There's a really simple way to eliminate this conflict of interest. All traffic tickets of all kind don't go to the city or county. They go to the state. The state then distributes the money back to the cities/counties based on how heavily trafficked their roads are. How much money came from each isn't even factored in.
Traffic safety laws should be about just that: traffic safety. They shouldn't be a backdoor tax. If we want optimal traffic safety solutions to be chosen, we have to eliminate the financial incentive for suboptimal ones.
Well, it's sure trying to get to that point. Looks like another big melt this summer, perhaps even another record-setter despite the cooling from last year's strong La Nina.:P
First off, that's an acronym, not a word. Secondly, EROEI of an *energy source* needs to be greater than one; EROEIs on things that *aren't* energy sources need not be. What's the EROEI of a spring? A pencil? A deck of cards?
You're changing oil from an energy source to an energy sink. That's no catastrophe. Oil is already extremely expensive as an energy source, far more expensive than almost any other commonly used energy source.
No, I know precisely what word I was looking for, but thanks for trying. Market failure is when the market fails to account for the true price of a good or service. What is this thread? Economics 101?
"Market failure is a term used by economists to describe the condition where the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not efficient."
Apparently it is Economics 101, but you're the one who needs to take the course; my term was more accurate for the given situation.
What exactly would be the tax rate on releasing benzene compounds into the groundwater near a town causing half the population to get cancer?
Accidental or intentional? The economic cost of lost wages, the cost of medical care, significant costs for lost opportunity costs due to contaminated water and land, costs for the devaluation of public and private property, general environmental damage, and a (significant) cost for the human suffering involved. Depending on the situation, criminal law could also potentially be involved here. As for the fines, we *already* fine companies for polluting like this; they'd still be fined, and probably moreso than they are now. But so would the less obvious pollution, such as CO2.
I know it can seem cruel to put a price on human lives. But we *already do that*, and really, we have to do that. Want to lower the rate of SIDS? We could hire a team of well-equipped doctors to sit next to every infant and monitor them at all times. You could probably nearly eliminate SIDS that way. But it's not going to happen. We can't afford the economic cost of having those doctors around at all times. We are valuing those lives at less than the cost of keeping doctors around. Want to eliminate pollution? We could take the flue gas of every factory and power plant in the world, freeze out all of the gasses, and then keep them buried in giant refrigerated facilities. But it's not going to happen. Keeping the environment that untouched is not worth the cost. You may not like this fact, but the economy, while growing, is at any point in time finite. Not everything can be afforded. Lives do have prices. If someone's smokestack leads indirectly and unintentionally to ten peoples' deaths from pollution-related diseases, but the benefit from running it will feed ten thousand people who otherwise would have starved, you'd condemn those ten thousand to death? Because, really, that's the sort of choices we're talking about here. If the oil and power industries disappeared off the face of the Earth tomorrow, what percent of people on the planet do you think would die? 90%?
Can you please tell me how much it would cost me for the right to inject 20ccs of lead salts into your bloodstream?
Oh, you mean murder? Yeah, let me just back up to where I advocated for repealing the laws on murder and assault.
Yes, it's not favorable. Which is why we don't do it currently. But for the people who insist on the "oil is going to run out soon!" argument, it completely invalidates the premise that "once it's gone, it's gone." No; once it's gone, it's more expensive and less thermodynamically efficient.
Plus I'm sure coal prices won't stay low once you start using it in earnest.
At *current coal prices*, we have ~285 years of economically recoverable coal with current consumption. Double consumption and you're still at a century and a half. And this is price-limited, and only known coal (which isn't very heavily explored for due to how much is available). And ignores advancing tech making prices cheaper, which it almost always does (that's why oil is, today, cheaper than it was when it used to bubble to the surface or could be collected in shallow wells -- also, likewise, why bitumen is economically recoverble at all, unlike in the '70s when it was tried before).
Requiring clean water pretty much makes it a non-starter given it's dwindling availability.
I think you're mixing up bitumen production with coal liquefaction. Coal liquefaction isn't done by steam reforming, but by partial oxidation and high temperature catalytic polymerization. Bitumen production does involve water (although far less than it used to, and there's rapidly increasing water reuse; most producers are nowhere near their water limits currently). However, it's a ridiculous argument to make, because the supposed "limit" is the Athabasca river. We're talking *Alberta*, not Libya; the area is practically covered in water. Some of the largest lakes on the planet with many order more water in them than could ever be needed are just hundreds of miles away. We ship *hot oil* by pipeline for thousands of miles over mountains and North Slope oil still isn't that exdpensive, and we're supposed to believe that these companies can't ship in *water from hundreds of miles away* of all things? Across flat land?
Peak oil is far from an availability problem, it's a production problem primarily.
We have steel mills shuttered across Appalachia. We have investors chomping at the bit to get a slice of that $100/barrel bonanza. We have a large unemployed labor force. We have college students picking their majors just four years before graduation, many of them choosing based on what has the most earning potential. Some countries, like India, are loaded with underemployed, skilled engineers. What, exactly, are you picturing is the problem here?
what is left is harder to get and so is likely to cause a reduction in supply.
No, what's left is harder to get, so it *increases production costs*, which are then passed on to you, the consumer. It's no longer a couple dollars per barrel in production -- it's $10-$30 in Athabasca, and $20-40 for shale.
Read the page I linked in the first post; it goes into all of this stuff and much more. Feel free to post any criticisms of the arguments on the page.
If you have any specific claims you'd like to challenge or don't think that the page's 40 or so references cover well enough, by all means, do so. Otherwise, you're just adding static to this thread.
You seem to be forgetting (deliberately?) that oil is primarily used as an energy _source_. Sure, you can make it artificially. But when it takes more energy to make that than it contains it is no longer an energy source, it's an energy _sink_. But don't let that worry your head in the sand.
You seem to be forgetting that there are countless sources of energy on earth apart from oil, many of which can provide orders of magnitude more than we currently produce, so having transportation fuels, which are just a fraction of our energy needs, go from a source to a sink is no fundamental tragedy. It'd increase *prices*, but we'd keep rolling.
Think of it this way: Powder river basin coal ranges from $5-$15 per short ton. Let's be pessimistic and say $15 per 907kg, so $0.0165/kg. Coal varies in energy density, but is roughly 30MJ/kg. So, a high price for powder river basin coal will cost you $0.000551/MJ. Oil is currently ~$100/barrel. A barrel of oil contains ~6100MJ. Therefore, oil costs $0.0164/MJ. That's 30 times as expensive per megajoule than paying a high price for powder river basin coal. Even if you compare it to the most expensive mass produced coal in the US, central Appalachian, which can cost up to $65/short ton, is still almost 8 times cheaper than oil. Oil is *very expensive* compared to its energy content.
Using a cheaper source of energy to produce oil is anything but a fundamental problem, economically, and since there's absolutely no shortage of energy sources, it's not a fundamental problem thermodynamically, either.
To create a portable energy source like oil, we just have to expend some "plus energy" to combine some carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.
You know, I just told you *how* you can do it. If you're too lazy to learn about the Fischer-Tropsch process or the Sabatier process, that's your own problem.
And how do you plan on getting past that whole "can't extract more energy than you put in" thing?
Oh, darn, you're right. As we know, oil is the only source of energy on the planet. The following sources of energy are impossible with current technology: * Coal * Combustible oil shale * Biomass * Natural gas (conventional and unconventional sources) * Shallow geothermal * Deep geothermal (EGS, for example, which has the potential in the US alone for something like 4 orders of magnitude more power than we currently consume) * Solar (both thermal and photovoltaic) * Wind (both low and high altitude) * Hydroelectric * Tidal * Oceanic conveyors * Ocean thermal * Nuclear (U235) * Nuclear (U238 breeders) * Nuclear (Thorium breeders)
Yeah, no way we can produce energy on Earth. Let's all give up transportation and die off.
Pollution and environmental issues are *the* classic economic textbook example of market failure.
I believe the word you're looking for is "externalities". Pollution and environmental issues are external to the market, so the market doesn't account for them. You need to internalize externalities with taxes based on them -- you need to assign them a realistic cost compared to what damage they do to society, and the market will readjust with that taken into account.
I'm a Keynesian; I don't believe in the authoritarian-socialist view of telling businesses, "You will do this," or, on the economic-libertarian view, doing absolutely nothing. I believe in the government simply adjusting the prices of elements of the market with taxes when needed to make externalities that have serious costs but are normally ignored now have costs that are factored into the market, and letting the market make its own choices now that it's facing true costs. And with the taxes collected as such, you can reduce general taxation on corporations and inviduals and/or ameliorate the damage caused.
In such a situation, I think that, for example, coal power would largely become uneconomical, while techs like wind, solar, and deep geothermal (EGS or whatnot) would become much more popular. But if coal power plant operators can still be profitable when compensating for the greenhouse gasses, heavy metals, and particulate matter they emit (prices based on the consequences of those actions, such as increased healthcare costs), and while paying more for coal that's compensating for the water pollution and so forth (also with prices based on the consequences of those actions), then by all means, continue.
If you can find a way to strip mine the ~10,000 feet to the Bakken, the world would beat a path to your door;) It's deep. It's deeper than the very productive Madison shale, and for a while, people thought that the oil in the Madison shale came from the Bakken (it's now known that it didn't). To get oil out of the Bakken, you drill down and then go horizontal.
Too bad algae farms tend to cost a small fortune to operate. I once read a paper studying the potential for algae farms to be economically viable producers of hydrogen, and even with superefficient algae, the lengths they had to go to make it economical were just ridiculous -- the plastic covering over the ponds as thin as cling wrap (hello, wind!), zero processing of the output, zero need for storing the output, zero need for pressurizing the output, and on and on and on.
I'm not saying it's impossible to make it work out economically. Just don't get your hopes up too far.
Yeah, it's not like we've found over a dozen supergiants in the past decade, including some of the largest fields ever discovered, or anything. Oh, wait, we have. Well, it's not like there are many orders of magnitude more fuel potential via syncrude from other sources. Oh, wait, there is.
By the way, I agree we should invest in alternative energy. But I'm not going to let what I want to happen get in the way of the facts.
The simple mathematics are that if something is being used faster then it is created, it will reach zero.
And therein lies the fundamental error. First off, you're not using "oil"; you're using gasoline or diesel or any number of refined products. You pull up light sweet crude, and it's pretty close to what you want out; you don't have to refine it much. You pull up sour crude, heavy crude, ultra-heavy crude, or even bitumen, and you've got a big refining task ahead of you. You cook oil out of keragenous rock like shale, and you're doing even more organic chemistry. Ultimately, you can make oil simply from CO or CO2, plus water for the H2, plus energy, via Fisher-Tropsch or Sabatier synthesis. In short, for oil to be able to *physically* run out, you need "peak energy" to occur.
Of course, the doomers make lots of other arguments. They're easily taken down, though. And I do mean "doomers". The more extreme ones are sort of a death cult.
B) This is about oil reserves INSIDE THE UNITED STATES
Actually, the Bakken formation extends into Canada, too.
The Bakken has a rather interesting history. Estimates on how much oil it produced have varied a lot. Back in the '70s, they thought it only had about 10B barrels -- which is a lot, but not when it's spread out over such a huge formation. To make matters worse, the formation is a dozen meters or so thick in most places. All together, recovery rates were expected to be 1-3%, and expensive at that. Not many takers.
Things have changed. After Price's paper that predicted over 400 billion barrels, computer simulations have been developed; the latest runs expect 200-300 billion barrels. Furthermore, horizontal drilling means that you can enter the thin formation and then run along it; this is what is used in the very successful Elm Coulee field.
The Bakken is just one minimally tapped deposit. There's absolutely no shortage of recoverable oil in the world. The problem is the consequences of recovering and burning it all.
C) The US is moving to 'alternative fuels'. The debate is not over whether or not to, but how big a priority it is.
Are you kidding? There's a huge debate over whether or not to, especially after the most recent papers suggesting that even sugarcane ethanol leads to more greenhouse gasses than gasoline. Let alone the fact that there's a widely growing acceptance that, despite the momentum, corn ethanol is a huge blunder. There's the food-for-fuel competition (food prices are up 40%, mostly from fuel prices and alternative fuel pressure). Now, I think it's good that corn prices aren't as artificially low as they used to be, but now they're artificially high, and everything is getting pushed up by the increased demand for biofuel land -- even other staples like wheat.
And what about cellulosic ethanol, this supposed panacea? This is one thing that drives me crazy. Look at how most big cellulosic ethanol companies are making the stuff. They turn the biomass into syngas (CO+H2) by burning it in a poorly oxygenated environment, and then use a complex, inefficient biological or catalytic process to convert it into ethanol. Well, here's the thing: we've been making syngas into *gasoline* for most of a century. That's how Nazi Germany and Apartheid-era South Africa kept their engines running (excepting, in the case of Germany, after we bombed most of their facilities). And it's a relatively efficient -- 70% or so. So, instead of making a fuel that we're *already set up for*, we're instead making a *less dense* fuel that we can only use in *limited quantities* in most cars and *can't ship in our pipelines*. Why? Because "cellulosic gasoline" isn't a buzzword. Nobody likes the word "gasoline", but lots of people like the word "ethanol". You get more investment, you get more tax breaks, and on and on. So the inferior solution gets chosen.
Anyways, if you want to *actually* clean up your act, either increase your MPG or switch your miles over to electricity (the significantly higher thermodynamic efficiencies of power plants mean that even dirty power plants run a car cleaner than a gasoline engine -- plus, electricity is a lot easier to clean up). Biofuels are an "easy" solution that isn't really a solution at all.
To heck with that, and with batteries - imagine being able to generate electricity from nuclear power plants themselves, rather than using them to heat water
To heck with that, too. You did notice that the tech involves lots of gold, right? It's bremsstrahlung radiation from the collision with gold that causes the shower of electrons that is captured.
Now, perhaps a *future* technology might use some other metal as the target. But this one would clearly be way too expensive to enclose a reactor or waste storage facility with.
When you look at the historical record for rocket engines, remember that very very few of those were designed with safety as the primary concern.
You're kidding, right? The primary design principle of a human-capable rocket is safety while still managing to get to orbit. Unfortunately, when your design envelope is "orbit", as opposed to "joyride", you don't have a lot of margin to work with.
Hence my earlier comment about repurposed missiles. You'd do better to look at the safety records of things like JATO bottles
JATO rockets don't deal with an orbital flight envelope, or anything remotely close. Heck, they're not even close to the flight envelope of your typical joyride "space tourism" flight. Even still, you mean something like this?
I said accidents aren't a given; I didn't say they weren't historically common.
Given that you accept that they are historically common, let's re-address my original statement that *when* (not if) an accident occurs with paying passengers (rather than just in an assembly building), what do you think that'll do to the market?
But there's no reason we have to repeat past mistakes, especially when the fundamental causes (ie, not making reliability a primary design goal) are so obvious and so easily fixed.
And yet they're *not* so easily fixed, since the accidents keep occurring, with virtually every rocket family at some point or another. Even Soyuz, widely regarded as a "safe" rocket, keeps blowing up; we've just been fortunate that it's been the unmanned Soyuz that have been exploding recently, not the manned ones.
Lox/Methane vs Lox/Kerosene vs Nitrous/HTPB doens't make a huge difference -- they all have broadly similar energy contents.
The hell it doesn't. The first has good ISP (325-400 or so vac.) and somewhat poor density. The second has fair ISP (275-350 or so vac.) and good density. The third has poor ISP (200-260 or so vac) and good density. Gee, which of these things is not orbit material without going all OTRAG...
Most rocket engine failures don't involve the propellants in the tanks mixing and detonating (that normally happens after the engine fails
Quite true, but the net effect is the same.
Blast shields can certainly contain that (where "contain" means "redirect aft where it won't hurt anything").
Now contain the detonation of the bulk propellants *after* whatever caused the initial failure. There's a reason that *no* manned orbital rocket systems rely on blast shielding to protect their occupants, and why detection of failures in advance plus the use of launch escape systems are relied upon. It's simply not an option.
The blast shield is substantially lighter than the chamber itself; there's nothing hard about taking it with you, unless you're trying to shave your margins to old-fashioned aerospace standards in pursuit of some goal other than a safe, reliable, and cheap to operate vehicle.
You mean like *actually getting to orbit*? Sorry, but if you think that you can get to orbit without shaving, you're sadly mistaken. Especially if you think you can do it with low ISP fuels as well.
XCOR isn't asking you to believe they can reach orbit; nor are they asking their investors to believe that. Long-term, they plan to do that, but they plan to build the experience and credibility first. This is a step on that path; it's obviously not sufficient. I find it odd that when you say it isn't orbit, and I answer that it's a step on the way, your complaint is that the journey isn't done yet.
You'll note that I commented that XCOR's use of scaleable propellants actually makes their claims of ultimately achieving orbit without completely starting over feasible (unlike Virgin). That said, the odds clearly state that you're going nowhere close to orbit, ever. Feel free to argue with the odds, but it's unreasonable to expect people to believ
LOX/Kerosene is certainly good as well. Lots of respectable orbital rockets use/have used LOX/Kerosene. ISP could stand to be better, but it's got nice density and is a mature tech.
It may surprise you to learn that there have been a *lot* more than four rocketry accidents in the world. Several percent of all launches have ended in failure. And the engines are a leading culprit. The entire Soviet manned moon mission was doomed by repeated engine problems in the N1, for example.
I don't right now, but I've (some of) it. No, I won't back it up more than that.
Once again, the claim is asserted, but no data is provided.
Accidents are no more a given in this industry than any other transportation industry.
Oh, please -- don't give me that;) Rockets, and especially rocketplanes, have a long history of high accident rates. Even when you're working with things on the ground, it's horribly dangerous work, as Virgin recently found out.
The rocket engines will be individually protected by blast shields in case something goes dramatically wrong
When you're hauling that much energy, a blast shield is no reassurance. You're dealing with LOX/Methane, no? I'd think you must be daft to believe that a blast shield light enough to take with you would keep you safe in a LOX/Methane CATO. Perhaps from a hybrid rocket explosion, but not when you're dealing with two easily vaporized, readily misceable fuels.
Aside from the engine and the flight plan, this is just a smallish airplane / glider, and most of the safety analysis is similar.
Yeah, apart from the "Mach 2" and "huge amounts of fuel and oxidizer" aspects, just like a glider.
Most importantly, it can draw on a long history of airplane safety analysis for the vast majority of failure modes.
Zenit and Pegasus are not private rockets in the same sense that the Lynx is; they're built largely for government markets and with substantial government funding. (Pegasus is slightly debateable, but even so it's not most rockets)
They're private rockets, designed, built, and operated by private rocket companies without subsidy. Yes, they "stood on the shoulders of giants", so to speak, borrowing tech from existing systems, but so? Yes, they get government contracts -- but so do half of the private businesses in the US.
Falcon has flown twice, and failed both times
Reaching 2/3rds the delta-V of orbit is far more than XCOR will probably ever do. However, more on this (to XCOR's credit) shortly.
are carefully chosen to help build the XCOR technology base for future work.
I will give XCOR credit for this. While I'm not the biggest fan of LOX/Methane (assuming that's what Lynx is going to use, since I know it's something XCOR has messed with; I prefer LOX/Propane because it has almost as much ISP, much higher density at 100K, and can share a common bulkhead), it does have enough ISP to reach orbit without a ridiculous scaling factor. Also, launching from ground means that you don't need a gigantic carrier to scale up. So you're certainly a lot more scaleable than Virgin, and I will be keeping an eye out. However, you have a long way to go before showing you have any sort of credibility when it comes to the ability to scale to orbit. The small, private rocketry field is littered with the graves of companies with equally grandiouse dreams.
Note that I used to hold SpaceX to this standard, too. They've clearly moved beyond that point by now, having virtually gotten to orbit and retired the risk on most of their systems. You are not in that position, so it's only reasonable to expect skepticism and scrutiny until you get there.
Also, if you think Lynx isn't facing any of the same challenges, you're severly underestimating the amount of work that goes into it.
What was I thinking, thinking that 11.5 times the velocity and 130 times the heat load per unit mass is a whole different ballgame?
You realize that SSIII is complete vaporware and physically cannot be based on SS1 or SS2, right? And that SS1 and SS2 aren't encountering the challenges involved in orbital craft like extreme thermal management and high levels of delta-V, right?
SpaceX has a booster (Falcon 1) that, but for *either* a baffle or bump suppression, would have orbitted a payload (it now has both), and nonetheless reached 2/3 of the needed delta-V (the payload even separated normally at the end of the burn). SpaceX has also been checking off multiengine test firings in advance of their heavy lift booster (Falcon 9), as well as successfully test firing an advanced, regenerative version of their Falcon engine. And their Dragon has passed all NASA certifications so far for a manned, *orbital* spacecraft.
How, exactly, does Virgin and their vaporware fit into Bigelow's needs? Sounds like they have everything they need in a company that's already most of the way there -- SpaceX. What do they need a company that's virtually none of the way there for?
Mythbusters throughly busted the clay pot approach, though. If there was any signal to begin with, it gets completely lost in the noise of the grainy surface.
You say that it's "abundantly clear". And how do you arrive at this conclusion? I've heard a bunch of people make that claim, and nobody backs it up.
Yes, there are some millionaires who've paid several million to go to orbit. But they get to *stay there for days*. It's a whole different ballpark. You're asking people to pay an order of magnitude or two less but get five orders of magnitude less time at 1/4th the altitude and 1/10th the delta-V. How many people ride MiGs to see the curvature of the Earth? How many take part in the zero-G parabolas? A few thousand annually, no? These things cost *two orders of magnitude less*.
Now, I'm not asserting that there is no market for these launches. I just question the size of the market. And even if it is big enough now, how big do you think it'll be after the first accident? Not "If" there is an accident, but "When"; it's pretty much a given in this business.
By the way: most rockets *are* run privately. Craft like the Shuttle are the exception, not the rule. Government subsidy often helps, but not always -- there's the Zenit, the Pegasus, and now the Falcon. And these actually, you know, go to orbit. I.e., they actually face the challenges involved rather then bypassing them by choosing an easy flight envelope that doesn't actually accomplish anything and whose craft can't be scaled up to orbit without a complete redesign.
Yeah, it's great that we're just now rediscovering genetic engineering, nuclear reactors, CIGS cells, multicore processors, carbon nanotubes, and satellite communications. We know that the Romans did all of these things thousands of years ago.
Yes, some people in historic times did some really darned impressive things, long before we would have thought they would have. No, most of our modern knowledge has not been "lost and rediscovered again and again and again."
Back on the original topic: I think it's perfectly reasonable that some day we might be able to recover even older sounds. And perhaps images.
"A theoretical model of the acoustic effect of crystallization is suggested based on the representation of a stepwise character of formation or disappearance of macrolayers and macroregions on a growing (or melting) surface. According to this model, the picture of oscillations reproduces in basic features the form of the signals observed in experiments. The oscillation frequency of the liquid is determined by the frequency of generation of jumps at the crystallization front, while the comparatively large values of peak pressures in acoustic waves are a consequence of the resonance phenomena."
Translation: crystallizing materials (cooling molten metals, cooling glasses, drying out of sugars and salts, all sorts of things you can picture remaining from an ancient environment) can leave traces of acoustic vibrations that were passing through them when they were cooling in their crystal structure. Meaning that we could potentially recover them. I don't know how widely applicable this technique is, but it certainly seems possible.
Images:
Many materials, both natural and manmade, suffer photodegradation. This is a process in which sunlight excites certain compounds and creates free radicals inside the material, which then, catalytically or not, damage the material from its original state. It seems quite possible to me that holographic information related to what frequencies of light struck where at what angles (and potentially even at what periods of time) could be restored by doing a detailed layer-by-layer atomic scale inspection of the material in question. Certainly I would expect poor temporal resolution (if any at all), but say, if you had an artifact that was in a single room for most of its existance, and then ended up buried with no further exposure to light, perhaps you could reconstruct the average appearance of the room.
It's right near the part that talks about how a Nash equilibrium does not inherently produce an optimal solution despite each actor making sound decisions based on their own rational self-interest.
Eh, it's pretty simple. This will begin to be rolled out as driver assist features already coming online, like radar range finding and collision alerts. And then automatic brake application for collision prevention and "smart" cruise controls that maintain distance. It'll move from there to basically the equivalent of HOV lanes for automated vehicles (non-automated vehicles driving in them would be reported and ticketted; radar range finding would still be needed for "unexpected circumstances").
More Americans hate driving than those who enjoy it "a great deal", and the ratio is continually shifting against driving. Even those who overall like to drive, many of them would readily give up their ability to drive in exchange for greater safety, less pollution/fuel consumption, faster transit times, and so forth. If these techs do come and do turn out to be popular among their users, expect big fights in cities for steadily increasing the percentage of lanes that are automated, up until complete automation of in-city traffic becomes standard (cities would like it a lot because it'd reduce smog, increase throughput, and decrease the need for further road construction). Those who like to drive would probably fight this tooth and nail, but I can't picture them winning. As a new generation grows up on increasingly automated road travel, it seems likely that even out of city, manual driving would increasingly become an "offroad" and "country" activity.
This all assumes that the tech does make it to market via the incremental approach currently being pursued, that it works, that it is safer than human driving, and that it is affordable enough to become widespread.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a really simple way to eliminate this conflict of interest. All traffic tickets of all kind don't go to the city or county. They go to the state. The state then distributes the money back to the cities/counties based on how heavily trafficked their roads are. How much money came from each isn't even factored in.
Traffic safety laws should be about just that: traffic safety. They shouldn't be a backdoor tax. If we want optimal traffic safety solutions to be chosen, we have to eliminate the financial incentive for suboptimal ones.
Well, it's sure trying to get to that point. Looks like another big melt this summer, perhaps even another record-setter despite the cooling from last year's strong La Nina. :P
First off, that's an acronym, not a word. Secondly, EROEI of an *energy source* needs to be greater than one; EROEIs on things that *aren't* energy sources need not be. What's the EROEI of a spring? A pencil? A deck of cards?
You're changing oil from an energy source to an energy sink. That's no catastrophe. Oil is already extremely expensive as an energy source, far more expensive than almost any other commonly used energy source.
No, I know precisely what word I was looking for, but thanks for trying. Market failure is when the market fails to account for the true price of a good or service. What is this thread? Economics 101?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
"In economics, an externality is an impact (positive or negative) on any party not involved in a given economic transaction."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
"Market failure is a term used by economists to describe the condition where the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not efficient."
Apparently it is Economics 101, but you're the one who needs to take the course; my term was more accurate for the given situation.
What exactly would be the tax rate on releasing benzene compounds into the groundwater near a town causing half the population to get cancer?
Accidental or intentional? The economic cost of lost wages, the cost of medical care, significant costs for lost opportunity costs due to contaminated water and land, costs for the devaluation of public and private property, general environmental damage, and a (significant) cost for the human suffering involved. Depending on the situation, criminal law could also potentially be involved here. As for the fines, we *already* fine companies for polluting like this; they'd still be fined, and probably moreso than they are now. But so would the less obvious pollution, such as CO2.
I know it can seem cruel to put a price on human lives. But we *already do that*, and really, we have to do that. Want to lower the rate of SIDS? We could hire a team of well-equipped doctors to sit next to every infant and monitor them at all times. You could probably nearly eliminate SIDS that way. But it's not going to happen. We can't afford the economic cost of having those doctors around at all times. We are valuing those lives at less than the cost of keeping doctors around. Want to eliminate pollution? We could take the flue gas of every factory and power plant in the world, freeze out all of the gasses, and then keep them buried in giant refrigerated facilities. But it's not going to happen. Keeping the environment that untouched is not worth the cost. You may not like this fact, but the economy, while growing, is at any point in time finite. Not everything can be afforded. Lives do have prices. If someone's smokestack leads indirectly and unintentionally to ten peoples' deaths from pollution-related diseases, but the benefit from running it will feed ten thousand people who otherwise would have starved, you'd condemn those ten thousand to death? Because, really, that's the sort of choices we're talking about here. If the oil and power industries disappeared off the face of the Earth tomorrow, what percent of people on the planet do you think would die? 90%?
Can you please tell me how much it would cost me for the right to inject 20ccs of lead salts into your bloodstream?
Oh, you mean murder? Yeah, let me just back up to where I advocated for repealing the laws on murder and assault.
Yes, it's not favorable. Which is why we don't do it currently. But for the people who insist on the "oil is going to run out soon!" argument, it completely invalidates the premise that "once it's gone, it's gone." No; once it's gone, it's more expensive and less thermodynamically efficient.
Plus I'm sure coal prices won't stay low once you start using it in earnest.
At *current coal prices*, we have ~285 years of economically recoverable coal with current consumption. Double consumption and you're still at a century and a half. And this is price-limited, and only known coal (which isn't very heavily explored for due to how much is available). And ignores advancing tech making prices cheaper, which it almost always does (that's why oil is, today, cheaper than it was when it used to bubble to the surface or could be collected in shallow wells -- also, likewise, why bitumen is economically recoverble at all, unlike in the '70s when it was tried before).
Requiring clean water pretty much makes it a non-starter given it's dwindling availability.
I think you're mixing up bitumen production with coal liquefaction. Coal liquefaction isn't done by steam reforming, but by partial oxidation and high temperature catalytic polymerization. Bitumen production does involve water (although far less than it used to, and there's rapidly increasing water reuse; most producers are nowhere near their water limits currently). However, it's a ridiculous argument to make, because the supposed "limit" is the Athabasca river. We're talking *Alberta*, not Libya; the area is practically covered in water. Some of the largest lakes on the planet with many order more water in them than could ever be needed are just hundreds of miles away. We ship *hot oil* by pipeline for thousands of miles over mountains and North Slope oil still isn't that exdpensive, and we're supposed to believe that these companies can't ship in *water from hundreds of miles away* of all things? Across flat land?
Peak oil is far from an availability problem, it's a production problem primarily.
We have steel mills shuttered across Appalachia. We have investors chomping at the bit to get a slice of that $100/barrel bonanza. We have a large unemployed labor force. We have college students picking their majors just four years before graduation, many of them choosing based on what has the most earning potential. Some countries, like India, are loaded with underemployed, skilled engineers. What, exactly, are you picturing is the problem here?
what is left is harder to get and so is likely to cause a reduction in supply.
No, what's left is harder to get, so it *increases production costs*, which are then passed on to you, the consumer. It's no longer a couple dollars per barrel in production -- it's $10-$30 in Athabasca, and $20-40 for shale.
Read the page I linked in the first post; it goes into all of this stuff and much more. Feel free to post any criticisms of the arguments on the page.
If you have any specific claims you'd like to challenge or don't think that the page's 40 or so references cover well enough, by all means, do so. Otherwise, you're just adding static to this thread.
You seem to be forgetting (deliberately?) that oil is primarily used as an energy _source_. Sure, you can make it artificially. But when it takes more energy to make that than it contains it is no longer an energy source, it's an energy _sink_. But don't let that worry your head in the sand.
You seem to be forgetting that there are countless sources of energy on earth apart from oil, many of which can provide orders of magnitude more than we currently produce, so having transportation fuels, which are just a fraction of our energy needs, go from a source to a sink is no fundamental tragedy. It'd increase *prices*, but we'd keep rolling.
Think of it this way: Powder river basin coal ranges from $5-$15 per short ton. Let's be pessimistic and say $15 per 907kg, so $0.0165/kg. Coal varies in energy density, but is roughly 30MJ/kg. So, a high price for powder river basin coal will cost you $0.000551/MJ. Oil is currently ~$100/barrel. A barrel of oil contains ~6100MJ. Therefore, oil costs $0.0164/MJ. That's 30 times as expensive per megajoule than paying a high price for powder river basin coal. Even if you compare it to the most expensive mass produced coal in the US, central Appalachian, which can cost up to $65/short ton, is still almost 8 times cheaper than oil. Oil is *very expensive* compared to its energy content.
Using a cheaper source of energy to produce oil is anything but a fundamental problem, economically, and since there's absolutely no shortage of energy sources, it's not a fundamental problem thermodynamically, either.
To create a portable energy source like oil, we just have to expend some "plus energy" to combine some carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.
You know, I just told you *how* you can do it. If you're too lazy to learn about the Fischer-Tropsch process or the Sabatier process, that's your own problem.
And how do you plan on getting past that whole "can't extract more energy than you put in" thing?
Oh, darn, you're right. As we know, oil is the only source of energy on the planet. The following sources of energy are impossible with current technology:
* Coal
* Combustible oil shale
* Biomass
* Natural gas (conventional and unconventional sources)
* Shallow geothermal
* Deep geothermal (EGS, for example, which has the potential in the US alone for something like 4 orders of magnitude more power than we currently consume)
* Solar (both thermal and photovoltaic)
* Wind (both low and high altitude)
* Hydroelectric
* Tidal
* Oceanic conveyors
* Ocean thermal
* Nuclear (U235)
* Nuclear (U238 breeders)
* Nuclear (Thorium breeders)
Yeah, no way we can produce energy on Earth. Let's all give up transportation and die off.
Pollution and environmental issues are *the* classic economic textbook example of market failure.
I believe the word you're looking for is "externalities". Pollution and environmental issues are external to the market, so the market doesn't account for them. You need to internalize externalities with taxes based on them -- you need to assign them a realistic cost compared to what damage they do to society, and the market will readjust with that taken into account.
I'm a Keynesian; I don't believe in the authoritarian-socialist view of telling businesses, "You will do this," or, on the economic-libertarian view, doing absolutely nothing. I believe in the government simply adjusting the prices of elements of the market with taxes when needed to make externalities that have serious costs but are normally ignored now have costs that are factored into the market, and letting the market make its own choices now that it's facing true costs. And with the taxes collected as such, you can reduce general taxation on corporations and inviduals and/or ameliorate the damage caused.
In such a situation, I think that, for example, coal power would largely become uneconomical, while techs like wind, solar, and deep geothermal (EGS or whatnot) would become much more popular. But if coal power plant operators can still be profitable when compensating for the greenhouse gasses, heavy metals, and particulate matter they emit (prices based on the consequences of those actions, such as increased healthcare costs), and while paying more for coal that's compensating for the water pollution and so forth (also with prices based on the consequences of those actions), then by all means, continue.
If you can find a way to strip mine the ~10,000 feet to the Bakken, the world would beat a path to your door ;) It's deep. It's deeper than the very productive Madison shale, and for a while, people thought that the oil in the Madison shale came from the Bakken (it's now known that it didn't). To get oil out of the Bakken, you drill down and then go horizontal.
Too bad algae farms tend to cost a small fortune to operate. I once read a paper studying the potential for algae farms to be economically viable producers of hydrogen, and even with superefficient algae, the lengths they had to go to make it economical were just ridiculous -- the plastic covering over the ponds as thin as cling wrap (hello, wind!), zero processing of the output, zero need for storing the output, zero need for pressurizing the output, and on and on and on.
I'm not saying it's impossible to make it work out economically. Just don't get your hopes up too far.
Yeah, it's not like we've found over a dozen supergiants in the past decade, including some of the largest fields ever discovered, or anything. Oh, wait, we have. Well, it's not like there are many orders of magnitude more fuel potential via syncrude from other sources. Oh, wait, there is.
By the way, I agree we should invest in alternative energy. But I'm not going to let what I want to happen get in the way of the facts.
The simple mathematics are that if something is being used faster then it is created, it will reach zero.
And therein lies the fundamental error. First off, you're not using "oil"; you're using gasoline or diesel or any number of refined products. You pull up light sweet crude, and it's pretty close to what you want out; you don't have to refine it much. You pull up sour crude, heavy crude, ultra-heavy crude, or even bitumen, and you've got a big refining task ahead of you. You cook oil out of keragenous rock like shale, and you're doing even more organic chemistry. Ultimately, you can make oil simply from CO or CO2, plus water for the H2, plus energy, via Fisher-Tropsch or Sabatier synthesis. In short, for oil to be able to *physically* run out, you need "peak energy" to occur.
Of course, the doomers make lots of other arguments. They're easily taken down, though. And I do mean "doomers". The more extreme ones are sort of a death cult.
B) This is about oil reserves INSIDE THE UNITED STATES
Actually, the Bakken formation extends into Canada, too.
The Bakken has a rather interesting history. Estimates on how much oil it produced have varied a lot. Back in the '70s, they thought it only had about 10B barrels -- which is a lot, but not when it's spread out over such a huge formation. To make matters worse, the formation is a dozen meters or so thick in most places. All together, recovery rates were expected to be 1-3%, and expensive at that. Not many takers.
Things have changed. After Price's paper that predicted over 400 billion barrels, computer simulations have been developed; the latest runs expect 200-300 billion barrels. Furthermore, horizontal drilling means that you can enter the thin formation and then run along it; this is what is used in the very successful Elm Coulee field.
The Bakken is just one minimally tapped deposit. There's absolutely no shortage of recoverable oil in the world. The problem is the consequences of recovering and burning it all.
C) The US is moving to 'alternative fuels'. The debate is not over whether or not to, but how big a priority it is.
Are you kidding? There's a huge debate over whether or not to, especially after the most recent papers suggesting that even sugarcane ethanol leads to more greenhouse gasses than gasoline. Let alone the fact that there's a widely growing acceptance that, despite the momentum, corn ethanol is a huge blunder. There's the food-for-fuel competition (food prices are up 40%, mostly from fuel prices and alternative fuel pressure). Now, I think it's good that corn prices aren't as artificially low as they used to be, but now they're artificially high, and everything is getting pushed up by the increased demand for biofuel land -- even other staples like wheat.
And what about cellulosic ethanol, this supposed panacea? This is one thing that drives me crazy. Look at how most big cellulosic ethanol companies are making the stuff. They turn the biomass into syngas (CO+H2) by burning it in a poorly oxygenated environment, and then use a complex, inefficient biological or catalytic process to convert it into ethanol. Well, here's the thing: we've been making syngas into *gasoline* for most of a century. That's how Nazi Germany and Apartheid-era South Africa kept their engines running (excepting, in the case of Germany, after we bombed most of their facilities). And it's a relatively efficient -- 70% or so. So, instead of making a fuel that we're *already set up for*, we're instead making a *less dense* fuel that we can only use in *limited quantities* in most cars and *can't ship in our pipelines*. Why? Because "cellulosic gasoline" isn't a buzzword. Nobody likes the word "gasoline", but lots of people like the word "ethanol". You get more investment, you get more tax breaks, and on and on. So the inferior solution gets chosen.
Anyways, if you want to *actually* clean up your act, either increase your MPG or switch your miles over to electricity (the significantly higher thermodynamic efficiencies of power plants mean that even dirty power plants run a car cleaner than a gasoline engine -- plus, electricity is a lot easier to clean up). Biofuels are an "easy" solution that isn't really a solution at all.
To heck with that, and with batteries - imagine being able to generate electricity from nuclear power plants themselves, rather than using them to heat water
To heck with that, too. You did notice that the tech involves lots of gold, right? It's bremsstrahlung radiation from the collision with gold that causes the shower of electrons that is captured.
Now, perhaps a *future* technology might use some other metal as the target. But this one would clearly be way too expensive to enclose a reactor or waste storage facility with.
When you look at the historical record for rocket engines, remember that very very few of those were designed with safety as the primary concern.
You're kidding, right? The primary design principle of a human-capable rocket is safety while still managing to get to orbit. Unfortunately, when your design envelope is "orbit", as opposed to "joyride", you don't have a lot of margin to work with.
Hence my earlier comment about repurposed missiles. You'd do better to look at the safety records of things like JATO bottles
JATO rockets don't deal with an orbital flight envelope, or anything remotely close. Heck, they're not even close to the flight envelope of your typical joyride "space tourism" flight. Even still, you mean something like this?
I said accidents aren't a given; I didn't say they weren't historically common.
Given that you accept that they are historically common, let's re-address my original statement that *when* (not if) an accident occurs with paying passengers (rather than just in an assembly building), what do you think that'll do to the market?
But there's no reason we have to repeat past mistakes, especially when the fundamental causes (ie, not making reliability a primary design goal) are so obvious and so easily fixed.
And yet they're *not* so easily fixed, since the accidents keep occurring, with virtually every rocket family at some point or another. Even Soyuz, widely regarded as a "safe" rocket, keeps blowing up; we've just been fortunate that it's been the unmanned Soyuz that have been exploding recently, not the manned ones.
Lox/Methane vs Lox/Kerosene vs Nitrous/HTPB doens't make a huge difference -- they all have broadly similar energy contents.
The hell it doesn't. The first has good ISP (325-400 or so vac.) and somewhat poor density. The second has fair ISP (275-350 or so vac.) and good density. The third has poor ISP (200-260 or so vac) and good density. Gee, which of these things is not orbit material without going all OTRAG...
Most rocket engine failures don't involve the propellants in the tanks mixing and detonating (that normally happens after the engine fails
Quite true, but the net effect is the same.
Blast shields can certainly contain that (where "contain" means "redirect aft where it won't hurt anything").
Now contain the detonation of the bulk propellants *after* whatever caused the initial failure. There's a reason that *no* manned orbital rocket systems rely on blast shielding to protect their occupants, and why detection of failures in advance plus the use of launch escape systems are relied upon. It's simply not an option.
The blast shield is substantially lighter than the chamber itself; there's nothing hard about taking it with you, unless you're trying to shave your margins to old-fashioned aerospace standards in pursuit of some goal other than a safe, reliable, and cheap to operate vehicle.
You mean like *actually getting to orbit*? Sorry, but if you think that you can get to orbit without shaving, you're sadly mistaken. Especially if you think you can do it with low ISP fuels as well.
XCOR isn't asking you to believe they can reach orbit; nor are they asking their investors to believe that. Long-term, they plan to do that, but they plan to build the experience and credibility first. This is a step on that path; it's obviously not sufficient. I find it odd that when you say it isn't orbit, and I answer that it's a step on the way, your complaint is that the journey isn't done yet.
You'll note that I commented that XCOR's use of scaleable propellants actually makes their claims of ultimately achieving orbit without completely starting over feasible (unlike Virgin). That said, the odds clearly state that you're going nowhere close to orbit, ever. Feel free to argue with the odds, but it's unreasonable to expect people to believ
LOX/Kerosene is certainly good as well. Lots of respectable orbital rockets use/have used LOX/Kerosene. ISP could stand to be better, but it's got nice density and is a mature tech.
It may surprise you to learn that there have been a *lot* more than four rocketry accidents in the world. Several percent of all launches have ended in failure. And the engines are a leading culprit. The entire Soviet manned moon mission was doomed by repeated engine problems in the N1, for example.
I don't right now, but I've (some of) it. No, I won't back it up more than that.
;) Rockets, and especially rocketplanes, have a long history of high accident rates. Even when you're working with things on the ground, it's horribly dangerous work, as Virgin recently found out.
Once again, the claim is asserted, but no data is provided.
Accidents are no more a given in this industry than any other transportation industry.
Oh, please -- don't give me that
The rocket engines will be individually protected by blast shields in case something goes dramatically wrong
When you're hauling that much energy, a blast shield is no reassurance. You're dealing with LOX/Methane, no? I'd think you must be daft to believe that a blast shield light enough to take with you would keep you safe in a LOX/Methane CATO. Perhaps from a hybrid rocket explosion, but not when you're dealing with two easily vaporized, readily misceable fuels.
Aside from the engine and the flight plan, this is just a smallish airplane / glider, and most of the safety analysis is similar.
Yeah, apart from the "Mach 2" and "huge amounts of fuel and oxidizer" aspects, just like a glider.
Most importantly, it can draw on a long history of airplane safety analysis for the vast majority of failure modes.
Yeah, just like the rest of rockets, right?
Zenit and Pegasus are not private rockets in the same sense that the Lynx is; they're built largely for government markets and with substantial government funding. (Pegasus is slightly debateable, but even so it's not most rockets)
They're private rockets, designed, built, and operated by private rocket companies without subsidy. Yes, they "stood on the shoulders of giants", so to speak, borrowing tech from existing systems, but so? Yes, they get government contracts -- but so do half of the private businesses in the US.
Falcon has flown twice, and failed both times
Reaching 2/3rds the delta-V of orbit is far more than XCOR will probably ever do. However, more on this (to XCOR's credit) shortly.
are carefully chosen to help build the XCOR technology base for future work.
I will give XCOR credit for this. While I'm not the biggest fan of LOX/Methane (assuming that's what Lynx is going to use, since I know it's something XCOR has messed with; I prefer LOX/Propane because it has almost as much ISP, much higher density at 100K, and can share a common bulkhead), it does have enough ISP to reach orbit without a ridiculous scaling factor. Also, launching from ground means that you don't need a gigantic carrier to scale up. So you're certainly a lot more scaleable than Virgin, and I will be keeping an eye out. However, you have a long way to go before showing you have any sort of credibility when it comes to the ability to scale to orbit. The small, private rocketry field is littered with the graves of companies with equally grandiouse dreams.
Note that I used to hold SpaceX to this standard, too. They've clearly moved beyond that point by now, having virtually gotten to orbit and retired the risk on most of their systems. You are not in that position, so it's only reasonable to expect skepticism and scrutiny until you get there.
Also, if you think Lynx isn't facing any of the same challenges, you're severly underestimating the amount of work that goes into it.
What was I thinking, thinking that 11.5 times the velocity and 130 times the heat load per unit mass is a whole different ballgame?
You realize that SSIII is complete vaporware and physically cannot be based on SS1 or SS2, right? And that SS1 and SS2 aren't encountering the challenges involved in orbital craft like extreme thermal management and high levels of delta-V, right?
SpaceX has a booster (Falcon 1) that, but for *either* a baffle or bump suppression, would have orbitted a payload (it now has both), and nonetheless reached 2/3 of the needed delta-V (the payload even separated normally at the end of the burn). SpaceX has also been checking off multiengine test firings in advance of their heavy lift booster (Falcon 9), as well as successfully test firing an advanced, regenerative version of their Falcon engine. And their Dragon has passed all NASA certifications so far for a manned, *orbital* spacecraft.
How, exactly, does Virgin and their vaporware fit into Bigelow's needs? Sounds like they have everything they need in a company that's already most of the way there -- SpaceX. What do they need a company that's virtually none of the way there for?
Mythbusters throughly busted the clay pot approach, though. If there was any signal to begin with, it gets completely lost in the noise of the grainy surface.
You say that it's "abundantly clear". And how do you arrive at this conclusion? I've heard a bunch of people make that claim, and nobody backs it up.
Yes, there are some millionaires who've paid several million to go to orbit. But they get to *stay there for days*. It's a whole different ballpark. You're asking people to pay an order of magnitude or two less but get five orders of magnitude less time at 1/4th the altitude and 1/10th the delta-V. How many people ride MiGs to see the curvature of the Earth? How many take part in the zero-G parabolas? A few thousand annually, no? These things cost *two orders of magnitude less*.
Now, I'm not asserting that there is no market for these launches. I just question the size of the market. And even if it is big enough now, how big do you think it'll be after the first accident? Not "If" there is an accident, but "When"; it's pretty much a given in this business.
By the way: most rockets *are* run privately. Craft like the Shuttle are the exception, not the rule. Government subsidy often helps, but not always -- there's the Zenit, the Pegasus, and now the Falcon. And these actually, you know, go to orbit. I.e., they actually face the challenges involved rather then bypassing them by choosing an easy flight envelope that doesn't actually accomplish anything and whose craft can't be scaled up to orbit without a complete redesign.
Yeah, it's great that we're just now rediscovering genetic engineering, nuclear reactors, CIGS cells, multicore processors, carbon nanotubes, and satellite communications. We know that the Romans did all of these things thousands of years ago.
Yes, some people in historic times did some really darned impressive things, long before we would have thought they would have. No, most of our modern knowledge has not been "lost and rediscovered again and again and again."
Back on the original topic: I think it's perfectly reasonable that some day we might be able to recover even older sounds. And perhaps images.
Sound:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/02w307324378k4jm/
"A theoretical model of the acoustic effect of crystallization is suggested based on the representation of a stepwise character of formation or disappearance of macrolayers and macroregions on a growing (or melting) surface. According to this model, the picture of oscillations reproduces in basic features the form of the signals observed in experiments. The oscillation frequency of the liquid is determined by the frequency of generation of jumps at the crystallization front, while the comparatively large values of peak pressures in acoustic waves are a consequence of the resonance phenomena."
Translation: crystallizing materials (cooling molten metals, cooling glasses, drying out of sugars and salts, all sorts of things you can picture remaining from an ancient environment) can leave traces of acoustic vibrations that were passing through them when they were cooling in their crystal structure. Meaning that we could potentially recover them. I don't know how widely applicable this technique is, but it certainly seems possible.
Images:
Many materials, both natural and manmade, suffer photodegradation. This is a process in which sunlight excites certain compounds and creates free radicals inside the material, which then, catalytically or not, damage the material from its original state. It seems quite possible to me that holographic information related to what frequencies of light struck where at what angles (and potentially even at what periods of time) could be restored by doing a detailed layer-by-layer atomic scale inspection of the material in question. Certainly I would expect poor temporal resolution (if any at all), but say, if you had an artifact that was in a single room for most of its existance, and then ended up buried with no further exposure to light, perhaps you could reconstruct the average appearance of the room.
It's right near the part that talks about how a Nash equilibrium does not inherently produce an optimal solution despite each actor making sound decisions based on their own rational self-interest.
Eh, it's pretty simple. This will begin to be rolled out as driver assist features already coming online, like radar range finding and collision alerts. And then automatic brake application for collision prevention and "smart" cruise controls that maintain distance. It'll move from there to basically the equivalent of HOV lanes for automated vehicles (non-automated vehicles driving in them would be reported and ticketted; radar range finding would still be needed for "unexpected circumstances").
More Americans hate driving than those who enjoy it "a great deal", and the ratio is continually shifting against driving. Even those who overall like to drive, many of them would readily give up their ability to drive in exchange for greater safety, less pollution/fuel consumption, faster transit times, and so forth. If these techs do come and do turn out to be popular among their users, expect big fights in cities for steadily increasing the percentage of lanes that are automated, up until complete automation of in-city traffic becomes standard (cities would like it a lot because it'd reduce smog, increase throughput, and decrease the need for further road construction). Those who like to drive would probably fight this tooth and nail, but I can't picture them winning. As a new generation grows up on increasingly automated road travel, it seems likely that even out of city, manual driving would increasingly become an "offroad" and "country" activity.
This all assumes that the tech does make it to market via the incremental approach currently being pursued, that it works, that it is safer than human driving, and that it is affordable enough to become widespread.