There are two energy proposals that are probably cheap enough to completely displace fossil fuels just by underpricing them.
Space based solar power is one of them. If you can get the cost to send power plant parts to GEO down to ~$100/kg, then the cost of power can fall to 1-2 cents per kWh. One cent power is low enough to convert to carbon neutral, dollar a gallon transportation fuels.
Big problem, it takes around $100 B to set up the transportation pipeline. (Which depends on using lasers to get ~9 km/sec exhaust velocity rockets.)
The other method looks about the same price but no transport cost. It will go public Oct.1. Key word StratoSolar.
If you have it in quantities for transportation fuel (vast amounts) you can combine it with carbon, even carbon dioxide, using the F/T process and make hydrocarbons. Those we do know how to deal with.
The economics is that one cent per kWh electric power will get you $1 a gallon transport fuels (~40 kWh in a gallon of gasoline). That counts the capital cost of the plant. Sasol has a billion dollar plant in Qatar that turns hydrogen and carbon monoxide into diesel. It would run just fine on carbon dioxide and half again as much hydrogen.
I think it is obvious that brains develop as part of embryogenesis. Now, if the instructions for this development process don't come from the genome, then where do they come from? I don't think anyone can make a serious case that the environment provided by the mother provides a lot of information regardless of how important it is. People have also mentioned DNA methylation, but it is obvious that at most the amount of information is only a bit per base pair.
I think all mammalian brains involve about the same set of development instructions. It would only take a few bits to change the size from a mouse to an elephant.
Probably only a few people remember the huge controversy in the human genome project where the actual number of genes came out to be 20-25% of what the researchers thought they would get. The "recipe" for brains may be a lot less complicated than people think. One way to think about it is that an individual computer may be simple, but a server farm can accomplish wonders.
Back during the fuel crisis a few years ago, the joke going around was that the airlines were going to offer liposuction at the gate. It was a win-win situation because not only would they be carrying less weight, but the extracted fat could be rendered into jet fuel.:-)
What happens is that the induced current from magnetic storms is extremely low frequency, close enough to DC for transformers. The current, even if it isn't very much, saturates the cores. Then the 60 Hz AC current to the transformer goes sky high and boils the oil in the transformers. Not good.
There are technical ways to get around this, but for rare events, the least complicated is to just shut down the parts of the grid where the transformers are saturating.
Getting into space (at reasonable cost) is all about exhaust velocity.
If you can figure out how to get the exhaust velocity up to the mission velocity, a 300 ton takeoff vehicle with an empty weight of 50 tons can put 50 tons of cargo in LEO. (Mission delta V about 9 km/sec.)
The hypersonic Skylon design from Reaction Engines is projected to get an awesome 10.5 km/sec equivalent exhaust velocity till it runs out of air. Above that it doesn't get any better exhaust velocity than SSME. (4.5 km/sec)
But if you switch to laser heated hydrogen, it's possible to get an average exhaust velocity in excess of 8 km/sec. Only problem is that it takes 6 GW of laser.
If you need a million tons per year to GEO (i.e., building power satellites) then this method gets the cost per kg to under $100.
For a human trait where the average is not moving up or down, then the individuals far out on either side of the bell curve must be failing to reproduced to roughly the same degree. If you think about this with respect to intelligence, then if the really smart ones are not reproducing, the ones on the other end of the scale are unlikely to be reproducing either. If this was not the case, then the average over generations would drift up or down until the curve was being trimmed on both sides equally.
According to a story I tend to credit, there was a full power test that morning in Fremont of an EMP simulator. From such sketchy detail as I was told (decades after the event) it was a BIG Marx generator that terminated in a 2 meter horn antenna filled with Freon.
It was pointed out over the bay--incidentally the main landing pattern for SFO.
". . . because of problems with his pressure altimeter, he was relying on the more accurate radio altimeter for verification of altitude. Capt. Asoh set the radio altimeter to give a light at a decision height of 211 ft (63.3 m). When the light blinked on, Capt. Asoh looked up expecting to be at about 200 ft (60 m) and heading for 28L.
"Instead, he was nearly in the waters of San Francisco Bay. He applied power, which raised the nose somewhat, and then the right main landing gear hit the water, followed by the left, and then the aircraft slewed to the left. Capt. Asoh cut power the aircraft settled into the shallow waters of San Francisco Bay."
Fortunately nobody was killed (or even hurt) in the crash, though the captain committed suicide sometime later.
A few hours after the crash, the people who worked the EMP simulator were abruptly told to tear the equipment down. It was moved out of the area to New Mexico within a few days. I don't know that a radio altimeter would have been damaged by testing the EMP simulator, but it seems plausible.
A while ago I worked out how much energy it would take to remove 100 ppm of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The area of the earth is ~5.1 x 1014 square meters; air pressure is ~100,000 N/m2. The force would be ~5.1 x 1019 and the mass (force/acceleration of 9.8 m/sec2) is ~5.2 x 1018kg or 5.2 x 1015 t. One ppm would be 5.2 x 109 t and 100 ppm would be ~520 billion tonnes.
It takes ~100kWh to remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-09/uoc-cd092908.php
Removing 100 ppm of CO2 from the air would take 52000 billion kWh or 52,000 TWh, or since a year is about 8700 hours, about six TW years. A TW is about twice the installed power in the US.
It would take a 1000 1GW nuclear reactors 6 years to bring the CO2 level back to the level of 1960 if no new CO2 was being added.
The problem is what to do with the CO2? Liquid CO2 has a density of 1.1. As liquid, this much CO2 would occupy ~470 cubic km. It would cause a real problem downwind if it blew out of storage. We know that oil stayed in the ground for millions of years.
It takes ~50 times as much energy to convert CO2 to synthetic oil as it does to capture it. So to convert 100 ppm of CO2 to synthetic oil would take ~300 TW-years. If we are already feeding 15 TW into making synthetic oil, we could dedicate another 15 TW into making more and pumping it back into empty oil fields. It would take two decades at this rate to bring the current CO2 level back to that of 1960. We might be able to take the CO2 level down far enough to get the earth to go into an ice age (for those who like to ski).
For the details on the energy cost of making synthetic oil see www.htyp.org/dtc
Tekfactory put his finger squarely on the problem. $500/pound is about $1000/kg and that is ten times to high for space based solar power to undercut fossil fuels. The Japanese recognize this.
"Transporting panels to the solar station 36,000 kilometers above the
earth's surface will be prohibitively costly, so Japan has to figure out
a way to slash expenses to make the solar station commercially viable,
said Hiroshi Yoshida, Chief Executive Officer of Excalibur KK, a
Tokyo-based space and defense-policy consulting company. "These expenses
need to be lowered to a hundredth of current estimates," Yoshida said by
phone from Tokyo.
I get the same number close enough. Current price to GEO $20,000/kg; required for space based solar power to displace fossils by being substantially less expensive (1-2 cents per kWh) is $100/kg, a factor of 200.
So design to cost. Start with the rocket equation:
Needed 100 t/hr to GEO, $100/kg. Try a two stage to GEO. Requires 14 km/sec, get the first 4 km/sec with a mass ratio 3 hydrogen/oxygen rocket. 4km/sec is easy to do, ask Elon Musk. To get the remaining 10 km/sec with a mass ratio 2 means an average exhaust velocity of 15km/sec.
Because you stage far short of LEO, the second stage must have relatively high thrust so 60 km/sec exhaust velocity ion engines won't do. Ablation laser propulsion (well understood physics) with an average exhaust velocity of 15 km/sec will provide over a g at 4 GW. The suborbital path keeps the second stage out of the atmosphere long enough (15 minutes) for the laser to push the second stage into geosynchronous transfer orbit.
At 4 payloads an hour (working the laser full time), each payload to GEO needs to be 25 t. So the laser stage is 50 t, the first stage 50 t (16%structure) and 200 t propellant. On takeoff it masses 300 tons, less than a 747. A large airport handles a lot more traffic than 8 747 takeoffs and landings an hour.
Hard engineering, no miracles required. Not cheap, the laser might eventually cost $40 billion. To get started (to positive cash flow) came out to $60 billion on a first cut proforma analysis.
A UK company, Reaction Engines, has an inordinately clever approach to boost the effective exhaust velocity so as to actually put positive payloads (12 tons) into LEO with hydrogen/oxygen single stage to orbit. What they are doing is recovering a lot of the energy that goes into liquefying hydrogen and using that to compress air to rocket chamber pressures up to 26km and Mach 5+. Google for them. Also Google henson oil drum if you want more details.
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There are two energy proposals that are probably cheap enough to completely displace fossil fuels just by underpricing them.
Space based solar power is one of them. If you can get the cost to send power plant parts to GEO down to ~$100/kg, then the cost of power can fall to 1-2 cents per kWh. One cent power is low enough to convert to carbon neutral, dollar a gallon transportation fuels.
Big problem, it takes around $100 B to set up the transportation pipeline. (Which depends on using lasers to get ~9 km/sec exhaust velocity rockets.)
The other method looks about the same price but no transport cost. It will go public Oct.1. Key word StratoSolar.
Agreed, hydrogen is a pain in the ass.
If you have it in quantities for transportation fuel (vast amounts) you can combine it with carbon, even carbon dioxide, using the F/T process and make hydrocarbons. Those we do know how to deal with.
The economics is that one cent per kWh electric power will get you $1 a gallon transport fuels (~40 kWh in a gallon of gasoline). That counts the capital cost of the plant. Sasol has a billion dollar plant in Qatar that turns hydrogen and carbon monoxide into diesel. It would run just fine on carbon dioxide and half again as much hydrogen.
I think it is obvious that brains develop as part of embryogenesis. Now, if the instructions for this development process don't come from the genome, then where do they come from? I don't think anyone can make a serious case that the environment provided by the mother provides a lot of information regardless of how important it is. People have also mentioned DNA methylation, but it is obvious that at most the amount of information is only a bit per base pair.
I think all mammalian brains involve about the same set of development instructions. It would only take a few bits to change the size from a mouse to an elephant.
Probably only a few people remember the huge controversy in the human genome project where the actual number of genes came out to be 20-25% of what the researchers thought they would get. The "recipe" for brains may be a lot less complicated than people think. One way to think about it is that an individual computer may be simple, but a server farm can accomplish wonders.
I was there too and this is accurate.
Back during the fuel crisis a few years ago, the joke going around was that the airlines were going to offer liposuction at the gate. It was a win-win situation because not only would they be carrying less weight, but the extracted fat could be rendered into jet fuel. :-)
What happens is that the induced current from magnetic storms is extremely low frequency, close enough to DC for transformers. The current, even if it isn't very much, saturates the cores. Then the 60 Hz AC current to the transformer goes sky high and boils the oil in the transformers. Not good. There are technical ways to get around this, but for rare events, the least complicated is to just shut down the parts of the grid where the transformers are saturating.
I believe I read every column he wrote for SciAm. There are few of my generation that were not influenced by Martin.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
Getting into space (at reasonable cost) is all about exhaust velocity.
If you can figure out how to get the exhaust velocity up to the mission velocity, a 300 ton takeoff vehicle with an empty weight of 50 tons can put 50 tons of cargo in LEO. (Mission delta V about 9 km/sec.)
The hypersonic Skylon design from Reaction Engines is projected to get an awesome 10.5 km/sec equivalent exhaust velocity till it runs out of air. Above that it doesn't get any better exhaust velocity than SSME. (4.5 km/sec)
But if you switch to laser heated hydrogen, it's possible to get an average exhaust velocity in excess of 8 km/sec. Only problem is that it takes 6 GW of laser.
If you need a million tons per year to GEO (i.e., building power satellites) then this method gets the cost per kg to under $100.
And 2 cents per kWh power.
I am in awe of the sagacity of the SC legislators. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp_(novel)#Reception
For a human trait where the average is not moving up or down, then the individuals far out on either side of the bell curve must be failing to reproduced to roughly the same degree. If you think about this with respect to intelligence, then if the really smart ones are not reproducing, the ones on the other end of the scale are unlikely to be reproducing either. If this was not the case, then the average over generations would drift up or down until the curve was being trimmed on both sides equally.
To give an example far from western culture, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/why-pygmies-are-small In this case, the larger ones didn't have enough reproductive years to replace themselves. (High mortality.)
The ones who matured too soon didn't do as well in child bearing either.
While we notice the smart people who are not having kids, the ones who are equally far from the mean on the low side don't reproduce either.
Keith Henson
"On November 22nd 1968, Japan Air flight #2 was nearing the end of a routine flight from Tokyo to San Francisco."
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-articles/read.main?id=1
According to a story I tend to credit, there was a full power test that morning in Fremont of an EMP simulator. From such sketchy detail as I was told (decades after the event) it was a BIG Marx generator that terminated in a 2 meter horn antenna filled with Freon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_generator
It was pointed out over the bay--incidentally the main landing pattern for SFO.
". . . because of problems with his pressure altimeter, he was relying on the more accurate radio altimeter for verification of altitude. Capt. Asoh set the radio altimeter to give a light at a decision height of 211 ft (63.3 m). When the light blinked on, Capt. Asoh looked up expecting to be at about 200 ft (60 m) and heading for 28L.
"Instead, he was nearly in the waters of San Francisco Bay. He applied power, which raised the nose somewhat, and then the right main landing gear hit the water, followed by the left, and then the aircraft slewed to the left. Capt. Asoh cut power the aircraft settled into the shallow waters of San Francisco Bay."
Fortunately nobody was killed (or even hurt) in the crash, though the captain committed suicide sometime later.
A few hours after the crash, the people who worked the EMP simulator were abruptly told to tear the equipment down. It was moved out of the area to New Mexico within a few days. I don't know that a radio altimeter would have been damaged by testing the EMP simulator, but it seems plausible.
"and away from all other areas of production, too heavily."
Truer words were never spoken. There are no lack of things that could be done, but very little interest in them.
Google Oil Drum Henson for an example. If you want, get in touch.
Keith Henson hkhenson at rogers dot com
A while ago I worked out how much energy it would take to remove 100 ppm of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The area of the earth is ~5.1 x 1014 square meters; air pressure is ~100,000 N/m2. The force would be ~5.1 x 1019 and the mass (force/acceleration of 9.8 m/sec2) is ~5.2 x 1018kg or 5.2 x 1015 t. One ppm would be 5.2 x 109 t and 100 ppm would be ~520 billion tonnes. It takes ~100kWh to remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-09/uoc-cd092908.php Removing 100 ppm of CO2 from the air would take 52000 billion kWh or 52,000 TWh, or since a year is about 8700 hours, about six TW years. A TW is about twice the installed power in the US. It would take a 1000 1GW nuclear reactors 6 years to bring the CO2 level back to the level of 1960 if no new CO2 was being added. The problem is what to do with the CO2? Liquid CO2 has a density of 1.1. As liquid, this much CO2 would occupy ~470 cubic km. It would cause a real problem downwind if it blew out of storage. We know that oil stayed in the ground for millions of years. It takes ~50 times as much energy to convert CO2 to synthetic oil as it does to capture it. So to convert 100 ppm of CO2 to synthetic oil would take ~300 TW-years. If we are already feeding 15 TW into making synthetic oil, we could dedicate another 15 TW into making more and pumping it back into empty oil fields. It would take two decades at this rate to bring the current CO2 level back to that of 1960. We might be able to take the CO2 level down far enough to get the earth to go into an ice age (for those who like to ski). For the details on the energy cost of making synthetic oil see www.htyp.org/dtc
Tekfactory put his finger squarely on the problem. $500/pound is about $1000/kg and that is ten times to high for space based solar power to undercut fossil fuels. The Japanese recognize this.
"Transporting panels to the solar station 36,000 kilometers above the earth's surface will be prohibitively costly, so Japan has to figure out a way to slash expenses to make the solar station commercially viable, said Hiroshi Yoshida, Chief Executive Officer of Excalibur KK, a Tokyo-based space and defense-policy consulting company. "These expenses need to be lowered to a hundredth of current estimates," Yoshida said by phone from Tokyo.
I get the same number close enough. Current price to GEO $20,000/kg; required for space based solar power to displace fossils by being substantially less expensive (1-2 cents per kWh) is $100/kg, a factor of 200.
So design to cost. Start with the rocket equation:
Needed 100 t/hr to GEO, $100/kg. Try a two stage to GEO. Requires 14 km/sec, get the first 4 km/sec with a mass ratio 3 hydrogen/oxygen rocket. 4km/sec is easy to do, ask Elon Musk. To get the remaining 10 km/sec with a mass ratio 2 means an average exhaust velocity of 15km/sec.
Because you stage far short of LEO, the second stage must have relatively high thrust so 60 km/sec exhaust velocity ion engines won't do. Ablation laser propulsion (well understood physics) with an average exhaust velocity of 15 km/sec will provide over a g at 4 GW. The suborbital path keeps the second stage out of the atmosphere long enough (15 minutes) for the laser to push the second stage into geosynchronous transfer orbit.
At 4 payloads an hour (working the laser full time), each payload to GEO needs to be 25 t. So the laser stage is 50 t, the first stage 50 t (16%structure) and 200 t propellant. On takeoff it masses 300 tons, less than a 747. A large airport handles a lot more traffic than 8 747 takeoffs and landings an hour.
Hard engineering, no miracles required. Not cheap, the laser might eventually cost $40 billion. To get started (to positive cash flow) came out to $60 billion on a first cut proforma analysis.
A UK company, Reaction Engines, has an inordinately clever approach to boost the effective exhaust velocity so as to actually put positive payloads (12 tons) into LEO with hydrogen/oxygen single stage to orbit. What they are doing is recovering a lot of the energy that goes into liquefying hydrogen and using that to compress air to rocket chamber pressures up to 26km and Mach 5+. Google for them. Also Google henson oil drum if you want more details.