There seems to be a way around the whole climate/energy problem.
Power satellites have long been dismissed because of the high cost of lifting parts to GEO.
But if you build just one with expensive conventional rockets and equip it with propulsion lasers, the cost to get the parts up for enough to end the use of fossil fuels goes to under $100/kg and the cost of power to under 2 cents per kWh.
At that price, the oil companies can make all the synthetic, carbon neutral gasoline they want for a dollar a gallon.
If you want to know more, ask, especially if you know someone who could lead a hundred billion dollar project. hkeithhenson@gmail.com
Gasoline has about 40 kWh/gal of energy in it. So if the process takes no more than 100 kWh to produce a gallon, then the energy cost is a dollar a gallon per cent of cost per kWh.
So penny a kWh power will provide dollar a gallon synthetic gasoline. (Plus capital cost for the plants of perhaps 10%).
I think I know how to get the cost of power down into the 1-2 cents per kWh level. It involves power satellites and laser propulsion to get the cost of lifting parts to GEO down. If you want to know more ask. hkeithhenson@gmail.com The previous iteration is here. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7898
I tied wars into evolutionary psychology in "Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War." It is certainly predictable from the economic prospects of a population.
I think we already know how to solve the energy problem. Power satellites are the obvious answer except the cost of lifting parts to GEO is too high.
Beamed power propulsion will get the cost down to under $100/kg, a point at which power is under two cents per kWh and synthetic fuels on off peak power cost around a dollar a gallon.
The trick is to build one power sat with conventional rockets and use it to power GW class propulsion lasers to bring up parts for thousands of power sats. The growth potential is high enough that a real effort could end the use of fossil fuels in a decade. And not by reducing energy use or shivering in the dark, but by undercutting the cost of fossil fuels with carbon neutral synthetics. http://www.htyp.org/dollar_a_gallon_gasoline
Since WW II the west has lived in a remarkable era.
The history of humans, most of it in the stone age, has been one of nearly continuous war. What shut it off for us?
I have run a rough model of how the psychological mechanisms that turn bad economic prospects into wars. It turns out that the advantage for genes is around 37% for attempting to kill neighboring tribes compared to starving as the result of population growth followed by a weather glitch. (For the genes, the downside of going to war is limited because the young women--who also carried the genes--were normally considered booty and incorporated as wives into the winning tribe.)
It also turned out that there was an even larger disadvantage for the genes if the prospects were for good times. So genes built highly sensitive "behavior switches" in the stone age.
I.e., bad economic prospects switch on the mechanisms that eventually lead to wars.
As long as the economic growth is higher than the population growth, the psychological mechanisms for wars stay off.
More if you Google for "Evolutionary psychology, memes, and the origin of war."
The basic physics says beamed energy is a good idea.
Beamed energy lets you get about twice the exhaust velocity you can get with the best chemical fuels.
That changes the mass ratio from 7.4 (to LEO with best chemical) to 3.
That's the difference between 13.5% structure, engines and payload to 33% The minimum for reusable is thought to be around 15%, so the payload fraction goes from -1.5% to perhaps 18% of take off mass.
"Investing in nuclear power plants and research is not now and will never be cost effective."
Suppose (It's possible) that biological research made humans completely immune to the effects of radiation.
Would that make nuclear power plants cost effective?
Two alternative ways to collect solar power
on
Bill Gates On Energy
·
· Score: 1
There are two ways I know of to collect dilute solar energy that might be economic, i.e., lower than the price of coal.
First is over 40 years old, go into space and beam energy down as microwaves..
Zero gravity and no wind means the collecting structures can be far lighter than anything on earth. They are still way too expensive to haul up by current or projected developments in chemical rockets. The cost must come down by a factor of 200 for current rockets and a factor of 40 for the projected cost of the Falcon Heavy. $100 per kg is what's needed..
That looks possible (at 500,000 tons per year) by using partly air breathing vehicles for the first stage and beamed energy (lasers) for the second. Details here: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7898.
The second way is to float the collectors at 20 km where you can avoid clouds and the cosine effect by pointing a 2 km parabolic reflector at the sun. This works as far north as Stockholm. You bring the energy down in a 50 meter diameter light pipe, convert to heat which can be efficiently stored at high temperature.
Based on materials cost, the investment looks to be around $1.2 B/GW and the power cost between one and two cents per kWh. The storage system (35,000 cubic meters of firebrick) costs a tenth of a cent per kWh. I worked on this for a year and a half. We found no showstoppers, but the engineering detail got beyond what could be done with a small unpaid team. More here www.stratosolar.com
It's hard to evaluate exactly what your chances are to come out the far side intact, but a dip in liquid nitrogen (after being loaded with antifreeze) offers better than zero chance. I presume Terry knows about it, if not, perhaps someone who knows him could suggest he check it out. Cryonic suspension following assisted suicide would provide excellent preservation of structure (http://www.merkle.com/cryo/).
Disclosure: I have been signed up with Alcor since 1986, and have helped with the processing of 19 of their patients, including several of my friends, one last December.
The Scientology connection to Anonymous was something I predicted in a scientology lawsuit deposition clear back in 1996.
Henson: well it comes off the recreation budget. [He is making fun of this expensive lawyer, and it's getting Lieberman's goat.] This is training for the big action, Henson says. Lieberman takes the bait: What's that?
Henson: when some major government finally decides to really sit down hard on free speech on the net.
Lieberman spends a few minutes in a halfhearted attempt to get Henson to say something seditious, but gives up quickly. Perhaps it occurs to him that he is being trolled.
Lieberman: so you welcome this [lawsuit] as a training exercise?
Anonymous ("the net") certainly used scientology as a training exercise starting in early 2008 that later figured into their defense of Wikileaks and their support for the various rebellions in the Islamic world.
That first Anon picket of scientology really impressed me when 9,000 people turned out. That was 100 times larger than any previous picket against the cult. I think it was instructive to Anon as well to see just how many would take part in something relatively risky. A number of people have been subjected to scn's legal attacks.
Keith Henson
PS Excellent article even if it does read somewhat like a PhD thesis.:-)
The cost of going into space is largely the low energy of chemical fuels compared to the energy physics says we need to get there. It is close to 15 kWh per kg, which is to day more than a kg of gasoline, never mind the oxygen needed to burn it.
Another way to look at it is exhaust velocity. A rocket that is 2/3rds fuel can get to the same velocity as it's exhaust velocity. The best we can do is the space shuttle engines. They give 4.5 km/s. Orbital is about 9 km/s so rockets have to stage.
You can heat hydrogen hot enough to give 9 km/s exhaust velocity, but until recently the efficiency of laser was too low to make this practical. Big solid state lasers have changed that.
A flyback stage to 6-7 km/s and lasers from there to GEO looks like it could get the cost down to $100/kg.
Details if anyone is interested. hkeithhenson@gmail.com
You do have to solve it with math, it's called the rocket equation.
The best chemical reactions give an exhaust velocity of about 4.5 km/sec. You need twice that much to get a substantial payload into LEO without staging (which is very expensive).
However, chemical reactions are not the only way to heat a gas and hydrogen heated with lasers to 600 deg less than the melting point of tungsten gives more than twice the exhaust velocity of the SSME.
This wasn't possible to consider until recent times when high power semiconductor laser diodes came on the market.
The air breathing Skylon used for a "first stage" has an equivalent exhaust velocity of 10.5 km/sec until it runs out of air at 26 km and 2 km/s. Switching to laser heated hydrogen at that point would put 1/3 of it's takeoff mass in LEO--about 50 tons of rocket plane and 50 tons of payload..
It does take a lot of laser power, about 6 GW, but we can draw that off the grid (in a few places).
I have been deeply involved with cryonics since 1985. Helped on 19 of the hundred Alcor has stored.
In fact the last one I helped with was a pancreatic cancer victim.
If there are people reading this to are in contact with Steve Jobs, I wish they would check with him, just to be sure he has considered (and probably rejected) this option.
It's inexpensive relative to person with Steve's resources.
If the genes contributing to religiosity are identified, it will be very interesting to see if they are over represented in the US where a fair sized part of the founding population came here for religious reasons.
A more recent genetic sorting out might be seen in the descendants of Mormons who may be over represented in certain new religions, i.e., cults.
I am sorry to say, but I expect that further study of this will find that self control is largely a genetic effect rather than something parents or teachers have a lot of ability to change.
Readers who want to dig into this might read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris
And this paper about where having more self control came from.
I can't see the future, but I know of two ways to get the cost of solar energy down to where synthetic carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuel should cost under a dollar a gallon. The first one I wrote about on The Oil Drum about a year ago, and the second is called StratoSolar. It works as far north as Stockholm and through clouds. In short, light concentrator at 20 km, light pipe to the ground and a conventional combined cycle power plant. Energy storage in hot bricks.
The original purpose of warfare was to kill people.
Humans are top level predators. The only thing that kills top level predators is other of their own kind. Lions for example.
When the population builds up to the point it stresses the ability of the ecosystem to feed it, it's time for a war. This went on long enough for it to be an evolved feature. See Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War.
"Also, you're not factoring in the costs of bringing metals back to the Earth (if that's your goal). It's far more expensive to do that than to mine them here and will be for the foreseeable future. Of course, if your goal is to use them in space anyway, then it might be better to mine them there. (On the other hand, then you have to build the refining and construction infrastructure in space, which has a lot of challenges of its own.)"
Energy is the only obvious product worth returning to earth, i.e. space based solar power. But if you do, the obvious material to build them out of (because of thermal shocks around the equinox) is 35% nickel Invar. A serious power satellite project rapidly uses up all the nickel deposits on Earth. What to do, oh what to do? It happens that typical nickel-iron asteroids are close to 10% nickel. A 50,000 ton processing plant incorporating a 10 GW power plant should be able to chew up 10,000 tons of asteroid and ship back 1000 tons of nickel a day. The chemical processing would be to melt, roll to foil thickness, take the nickel, iron and cobalt out with warm CO then process the dust for gold and platinum. So after 50 days of operation it pays back the lift cost in produced nickel. Dr Lewis from the U of Arizona worked out the process.
One target would be 1986 DA, a 2 plus km chunk that is thought to be solid nickel iron.
If you already have a production facility for power satellites in GEO, reaching this asteroid takes only 140 m/sec.
Slashdot Mirror
There seems to be a way around the whole climate/energy problem.
Power satellites have long been dismissed because of the high cost of lifting parts to GEO.
But if you build just one with expensive conventional rockets and equip it with propulsion lasers, the cost to get the parts up for enough to end the use of fossil fuels goes to under $100/kg and the cost of power to under 2 cents per kWh.
At that price, the oil companies can make all the synthetic, carbon neutral gasoline they want for a dollar a gallon.
If you want to know more, ask, especially if you know someone who could lead a hundred billion dollar project. hkeithhenson@gmail.com
I have bisected bugs, horizontally.
When I was in college the place we lived in had an infestation of 2 inch cockroaches.
Used to kill them with wax bullets.
Shoot at the floor at a low angle a few inches in front of the bug and the spray of wax would cut them in half.
Often the bottom half would run off and leave the top half.
Gasoline has about 40 kWh/gal of energy in it. So if the process takes no more than 100 kWh to produce a gallon, then the energy cost is a dollar a gallon per cent of cost per kWh.
So penny a kWh power will provide dollar a gallon synthetic gasoline. (Plus capital cost for the plants of perhaps 10%).
http://www.htyp.org/dollar_a_gallon_gasoline
I think I know how to get the cost of power down into the 1-2 cents per kWh level. It involves power satellites and laser propulsion to get the cost of lifting parts to GEO down. If you want to know more ask. hkeithhenson@gmail.com The previous iteration is here. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7898
It is worth considering why riots are so easy to set off in that part of the world.
I expect that the poor economic conditions are more of a factor than the particular flavor of religion.
I tied wars into evolutionary psychology in "Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War." It is certainly predictable from the economic prospects of a population.
I think we already know how to solve the energy problem. Power satellites are the obvious answer except the cost of lifting parts to GEO is too high.
Beamed power propulsion will get the cost down to under $100/kg, a point at which power is under two cents per kWh and synthetic fuels on off peak power cost around a dollar a gallon.
The trick is to build one power sat with conventional rockets and use it to power GW class propulsion lasers to bring up parts for thousands of power sats. The growth potential is high enough that a real effort could end the use of fossil fuels in a decade. And not by reducing energy use or shivering in the dark, but by undercutting the cost of fossil fuels with carbon neutral synthetics. http://www.htyp.org/dollar_a_gallon_gasoline
Since WW II the west has lived in a remarkable era.
The history of humans, most of it in the stone age, has been one of nearly continuous war. What shut it off for us?
I have run a rough model of how the psychological mechanisms that turn bad economic prospects into wars. It turns out that the advantage for genes is around 37% for attempting to kill neighboring tribes compared to starving as the result of population growth followed by a weather glitch. (For the genes, the downside of going to war is limited because the young women--who also carried the genes--were normally considered booty and incorporated as wives into the winning tribe.)
It also turned out that there was an even larger disadvantage for the genes if the prospects were for good times. So genes built highly sensitive "behavior switches" in the stone age.
I.e., bad economic prospects switch on the mechanisms that eventually lead to wars.
As long as the economic growth is higher than the population growth, the psychological mechanisms for wars stay off.
More if you Google for "Evolutionary psychology, memes, and the origin of war."
The basic physics says beamed energy is a good idea.
Beamed energy lets you get about twice the exhaust velocity you can get with the best chemical fuels.
That changes the mass ratio from 7.4 (to LEO with best chemical) to 3.
That's the difference between 13.5% structure, engines and payload to 33% The minimum for reusable is thought to be around 15%, so the payload fraction goes from -1.5% to perhaps 18% of take off mass.
Keith Henson
Does anyone know if Steve has considered cryonic suspension?
Does he even know about it?
Everyone is either in the experimental group (those who are suspended) or the control group (everyone else).
I would sure like Steve to be in the experimental group. http://www.merkle.com/cryo/
Besides, I think he would rather interested in how Apple does over the next 50-100 years (maybe even less depending on how fast things develop).
Suppose (It's possible) that biological research made humans completely immune to the effects of radiation.
Would that make nuclear power plants cost effective?
There are two ways I know of to collect dilute solar energy that might be economic, i.e., lower than the price of coal.
.
First is over 40 years old, go into space and beam energy down as microwaves.
Zero gravity and no wind means the collecting structures can be far lighter than anything on earth. They are still way too expensive to haul up by current or projected developments in chemical rockets. The cost must come down by a factor of 200 for current rockets and a factor of 40 for the projected cost of the Falcon Heavy. $100 per kg is what's needed..
That looks possible (at 500,000 tons per year) by using partly air breathing vehicles for the first stage and beamed energy (lasers) for the second. Details here: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7898.
The second way is to float the collectors at 20 km where you can avoid clouds and the cosine effect by pointing a 2 km parabolic reflector at the sun. This works as far north as Stockholm. You bring the energy down in a 50 meter diameter light pipe, convert to heat which can be efficiently stored at high temperature.
Based on materials cost, the investment looks to be around $1.2 B/GW and the power cost between one and two cents per kWh. The storage system (35,000 cubic meters of firebrick) costs a tenth of a cent per kWh. I worked on this for a year and a half. We found no showstoppers, but the engineering detail got beyond what could be done with a small unpaid team. More here www.stratosolar.com
It's hard to evaluate exactly what your chances are to come out the far side intact, but a dip in liquid nitrogen (after being loaded with antifreeze) offers better than zero chance. I presume Terry knows about it, if not, perhaps someone who knows him could suggest he check it out. Cryonic suspension following assisted suicide would provide excellent preservation of structure (http://www.merkle.com/cryo/).
Disclosure: I have been signed up with Alcor since 1986, and have helped with the processing of 19 of their patients, including several of my friends, one last December.
The Scientology connection to Anonymous was something I predicted in a scientology lawsuit deposition clear back in 1996.
:-)
Henson: well it comes off the recreation budget. [He is making fun of this expensive lawyer, and it's getting Lieberman's goat.] This is training for the big action, Henson says. Lieberman takes the bait: What's that?
Henson: when some major government finally decides to really sit down hard on free speech on the net.
Lieberman spends a few minutes in a halfhearted attempt to get Henson to say something seditious, but gives up quickly. Perhaps it occurs to him that he is being trolled.
Lieberman: so you welcome this [lawsuit] as a training exercise?
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.org.eff.talk/msg/33112ae138985240?hl=en%E8%85%98ae138985240&
Anonymous ("the net") certainly used scientology as a training exercise starting in early 2008 that later figured into their defense of Wikileaks and their support for the various rebellions in the Islamic world.
That first Anon picket of scientology really impressed me when 9,000 people turned out. That was 100 times larger than any previous picket against the cult. I think it was instructive to Anon as well to see just how many would take part in something relatively risky. A number of people have been subjected to scn's legal attacks.
Keith Henson
PS Excellent article even if it does read somewhat like a PhD thesis.
30 years ago I proposed putting radiation sensors in watches. When cell phones became common, I asked why cell phones don't incorporate them.
I wonder if the current mess in Japan will bring cell phone radiation detectors to the market?
Or if it has already?
The cost of going into space is largely the low energy of chemical fuels compared to the energy physics says we need to get there. It is close to 15 kWh per kg, which is to day more than a kg of gasoline, never mind the oxygen needed to burn it.
Another way to look at it is exhaust velocity. A rocket that is 2/3rds fuel can get to the same velocity as it's exhaust velocity. The best we can do is the space shuttle engines. They give 4.5 km/s. Orbital is about 9 km/s so rockets have to stage.
You can heat hydrogen hot enough to give 9 km/s exhaust velocity, but until recently the efficiency of laser was too low to make this practical. Big solid state lasers have changed that.
A flyback stage to 6-7 km/s and lasers from there to GEO looks like it could get the cost down to $100/kg.
Details if anyone is interested. hkeithhenson@gmail.com
You do have to solve it with math, it's called the rocket equation.
The best chemical reactions give an exhaust velocity of about 4.5 km/sec. You need twice that much to get a substantial payload into LEO without staging (which is very expensive).
However, chemical reactions are not the only way to heat a gas and hydrogen heated with lasers to 600 deg less than the melting point of tungsten gives more than twice the exhaust velocity of the SSME.
This wasn't possible to consider until recent times when high power semiconductor laser diodes came on the market.
The air breathing Skylon used for a "first stage" has an equivalent exhaust velocity of 10.5 km/sec until it runs out of air at 26 km and 2 km/s. Switching to laser heated hydrogen at that point would put 1/3 of it's takeoff mass in LEO--about 50 tons of rocket plane and 50 tons of payload..
It does take a lot of laser power, about 6 GW, but we can draw that off the grid (in a few places).
Keith Henson
I have been deeply involved with cryonics since 1985. Helped on 19 of the hundred Alcor has stored.
In fact the last one I helped with was a pancreatic cancer victim.
If there are people reading this to are in contact with Steve Jobs, I wish they would check with him, just to be sure he has considered (and probably rejected) this option.
It's inexpensive relative to person with Steve's resources.
Keith Henson
If the genes contributing to religiosity are identified, it will be very interesting to see if they are over represented in the US where a fair sized part of the founding population came here for religious reasons.
A more recent genetic sorting out might be seen in the descendants of Mormons who may be over represented in certain new religions, i.e., cults.
I am sorry to say, but I expect that further study of this will find that self control is largely a genetic effect rather than something parents or teachers have a lot of ability to change.
Readers who want to dig into this might read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris
And this paper about where having more self control came from.
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf
Of course the way medical technology is progressing I expect self control to be available in a bottle. :-)
Keith Henson
I think I may be more disturbed by the government orders to large numbers of people to not read the Wikileaks materials than anything else.
When they start telling people not to read the NY Times it's going over the edge of stupid.
It may be lesser problem to live under an evil government than a stupid one. I really wonder where the pronouncements are coming from?
I can't see the future, but I know of two ways to get the cost of solar energy down to where synthetic carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuel should cost under a dollar a gallon. The first one I wrote about on The Oil Drum about a year ago, and the second is called StratoSolar. It works as far north as Stockholm and through clouds. In short, light concentrator at 20 km, light pipe to the ground and a conventional combined cycle power plant. Energy storage in hot bricks.
The original purpose of warfare was to kill people.
Humans are top level predators. The only thing that kills top level predators is other of their own kind. Lions for example.
When the population builds up to the point it stresses the ability of the ecosystem to feed it, it's time for a war. This went on long enough for it to be an evolved feature. See Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War.
It might even be good for you in moderation.
Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?
http://www.jpands.org/vol9no1/chen.pdf
. . . it appears that significant beneficial health effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure.
"Also, you're not factoring in the costs of bringing metals back to the Earth (if that's your goal). It's far more expensive to do that than to mine them here and will be for the foreseeable future. Of course, if your goal is to use them in space anyway, then it might be better to mine them there. (On the other hand, then you have to build the refining and construction infrastructure in space, which has a lot of challenges of its own.)"
Energy is the only obvious product worth returning to earth, i.e. space based solar power. But if you do, the obvious material to build them out of (because of thermal shocks around the equinox) is 35% nickel Invar. A serious power satellite project rapidly uses up all the nickel deposits on Earth. What to do, oh what to do? It happens that typical nickel-iron asteroids are close to 10% nickel. A 50,000 ton processing plant incorporating a 10 GW power plant should be able to chew up 10,000 tons of asteroid and ship back 1000 tons of nickel a day. The chemical processing would be to melt, roll to foil thickness, take the nickel, iron and cobalt out with warm CO then process the dust for gold and platinum. So after 50 days of operation it pays back the lift cost in produced nickel. Dr Lewis from the U of Arizona worked out the process.
One target would be 1986 DA, a 2 plus km chunk that is thought to be solid nickel iron.
If you already have a production facility for power satellites in GEO, reaching this asteroid takes only 140 m/sec.
Nice fantasy if nothing else.
The next 50 years will probably see the end of humanity as we know it now.
Is this good or bad? Ghod knows, I sure don't.
Only way I could express my thoughts on this topic was in fiction. http://www.terasemjournals.org/GN0202/henson.html