Indeed, the Zeppelin company did a secret report on the Hindenberg tragedy and noted that the canvas covering was extremely flammable, to say the least. I believe on the Graf Zeppelin II (which did fly for a few years before World War II) they went to a less-flammable covering and also changed some of the canvas covering hooks to bronze, which did not transmit electrical discharges like steel ones do.
Actually, I don't believe in peak oil for a number of reasons:
1) We've barely tapped into the oil found in the Gulf of Mexico.
2) There are huge amounts of oil in the continental shelf of almost every continent waiting to be tapped.
3) Contrary to what people think, the OPEC producers in the Middle East have not really tapped their reserves. They have surprisingly few oil rigs active per hectare compared to what is done in the USA. In fact, if we use the very latest oil extraction techniques all over the Middle East they could probably up their reserves by 8 to 10 times (maybe even more!).
4) The former USSR has massively huge oil reserves waiting to be tapped, now possible thanks to the experience from operating oil production platforms in the Alaska North Slope.
5) Recent breakthroughs in in situ oil extraction could make it possible to get crude oil from oil tar sands and oil shale without having to expensively mine out the tar sands or shale rock. Suddenly, Alberta province in Canada and the states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming could end up being huge oil producers.
Most of these peak oil doomsayers assume current oil production technology, not factoring in improved means of oil extraction by steam injection, improved means to extract oil from the deep ocean or the new in situ extraction from tar sands and oil shale.
But here's the thing about Iceland though: they can tap into easily-available geothermal power (thanks to Iceland being one of the world's most active volcanic regions) to generate the large amounts of electricity necessary to produce hydrogen on a fairly large scale. Also, due to the relatively low population of Iceland, they don't really need to make that much hydrogen to support local energy needs.
Here in the USA, a potentially better solution is to develop better means of electric power storage to take advantage of wind power and solar power across the USA. Thanks to that recent breakthrough announced by MIT earlier this year of a new type of nanotube-based supercapacitor to store electric energy on a relatively small unit, that opens the door for true distributed power generation where every home has a solar panel to generate power, a means to store all that power generated, and to even distribute the excess power generated to other users.
However, watch out for the Creative MuVo V100. At only US$88 for the 2 GB version that's just over HALF the price of the iPod nano 2 GB.
I'm using a Zen Nano Plus 512 MB and it's actually a sweet little unit, great for listening to downloaded podcasts. The only downside is it does tend to use a lot of AAA batteries, so it's a good idea to invest in decent rechargeable AAA batteries and charger (I've found NiMH AAA batteries makes the Zen Nano Plus play as long as 17 hours before needing a recharge).
My old CRT IIyama monitor is also better than most LCD flat monitors you can buy today.
However, today's 19" and bigger LCD panel computer monitors have gotten very good in terms of contrast, color quality and the ability to play back fast-moving motion from video sources. If you've seen the NEC MultiSync 90GX2 19" LCD panel monitor the contrast quality leaves nothing to be desired, to say the least.
I think another thing that could drastically alter the oil consumption equation is the fact MIT's recent announcement of the development of vastly improved supercapacitor electrical storage units using carbon nanotubes makes electric cars and electric power generation by wind and solar power far more viable. That means potentially dramatically lower need for gasoline and less pressure to use fossil fuels for power generation within the next 20 years.
The day you can walk into Walmart and buy a 4 - 8GB flash player for $39.99 is the day the iPod will die.
You can already get 1 GB flash players for US$60 at many places already.
But seriously, the current iPods have way more functionality than the majority of MP3 players out there (something many users do want), and I expect by this time in 2007 we'll be able to get 20 GB flash memory iPods that will replace the current nanos.
I agree due to the huge technical challenges to contain the heated plasma of deuterium and tritium gas to get fusion.
solar power : too expensive, currently massive quantities of oil are needed to create solar panels, research ongoing
Now more viable than you think. Thanks to nanotechnology breakthroughs we could see production cost of solar panels drop dramatically in the next 5-7 years.
wind : unreliable, will place extreme demands on distribution net, and effects unknown
Then why are multiple companies putting up 1-5 MW giant wind turbines all over the US Midwest?
sea wave power : currently not possible, in development
Recent breakthroughs in capturing sea wave motion to convert to electricity could make it possible to put up large numbers of such generators along the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines of the USA within the next 20-25 years.
By the way, the development of lower-cost supercapacitors using nanotechnology that could store large amounts of electricity in a relatively small space could make solar and wind power even more viable, since they could be used to store electricity generated by solar panels and wind turbines and release the power at night time and in low wind conditions.
The problem is that when Viking did its soil sampling it did it only on the very surface of the topsoil, which may not have enough water and is too exposed to UV rays from the Sun to support even microbes. This is why I suggest drilling down 100 cm into the soil--at that point, there may be still enough water trapped in the soil to support primitive microbial lifeforms.
Actually, the resolution of the HiRISE camera could be even better because Mars' very thin atmosphere causes far less atmospheric refraction issues than imaging Earth from LEO. That picture of Opportunity was done probably with the camera not fully calibrated; properly calibrated the HiRISE camera could probably resolve objects as small as 30 cm across in the right conditions.
There are a number of Mars lander missions planned by NASA and ESA that will try to answer that very question. The new rovers will drill up to 100 cm under the surface and a new generation of chemical analyzers will look at the chemical results from that deep in the soil. It's likely that small microbes could live in the Martian soil using small amounts of water moisture trapped in the soil.
By the way, besides the excise tax based on engine displacement and car physical size I proposed, I would also provide substantial tax breaks on automobiles that use fuel cells or future electric car technologies. This two-pronged attack would substantially increase sales of cars that don't use fossil fuels, not to mention giving an incentive to buy more fuel efficient fossil-fuelled cars in the first place.
Didn't you read about the original poster mentioning the issue of the so-called last mile connection? That very issue prevented a lot of people from getting broadband access for many years, and it wasn't until new equipment became available around 2002-2003 to overcome "last mile" issues that the telephone companies and the cable companies could finally put broadband in the the majority of homes in metropolitan areas.
As far asw having 86 million people wired by now, have you not heard of the last mile problem. Laying the cable costs money. And takes time. After the dot bomb the telcos had to retrench for a few years until the market improved a bit.
The dot-com collapse was a big reason why there was a big delay in getting broadband to metropolitan areas across the USA. It's only within the last three years that landline broadband has been widely available in most larger cities across the USA. Most AT&T customers now have at least access to DSL broadband, and the cable companies have made broadband available to almost everyone nowadays.
A likely better solution is to impose an excise tax on new car purchases based on the engine displacement and physical size of the car like they do in Europe and Japan. Such an excise tax would immediately make people buy a lot more smaller cars, which right there would help cut fuel consumption.
I can understand your concern, but I'm sure portable device manufacturers that adopt ultracapacitor batteries will use totally new internal circuitry for better compatibility with this energy storage device.
I think once we get ultracapacitor technology to work decently well and with high safety it could be very useful for devices like iPods, PDA's, and cellphones. Imagine charging the batteries in under 15 minutes and the batteries run several times longer than standard NiMH or Li-On batteries on a single charge; an iPod nano using such a battery could run maybe over 100 hours before needing another recharge, and you only need to keep it plugged into the USB port for around 30 minutes to fully charge the battery pack.
I think it's only within the past 18 months that Apple machines have become really viable options for home users, mostly because hardware costs in regards to the features on the current iMacs have come way, way down. The current 17" iMac with the 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU costs around US$1,200, not bad considering all the standard features on the machine. Because it has both IEEE-1394 and USB 2.0 ports, there are plentiful external devices you can plug into the iMac, including external mass storage devices for long term data archival.
However, once you go above 2 MW power generation the size of the windmill gets ridiculously large and unwieldy. People are skeptical of the gigantic 400 foot diameter wind turbines now under construction.
Expect many 2 MW wind turbines to go up in North and South Dakota over the next 15 years.
The fuel efficiency is wonderful, but I for one don't want to drive a car that smells and sounds like a school bus or semitruck... or are car diesel engines different in some magic way?
Thanks to breakthroughs in precisely delivering fuel to the combustion chamber and a new generation of particulate traps and catalytic converters in the past decade, today's diesel engines aren't the smoky, smelly engines of past. If you've driven the Mercedes-Benz E320CDI with the new BlueTec emission control system, you'll never see smoke or smell the distict odor of diesel exhaust.
In short, invest in General Electric. GE is heavily into wind power, and their 2 MW wind turbines are going up everywhere in the world. There is talk of putting up thousands of 2 MW wind turbines in the Great Plains far away from where people will complain about being an eyesore, and you know GE will jump at a chance to supply these turbines on large scale.
One thing we should push for is far more usage of wind power.
The Great Plains of the USA is one of the best areas on Earth for large-scale wind farms. Imagine thousands of 2 MW wind turbines, located in areas where few people will complain about being an eyesore; we could generate as much as 20,000 MW of power from these turbines.
Also, thanks to nanotechnology, we could drastically reduce the cost of solar panels to generate electricity; imagine whole neighborhoods where every home has a solar panel with a nanotube supercapacitor bank storing the energy for use at night, with all the power connected together in a distributed power generating fashion.
In short, the next big company won't be the oil companies, it will be General Electric.
Lockyer will cause a huge backlash against the Democrats for this totally insane lawsuit.
Encouraging better fuel efficiency should be an incentive-laden process, not one done by expensive lawsuits that just benefits lawyers and almost no one else. Besides my suggestions I wrote on other messages on this topic, how about making the cost of a monthly mass transit mostly tax-deductible? Just that would make a lot more people ride mass transit.
How about some creative legislation, like providing state incentives rather than disencentives for more fuel efficient cars?
AMEN to your suggestion! (big thumbs up)
I would impose excise taxes based on engine displacement and external physical size of a car, which would strongly encourage automakers here in the USA to sell a lot more smaller, fuel-efficient cars to start with. Also, I would strongly encourage automakers to develop cleaner turbodiesel engines, since turbodiesel engines offer surprisingly good performance but with 25-35% better fuel efficiency compared to gasoline-powered equivalent engines.
This is the type of totally ridiculous lawsuit that does NOTHING to improve fuel efficiency. (wagging fingers)
A better solution is the encourage:
1) Tax incentives for limiting engine displacement and vehicle size like they do in Europe and Japan. Fortunately, today's smaller cars aren't the death traps they used to be, thanks to stringent safety testing by the likes of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) in the USA and the European New Car Assessment Programme (EuroNCAP) authorities. Also, thanks to modern design, cars that look small externally actually sport an amazing amount of interior space; take a look at the Honda Fit or Nissan Versa to see the surprising front and back seat space despite the small size of these vehicles. Also, thanks to modern engine design, today's small cars offer surprisingly good performance also.
2) The development of clean-burning turbodiesel engines that offer 25-35% better fuel efficiency than equivalent gasoline engines. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in exhaust emission control systems, turbodiesel engines not only emit pretty much no smoke or distinct smell, but can even meet the stringent EPA Tier 2 Bin 5 and CARB 2007 emission regulations for gasoline engines. An example of how well diesel engines can be was demonstrated recently when Car and Driver magazine tested a BMW 330d sports sedan; on mostly highway travel, they managed to average an amazing 44 miles per US gallon fuel efficiency, which is the type of fuel efficiency you normally associate with a small hybrid drivetrain car!
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Indeed, the Zeppelin company did a secret report on the Hindenberg tragedy and noted that the canvas covering was extremely flammable, to say the least. I believe on the Graf Zeppelin II (which did fly for a few years before World War II) they went to a less-flammable covering and also changed some of the canvas covering hooks to bronze, which did not transmit electrical discharges like steel ones do.
Actually, I don't believe in peak oil for a number of reasons:
1) We've barely tapped into the oil found in the Gulf of Mexico.
2) There are huge amounts of oil in the continental shelf of almost every continent waiting to be tapped.
3) Contrary to what people think, the OPEC producers in the Middle East have not really tapped their reserves. They have surprisingly few oil rigs active per hectare compared to what is done in the USA. In fact, if we use the very latest oil extraction techniques all over the Middle East they could probably up their reserves by 8 to 10 times (maybe even more!).
4) The former USSR has massively huge oil reserves waiting to be tapped, now possible thanks to the experience from operating oil production platforms in the Alaska North Slope.
5) Recent breakthroughs in in situ oil extraction could make it possible to get crude oil from oil tar sands and oil shale without having to expensively mine out the tar sands or shale rock. Suddenly, Alberta province in Canada and the states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming could end up being huge oil producers.
Most of these peak oil doomsayers assume current oil production technology, not factoring in improved means of oil extraction by steam injection, improved means to extract oil from the deep ocean or the new in situ extraction from tar sands and oil shale.
But here's the thing about Iceland though: they can tap into easily-available geothermal power (thanks to Iceland being one of the world's most active volcanic regions) to generate the large amounts of electricity necessary to produce hydrogen on a fairly large scale. Also, due to the relatively low population of Iceland, they don't really need to make that much hydrogen to support local energy needs.
Here in the USA, a potentially better solution is to develop better means of electric power storage to take advantage of wind power and solar power across the USA. Thanks to that recent breakthrough announced by MIT earlier this year of a new type of nanotube-based supercapacitor to store electric energy on a relatively small unit, that opens the door for true distributed power generation where every home has a solar panel to generate power, a means to store all that power generated, and to even distribute the excess power generated to other users.
However, watch out for the Creative MuVo V100. At only US$88 for the 2 GB version that's just over HALF the price of the iPod nano 2 GB.
I'm using a Zen Nano Plus 512 MB and it's actually a sweet little unit, great for listening to downloaded podcasts. The only downside is it does tend to use a lot of AAA batteries, so it's a good idea to invest in decent rechargeable AAA batteries and charger (I've found NiMH AAA batteries makes the Zen Nano Plus play as long as 17 hours before needing a recharge).
However, today's 19" and bigger LCD panel computer monitors have gotten very good in terms of contrast, color quality and the ability to play back fast-moving motion from video sources. If you've seen the NEC MultiSync 90GX2 19" LCD panel monitor the contrast quality leaves nothing to be desired, to say the least.
I think another thing that could drastically alter the oil consumption equation is the fact MIT's recent announcement of the development of vastly improved supercapacitor electrical storage units using carbon nanotubes makes electric cars and electric power generation by wind and solar power far more viable. That means potentially dramatically lower need for gasoline and less pressure to use fossil fuels for power generation within the next 20 years.
The day you can walk into Walmart and buy a 4 - 8GB flash player for $39.99 is the day the iPod will die.
You can already get 1 GB flash players for US$60 at many places already.
But seriously, the current iPods have way more functionality than the majority of MP3 players out there (something many users do want), and I expect by this time in 2007 we'll be able to get 20 GB flash memory iPods that will replace the current nanos.
fusion : currently not possible, in development
I agree due to the huge technical challenges to contain the heated plasma of deuterium and tritium gas to get fusion.
solar power : too expensive, currently massive quantities of oil are needed to create solar panels, research ongoing
Now more viable than you think. Thanks to nanotechnology breakthroughs we could see production cost of solar panels drop dramatically in the next 5-7 years.
wind : unreliable, will place extreme demands on distribution net, and effects unknown
Then why are multiple companies putting up 1-5 MW giant wind turbines all over the US Midwest?
sea wave power : currently not possible, in development
Recent breakthroughs in capturing sea wave motion to convert to electricity could make it possible to put up large numbers of such generators along the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines of the USA within the next 20-25 years.
By the way, the development of lower-cost supercapacitors using nanotechnology that could store large amounts of electricity in a relatively small space could make solar and wind power even more viable, since they could be used to store electricity generated by solar panels and wind turbines and release the power at night time and in low wind conditions.
The problem is that when Viking did its soil sampling it did it only on the very surface of the topsoil, which may not have enough water and is too exposed to UV rays from the Sun to support even microbes. This is why I suggest drilling down 100 cm into the soil--at that point, there may be still enough water trapped in the soil to support primitive microbial lifeforms.
Actually, the resolution of the HiRISE camera could be even better because Mars' very thin atmosphere causes far less atmospheric refraction issues than imaging Earth from LEO. That picture of Opportunity was done probably with the camera not fully calibrated; properly calibrated the HiRISE camera could probably resolve objects as small as 30 cm across in the right conditions.
There are a number of Mars lander missions planned by NASA and ESA that will try to answer that very question. The new rovers will drill up to 100 cm under the surface and a new generation of chemical analyzers will look at the chemical results from that deep in the soil. It's likely that small microbes could live in the Martian soil using small amounts of water moisture trapped in the soil.
By the way, besides the excise tax based on engine displacement and car physical size I proposed, I would also provide substantial tax breaks on automobiles that use fuel cells or future electric car technologies. This two-pronged attack would substantially increase sales of cars that don't use fossil fuels, not to mention giving an incentive to buy more fuel efficient fossil-fuelled cars in the first place.
Didn't you read about the original poster mentioning the issue of the so-called last mile connection? That very issue prevented a lot of people from getting broadband access for many years, and it wasn't until new equipment became available around 2002-2003 to overcome "last mile" issues that the telephone companies and the cable companies could finally put broadband in the the majority of homes in metropolitan areas.
As far asw having 86 million people wired by now, have you not heard of the last mile problem. Laying the cable costs money. And takes time. After the dot bomb the telcos had to retrench for a few years until the market improved a bit.
The dot-com collapse was a big reason why there was a big delay in getting broadband to metropolitan areas across the USA. It's only within the last three years that landline broadband has been widely available in most larger cities across the USA. Most AT&T customers now have at least access to DSL broadband, and the cable companies have made broadband available to almost everyone nowadays.
A likely better solution is to impose an excise tax on new car purchases based on the engine displacement and physical size of the car like they do in Europe and Japan. Such an excise tax would immediately make people buy a lot more smaller cars, which right there would help cut fuel consumption.
I can understand your concern, but I'm sure portable device manufacturers that adopt ultracapacitor batteries will use totally new internal circuitry for better compatibility with this energy storage device.
I think once we get ultracapacitor technology to work decently well and with high safety it could be very useful for devices like iPods, PDA's, and cellphones. Imagine charging the batteries in under 15 minutes and the batteries run several times longer than standard NiMH or Li-On batteries on a single charge; an iPod nano using such a battery could run maybe over 100 hours before needing another recharge, and you only need to keep it plugged into the USB port for around 30 minutes to fully charge the battery pack.
I think it's only within the past 18 months that Apple machines have become really viable options for home users, mostly because hardware costs in regards to the features on the current iMacs have come way, way down. The current 17" iMac with the 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU costs around US$1,200, not bad considering all the standard features on the machine. Because it has both IEEE-1394 and USB 2.0 ports, there are plentiful external devices you can plug into the iMac, including external mass storage devices for long term data archival.
However, once you go above 2 MW power generation the size of the windmill gets ridiculously large and unwieldy. People are skeptical of the gigantic 400 foot diameter wind turbines now under construction.
Expect many 2 MW wind turbines to go up in North and South Dakota over the next 15 years.
The fuel efficiency is wonderful, but I for one don't want to drive a car that smells and sounds like a school bus or semitruck... or are car diesel engines different in some magic way?
Thanks to breakthroughs in precisely delivering fuel to the combustion chamber and a new generation of particulate traps and catalytic converters in the past decade, today's diesel engines aren't the smoky, smelly engines of past. If you've driven the Mercedes-Benz E320CDI with the new BlueTec emission control system, you'll never see smoke or smell the distict odor of diesel exhaust.
In short, invest in General Electric. GE is heavily into wind power, and their 2 MW wind turbines are going up everywhere in the world. There is talk of putting up thousands of 2 MW wind turbines in the Great Plains far away from where people will complain about being an eyesore, and you know GE will jump at a chance to supply these turbines on large scale.
One thing we should push for is far more usage of wind power.
The Great Plains of the USA is one of the best areas on Earth for large-scale wind farms. Imagine thousands of 2 MW wind turbines, located in areas where few people will complain about being an eyesore; we could generate as much as 20,000 MW of power from these turbines.
Also, thanks to nanotechnology, we could drastically reduce the cost of solar panels to generate electricity; imagine whole neighborhoods where every home has a solar panel with a nanotube supercapacitor bank storing the energy for use at night, with all the power connected together in a distributed power generating fashion.
In short, the next big company won't be the oil companies, it will be General Electric.
Lockyer will cause a huge backlash against the Democrats for this totally insane lawsuit.
Encouraging better fuel efficiency should be an incentive-laden process, not one done by expensive lawsuits that just benefits lawyers and almost no one else. Besides my suggestions I wrote on other messages on this topic, how about making the cost of a monthly mass transit mostly tax-deductible? Just that would make a lot more people ride mass transit.
How about some creative legislation, like providing state incentives rather than disencentives for more fuel efficient cars?
AMEN to your suggestion! (big thumbs up)
I would impose excise taxes based on engine displacement and external physical size of a car, which would strongly encourage automakers here in the USA to sell a lot more smaller, fuel-efficient cars to start with. Also, I would strongly encourage automakers to develop cleaner turbodiesel engines, since turbodiesel engines offer surprisingly good performance but with 25-35% better fuel efficiency compared to gasoline-powered equivalent engines.
This is the type of totally ridiculous lawsuit that does NOTHING to improve fuel efficiency. (wagging fingers)
A better solution is the encourage:
1) Tax incentives for limiting engine displacement and vehicle size like they do in Europe and Japan. Fortunately, today's smaller cars aren't the death traps they used to be, thanks to stringent safety testing by the likes of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) in the USA and the European New Car Assessment Programme (EuroNCAP) authorities. Also, thanks to modern design, cars that look small externally actually sport an amazing amount of interior space; take a look at the Honda Fit or Nissan Versa to see the surprising front and back seat space despite the small size of these vehicles. Also, thanks to modern engine design, today's small cars offer surprisingly good performance also.
2) The development of clean-burning turbodiesel engines that offer 25-35% better fuel efficiency than equivalent gasoline engines. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in exhaust emission control systems, turbodiesel engines not only emit pretty much no smoke or distinct smell, but can even meet the stringent EPA Tier 2 Bin 5 and CARB 2007 emission regulations for gasoline engines. An example of how well diesel engines can be was demonstrated recently when Car and Driver magazine tested a BMW 330d sports sedan; on mostly highway travel, they managed to average an amazing 44 miles per US gallon fuel efficiency, which is the type of fuel efficiency you normally associate with a small hybrid drivetrain car!