No, I would never tempt my maker that way. He gave us the invention of the parachute so that we'd use it.
It rather reminds me of the guy who was in a house that was about to be flooded out, a rescue team came by and said, "quick, get in the Jeep, we'll save you". The man replied, "no, it's ok, God will take care of me".
Then the flood waters rose, a boat came along, "quick, get in, we'll save you!". "No" the man replied, "God is with me".
Then the house was almost covered by water, a helicopter came by, "quick, climb on, we'll save you!". "No, it's ok, God will save me", he replied.
Then the water rose and he drowned.
When he got to heaven and faced God, he said, "Lord, I've always been faithful, always held you in my heart, why didn't you save me?"
The Lord replied, "I sent you a Jeep, a boat, and a helicopter, what more did you want?"
God did protect me, he gave me a well designed parachute and good instructors to keep me safe.
Most of the time you're wearing a 4 point safety harness, but there actually are helicopters that you can fly with the doors off, with nothing but an automotive style seat belt.
Not my first choice.:)
I've never done full acrobatics in a helicopter (yes, some can), but I've had one 90 degrees over on its side, that's an experience. (AS350, it has a rigid rotor system so it can do it)
It was on my bucket list, wanted to try it to see what all the fuss was about.
I've had many amazing experiences in life. Getting married, the birth of my children, flying solo for the first time (in a helicopter with the doors off, quite an experience!).
About the only thing that compares... the birth of my first child... that is first on the list, skydiving would be second... above everything else...
There is simply nothing I can say to anyone who hasn't done it... stepping out of an airplane at 13,500 feet above the ground, parachute on your back, nothing but you, the sky, and God.
Well, ok, the pair of instructors with you, one per side. I did the accelerated free fall option, so I had my own chute, they fall with you to 5,000 ft, then you open and spend about 4 minutes by yourself under canopy (they fall another 1,000 ft to make sure your chute opens cleanly, then they open their own.)
I understand it, it is amazing, and I never need to do it again.:)
You know why there's been so many "Worst. Storm. EVER!" incidences lately?
Why yes, yes I do...
1. We have 7 billion people living on this planet, the chances of having a lot of them hit and hurt by a big storm are much higher today than 100 years ago, when less than 25% of that number lived here.
2. We have only been keeping detailed records of weather for about 100 years, and frankly some of the records from 100 years ago weren't all that great. This is not a long time from Earth's point of view.
It is a common mistake of humans to think of everything in human scale, but Earth doesn't work in human timeframes, it works in Earth timeframes.
The idea of a 200 mpg carburetor is old, 1935 old... If it was real, anything invented back in 1935 could be invented in China, or Iran, or Russia today... Or India or Australia, or frankly South Africa...
Unless you think black helicopters are flying around the world, killing anyone who comes up with it.
However, if it costs, say, $5,000 to properly insulate my home, and it saves, say, $50 a month in the utility bill, then it will take 100 months to pay back.
Actually more, when you consider the time value of money.
So maybe 10 years to pay back the investment.
The average American moves every 7 years, some twice as often. Why spend a ton of money doing that to your house when you won't even be here?
Yes, you can say it cuts power bills in the future, but that isn't what sells houses to most people. What sells houses to most people is the price.
We don't demolish and replace homes every 10-15 years, not sure who is telling you that, but it isn't true.
America has a lot of open land, very little of this country is actually developed, so millions of homes are being built where there was nothing before.
My own home was built in 2001. Before then this was cow pasture. There are aerial pictures on Google Earth over time showing how this whole area developed over the past 20 years.
There are now 250,000 people living here, where 20 years ago, there were almost none.
These homes will stand for a very long time, they are just building new homes 30 miles north of here where there was cow pastures before.
Regarding hiring people... How many nuclear accidents has the US Navy had in their sea going reactors?
Would you be opposed to simply having the US Navy run our reactors? They seem to have a pretty darn good track record of it. They aren't the cheapest solution, but in this case, I don't think going with the lowest bidder makes sense.
It would be if carbon emissions were taxed at a rate reflective of the harm to the planet that we believe they may be doing.
Another factor is that half of the nuclear reactors in the world are Gen 1 plants. They need replacing because they were very early, version 1 reactors that were designed before we knew a lot about such things.
We may or may not need to replace reactors in another 40 years. Perhaps we will, because fusion might be figured out by then (long shot on that one, but you never know).
There is cleaner coal, and moving in that direction helps since we aren't going to rid the world of coal power plants any time soon.
The primary problem with batteries is that they are not green, in many cases they are worse than the current solutions.
Batteries take energy to make, energy to move, energy to recycle.
Geothermal is nice, but it only works in limited locations and can only make a limited amount of power. Wave and ocean power has its own issues, none of it is proven and frankly you run the risk that if you start to extract energy from the ocean, you change it in the process.
I suspect that many people who make such suggestions have never really done the math on how much energy humans use, how fast it is growing, and how much energy can be gained from solar, wind, etc.
The math shows there is an order of magnitude missing in the "clean" energy technologies.
If it was so simple, we'd have done it already. It just... isn't...
:) The quotes are there for anyone who is against something without having a counter proposal to offer.
Just saying, "no nuclear", or "no coal", without having another option, is just someone who is not adding to the conversation.
When they reply, "oh, we just need more solar", then I know they are nuts, because that isn't a baseline power solution. It is too transient, too expensive, and doesn't produce enough power per sqm to power the world.
The only solar that I can see that would do so is solar in space that beams microwave power down to the ground. Simply because, last time I checked, there are no clouds in space and it would be dependable.
Until that time, you have coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.
Did you ever think that maybe if we didn't "FlyHelicopters" we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place?
Sure, and if we all died tomorrow, the Earth would perhaps be a cleaner place.
With of course no one around to enjoy it, so what would be the point?
There is simply no other way to power airplanes and helicopters other than with fuel. Jet turbines can be powered with biodiesel, which helps, but has its own issues, and would be interesting to try and produce on the scale the airlines require.
Honestly, I don't know what the f*ck Americans are doing to have almost twice as much emissions as here in Europe.
There are several reasons. First, our energy costs are lower, so we can more easily afford to use power.
Second, we tend to live in larger houses, drive larger cars (and trucks), and in general consume more "stuff".
I'm above average in my CO2 production, to be sure, but I live in a 350 square meter house, drive a truck that gets 5 kilometers to the liter (or 20 L/100 if you prefer that metric), and I have 8 tons of air conditioning on my house (I have no idea how that converts to Europe's measurements).
Just a random post online talking about how we use tons of AC and Europe does not.
HVAC is, by far, our largest residential use of power in the United States. Making our TVs use less power will help, but replacing the older HVAC systems will make far more difference. It is expensive to do however on any scale.
All interesting bits of info, but it misses the grand point. Maybe you get it, but a lot of people don't.
You say the world does 4.9 tons per person.
Lets say, just for fun, that we can get the world down to 2.5 tons per person. Lets say that we spend a large amount of money and put solar everywhere, wind farms everywhere, make electronics more power efficient, and spent a huge sum of taxpayer dollars to replace old and inefficient HVAC systems and other items with new energy efficient systems.
Wonderful!!!
Now, the 7.1 billion people on this Earth are producing only 2.5 tons of CO2 instead of 4.9 tons.
What happens in 50-100 years when the population is 14 billion people?
We're right back to where we started, emissions equal to today, and you can't cut them in half again quite so easily (without killing our way of life).
It isn't all one thing or another. You can't conserve your way to prosperity, but you also can't just consume endlessly either without regard to the cost.
We do need to become more energy efficient, no doubt about it. But we also need to produce more power. Our total power needs aren't going down, they are going up. Maybe we can slow the growth, but we aren't going to shrink the total number.
There are billions of people in the world who have no HVAC, sooner or later they are going to want it/get it. There are a billion people with no clean running water. Clean running water takes energy to move and produce.
Global power demand is only going up. We need to stop dreaming about windmills saving the Earth and start building modern nuclear reactors that, when they fail (not if, when, all mechanical things break), they fail to a safe mode. These designs already exist, but no one wants to build them because the common person doesn't understand that there is more than one type of nuclear reactor in the world.
This will take education, it will take time, and frankly, it will take the support of the green movement to understand that a modern nuclear reactor is better than a coal fired power plant.
South facing windows? You mean so we have to run the HVAC harder in the summer to keep the building cold?
Solar water heaters are nice, but expensive. My existing hot water tanks are half the price of a solar water system. My monthly natural gas bill to heat them is less over 10 years than the higher price of the solar system.
Most of the ideas toss out there aren't very realistic, you can talk about insulation all you want, but the millions of existing buildings won't be upgraded. There are 20 year old HVAC systems not getting replaced, etc.
We need cheap, clean power. The only source for that for baseline loads is nuclear. The other option is coal and natural gas. Solar and wind help, but are not baseline loads, nor will they become such, no matter how hard Germany tries.
Neither really solves the problem. Industry and HVAC are where most of our power consumption goes, that and transportation. Moving stuff around takes energy.
Windows 7 runs just fine on a Mac, what are you thinking?
Apple has a very small share of the consumer computer market, their prices are too high and their software choices more limited.
Linux hardly even rates a listing in the consumer computer market. No amount of talk of technical superiority changes that truth.
There are many reasons why this is, but the reasons are almost beside the point. Because the situation that caused Windows to take over the market has not changed, the market will not change.
I first used Linux in 1996, I have used it off and on since. Nice OS, I see the value there, if I was running a web server, or super computer.
Linux on the desktop? I've heard that for 15 years now, still aren't there, won't happen any time soon.
Sadly, from everything I've heard from "environmentalists" for the past 20 years, they seem to be against almost everything that might do something bad at some point.
Look, I don't knock the idea, harming the enviroment is bad, polution is bad, and there is a reasonable chance that all this CO2 is bad.
Ok, fair enough. But the "environmentalists" are against coal, they are against natural gas, they are against oil, they are against nuclear, they are against... well, everything.
Are they expecting us to all go back and live in caves?
Solar and wind are nice, they help, but they aren't going to become our primary power source anytime soon (and probably not ever).
So what then? What exactly can we use to power our world?
Slashdot Mirror
A helicopter is just a collection of 10,000 parts traveling loosely in formation! :)
No, I would never tempt my maker that way. He gave us the invention of the parachute so that we'd use it.
It rather reminds me of the guy who was in a house that was about to be flooded out, a rescue team came by and said, "quick, get in the Jeep, we'll save you". The man replied, "no, it's ok, God will take care of me".
Then the flood waters rose, a boat came along, "quick, get in, we'll save you!". "No" the man replied, "God is with me".
Then the house was almost covered by water, a helicopter came by, "quick, climb on, we'll save you!". "No, it's ok, God will save me", he replied.
Then the water rose and he drowned.
When he got to heaven and faced God, he said, "Lord, I've always been faithful, always held you in my heart, why didn't you save me?"
The Lord replied, "I sent you a Jeep, a boat, and a helicopter, what more did you want?"
God did protect me, he gave me a well designed parachute and good instructors to keep me safe.
Not my first choice. :)
I've never done full acrobatics in a helicopter (yes, some can), but I've had one 90 degrees over on its side, that's an experience. (AS350, it has a rigid rotor system so it can do it)
It was on my bucket list, wanted to try it to see what all the fuss was about.
I've had many amazing experiences in life. Getting married, the birth of my children, flying solo for the first time (in a helicopter with the doors off, quite an experience!).
About the only thing that compares... the birth of my first child... that is first on the list, skydiving would be second... above everything else...
There is simply nothing I can say to anyone who hasn't done it... stepping out of an airplane at 13,500 feet above the ground, parachute on your back, nothing but you, the sky, and God.
Well, ok, the pair of instructors with you, one per side. I did the accelerated free fall option, so I had my own chute, they fall with you to 5,000 ft, then you open and spend about 4 minutes by yourself under canopy (they fall another 1,000 ft to make sure your chute opens cleanly, then they open their own.)
I understand it, it is amazing, and I never need to do it again. :)
Both short term and long term?
What effect do they have on birds, fish, the water, wind speed?
How many would you need to replace all the nuclear reactors in Japan?
What effect does that have?
People keep talking about wind turbines as harmless. Are they?
You know why there's been so many "Worst. Storm. EVER!" incidences lately?
Why yes, yes I do...
1. We have 7 billion people living on this planet, the chances of having a lot of them hit and hurt by a big storm are much higher today than 100 years ago, when less than 25% of that number lived here.
2. We have only been keeping detailed records of weather for about 100 years, and frankly some of the records from 100 years ago weren't all that great. This is not a long time from Earth's point of view.
It is a common mistake of humans to think of everything in human scale, but Earth doesn't work in human timeframes, it works in Earth timeframes.
And super-cheap energy production would not be created just once.
This, right here...
The nonsense of "someone created super efficient engines or batteries or whatever, then oil companies bought the patent and buried them".
That is such nonsense. A good invention can be invented by more than one person, and the US and Europe aren't the only places that can do this.
http://www.mikebrownsolutions.com/fish3.htm
The idea of a 200 mpg carburetor is old, 1935 old... If it was real, anything invented back in 1935 could be invented in China, or Iran, or Russia today... Or India or Australia, or frankly South Africa...
Unless you think black helicopters are flying around the world, killing anyone who comes up with it.
In which case, I really can't help you. :)
However, if it costs, say, $5,000 to properly insulate my home, and it saves, say, $50 a month in the utility bill, then it will take 100 months to pay back.
Actually more, when you consider the time value of money.
So maybe 10 years to pay back the investment.
The average American moves every 7 years, some twice as often. Why spend a ton of money doing that to your house when you won't even be here?
Yes, you can say it cuts power bills in the future, but that isn't what sells houses to most people. What sells houses to most people is the price.
America has a lot of open land, very little of this country is actually developed, so millions of homes are being built where there was nothing before.
My own home was built in 2001. Before then this was cow pasture. There are aerial pictures on Google Earth over time showing how this whole area developed over the past 20 years.
There are now 250,000 people living here, where 20 years ago, there were almost none.
These homes will stand for a very long time, they are just building new homes 30 miles north of here where there was cow pastures before.
Would you be opposed to simply having the US Navy run our reactors? They seem to have a pretty darn good track record of it. They aren't the cheapest solution, but in this case, I don't think going with the lowest bidder makes sense.
Another factor is that half of the nuclear reactors in the world are Gen 1 plants. They need replacing because they were very early, version 1 reactors that were designed before we knew a lot about such things.
We may or may not need to replace reactors in another 40 years. Perhaps we will, because fusion might be figured out by then (long shot on that one, but you never know).
The primary problem with batteries is that they are not green, in many cases they are worse than the current solutions.
Batteries take energy to make, energy to move, energy to recycle.
Geothermal is nice, but it only works in limited locations and can only make a limited amount of power. Wave and ocean power has its own issues, none of it is proven and frankly you run the risk that if you start to extract energy from the ocean, you change it in the process.
I suspect that many people who make such suggestions have never really done the math on how much energy humans use, how fast it is growing, and how much energy can be gained from solar, wind, etc.
The math shows there is an order of magnitude missing in the "clean" energy technologies.
If it was so simple, we'd have done it already. It just... isn't...
Of course, they used gasoline to run their engines, the hydrogen was just used for lift, and we all saw how well THAT worked out! :)
Just saying, "no nuclear", or "no coal", without having another option, is just someone who is not adding to the conversation.
When they reply, "oh, we just need more solar", then I know they are nuts, because that isn't a baseline power solution. It is too transient, too expensive, and doesn't produce enough power per sqm to power the world.
The only solar that I can see that would do so is solar in space that beams microwave power down to the ground. Simply because, last time I checked, there are no clouds in space and it would be dependable.
Until that time, you have coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.
Pick one (or more).
Now... Who is going to pay for them? We already have millions of existing homes, would you tear them all down?
What happens when a house costs 30% more to build your way? 100% more? Who pays for that?
Do we regulate it and ban existing brick homes? Or new brick homes?
I am not against it, just saying that you have to deal with the practical issues before tossing out a "solution".
The devil, as they say, is in the details...
Did you ever think that maybe if we didn't "FlyHelicopters" we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place?
Sure, and if we all died tomorrow, the Earth would perhaps be a cleaner place.
With of course no one around to enjoy it, so what would be the point?
There is simply no other way to power airplanes and helicopters other than with fuel. Jet turbines can be powered with biodiesel, which helps, but has its own issues, and would be interesting to try and produce on the scale the airlines require.
Moving people and stuff around consumes energy.
Europeans also have a different attitude than Americans towards energy consumption.
It probably helps that our power bills are lower and that we are generally wealthier than most people in Europe.
Not saying that is a good or bad thing, just that it is a thing and has an effect.
The cost to run the AC all day here in Texas is simply not as high as it would be in most of Europe.
Honestly, I don't know what the f*ck Americans are doing to have almost twice as much emissions as here in Europe.
There are several reasons. First, our energy costs are lower, so we can more easily afford to use power.
Second, we tend to live in larger houses, drive larger cars (and trucks), and in general consume more "stuff".
I'm above average in my CO2 production, to be sure, but I live in a 350 square meter house, drive a truck that gets 5 kilometers to the liter (or 20 L/100 if you prefer that metric), and I have 8 tons of air conditioning on my house (I have no idea how that converts to Europe's measurements).
http://www.yelp.com/topic/atlanta-why-dont-europeans-use-air-conditioning-very-much
Just a random post online talking about how we use tons of AC and Europe does not.
HVAC is, by far, our largest residential use of power in the United States. Making our TVs use less power will help, but replacing the older HVAC systems will make far more difference. It is expensive to do however on any scale.
You say the world does 4.9 tons per person.
Lets say, just for fun, that we can get the world down to 2.5 tons per person. Lets say that we spend a large amount of money and put solar everywhere, wind farms everywhere, make electronics more power efficient, and spent a huge sum of taxpayer dollars to replace old and inefficient HVAC systems and other items with new energy efficient systems.
Wonderful!!!
Now, the 7.1 billion people on this Earth are producing only 2.5 tons of CO2 instead of 4.9 tons.
What happens in 50-100 years when the population is 14 billion people?
We're right back to where we started, emissions equal to today, and you can't cut them in half again quite so easily (without killing our way of life).
It isn't all one thing or another. You can't conserve your way to prosperity, but you also can't just consume endlessly either without regard to the cost.
We do need to become more energy efficient, no doubt about it. But we also need to produce more power. Our total power needs aren't going down, they are going up. Maybe we can slow the growth, but we aren't going to shrink the total number.
There are billions of people in the world who have no HVAC, sooner or later they are going to want it/get it. There are a billion people with no clean running water. Clean running water takes energy to move and produce.
Global power demand is only going up. We need to stop dreaming about windmills saving the Earth and start building modern nuclear reactors that, when they fail (not if, when, all mechanical things break), they fail to a safe mode. These designs already exist, but no one wants to build them because the common person doesn't understand that there is more than one type of nuclear reactor in the world.
This will take education, it will take time, and frankly, it will take the support of the green movement to understand that a modern nuclear reactor is better than a coal fired power plant.
^ You sir, deserve about a thousand mod points for that post! Frankly, I couldn't have said it better myself. +100 to you!
Solar water heaters are nice, but expensive. My existing hot water tanks are half the price of a solar water system. My monthly natural gas bill to heat them is less over 10 years than the higher price of the solar system.
Most of the ideas toss out there aren't very realistic, you can talk about insulation all you want, but the millions of existing buildings won't be upgraded. There are 20 year old HVAC systems not getting replaced, etc.
We need cheap, clean power. The only source for that for baseline loads is nuclear. The other option is coal and natural gas. Solar and wind help, but are not baseline loads, nor will they become such, no matter how hard Germany tries.
Neither really solves the problem. Industry and HVAC are where most of our power consumption goes, that and transportation. Moving stuff around takes energy.
However, it isn't the main solution. You cannot cut the consumption to zero, and even if you could, it wouldn't make all that big of a difference.
Power is used far more for manufacturing, HVAC, etc than for consumer goods.
Producing cheap, clean power is the solution, sadly we are a long way from that because some people are opposed to anything new.
Apple has a very small share of the consumer computer market, their prices are too high and their software choices more limited.
Linux hardly even rates a listing in the consumer computer market. No amount of talk of technical superiority changes that truth.
There are many reasons why this is, but the reasons are almost beside the point. Because the situation that caused Windows to take over the market has not changed, the market will not change.
I first used Linux in 1996, I have used it off and on since. Nice OS, I see the value there, if I was running a web server, or super computer.
Linux on the desktop? I've heard that for 15 years now, still aren't there, won't happen any time soon.
Look, I don't knock the idea, harming the enviroment is bad, polution is bad, and there is a reasonable chance that all this CO2 is bad.
Ok, fair enough. But the "environmentalists" are against coal, they are against natural gas, they are against oil, they are against nuclear, they are against... well, everything.
Are they expecting us to all go back and live in caves?
Solar and wind are nice, they help, but they aren't going to become our primary power source anytime soon (and probably not ever).
So what then? What exactly can we use to power our world?