few.

You can repeat the exercise for people lighting their porches, then yards and driveways to secure their houses against intruders. Sure, pitch dark places have lots of dangers, and illumination does lower some dangers, but you can't eliminate the danger simply by simply illuminating more and more. Lots of crime happens during broad daylight. Clearly simple fear of the dark drives the impulse to illuminate everything, much like fear of flying drives insane and useless airport security, even though your likelihood of dying in a car crash is orders of magnitude greater than that of dying on a plane.

Finding a balance for these things requires pretty careful thought about when something actually works, and when it doesn't. In the case of infrastructure like lighting, where you have vested interests and an emotional overlay, and where public perception is that things should just work, that's very hard to do. But making our use of technology sustainable is going to require that we go back, try to dig out the real problem from the cruft and figure out when we can make things better by using less. It can be done, but I sure don't see a lot of signs that it's going to be easy.

It does: http://www.regentsprep.org/Regents/math/algtrig/ATP8b/exponentialResource.htm . It falls off as e to the negative one seventh times height in kilometers. I couldn't find a plot though, argh. According to: http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JaredGoldberger.shtml, at the top of everest atmopheric pressure is 30kPa, 101 or so is normal at sea level, so it is a bit less than a third there.

Science degree, actually.

The engineering degree wouldn't come out to play until actual engineering made an appearance.

Sigh...

Somebody piped up that they'd been working on a solar-powered car out at the local airport.

1. An EV takes about 1kwh to go 1 mile.
2. The sun's power on the surface is ~ 1.4kW/m^2.
3. Average footprint of a car: Honda Civic: 4.5Mx1.4M, surface area: 6.5m^2, being generous. No loss for windows, the car's covered in solar panels, etc...
Math:
40mph@1kwh/mile = 40kwh/hour = 40 kw needed.
6.5m^2*1.4kW/m^2 = 9kW, assuming 100% effective solar cells. More likely 1.8-2.7kw assuming real world 20-30% efficient cells.

So the solar cells are producing ~6% of the power necessary for the car. Even with batteries, you'd need 16-17 hours of sun for every hour of operation. You'd be better off putting the panels on your roof and feeding to the grid then using the grid to charge your electric car, than to risk the expensive and fragile cells in an accident.

As for the $5 of 'fuel' to get it started, I have no clue. What kind of fuel is it? Heck, I don't even know if they're proposing using electric solar panels. It could be a solar steam engine for all I know, but the energy requirements are the same, and a solar steam engine would present efficiency problems of it's own, especially on a mobile platform(basically, solar steam scales up well, it's best used for huge, static, power production plants).

Do you agree with my math? Is there something missing? Competition solar 'cars' work by weighing less than go carts, operating in a desert during the summer(and hoping for no clouds), having low maximum speeds, extreme profiling, limited to the driver, no cargo room, little to no considerations for safety in a crash. Which wouldn't work for a 'family commuter'.

Do you have a specific proposal in that page you'd like for me to comment on? Keep in mind on any 'patent suppression' that patents expire, and to get one requires people to register that idea. After the expiration, anybody can take the patent documentation to build their own device.

If I thought my feet were going to be stepped on, I would still pick the elephant before a woman in stilettos.

a traveler at a velocity 0.9 times the speed of light will make the trip in only a few years

A speck of paint put a nearly quarter inch wide pit in the window of the space shuttle.

http://www.space.com/spacewatch/space_junk.html

Bear in mind as the article mentions orbital velocities are as slow as 17,500 mph. The speed of light is approx. 670,000,000 mph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

If you're going at 0.9c, hitting anything the size of a golf is going to end your trip real quick!

A golf ball has the mass of about 0.046kg.

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/ImranArif.shtml

At 0.9c it would have about 5.4*10^15 J of KE.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/releng.html

In contrast, a 20 kiloton fission bomb has about 8.4*10^13 J.

http://www.chemcases.com/nuclear/nc-09.htm

Another way to look at it is this... you're not going towards Alpha Centauri at 0.9c ... Alpha Centauri is coming towards you at 0.9c.

Granted the space between here and Alpha Centauri is mostly empty, but what are the chances of hitting anything within a couple of orders of magnitude of the mass of a golf ball b/w here and Alpha Centauri? Even hitting something 1/100 its mass at that speed is going to be like a small nuke going off.

As we are in 2009, which is less than half way to 2030, let be generous and say there are 900 million cars on the road today.

This means we need to plant trees on 1.8 billion acres.

Considering that the Sahara Desert is over 2 billion acres, I think we have plenty of space. and as the Sahara is not too densely populated, it won't affect too many people, and will actually provide a lot of work for people in Africa, which will go a long way to solving may problems there.

Note: There are other deserts that could be used as well ;)

Salt storage isn't something that scales down well; it's used by solar thermal plants, not solar voltiac cells. You wouldn't be placing this every mile, you'd be keeping it at the solar plant.

In my combined vision for the future I figure a couple things:

1. Plug in Hybrids/EVs will have a far greater role.
2. Due to expense/savings, many/most home charging stations will have load leveling capabilities.
3. Putting a PHEV/EV in a garage will swamp all but the most extreme energy saving measures otherwise taken. The tesla roadster has a 53kwh battery, and uses 28 kwh per 100 miles. 3.57 miles/kwh. Figure an annual average driving distance of 15000 miles, that's 4.2K kwh/year, 350 kwh/month. About 50% of the average annual usage of households in the USA(8,900 kwh/year. Keep in mind that the Tesla is light and efficient compared to most EVs due to it's sports car heritage and LiIon batteries. Oh, and that most families at this point have 2 or more vehicles.

A - Given 1&3, More generating capacity will be needed, not less, even if our population remains stable.
B - Given A&2, the difference between peak and baseload should shrink.
C - Despite 3, energy saving and leveling measures should be taken where practical.
D - Despite what realtors tell us, homes DON'T always increase in value. It's mostly the land the house sits on. At some point it's worth it to tear the sucker down and build a *GOOD* house on the plot. Good today = energy efficient. All sorts of tricks are possible with a new house that aren't possible or practical with an old one. But I'd put a dryer(30A@220V) or even stove(50A) plug into the garage.
E - Save the oil/NG for building materials and long range high speed travel.

Get people off of direct electric heat and towards geothermal heat pumps. Interesting tidbit - did you know that heat pump water heaters are produced? They'll cool and dehumidify the air around the hot water tank while heating the water. Cost is around a third that of direct electric. They've also developed heat pump dryers - they need a line to a drain like the washer, but use substantially less electricity and dry clothes faster with less heat. If I was running a laundrymat in a trustworthy area, I'd seriously consider them - not only would it reduce my expenses with the dryers, it'd also reduce the amount of AC needed.

I figure lots of solar in areas where peak demand tends to coincide with peak sun, wind in the appropriate areas, all backed up by a ton of nuclear capacity - and nuclear CAN load level; they're generally run at max capacity because they're the cheapest source of demand electricty going. Spreading solar out is pretty much required; in my area putting a wind turbine up next to/in a lot of the small towns would reduce the amount of electricity lost on wires.

A 20' container is approx 19' x 7' x 7' or 1.6M cubic inches (it's a bit bigger, but I left room for pallets, etc).

If a CFL + packaging is 3" x 4" x 6" = 72 in^3 then you can fit around 22,000 of them into a 20' container

This site claims you can ship a 20' container from China to the US for $3800 USD

Let's say that 75% of the shipping cost goes toward fuel, the rest goes to labor, paying off the ship, container rental, etc. Sounds reasonable.

I'm going to use Diesel for the energy calculations. I know that ships run off bunker fuel, not diesel, but I have to think that the cost per unit of energy for bunker fuel is cheaper than diesel since it's less refined, so by using Diesel I'm being conservative. Right now you can buy diesel for under $2/gal, so with 75% of $3800, we can buy 1425 gallons of diesel.

Diesel has 38 MJ of energy per liter (143 MJ/gal), or 40KWh according to the units command.

So, each light bulb uses 40KWh / 22,000 = 1.8 KWh (1800 Wh)of energy

A 29 Watt CFL can replace a 100 Watt incandescent bulb, so that's a 71 watt savings... 1800Wh / 71 W = 25 hours

Sooooo....a CFL will save the energy used to ship it in about 25 hours of operation. CFL's are supposed to last 5000 hours, so over its lifetime, it will save over 200 times more energy than used to ship it. (of course, this is only this shipping energy, and ignores the extra energy that it took to manufacture the CFL it as compared to an incadescent. I don't know how to do that math).

The volume of all of the Earth's oceans combined is estimated at 1.37 × 10^9 km^3. The volume of the moon is ~4/3*pi*(3476km)^3 = 1.75925143 × 10^11 km^3. Given that, I don't think the pacific ocean is a hole left from the moon splitting from the Earth. But then, IANAAP.

Correct, the total volume of the oceans is ~1.3*10^6 km^3, the volume of the moon is ~2.2*10^10 km^3 so it's not even close.

Not to mention, according to the Giant Impact Hypothesis, the iron core of the mars-size body that struck the earth sunk down and was mostly absorbed into the earth's core. The moon has far less iron in its core than most other bodies in the solar system. Consider also that tectonic plates have been moving for billions of years and have formed more than a dozen different "super-continents" over time in various configurations. There's no way the Pacific ocean is a gouge from the moon-making.

Correct, the total volume of the oceans is ~1.3*10^6 km^3, the volume of the moon is ~2.2*10^10 km^3 so it's not even close.

Don't read Genesis, read elsewhere. For example, the following indicate that it was the sun that moved in the heavens, and that it was the earth that stood still, implying its position in the centre of the universe.

Joshua 10:12-13
Then spoke Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the men of Israel; and he said in the sight of Israel, "Sun, stand thou still at Gibeon, and thou Moon in the valley of Aijalon." And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stayed in the midst of heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day.

Habakkuk 3:11
The sun and moon stood still in their habitation at the light of thine arrows as they sped, at the flash of thy glittering spear.

Psalms 19:4-6
yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes forth like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and like a strong man runs his course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them; and there is nothing hid from its heat.

Ecclesiastes 1:5
The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.

The following all indicate that the earth did not move:

1 Chronicles 16:30
tremble before him, all earth; yea, the world stands firm, never to be moved.

Psalms 93:1
The Lord reigns; he is robbed in majesty; the lord is robbed, he is girded with strength. Yea, the world is established; it shall never be moved.

Psalms 96:10
Say among the nations, "The Lord reigns! Yea, the world is established, it shall never be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity."

These were taken from here, where there are a few more references.

Hasn't this "glass is a liquid" bullshit been debunked countless times?

Yes, it has.

Here are some links:

http://sciencegeekgirl.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/liquid-glass/
http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/5_30_98/fob3.htm
http://www.thefoa.org/tech/glass.htm
http://dwb.unl.edu/Teacher/NSF/C01/C01Links/www.ualberta.ca/~bderksen/florin.html

This urban legend has been thoroughly debunked. An amorphous solid (which is what glass is) is still a solid.

As for the other posters in this thread and in parallel branches who claim that there's no melting point for glass... this is also factually untrue. See this article for details.

Oh don't worry. It'll be a one-way trip.

And for all those people saying how they'd like to go there please try spending a year in one of Antarctica's dry valleys while wearing a space suit and living in a tiny craft with minimal supplies or repair abilities. You'd still have more interesting and friendly scenery than you'd have on Mars.

Actually, the sun ROTATES

So I'd say just watch it for about a month and you'll get to see the 'whole thing'.

But thanks for playing.

While I entirely agree with your message, I feel that I should mention the accepted value for insolation is closer to 1400 watts per square meter, not 400 -- which only goes to reinforce your point. Just thought you might like to know.

An earth-like atmosphere? ... they just need one that's breathable and that won't actively kill them.

Umm... that would be an Earth-like atmosphere: one that's breathable and won't actively kill [humans].

And just where do you propose the (Human breathable) gases will come from? Mars' current atmospheric pressure is currently one-thousand times less that of Earth's.

Even if the gases can be produced there's the very large problem of the significantly smaller mass Mars has in comparison to the Earth's. This will greatly affect the gases' retention. For all we know there is an equilibrium between a planet's mass, it's average temperature, it's volume of atmosphere, and (as a far-fetched idea) the solar winds - that is to say, what if there's a big surprise with the rate of atmospheric retention once the volume increases above it's maximum (in relation to other, more static factors); that the rate of lose could increase dramatically over a certain volume. Who knows?

If you go here

So wouldn't that tend to prevent anything man made from getting near the sun, much less its "surface" / chromosphere?

RS

From your own link: Though the corona's temperature is high it's molecules are so far apart that the gases release little heat. If a person were to stand on the sun's corona they wouldn't burn, they would freeze in the near vacuum of the corona.

If you go here

there's this data:

"Gas particles in the corona can reach temperatures of up to 1,700,000 ÂC"

- Prentice Hall Earth Science. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987: 73.

So wouldn't that tend to prevent anything man made from getting near the sun, much less its "surface" / chromosphere?

RS

Most of us cannot see more than about 1 million colors, I believe.

It seems that the "experts" also do believe rather than know. Numbers differ from 100,000 to 10Mio here .

CC.

Yeah, I read that, and I'll give the artist credit for touching on the required elements. However, this is where the reality-disconnect happens. Just because you drew a red cylindrical thingy and declared it to be an ultracapacitor or high-pressure accumulator, doesn't make it so.

Power density is the issue. If you look at gasoline, you're talking about 45 MJ/kg. The best batteries in the world don't approach that energy density; ultracaps are worse. With Li-ion batteries in the 250 Wh/l range, and say a 10kW motor, your 1-hour run time will require at least 40 liters of battery (assuming 100% conversion efficiency.) I'll spot you a 4x improvement in the battery tech in the short term. You still need 10 liters of battery. The "artist" batteries are ... volumetrically optimistic.

Your experiments are dumb and irrelevant. Here are some non-hypothetical numbers:

Mass of the atmosphere: 5.15*10^18kg
Mass of the oceans: 1.4*10^21kg

So, the oceans are about 250 times more massive than the atmosphere. It also takes about 4 times as much energy to raise a mass of liquid water by one degree as the same mass of air. Ergo, it takes about 1,000 times as much heat to raise the Earth's water temperature as its air. This is neglecting that the heat of fusion of water is about 80 times that of its specific heat, so the polar ice caps can absorb vast amounts of energy and skew the equation even more in favor of the water.

A thousand times. Three orders of magnitude. And again, you wouldn't have to use the extra energy for air condition, so the water cooling numbers are better still.

Kindergarten indeed.

At roughly $1000.00 per leter of Liquid He, Liquid Nitrogin is much cheaper.

Could be true, in principle. According to This site, the chromatic abberation of the eye is about 1 diopter across the red-blue range. However, although 1 diopter is the difference between focusing at 1 meter and at infinity, it is only the difference between focusing at 20 cm or 17 cm. And you keep the problem of lack of blue receptors.

I like the idea of gravitational batteries.

Suppose that solar cells get to the point where a few kilowatts of peak power can be put on the roof. That's a huge amount of energy, and the fatal problem is that you get it during the day when you're at work. Storing it in batteries would lead to a huge and expensive array. Even worse, that many batteries would mean that one would fail rather often.

But consider a hollow cylinder with a weight inside it. An electric motor would run from the solar cells during the day to lift the weight during the day. When you get home that same motor would run in dynamo mode. The weight would sink and you could use power. Once the weight hit the bottom you'd use the grid instead. A microprocessor would work out if you would be likely to have surplus power and sell it back to the grid if you live somewhere like Germany where this is worthwhile. Essentially you pay for the energy storage mechanism by exploiting the fact that power is more expensive in the evenings. And it would be if solar cells became economic. During the day, vast numbers of solar cells would push the price down.

My idea is that you sell a plastic cylinder containing a hollow tank. When it is installed, the installers would bury the cylinder and fill the hollow tank with concrete to increase the weight. Actually, you could build a shed sized storage device where a concrete cylinder is surrounded by concrete walls for safety. The whole thing would be sold hollow, you'd fill the cavities with concrete on installation.

Consider a 5m cube of concrete lifted 10m. That's 125m^3 of concrete, which weighs about 2300 kg/m^3. So 287000kg. Putting it into the equation for potential energy I get 28.175 MJ. Now 1kWh is 3.6MJ. So I can store 7.8kWh. Which is sufficient for storing energy from solar cells, even a sizable array. Done right it should have a much longer life than rechargeable batteries too.

Another possibility would be to build the house to weigh as much as possible, possibly around concrete weights, and on a mechanism that lets it rise a few centimetres when it was storing energy from the solar cells, then slowly sink back as the energy was used. I think I'd probably have a central chamber containing the weight though, and just move that.

Of course, you could build a huge storage device and attach it to a renewable power station too, to level out the varying power output from solar cells or wind generators. Or just attach it to the grid and buy power when it is expensive and sell it when it is cheap. People have actually built storage systems like this, using water as the weight -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity