But when you burn the algae, the CO2 is released again.
So pump it back into the algae pond. Carbon can be stored in algae just as well as it can be stored by pumping it underground.
Once a solar panel is made, it produces power for upwards of 25-30 years (minimum) without any further CO2 being put in the atmosphere.
An algae pond can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Currently, solar panels can't do that.
I'd like to also point out that Nanosolar's new method of printing solar panels almost has the price down to $1/Watt. Within the next 1-2 years, solar is going to be *dirt* cheap.
Hopefully that will happen soon. Or maybe we can use those "500 times better" solar panels that the schoolboy invented.
Are you saying we should store all the carbon as T-shirts?
Kittens, puppies, and t-shirts, yes. Amongst other things. Why not? Would you rather have a t-shirt, or the knowledge that some carbon dioxide had been pumped underground?
What you seem to forget, is that it costs energy to make stuff out of carbon. If it costs more energy to produce 5 tons of useful stuff per person per year than we get by burning fossil fuels than we should just stop burning fossil fuels (assuming we want to go carbon neutral).
Yes, it costs energy to make stuff. We get most of our energy from fossil fuels. We make lots of stuff. Just about all of it contains carbon. Some of that carbon comes from the atmosphere. We're already using fossil fuels to make stuff. That stuff is already storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
People will stop using fossil fuels when there is a cheaper and better replacement. Notice how hardly anybody uses whale oil for lighting any more. Even though people aren't burning whale oil for light, we still have lighting. People who think that we're going to stop using fossil fuels before we have some other form of energy aren't being realistic.
And guess what plants use energy to store CO2 as glucose, more energy than we got by producing that CO2 in the first place.
They get the energy from the sun. Same as the plants that died and turned into coal got their energy from the sun. It doesn't matter if it takes them more energy, because it's free.
> Why not grow the algae, dry it out, and burn it in the power plant?
Because solar panels are more efficient than the algae. Growing plants for no other reason than to burn them is madness.
An algae pond is a hole in the ground with water in it. It could have some pipes on the bottom for pumping carbon dioxide into the water. An algae pond might cost $1 per square meter. Solar panels cost $1000 per square meter. Since solar energy is free, it wouldn't matter if plants were only 10% as efficient as solar panels. It'd still be much cheaper to have an algae pond than solar panels. And solar panels don't absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Algae ponds can do that.
Yes, that would make sense. It also makes sense to grow the fastest growing useful plants all over the place. For example, cars are currently predominantly made of steel. But consider the Corvette, "wrap your ass in fiberglass". If we replace the glass in fiberglass with woven plant material, we can produce panels which store carbon. All we have to do is balance the books. If we want to release 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, then we'll need to take 30 billion tons out. So if we have 6 billion people, we could provide say 5 tons of carbon in the form of useful stuff for each person each year.
If the stuff wears out or isn't wanted any more, it can be collected and burned in the electricity-producing incinerator. Or it could be composted or mulched to improve plant growth. We'll have a lot of stuff, so there will be a lot of different uses.
Pumping carbon dioxide underground isn't the right thing to do. At least pump it into a pond and grow some algae with it. Then, dry out the algae, and turn it into plastic, fuel, animal food, etc. Why not grow the algae, dry it out, and burn it in the power plant?
Also I wish to complain about where it says C02 in the summary. "See Zero Two". Oh yeah baby, that's real science. How about changing it to CO2? "See Oh Two"?
That's what this "clean coal" thing is about, they want to store
the atoms underground. I'm just saying that we can store the
atoms as clothes, paper, furniture, boats, houses, puppies,
diamonds, cars, kittens, shoes, cotton plants, palm trees,
footballs, bricks, etc. There are heaps of things made out of
carbon on the planet. Each of them keeps some carbon atoms out of
the atmosphere. They don't have to keep it out of the atmosphere
forever. We just need enough of the things to keep enough atoms
out of the atmosphere at the time.
Like I said, we produce billions of tons of CO2 per year, that is
a LOT of stuff made out of carbon. It's probably much easier to
store much of that underground than to make all kinds of stuff
out of it.
The billions of tons of carbon dioxide we produce each year must
come from somewhere. Aliens aren't delivering it in spaceships.
The carbon dioxide comes from the billions of tons of fossil fuels
that we're mining, transporting, and burning. It should be obvious
that we are able to mine, transport, and burn all those tons of
fossil fuels, even though all that coal etc is "a LOT of stuff
made out of carbon".
Not only are we currently able to mine, transport, and use
billions of tons of fossil fuels every year, we are also able to
mine, harvest, manufacture, produce, transport, use, and consume
billions of tons per year of other stuff. Other stuff is defined
as anything that is not fossil fuels. Therefore, we clearly
already have the capacity to deal with amounts of stuff that you
consider "a LOT" and difficult to deal with.
All we have to do is to count the carbon atoms in the fossil
fuels we burn each year, and make sure we take that many carbon
atoms out of the atmosphere and the ocean in plant and animal
products. If we use those products for some years, then the
carbon is stored out of the atmosphere.
The problem is we produce billions of tons of CO2 each
year. Suppose your paper is made out of pure CO2. Even if we
produced a 1000 tons of paper each year and kept that paper
forever, that is less than 0.1% of the CO2 we produce every year.
Okay, now try to imagine what would happen if, rather than producing 1000 tons of paper, we produced billions
of tons of paper, kittens, puppies, diamonds, boats, and other
stuff every year. You know, like we already are. What percentage
would that be of the carbon dioxide we produce every year?
We are also water-based lifeforms. Surely it is
madness to complain about floods?
Floods often have bad effects. Complaining about floods isn't
madness. Water covers three quarters of the planet. It would be
madness to say that water is pollution. How can water be pollution
when it's everywhere?
The four most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen,
helium, oxygen, and carbon. How can carbon be called pollution?
It's everywhere.
Suppose we build machines that take carbon
dioxide out of the atmosphere, and convert it into cars,
buildings, boats, kittens, cotton plants, boats, puppies,
etc. Suppose that these machines allow us to take as much carbon
dioxide out of the atmosphere as we want. Suppose we've also got
solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal power stations powering
everything.
Suppose we didn't need to burn fossil fuels for energy. If we
had those machines, should we burn the fossil fuels and convert
it into kittens and other things? Or should we keep it buried
underground?
How can plants get us out of this mess? If the coal we're burning is made of dead plants, then plants got us into this mess, why can't they get us out?
The mess is caused by people getting carbon from outside our environment (deep underground) and putting it IN our environment. Plants did NOT get us in this mess.
If coal is made of plants, then coal is part of our environment. It's just part that has been turned into rock for a long time. Think about an atom of carbon in a hunk of coal. Imagine it being dug up and transported to a power plant and burned. It meets an oxygen molecule, and they join up to form a carbon dioxide molecule. That's pretty much all most people think about when they talk about global warming.
Here's the other part of the story that most people aren't thinking about. Instead of thinking about the atom of carbon in the present and in the future, think about its past. Think about where it came from.
The carbon atom in the hunk of coal was once a carbon atom in a plant, most likely about 300 million to 360 million years ago. That plant was turned into coal by being covered in mud and squashed for hundreds of millions of years.
The carbon atom must have been in the atmosphere or in the ocean in order to get absorbed by the plant. Those are pretty much the only places that plants get carbon dioxide. Therefore, carbon dioxide levels must have been much higher hundreds of millions of years ago. There had to be heaps of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and in the ocean in order for all that coal and other fossil fuel to form. It didn't just get put there by aliens. Fossil fuels are made of dead squished up plants and animals. Coal, oil, and natural gas were once alive.
So the only way that all the carbon could have gotten into the coal, oil, etc, is if it was all in the atmosphere and the ocean, and then plants sucked it out, and deposited their bodies to form future coal. For example, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the
Cambrian period averaged 4500ppm, over 10 times higher than current levels.
There is no way we could possibly get the atmosphere back up to 4500ppm. We would have to find, dig up and burn all the fossil fuel on the planet. And even that wouldn't be enough. We would also have to burn all the rock that has formed in the last billion years. Rock is made of calcium carbonate. The large sheets of limestone show that areas of the planet were covered with an ocean with a huge amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in it. That's how limestone gets formed. And limestone is partially solid carbon dioxide.
There is no need to keep a piece of paper forever. Suppose a ton of paper contains 250kg of carbon atoms. Suppose it takes ten years for a ton of paper to rot and convert into carbon dioxide. If you produce 100 tons of paper per year, you will end up with about 1000 tons of paper on hand at any time. That paper will contain 250 tons of carbon atoms. Those carbon atoms won't be in the atmosphere, because they are in the paper.
It's the same with coal. The only reason the carbon atoms are stuck in coal instead of being inside a puppy or a cotton plant is because they happened to be in those plants when they got buried. It's still a cycle, the same as paper rotting is a cycle. Burning coal is a natural process, which occurs even without human intervention. This should not be very surprising, since coal can be up to 100% carbon, and the atmosphere is 20% oxygen. Of course it will burn if the conditions are right. Maybe a lightning strike sets it off.
It's simply a balance problem. If we want to burn the coal, we need to store enough carbon atoms as something which isn't carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the ocean. That's what this "clean coal" thing is about, they want to store the atoms underground. I'm just saying that we can store the atoms as clothes, paper, furniture, boats, houses, puppies
It'd be more useful to grow plants that we can use the products from. For example, assume that a ton of coal contains 1 ton of carbon. Burning it will produce about 3.6 tons of carbon dioxide. That amount of carbon dioxide therefore contains 1 ton of carbon, and about 2.6 tons of oxygen.
Consider a cotton plant. When the cotton is picked from the plant, it contains carbon that the plant absorbed from the atmosphere. Let's assume that 4 tons of cotton contains 1 ton of carbon. That means that all the carbon from burning 1 ton of coal is stored in 4 tons of cotton. If we use the 4 tons of cotton to make clothes and other things, that stores the carbon in a form where it's not in the atmosphere. If the carbon isn't in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, it can't cause global warming.
And it's not just cotton. Every plant product contains stored carbon. To get the carbon, the plant had to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or from the ocean. Since this problem is all about balance, we should in theory be able to balance the amount of carbon being dug up and burned with the amount we store by harvesting plants and using them for long-lasting things. Even products like paper are useful, as long as they aren't burned once they aren't wanted any more.
If plant products are going to be burned, they should be burned in a power plant to produce electricity. It should be possible to replace coal with waste paper, and other waste plant products. This is already being done at various places around the world.
Of course people will object and say that this can't possibly work. How can plants get us out of this mess? If the coal we're burning is made of dead plants, then plants got us into this mess, why can't they get us out? Plants were able to absorb all of the carbon dioxide needed to make the coal in the first place. Surely with all the agricultural knowledge in the world, we can grow plants and absorb it again.
It's okay for kids to learn how to use Microsoft software. Microsoft knows that they have to provide educational software for that to happen. They couldn't sit back and allow Linux to dominate that market. The Egyptian and Peruvian governments believe that their children must learn how to use Microsoft software, since it's dominant.
It's easy to imagine that it will all go wrong in the future, and maybe it will. One good thing is that if XP on the XO fails, it'll be easy to install Linux on those machines. So Microsoft can't afford to boost the project at the start, and then let it die. If they do that, Linux will take over. Microsoft will have to commit to this project for years to come.
This will also allow direct comparisons between countries which give their children XP XOs and countries which issue Linux XOs. If the Linux ones are working well and the Windows ones are breaking too easily, it'll look very bad for Microsoft. Conversely, if the Windows ones are working well and the Linux ones turn out not to be doing the job, then future countries might like to choose Windows for their XOs.
The XO project has forced Microsoft to directly compete with Linux on the desktop. This is a battle that Microsoft must win. But can they do it?
Since literalists stake their fervor on a complete acceptance of the Bible
Apparently, these literalists believe that the bible is 100% literally true. Where do they get this idea? Does the bible say that the bible is 100% literally true? I don't think it does, because it says several times in the bible that it is not completely literally true. For example:
Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable. (Matthew 13:34)
A parable is not literally true, it's a comparison, an allegory. If somebody claims to be taking the bible completely literally, the obvious question to ask them is why they are doing that. If they are also claiming to base their beliefs totally on the bible, they should be able to point out the part of the bible which says that it should all be taken literally. Which they won't be able to, because the bible is chock-full of parables, stories, and symbolic language.
That's where this problem is coming from. Some people have decided that everybody must accept that the bible is completely literally true. And it's not. It's a spiritual book, not a science textbook.
Say our roads were only rated for vehicles traveling at 35 MPH, and we weren't investing in better roads -- while cars are capable of safely traveling at high speeds in may other countries, we remain stuck with 35 MPH limits. Now, you see? It shows how far we've fallen behind, that's what it has to do with it.
Suppose it would cost a trillion dollars to upgrade your roads to allow speeds of 75mph. At the same time, somebody is working on flying cars, which will cost twice as much as those old cars with wheels that need a road. If the flying cars can go 500mph, doesn't it make sense to not waste money on roads, and just go straight to flying cars?
Except after the initial outlay for the winbelt, you never need to crank again. Any man would pay $125 for indefinite free cranking.
Let me put it another way. For
$109 you can buy a 5 watt solar panel. Now do you really want to pay $125 to get 1 watt from a winbelt, when you could pay less and get 5 watts from a solar panel? Winbelts are too expensive, they cost 5 times as much as a solar panel.
Forty milliwatts for $5 is outrageously expensive. For $5 they could get one of those torches with the built-in generator and hand crank. They could crank it for 1 minute, then get 1 hour of light (if you believe the packaging). So assuming the torch has a 1 watt LED, the human needs to put in about 70 watts for 1 minute. To run a 1 watt LED off 40 mW generators, you need 25 generators, at a cost of $125. Better to go with the torch.
He *isn't* spelling out his punctuation.
"period (mostly North America) And nothing else; and nothing less; used for emphasis."
Please don't try and grammar/spelling/etc nazi without engaging brain, it makes you look silly.
He is spelling out punctuation. Look at your definition: "And nothing else". You mean like "end of sentence"? And what punctuation mark is often used to end a sentence? It's a period, isn't it? That's what "period" means, "end of sentence". The best way to represent this concept is by using the symbol "." because that's how it is commonly written, and therefore many people understand it.
Even using your definition of period meaning "and nothing else", the sentence is still atrocious, because after saying "and nothing else", he goes on to say something else. If you want to use period as emphasis, then the meaning will be "and nothing else", with the sense of "end of sentence". To continue your sentence after that is abominable. It'd be like if Forrest Gump would say "And that's all I have to say about that", but then continue talking about the same thing. Shutup Forrest shutup!
I think that this sentence is awful: "How in the world do you have this much phone sex, period, but especially at work, and not have anyone notice?". Are you seriously saying that you think that is a good sentence? It's horrible! Possibly I may have been too harsh in suggesting that the sentence should be taken outside and shot. But if nobody says anything, how will people ever improve their writing?
Spelling out period in a sentence for emphasis is like waggling your fingers around to represent quote marks while speaking. It's pretty silly. I'd recommend avoiding both those things. Period exclamation mark.
Suppose a stamp collector comes up to me and says "Hey, how about that stamp collecting?" I can smile and say "Sorry, I don't want to talk about stamp collecting. Would you like to talk about gardening?" So that problem is pretty much solved.
I don't see why doing some gardening would have to exclude caring about the war in Iraq. It seems possible to do both.
As for some hypothetical leader lying when they say that God told them to have a war, why should that be a surprise? They've been telling lies about so much other stuff, why wouldn't they lie about that too? Why should we specifically oppose a war because a politician said that "it's a mission from God"? Shouldn't we support or oppose a war based on many other factors, rather than what one person might have said about it?
Yes people are dying in Iraq. What are you saying I should do? Go join the Army and go to Iraq? How would having more soldiers there stop the war? How would more guns stop people from dying? How about if everybody involved in the war stops fighting and starts gardening instead? That would end the war and stop the killing.
Well, imagine if there were people who were trying to actively convert you to a stamp collector
There are such people. I regularly see advertisements encouraging people to collect stamps. The Post Office publishes some of the advertisements.
or at least force you to life your life so it won't offend the stamp collectors... Would you put any effort into not collecting stamps then, or would you just submit to the tyranny of stamp collectors?
I'd get on with doing whatever I want to do, and just ignore the stamp collectors. Who cares what they think? And if they say I really really really have to collect stamps because it's so great, I'd still ignore them if I'm not interested in stamp collecting. And I'd continue doing whatever I wanted to do. Suppose it was gardening. If somebody asked me what hobbies I enjoyed, I'd say "gardening". I might even say that I was a gardener. I wouldn't go around telling everybody that I am an "anti-stamp-collector" and getting into never-ending stupid arguments with stamp collectors. I'd just ignore them, because I don't care about stamp collecting. I like gardening. I'm a gardener.
And I'd never talk about stamp collecting again. On the internet, I wouldn't go to a big Stamp Collecting Forum and argue with stamp collectors about how their hobby is so lame and dumb. I wouldn't go to an Anti-Stamp-Collecting Forum and rabbit on about how bad stamp collectors are. I'd go to a big Gardening Forum and talk about gardening, which I like.
He didnt compromise accounts, in the summary it says he tapped into land lines.
He should have tapped in somewhere later in the system, so his calls wouldn't get charged to a customer. But hey, maybe he wanted to get caught.
Also I wish to complain about this sentence from the summary. This sentence should be taken outside and shot:
How in the world do you have this much phone sex, period, but especially at work, and not have anyone notice?
It's a bad idea to start spelling out your punctuation. As you can see in the above sentence, the author has ended up with the word "period' surrounded by commas. "Period" is supposed to end a sentence. And it is supposed to be written as "." not spelled out with letters. Spelling out "period" in the middle of a sentence, and surrounding it with commas, is madness exclamation mark. See question mark? It's stupid. Please don't spell out the word "period", use the popular abbreviation: .
These guys aren't anywhere near making anything as complex as actual biological life. What they're doing is more like biological engineering than biology.
It'd be interesting to see what happens if somebody did try to create something alive from scratch. Here we have one guy adding proteins to a lipid membrane to see if it can replicate itself. The article also mentions somebody else doing genetic engineering on some bacteria. But both of them are using parts made from living organisms.
Here's a report of some people who made some polio virus out of gene sequences they bought by mail order. Presumably the gene sequences they bought would have been made by some genetically engineered bacteria. So that is not really built from scratch. And also it's a virus, so many people don't consider it to be "alive".
It would be very interesting if somebody could work out how to make bacteria out of some simple organic chemicals, such as methane, ethanol, or sugars. Hooking together DNA made by a genetic engineering isn't really the same. The real test would be if somebody could make some bacteria, and those bacteria started growing and reproducing. This would possibly give some insight into whether life is just chemistry, or if there is something else required. It would also be a great boost to the theory of abiogenesis.
Wouldn't it be better to use two drives in RAID1 (mirroring)? That will give extra read speed, since it can read from either drive. It also provides a bit less chance of losing all the data on the drives, since they are mirrored. Drives are big and cheap, so mirrors are a good idea.
It would also be interesting to mirror a solid state drive with a mechanical drive. It would cost more than two mechanical drives, but less than two solid state drives. Hopefully mirroring an SSD with a HDD would combine the faster write speed of the HDD and the faster read speed of the SSD. It's a nice dream anyway, and I'm going to try it out once I get some SSDs.
Why does the media use foreign names for astronauts from other countries? We've got cosmonaut and now "yuhangyuan"? That's ridiculous. Is "astronaut" somehow reserved for only US spacefarers?
You're right! We should all use the same word. The first person in space was Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Of course you will agree that since we all want to use the same word, and that cosmonauts were first, we should call all spacefarers by the original name: cosmonauts. Right?
Because, given the way China tends to think, when I see them putting men in space, it makes me think they already have long term plans for trips to the moon, and perhaps even a permanent presence off-planet. And I say, it's about time.
Humans could do much worse than start making the steps to get us off this rock.
The first step would be to build a space station in Earth orbit. Okay, let's pretend that's done. Then we need to build a spaceship at the space station. This spaceship would be used to fly from the station out into space or the moon. It would never go to Earth, so it doesn't need to be streamlined. Then we can fly the fuel for it to the space station, where it can refuel. The advantage would be that we wouldn't need to launch the spaceship from Earth's surface every time. It can fly from earth orbit where the station is.
The spaceship would have to go find some fuel sources in space, and resources to build more ships and more space stations. Otherwise these materials would have to be flown up from Earth at great expense. They'd also have to build some space-greenhouses for growing plants for people to eat. And probably space-barns full of space-cows and space-chickens. And space-burger-joints selling squished-up space-cow burgers inna tube.
As for getting us off this planet, it might be possible. If we get some good advances in space travel, the cost of launching something into orbit might get down to $100/kg. That would be a cost of say $10,000 per person, so it's not completely unreasonable. We could launch the whole USA population into space for three trillion dollars! But they'd want somewhere to live, and stuff to eat. That's why we'd need the space stations, space barns, and space burger joints.
Then once we have people living in space for long enough, somebody can invent a hyperspace drive, or else we can build generation ships to fly to the next star over.
The carbon stored in oil was all in the atmosphere at the same time before it became locked up in plants and animals.
No, it wasn't all in the atmosphere at the same time. Most of it was in the ocean, same as most of the carbon dioxide is in the ocean now. Isn't this how the scientific theory goes: There was heaps of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Primitive plants developed, which absorbed the carbon dioxide, and produced oxygen. This switched the atmosphere over from a mix of carbon dioxide and nitrogen into a mix of oxygen and nitrogen. Therefore, before the plants, the atmosphere had a huge amount more carbon dioxide than it has now.
And yet, despite the much higher levels of carbon dioxide than we have now, life flourished. Mosses and ferns grew to gigantic sizes in the carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere. Then they died and got squished and turned into coal and oil. So if anybody tells you that we have to "save the planet" from carbon dioxide, ask them why the planet wasn't destroyed when the carbon dioxide levels were much higher than now. Where did the coal, oil, and all fossil fuels come from? From plants and animals which got their carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the ocean. Isn't that the standard scientific theory?
The objection that "it wasn't all in the atmosphere at the same time" is interesting. It implies that back in the olden days, when the coal seams and oil reservoirs were forming, the carbon dioxide was "somewhere else". Where was it then? How did the plants and animals get it into their bodies? Surely it must have been in the ocean or the atmosphere for a plant to absorb it, and from there an animal could eat the plant to get it.
The objection also implies that if we burn coal, oil, and gas, that all of the carbon dioxide will end up in the atmosphere at the same time. Of course, that won't happen. Think about the carbon dioxide from all the coal people have burned in all of human history. Where is it? Is it all in the atmosphere right now? No it isn't, a lot of it has been absorbed by the ocean, by plants, and by rock formation. Therefore, all the carbon dioxide we've released into the atmosphere isn't all still in there. So it can't all be in there at the same time, can it?
Secondly, all of the carbon dioxide from all of the oil, gas, and coal won't be in the atmosphere at the same time, because we haven't burned it all yet. We don't even know where all of it is, and of the stuff we do know about, we haven't dug it all up and burned it. There is still heaps left. For example, you may have heard of coal fields with hundreds of years of supply left. If we've got hundreds of years of coal left, obviously all the carbon dioxide won't end up in the atmosphere at the same time, because it's still locked up in the coal, in the ground.
So what's different about now than in prehistoric times? One difference is that there are much more efficient plants living here. Back when the coal was formed, it was giant moss and suchlike that were dominant plants. Look at moss now, it only grows a few millimetres high. Now we have plants like C4 plants and CAM plants, that can really suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. They are best at absorbing carbon dioxide from even very low concentrations, and when it's hot. When carbon dioxide concentrations are high, then even the not-so-efficient C3 plants can easily absorb it.
Therefore, if we burn the fossil fuels, we should expect to see increased plant growth. If we collect up things like plant fibres and use them for long term things, this will store the carbon from the fossil fuels in a non-atmospheric form. One technique for doing this is to build a house and furniture out of wood. We could grow plantations of trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Then we could cut down the trees and use the wood. So if we have plantations of various plants which produce large amounts of carbon-rich fibre, we can harvest the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Pretty simple huh.
Or we could believe all the doom-and-gloom merchants.
Slashdot Mirror
So pump it back into the algae pond. Carbon can be stored in algae just as well as it can be stored by pumping it underground.
An algae pond can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Currently, solar panels can't do that.
Hopefully that will happen soon. Or maybe we can use those "500 times better" solar panels that the schoolboy invented.
Kittens, puppies, and t-shirts, yes. Amongst other things. Why not? Would you rather have a t-shirt, or the knowledge that some carbon dioxide had been pumped underground?
Yes, it costs energy to make stuff. We get most of our energy from fossil fuels. We make lots of stuff. Just about all of it contains carbon. Some of that carbon comes from the atmosphere. We're already using fossil fuels to make stuff. That stuff is already storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
People will stop using fossil fuels when there is a cheaper and better replacement. Notice how hardly anybody uses whale oil for lighting any more. Even though people aren't burning whale oil for light, we still have lighting. People who think that we're going to stop using fossil fuels before we have some other form of energy aren't being realistic.
They get the energy from the sun. Same as the plants that died and turned into coal got their energy from the sun. It doesn't matter if it takes them more energy, because it's free.
An algae pond is a hole in the ground with water in it. It could have some pipes on the bottom for pumping carbon dioxide into the water. An algae pond might cost $1 per square meter. Solar panels cost $1000 per square meter. Since solar energy is free, it wouldn't matter if plants were only 10% as efficient as solar panels. It'd still be much cheaper to have an algae pond than solar panels. And solar panels don't absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Algae ponds can do that.
Yes you are. Plastic bottles are often made of PET, which has the molecular formula C10H8O4. The O4 stands for 4 Oxygen atoms.
Yes, that would make sense. It also makes sense to grow the fastest growing useful plants all over the place. For example, cars are currently predominantly made of steel. But consider the Corvette, "wrap your ass in fiberglass". If we replace the glass in fiberglass with woven plant material, we can produce panels which store carbon. All we have to do is balance the books. If we want to release 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, then we'll need to take 30 billion tons out. So if we have 6 billion people, we could provide say 5 tons of carbon in the form of useful stuff for each person each year.
If the stuff wears out or isn't wanted any more, it can be collected and burned in the electricity-producing incinerator. Or it could be composted or mulched to improve plant growth. We'll have a lot of stuff, so there will be a lot of different uses.
Pumping carbon dioxide underground isn't the right thing to do. At least pump it into a pond and grow some algae with it. Then, dry out the algae, and turn it into plastic, fuel, animal food, etc. Why not grow the algae, dry it out, and burn it in the power plant?
Also I wish to complain about where it says C02 in the summary. "See Zero Two". Oh yeah baby, that's real science. How about changing it to CO2? "See Oh Two"?
The billions of tons of carbon dioxide we produce each year must come from somewhere. Aliens aren't delivering it in spaceships. The carbon dioxide comes from the billions of tons of fossil fuels that we're mining, transporting, and burning. It should be obvious that we are able to mine, transport, and burn all those tons of fossil fuels, even though all that coal etc is "a LOT of stuff made out of carbon".
Not only are we currently able to mine, transport, and use billions of tons of fossil fuels every year, we are also able to mine, harvest, manufacture, produce, transport, use, and consume billions of tons per year of other stuff. Other stuff is defined as anything that is not fossil fuels. Therefore, we clearly already have the capacity to deal with amounts of stuff that you consider "a LOT" and difficult to deal with.
All we have to do is to count the carbon atoms in the fossil fuels we burn each year, and make sure we take that many carbon atoms out of the atmosphere and the ocean in plant and animal products. If we use those products for some years, then the carbon is stored out of the atmosphere.
Okay, now try to imagine what would happen if, rather than producing 1000 tons of paper, we produced billions of tons of paper, kittens, puppies, diamonds, boats, and other stuff every year. You know, like we already are. What percentage would that be of the carbon dioxide we produce every year?
Floods often have bad effects. Complaining about floods isn't madness. Water covers three quarters of the planet. It would be madness to say that water is pollution. How can water be pollution when it's everywhere?
The four most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and carbon. How can carbon be called pollution? It's everywhere.
Suppose we build machines that take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and convert it into cars, buildings, boats, kittens, cotton plants, boats, puppies, etc. Suppose that these machines allow us to take as much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as we want. Suppose we've also got solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal power stations powering everything.
Suppose we didn't need to burn fossil fuels for energy. If we had those machines, should we burn the fossil fuels and convert it into kittens and other things? Or should we keep it buried underground?
If coal is made of plants, then coal is part of our environment. It's just part that has been turned into rock for a long time. Think about an atom of carbon in a hunk of coal. Imagine it being dug up and transported to a power plant and burned. It meets an oxygen molecule, and they join up to form a carbon dioxide molecule. That's pretty much all most people think about when they talk about global warming.
Here's the other part of the story that most people aren't thinking about. Instead of thinking about the atom of carbon in the present and in the future, think about its past. Think about where it came from.
The carbon atom in the hunk of coal was once a carbon atom in a plant, most likely about 300 million to 360 million years ago. That plant was turned into coal by being covered in mud and squashed for hundreds of millions of years.
The carbon atom must have been in the atmosphere or in the ocean in order to get absorbed by the plant. Those are pretty much the only places that plants get carbon dioxide. Therefore, carbon dioxide levels must have been much higher hundreds of millions of years ago. There had to be heaps of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and in the ocean in order for all that coal and other fossil fuel to form. It didn't just get put there by aliens. Fossil fuels are made of dead squished up plants and animals. Coal, oil, and natural gas were once alive.
So the only way that all the carbon could have gotten into the coal, oil, etc, is if it was all in the atmosphere and the ocean, and then plants sucked it out, and deposited their bodies to form future coal. For example, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the Cambrian period averaged 4500ppm, over 10 times higher than current levels.
There is no way we could possibly get the atmosphere back up to 4500ppm. We would have to find, dig up and burn all the fossil fuel on the planet. And even that wouldn't be enough. We would also have to burn all the rock that has formed in the last billion years. Rock is made of calcium carbonate. The large sheets of limestone show that areas of the planet were covered with an ocean with a huge amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in it. That's how limestone gets formed. And limestone is partially solid carbon dioxide.
There is no need to keep a piece of paper forever. Suppose a ton of paper contains 250kg of carbon atoms. Suppose it takes ten years for a ton of paper to rot and convert into carbon dioxide. If you produce 100 tons of paper per year, you will end up with about 1000 tons of paper on hand at any time. That paper will contain 250 tons of carbon atoms. Those carbon atoms won't be in the atmosphere, because they are in the paper.
It's the same with coal. The only reason the carbon atoms are stuck in coal instead of being inside a puppy or a cotton plant is because they happened to be in those plants when they got buried. It's still a cycle, the same as paper rotting is a cycle. Burning coal is a natural process, which occurs even without human intervention. This should not be very surprising, since coal can be up to 100% carbon, and the atmosphere is 20% oxygen. Of course it will burn if the conditions are right. Maybe a lightning strike sets it off.
It's simply a balance problem. If we want to burn the coal, we need to store enough carbon atoms as something which isn't carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the ocean. That's what this "clean coal" thing is about, they want to store the atoms underground. I'm just saying that we can store the atoms as clothes, paper, furniture, boats, houses, puppies
It'd be more useful to grow plants that we can use the products from. For example, assume that a ton of coal contains 1 ton of carbon. Burning it will produce about 3.6 tons of carbon dioxide. That amount of carbon dioxide therefore contains 1 ton of carbon, and about 2.6 tons of oxygen.
Consider a cotton plant. When the cotton is picked from the plant, it contains carbon that the plant absorbed from the atmosphere. Let's assume that 4 tons of cotton contains 1 ton of carbon. That means that all the carbon from burning 1 ton of coal is stored in 4 tons of cotton. If we use the 4 tons of cotton to make clothes and other things, that stores the carbon in a form where it's not in the atmosphere. If the carbon isn't in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, it can't cause global warming.
And it's not just cotton. Every plant product contains stored carbon. To get the carbon, the plant had to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or from the ocean. Since this problem is all about balance, we should in theory be able to balance the amount of carbon being dug up and burned with the amount we store by harvesting plants and using them for long-lasting things. Even products like paper are useful, as long as they aren't burned once they aren't wanted any more.
If plant products are going to be burned, they should be burned in a power plant to produce electricity. It should be possible to replace coal with waste paper, and other waste plant products. This is already being done at various places around the world.
Of course people will object and say that this can't possibly work. How can plants get us out of this mess? If the coal we're burning is made of dead plants, then plants got us into this mess, why can't they get us out? Plants were able to absorb all of the carbon dioxide needed to make the coal in the first place. Surely with all the agricultural knowledge in the world, we can grow plants and absorb it again.
Mysql has manuals online, as does postgresql and Oracle.
It's okay for kids to learn how to use Microsoft software. Microsoft knows that they have to provide educational software for that to happen. They couldn't sit back and allow Linux to dominate that market. The Egyptian and Peruvian governments believe that their children must learn how to use Microsoft software, since it's dominant.
It's easy to imagine that it will all go wrong in the future, and maybe it will. One good thing is that if XP on the XO fails, it'll be easy to install Linux on those machines. So Microsoft can't afford to boost the project at the start, and then let it die. If they do that, Linux will take over. Microsoft will have to commit to this project for years to come.
This will also allow direct comparisons between countries which give their children XP XOs and countries which issue Linux XOs. If the Linux ones are working well and the Windows ones are breaking too easily, it'll look very bad for Microsoft. Conversely, if the Windows ones are working well and the Linux ones turn out not to be doing the job, then future countries might like to choose Windows for their XOs.
The XO project has forced Microsoft to directly compete with Linux on the desktop. This is a battle that Microsoft must win. But can they do it?
Apparently, these literalists believe that the bible is 100% literally true. Where do they get this idea? Does the bible say that the bible is 100% literally true? I don't think it does, because it says several times in the bible that it is not completely literally true. For example:
A parable is not literally true, it's a comparison, an allegory. If somebody claims to be taking the bible completely literally, the obvious question to ask them is why they are doing that. If they are also claiming to base their beliefs totally on the bible, they should be able to point out the part of the bible which says that it should all be taken literally. Which they won't be able to, because the bible is chock-full of parables, stories, and symbolic language.
That's where this problem is coming from. Some people have decided that everybody must accept that the bible is completely literally true. And it's not. It's a spiritual book, not a science textbook.
Suppose it would cost a trillion dollars to upgrade your roads to allow speeds of 75mph. At the same time, somebody is working on flying cars, which will cost twice as much as those old cars with wheels that need a road. If the flying cars can go 500mph, doesn't it make sense to not waste money on roads, and just go straight to flying cars?
I think we need more flying car analogies.
Let me put it another way. For $109 you can buy a 5 watt solar panel. Now do you really want to pay $125 to get 1 watt from a winbelt, when you could pay less and get 5 watts from a solar panel? Winbelts are too expensive, they cost 5 times as much as a solar panel.
Forty milliwatts for $5 is outrageously expensive. For $5 they could get one of those torches with the built-in generator and hand crank. They could crank it for 1 minute, then get 1 hour of light (if you believe the packaging). So assuming the torch has a 1 watt LED, the human needs to put in about 70 watts for 1 minute. To run a 1 watt LED off 40 mW generators, you need 25 generators, at a cost of $125. Better to go with the torch.
He is spelling out punctuation. Look at your definition: "And nothing else". You mean like "end of sentence"? And what punctuation mark is often used to end a sentence? It's a period, isn't it? That's what "period" means, "end of sentence". The best way to represent this concept is by using the symbol "." because that's how it is commonly written, and therefore many people understand it.
Even using your definition of period meaning "and nothing else", the sentence is still atrocious, because after saying "and nothing else", he goes on to say something else. If you want to use period as emphasis, then the meaning will be "and nothing else", with the sense of "end of sentence". To continue your sentence after that is abominable. It'd be like if Forrest Gump would say "And that's all I have to say about that", but then continue talking about the same thing. Shutup Forrest shutup!
I think that this sentence is awful: "How in the world do you have this much phone sex, period, but especially at work, and not have anyone notice?". Are you seriously saying that you think that is a good sentence? It's horrible! Possibly I may have been too harsh in suggesting that the sentence should be taken outside and shot. But if nobody says anything, how will people ever improve their writing?
Spelling out period in a sentence for emphasis is like waggling your fingers around to represent quote marks while speaking. It's pretty silly. I'd recommend avoiding both those things. Period exclamation mark.
Suppose a stamp collector comes up to me and says "Hey, how about that stamp collecting?" I can smile and say "Sorry, I don't want to talk about stamp collecting. Would you like to talk about gardening?" So that problem is pretty much solved.
I don't see why doing some gardening would have to exclude caring about the war in Iraq. It seems possible to do both.
As for some hypothetical leader lying when they say that God told them to have a war, why should that be a surprise? They've been telling lies about so much other stuff, why wouldn't they lie about that too? Why should we specifically oppose a war because a politician said that "it's a mission from God"? Shouldn't we support or oppose a war based on many other factors, rather than what one person might have said about it?
Yes people are dying in Iraq. What are you saying I should do? Go join the Army and go to Iraq? How would having more soldiers there stop the war? How would more guns stop people from dying? How about if everybody involved in the war stops fighting and starts gardening instead? That would end the war and stop the killing.
There are such people. I regularly see advertisements encouraging people to collect stamps. The Post Office publishes some of the advertisements.
I'd get on with doing whatever I want to do, and just ignore the stamp collectors. Who cares what they think? And if they say I really really really have to collect stamps because it's so great, I'd still ignore them if I'm not interested in stamp collecting. And I'd continue doing whatever I wanted to do. Suppose it was gardening. If somebody asked me what hobbies I enjoyed, I'd say "gardening". I might even say that I was a gardener. I wouldn't go around telling everybody that I am an "anti-stamp-collector" and getting into never-ending stupid arguments with stamp collectors. I'd just ignore them, because I don't care about stamp collecting. I like gardening. I'm a gardener.
And I'd never talk about stamp collecting again. On the internet, I wouldn't go to a big Stamp Collecting Forum and argue with stamp collectors about how their hobby is so lame and dumb. I wouldn't go to an Anti-Stamp-Collecting Forum and rabbit on about how bad stamp collectors are. I'd go to a big Gardening Forum and talk about gardening, which I like.
He should have tapped in somewhere later in the system, so his calls wouldn't get charged to a customer. But hey, maybe he wanted to get caught.
Also I wish to complain about this sentence from the summary. This sentence should be taken outside and shot:
It's a bad idea to start spelling out your punctuation. As you can see in the above sentence, the author has ended up with the word "period' surrounded by commas. "Period" is supposed to end a sentence. And it is supposed to be written as "." not spelled out with letters. Spelling out "period" in the middle of a sentence, and surrounding it with commas, is madness exclamation mark. See question mark? It's stupid. Please don't spell out the word "period", use the popular abbreviation: .
It'd be interesting to see what happens if somebody did try to create something alive from scratch. Here we have one guy adding proteins to a lipid membrane to see if it can replicate itself. The article also mentions somebody else doing genetic engineering on some bacteria. But both of them are using parts made from living organisms.
Here's a report of some people who made some polio virus out of gene sequences they bought by mail order. Presumably the gene sequences they bought would have been made by some genetically engineered bacteria. So that is not really built from scratch. And also it's a virus, so many people don't consider it to be "alive".
It would be very interesting if somebody could work out how to make bacteria out of some simple organic chemicals, such as methane, ethanol, or sugars. Hooking together DNA made by a genetic engineering isn't really the same. The real test would be if somebody could make some bacteria, and those bacteria started growing and reproducing. This would possibly give some insight into whether life is just chemistry, or if there is something else required. It would also be a great boost to the theory of abiogenesis.
Wouldn't it be better to use two drives in RAID1 (mirroring)? That will give extra read speed, since it can read from either drive. It also provides a bit less chance of losing all the data on the drives, since they are mirrored. Drives are big and cheap, so mirrors are a good idea.
It would also be interesting to mirror a solid state drive with a mechanical drive. It would cost more than two mechanical drives, but less than two solid state drives. Hopefully mirroring an SSD with a HDD would combine the faster write speed of the HDD and the faster read speed of the SSD. It's a nice dream anyway, and I'm going to try it out once I get some SSDs.
You're right! We should all use the same word. The first person in space was Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Of course you will agree that since we all want to use the same word, and that cosmonauts were first, we should call all spacefarers by the original name: cosmonauts. Right?
The first step would be to build a space station in Earth orbit. Okay, let's pretend that's done. Then we need to build a spaceship at the space station. This spaceship would be used to fly from the station out into space or the moon. It would never go to Earth, so it doesn't need to be streamlined. Then we can fly the fuel for it to the space station, where it can refuel. The advantage would be that we wouldn't need to launch the spaceship from Earth's surface every time. It can fly from earth orbit where the station is.
The spaceship would have to go find some fuel sources in space, and resources to build more ships and more space stations. Otherwise these materials would have to be flown up from Earth at great expense. They'd also have to build some space-greenhouses for growing plants for people to eat. And probably space-barns full of space-cows and space-chickens. And space-burger-joints selling squished-up space-cow burgers inna tube.
As for getting us off this planet, it might be possible. If we get some good advances in space travel, the cost of launching something into orbit might get down to $100/kg. That would be a cost of say $10,000 per person, so it's not completely unreasonable. We could launch the whole USA population into space for three trillion dollars! But they'd want somewhere to live, and stuff to eat. That's why we'd need the space stations, space barns, and space burger joints.
Then once we have people living in space for long enough, somebody can invent a hyperspace drive, or else we can build generation ships to fly to the next star over.
No, it wasn't all in the atmosphere at the same time. Most of it was in the ocean, same as most of the carbon dioxide is in the ocean now. Isn't this how the scientific theory goes: There was heaps of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Primitive plants developed, which absorbed the carbon dioxide, and produced oxygen. This switched the atmosphere over from a mix of carbon dioxide and nitrogen into a mix of oxygen and nitrogen. Therefore, before the plants, the atmosphere had a huge amount more carbon dioxide than it has now.
And yet, despite the much higher levels of carbon dioxide than we have now, life flourished. Mosses and ferns grew to gigantic sizes in the carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere. Then they died and got squished and turned into coal and oil. So if anybody tells you that we have to "save the planet" from carbon dioxide, ask them why the planet wasn't destroyed when the carbon dioxide levels were much higher than now. Where did the coal, oil, and all fossil fuels come from? From plants and animals which got their carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the ocean. Isn't that the standard scientific theory?
The objection that "it wasn't all in the atmosphere at the same time" is interesting. It implies that back in the olden days, when the coal seams and oil reservoirs were forming, the carbon dioxide was "somewhere else". Where was it then? How did the plants and animals get it into their bodies? Surely it must have been in the ocean or the atmosphere for a plant to absorb it, and from there an animal could eat the plant to get it.
The objection also implies that if we burn coal, oil, and gas, that all of the carbon dioxide will end up in the atmosphere at the same time. Of course, that won't happen. Think about the carbon dioxide from all the coal people have burned in all of human history. Where is it? Is it all in the atmosphere right now? No it isn't, a lot of it has been absorbed by the ocean, by plants, and by rock formation. Therefore, all the carbon dioxide we've released into the atmosphere isn't all still in there. So it can't all be in there at the same time, can it?
Secondly, all of the carbon dioxide from all of the oil, gas, and coal won't be in the atmosphere at the same time, because we haven't burned it all yet. We don't even know where all of it is, and of the stuff we do know about, we haven't dug it all up and burned it. There is still heaps left. For example, you may have heard of coal fields with hundreds of years of supply left. If we've got hundreds of years of coal left, obviously all the carbon dioxide won't end up in the atmosphere at the same time, because it's still locked up in the coal, in the ground.
So what's different about now than in prehistoric times? One difference is that there are much more efficient plants living here. Back when the coal was formed, it was giant moss and suchlike that were dominant plants. Look at moss now, it only grows a few millimetres high. Now we have plants like C4 plants and CAM plants, that can really suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. They are best at absorbing carbon dioxide from even very low concentrations, and when it's hot. When carbon dioxide concentrations are high, then even the not-so-efficient C3 plants can easily absorb it.
Therefore, if we burn the fossil fuels, we should expect to see increased plant growth. If we collect up things like plant fibres and use them for long term things, this will store the carbon from the fossil fuels in a non-atmospheric form. One technique for doing this is to build a house and furniture out of wood. We could grow plantations of trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Then we could cut down the trees and use the wood. So if we have plantations of various plants which produce large amounts of carbon-rich fibre, we can harvest the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Pretty simple huh.
Or we could believe all the doom-and-gloom merchants.
So the navy already has data centers mounted in ships, cooled by the ocean. That sounds like prior art to me. Sorry Google, no patent for you.
Are you sure? Wow Sight and Sound is selling Linux version EEE PCs: https://shop.1wow.com.au/productcart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=&idproduct=1280 It's only got 4 GB SSD, and an 18cm (7inch) screen, but it says Linux.