Right now everybody here is upset over rising gas prices, but if you look at the global oil production and consumption trends, it's going to be more than just high prices in a few years. It's going to be shortages and rationing.
Let's imagine a future where gasoline is $10+/gallon -- if you are lucky enough to find a station that has some, and if you have a ration ticket allowing you to buy a few gallons. Let's imagine your neighbor has an electric car that he can charge at home for the equivalent of $0.60/gallon and drive whenever he wants. Hmm. . . You just might find yourself wanting an electric car too.
Man, you need to do some research before spouting off.
1. Electric cars don't have to be -- and shouldn't be -- "totally gutless". Consider the Tesla Roadster: 0-60 MPH in 3.9 seconds. It'll easily out-drag my Esprit V8 from a standing start, and the Esprit is a very fast car.
2. Who said anything about lead-acid batteries? That's completely outdated technology, everybody is looking to lithium-ion now. Li-ion cells are considered non-toxic by the EPA, you can literally dump them into landfills. That's not allowed with lead-acid batteries. . . or used motor oil.
3. "And it costs twice as much as a comparable gas vehicle." The Tesla costs $98,000 and performs much like Porsches and Lambos that typically run more like $400,000. That's before even getting into maintenance and fuel costs.
The only major obstacle to electric cars right now is the cost of Li-ion cells, and that can be solved through mass production -- the same thing that made gasoline engines affordable.
Actually, the biggest "efficiency trick" you can use in an electric car is the electric motor itself -- which converts energy into motion about three *times* as efficiently as a piston engine. That's why the Tesla Roadster carries energy equivalent to less than two gallons of gasoline, but can still manage to go 245 miles on it.
I think the most promising future energy sources, beginning with the best, are. . .
1. Aneutronic fusion / IEC Polywell reactors. If this works -- as seems likely, based on experimental results thus far -- it could begin displacing *all* other forms of power generation within 15 years. The potential is mind-boggling. This could make coal, fission, natural gas, wind, and the majority of solar power and petroleum fuels hopelessly obsolete. Rapidly.
2. Enhanced geothermal. According to a study from MIT, a relatively small R&D investment could open up enhanced geothermal energy production, at competitive costs, over wide geographical areas, including large parts of the USA. It could scale to meet a very large portion of electrical demand. An enhanced geothermal plant is conceptually similar to a nuclear plant, except that the atomic pile is safely tucked away under the earth's crust.
3. Nuclear fission. If fusion doesn't work out, there's good old fission, and you can build it anywhere, even places where enhanced geothermal won't work. We've learned a fair bit about designing and managing fission reactors, but very little has been put into practice in the USA since we haven't broken ground on any new nuclear plants for several decades. We need to start building *now* just to hold our ground as aging plants come up for decommissioning.
4. Solar. It's intermittent, expensive, and requires large amounts of land. And yet, the hype around solar is scary. Nuclear and geothermal have so many practical advantages, I have a hard time imagining solar providing most of the world's energy -- something all the faithful sun-worshippers expect. Still and all. . . Solar technology is being researched, progress is being made, and there's no question it will work at some price level. It may be useful for rooftop systems and assisting peak power demand, at the very least.
5. Biofuels. This is an inefficient method of gathering solar energy, and it competes with food production for the same resources. Realistically, we're not going to power our whole industrial society off this stuff. However, it does produce concentrated liquid fuels, which are highly useful for certain tasks. There will probably be some kind of long-term role for biofuels -- especially if we can get away from food crops and move to cellulose or algae.
What you see is the retail price of solar panels going up, not the cost of making them. Prices are driven by supply and demand, and this uptick has been driven by demand. That makes solar panel manufacturing more lucrative and spurs investment in new and expanded production facilities. Higher volume production will typically lead to lower production costs while better satisfying demand, and thereby resulting in lower -- sometimes dramatically lower -- prices in the long run.
This has happened time and again in the manufacturing industries. My favorite recent example is LCD monitors.
I'm not sure it's fair to call LaserDisc a "flop" since disc and players were sold and were apparently viable in the marketplace for about 20 years -- from 1978 right up until DVD came in and blitzed it. There are still a lot of LD collectors. If you want a real flop, I suggest you ponder the fate of RCA's SelectaVision videodisc format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SelectaVision
And now history repeats. But which format will be the next LaserDisc, and which will be the next SelectaVision?
The CD has been such a huge success story, most people don't realize how hard it was to bring about. It's easy to look back in retrospect and think it was easy, that it was inevitable.
I'm old enough (sad to say) that I remember following the development of the technology in the years before CDs ever hit the market. It seemed to take forever! There was bickering between the different companies over formats and standards, there was delay after delay. I knew what the technology promised, and I wanted it badly. . . but for several years it seemed like the industry was just going to talk, and talk, and argue, and negotiate, and fiddle around, and never actually produce anything. When CDs and players finally hit the market, it seemed to most people like a technological miracle out of the blue. I was glad to finally see it, but also annoyed that it had taken so long for the industry to get their act together. (And I feel the same way now, only much moreso, about Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. They still haven't got their act together.)
Although the CD was a great advance, there were problems in those early days. . . The first players were terribly expensive. CDs sold for at least double what we were accustomed to paying for LP records and cassettes. Recording engineers had no experience mastering digital recordings, and a lot of the early CDs came out with weak bass and painfully boosted treble (and some of those are still available today in the back catalog, they've never been remastered). There were also a lot of defective CDs on store shelves for the first few years; mostly they seemed to come from Germany.
1. Not sure exactly what Think are planning, but Tesla are setting up regional service centers for their cars. They also have trucks, so if your car needs service they can send a truck to pick it up, fix it at the service center, and bring it back to you. Expensive? They figure it's less expensive than the traditional way of setting up a zillion service centers with one in every little village.
2. The Think car was previously imported and sold by Ford. Ford spent a lot of money getting it to meet US safety standards, and the new Think cars will take advantage of that work.
The price issue is not a scientific problem, it's not an engineering problem. . . It's a manufacturing problem. I like to compare with LCD panels. Color LCD panels are some of the most difficult items to manufacture that have ever been invented, and I'm sure you'll recall how expensive they were at first. Companies like Samsung and Matsushita saw the demand, invested huge sums of money to build large, sophisticated, automated factories, worked hard at refining the production process, and now LCDs are almost given away in boxes of cereal. The price reduction has been about 90%.
The same thing can and should happen with lithium-ion batteries. They are made out of common elements, mostly lithium and carbon. (That's unlike hydrogen fuel cells, for example, which require a platinum catalyst.) It's just a question of investing the capital in large-scale production and refining the process.
Honestly, I can't understand why I would ever even consider a DVR not integrated into my satellite receiver. How would it get guide listings? How would it turn the receiver on and off, or set the channel? How could it record two shows at once? It just doesn't make sense.
My DISH 942 has been working very well. Tivo has never been a plausible option for me.
My only real complaint is that I can't copy saved shows off the 942 and onto my computer. There have been times when I wanted to grab a snippet of video and show to my friends, but there's no way to do it digitally. I'd have to drag out the digitizer which is a big nuisance.
Terraforming Mars is neither necessary nor desirable. Within perhaps 50 years we could easily have human-level AI and advanced robotics. Such robots could be designed for the Martian environment as it exists now. It will prove much easier to adapt our descendants -- our mind children -- to Mars (and many other environments that are hostile to humans) than it would ever be to adapt Mars to us.
In fact, the more optimistic transhumanists would tend to assume that people alive today may see a time when they can upload or upgrade into an advanced robotic form themselves -- so it wouldn't even necessarily be our remote sort-of-descendants who colonize Mars, it could be us, suitably transformed.
Conventional wisdom is that Mars will be explored by robots, then colonized by humans. I turn that idea on it's head. Humans will explore Mars -- today's robotic probes are too crude and limited, so that a single manned expedition could do scientific work that would take decades, maybe centuries, with robots. The other side of that coin is that 50-100 years from now humans will become obsolete for space travel and colonization. The people who actually live on Mars and build a society there will be synthetic people, not homo sapiens.
We've reached the point where li-ion cells have the energy density needed for a practical electric car. Of course more energy is always better. . . but the batteries now have crossed the line into adequacy. The only thing holding them back is cost. The Tesla has something like $20,000 worth of batteries. The Phoenix SUT has more advanced batteries with a much longer service life, but they reputedly cost $70,000. These costs have to come down, and I believe they will come down. It's going to require a huge capital investment in automated factories to produce them.
It's the same thing that happened with LCD displays, for example, which are incredibly difficult items to manufacture. Big companies like Samsung invested in huge factories and they brought the cost down. The same will happen with li-ion batteries, but it will take several years.
These are some of the most steampunk-ish actual working devices I've seen. Some are fancier than others, with the more ornate models looking like they came right out of Myst. They aren't movie or vidgame props, they are some of the most powerful and accurate (and expensive) air rifles in the world -- and all hand-made by Gary Barnes himself. Although not technically (or legally, in the USA) considered to be firearms, these air rifles have been used successfully for hunting deer, wild hogs, and in at least one case a buffalo.
Yes, VHS to DVD was a huge step. . . But LD (LaserDisc) to DVD wasn't a huge step. DVD really offers very little -- aside from a smaller disc -- that LD hadn't already offered for years. So why did everyone abandon the excellent and long-established LD format for something minimally better? For that matter, why didn't LD ever really take off and displace VHS for pre-recorded content years before DVD even came along? There's no logic.
I do think LD was ahead of its time. People were beginning to appreciate the format's advantages, and it finally was starting to show signs of taking off in a big way, right up until DVD took all the wind out of its sails. It was particularly frustrating how many people were gushing over the "amazing new" DVD technology without even knowing that LD existed and had offered most of the same features for years and years already.
Also consider. . . Now we have many people chiming in to say that DVD is "good enough" and that improved picture quality isn't enough to justify the move to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Again I ask, where's the logic? If improved image quality isn't enough to move them, then why did we all move from LD to DVD when it didn't even offer that much?
I've often felt that in a logical world DVD would never have existed. LD would have become popular and widespread, until it was possible to make a real leap forward to HD discs (which IMHO should have happened some years before now). The success of DVD really threw everything out of whack, from my standpoint. It not only made LD players and disc collections obsolete before their time, but it also stunted the development of HD discs because the industry didn't want to introduce them while DVD was still considered relatively new.
HD discs are something I've wanted badly for several years. I'm already on my *second* HD set, and I've got HD satellite, a HD hard drive based recorder, an ATSC tuner, and the only missing element is HD discs. My frustration is, they are arriving years behind all the other HD components, plus we get an unwanted "format war", plus all the DRM nonsense on top of that. It's very disappointing. It didn't have to be this way.
You've got it all wrong, and I'll be happy to explain why.:)
The Tesla Roadster starts at $92,000 which is much less than other exotic sports cars it can run with -- Porsches and Ferraris. It's not intended to be "basic transportation" and any attempt to compare its price tag with cars that are basic transportation is pointless.
The batteries don't lay down and die at the end of five years. By then the estimate is that they'll be reduced to about 80% of their original capacity -- which means even a "worn out" battery will still take you about twice as far as a brand new GM EV1 could go. Also, if the price trends of li-ion cells continue, the cost will be about $12,000 by then, not $20,000. If battery durability continues to improve as many in the industry (including GM) foresee, that first replacement battery pack you swap into the car might very likely be the last one it ever needs.
I am not sure what "hazardous chemicals" you think a li-ion cell contains. According to the EPA they are not hazardous and are considered safe to chuck into a landfill -- unlike lead-acid batteries or even used motor oil. (But chucking them into a landfill would make no sense, because they can be profitably recycled.) Why don't I hear people crying about all the toxic used motor oil that has to be disposed of every year?
The comparison with an Aveo is pointless. It's not a high-performance car at all, it's a car produced in large numbers and targeted at a price point with mass appeal. Someday there will be electric cars in that category too -- and the Tesla Roadster is paving the way for them. A lot of electric car companies have gone out of business because they thought they could save the world with their first product, they thought they were going to start by producing an electric Model T or an electric VW Beetle. It didn't work. They forget that the Model T was preceded by some very expensive cars that were basically toys for the wealthy, but that's where the technology grew from.
Li-ion cells are known for holding up better in cold temperatures than other battery chemistries. Tesla have posted some great videos of their car blasting around a frozen lake in Sweden, so it appears they have a handle on cold weather operation.
As for the cars you "looked at" years ago, like the EV1 or the various homebrew conversions, those were powered with lead-acid batteries and the conversions probably had simple DC motors. Technology has moved on since then.
Others have already jumped to answer this, but just to make it official. . .
When I wrote that my whole music collect is in iTunes, I'm talking about stuff ripped from CDs and acquired from. . . ah, other sources. I haven't bought music from ITMS thus far because I didn't want my music collection contaminated with DRM. When the non-DRM tracks become available, then I plan to give ITMS a spin.
And yeah. . . It's a convenience thing. I could live without a dock connector for my car, but I would be missing something highly convenient. I could live with a player that doesn't sync with iTunes, but it would be a pain in the neck. Why should I subject myself to a pain in the neck rather than simply buy an iPod?
Using iTunes to store and organize my whole music collection was a revelation to me. I can't imagine going back to the multiple shelves of CDs that I used to have stacked here.
1. Okay. . . You think people simply won't buy the cars if they can't recharge quickly. I don't think most people will be hung up on that issue, particularly as the range-per-charge increases. We'll just have to agree to disagree on this point -- or wait and see what the marketplace decides.
2. Electric cars have potentially a much longer service life than gasoline-powered cars, due to the simplicity of the electric motor. If the car lasts twice as long, then the "dust to dust" energy consumption (per mile driven) should improve considerably. Also, lithium-ion batteries use much less toxic materials than lead-acid batteries and will be recycled.
3. I don't understand what you mean by that?? My point was that the electric grid we have today can support tens of millions of electric cars. There is no need to construct new power plants or lay out new power lines to support them.
And getting back to 4, the video you couldn't watch. . . It shows a Tesla Roadster blasting around a frozen lake in Sweden while the temperature is -30F. Check it when you get a chance! It's a thing of beauty.:)
As for hydrogen. . . I'm not optimistic about it. It's much less efficient than a battery-electric vehicle, and the whole hydrogen distribution infrastructure has to be built. I'm not against hydrogen research, and I'm not against research into flywheels or compressed air or any other idea. They should all get their chance. However, I think hydrogen has been over-promised; there has been too much hyperbole.
I think biofuels have a lot of potential if they can get away from food crops and move to algae-derived or cellulose-derived fuels.
It's about time to replace my ancient (1st gen) iPod, which has given heroic service. What would it take for me to consider another brand, any other brand, beside Apple?
1. must play MP3 and M4A (AAC)
2. must play nice with my Power Mac
3. must sync with iTunes (practically my entire music collection is in iTunes)
4. must work with the iPod dock connector in my car
Zune should have no problem with 1, might possibly be okay with 2, but is locked out of 3 & 4 -- along with every other non-Apple player on the market, thus far, to the best of my knowledge. If anyone knows differently, please correct me!
(And before anyone says anything. . . . No, my 1st gen iPod doesn't have a dock connector. In fact, my car stereo has only an aux input, it doesn't yet have an iPod dock connector either. My next one will. I'm looking to the future here.)
I have to disagree with your leading statement. The energy density of lithium-ion batteries today is adequate for making practical electric cars. Of course more is always better, and I'm optimistic that it can be improved further -- but energy density is no longer the big sticking point that it was.
The little two-seat Tesla Roadster with a 250-mile range has been demonstrated, and multiple companies are now working on more practical four-door cars which can have a 200-mile driving range. This doesn't require any breakthroughs, and it will get you "to the next town" with very few exceptions.
The critical areas that need improvement are cost and service life. Tesla Motors are projecting a life span of five years or 100,000 miles for their carefully managed battery pack. That's much better than the two years you stated. I think with the research that is ongoing, service life will further improve over the next several years. (And GM are betting on this happening to make their Chevy Volt concept workable.)
I think the requirement that cars be "refueled quickly" is overstated. The longer the range becomes, the less you need to refuel or recharge it quickly. With a dependable 200-mile driving range between charges, and the ability to recharge overnight at home, most people won't need to stop at a charging station mid-trip all that often. If you can get the range up to about 500 miles, then rapid charging would become moot for the great majority of people. (At least speaking for myself, I don't think I've ever driven more than 300 miles in a day's time, and I wouldn't want to drive more than 500 in a day if I could possibly avoid it.)
I have looked into flywheel storage technology. It looked promising several years ago, but battery technology advanced faster and has left flywheels behind. Notable problems you have with flywheels are: energy density, energy losses while the flywheel is spinning idle, and safety concerns about its failure modes.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now everybody here is upset over rising gas prices, but if you look at the global oil production and consumption trends, it's going to be more than just high prices in a few years. It's going to be shortages and rationing.
Let's imagine a future where gasoline is $10+/gallon -- if you are lucky enough to find a station that has some, and if you have a ration ticket allowing you to buy a few gallons. Let's imagine your neighbor has an electric car that he can charge at home for the equivalent of $0.60/gallon and drive whenever he wants. Hmm. . . You just might find yourself wanting an electric car too.
Man, you need to do some research before spouting off.
1. Electric cars don't have to be -- and shouldn't be -- "totally gutless". Consider the Tesla Roadster: 0-60 MPH in 3.9 seconds. It'll easily out-drag my Esprit V8 from a standing start, and the Esprit is a very fast car.
2. Who said anything about lead-acid batteries? That's completely outdated technology, everybody is looking to lithium-ion now. Li-ion cells are considered non-toxic by the EPA, you can literally dump them into landfills. That's not allowed with lead-acid batteries. . . or used motor oil.
3. "And it costs twice as much as a comparable gas vehicle." The Tesla costs $98,000 and performs much like Porsches and Lambos that typically run more like $400,000. That's before even getting into maintenance and fuel costs.
The only major obstacle to electric cars right now is the cost of Li-ion cells, and that can be solved through mass production -- the same thing that made gasoline engines affordable.
Actually, the biggest "efficiency trick" you can use in an electric car is the electric motor itself -- which converts energy into motion about three *times* as efficiently as a piston engine. That's why the Tesla Roadster carries energy equivalent to less than two gallons of gasoline, but can still manage to go 245 miles on it.
I think the most promising future energy sources, beginning with the best, are. . .
1. Aneutronic fusion / IEC Polywell reactors. If this works -- as seems likely, based on experimental results thus far -- it could begin displacing *all* other forms of power generation within 15 years. The potential is mind-boggling. This could make coal, fission, natural gas, wind, and the majority of solar power and petroleum fuels hopelessly obsolete. Rapidly.
2. Enhanced geothermal. According to a study from MIT, a relatively small R&D investment could open up enhanced geothermal energy production, at competitive costs, over wide geographical areas, including large parts of the USA. It could scale to meet a very large portion of electrical demand. An enhanced geothermal plant is conceptually similar to a nuclear plant, except that the atomic pile is safely tucked away under the earth's crust.
3. Nuclear fission. If fusion doesn't work out, there's good old fission, and you can build it anywhere, even places where enhanced geothermal won't work. We've learned a fair bit about designing and managing fission reactors, but very little has been put into practice in the USA since we haven't broken ground on any new nuclear plants for several decades. We need to start building *now* just to hold our ground as aging plants come up for decommissioning.
4. Solar. It's intermittent, expensive, and requires large amounts of land. And yet, the hype around solar is scary. Nuclear and geothermal have so many practical advantages, I have a hard time imagining solar providing most of the world's energy -- something all the faithful sun-worshippers expect. Still and all. . . Solar technology is being researched, progress is being made, and there's no question it will work at some price level. It may be useful for rooftop systems and assisting peak power demand, at the very least.
5. Biofuels. This is an inefficient method of gathering solar energy, and it competes with food production for the same resources. Realistically, we're not going to power our whole industrial society off this stuff. However, it does produce concentrated liquid fuels, which are highly useful for certain tasks. There will probably be some kind of long-term role for biofuels -- especially if we can get away from food crops and move to cellulose or algae.
And I quote, ". . .there's no expectation that a clean fusion reactor will be developed in the next 50 years."
/ 18/0616205
i c_confinement
I assume you missed this piece:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11
More here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_electrostat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
What you see is the retail price of solar panels going up, not the cost of making them. Prices are driven by supply and demand, and this uptick has been driven by demand. That makes solar panel manufacturing more lucrative and spurs investment in new and expanded production facilities. Higher volume production will typically lead to lower production costs while better satisfying demand, and thereby resulting in lower -- sometimes dramatically lower -- prices in the long run.
This has happened time and again in the manufacturing industries. My favorite recent example is LCD monitors.
There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
What?
Don't cross the streams.
Why?
It would be bad.
I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad?"
Try to imagine the instant annihilation of all matter and energy within 500 million light years of here.
Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
I'm not sure it's fair to call LaserDisc a "flop" since disc and players were sold and were apparently viable in the marketplace for about 20 years -- from 1978 right up until DVD came in and blitzed it. There are still a lot of LD collectors. If you want a real flop, I suggest you ponder the fate of RCA's SelectaVision videodisc format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SelectaVision
And now history repeats. But which format will be the next LaserDisc, and which will be the next SelectaVision?
The CD has been such a huge success story, most people don't realize how hard it was to bring about. It's easy to look back in retrospect and think it was easy, that it was inevitable.
I'm old enough (sad to say) that I remember following the development of the technology in the years before CDs ever hit the market. It seemed to take forever! There was bickering between the different companies over formats and standards, there was delay after delay. I knew what the technology promised, and I wanted it badly. . . but for several years it seemed like the industry was just going to talk, and talk, and argue, and negotiate, and fiddle around, and never actually produce anything. When CDs and players finally hit the market, it seemed to most people like a technological miracle out of the blue. I was glad to finally see it, but also annoyed that it had taken so long for the industry to get their act together. (And I feel the same way now, only much moreso, about Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. They still haven't got their act together.)
Although the CD was a great advance, there were problems in those early days. . . The first players were terribly expensive. CDs sold for at least double what we were accustomed to paying for LP records and cassettes. Recording engineers had no experience mastering digital recordings, and a lot of the early CDs came out with weak bass and painfully boosted treble (and some of those are still available today in the back catalog, they've never been remastered). There were also a lot of defective CDs on store shelves for the first few years; mostly they seemed to come from Germany.
Just imagine how we must look the the super-intelligent galactic gas clouds. . .
http://baetzler.de/humor/meat_beings.html
1. Not sure exactly what Think are planning, but Tesla are setting up regional service centers for their cars. They also have trucks, so if your car needs service they can send a truck to pick it up, fix it at the service center, and bring it back to you. Expensive? They figure it's less expensive than the traditional way of setting up a zillion service centers with one in every little village.
2. The Think car was previously imported and sold by Ford. Ford spent a lot of money getting it to meet US safety standards, and the new Think cars will take advantage of that work.
The price issue is not a scientific problem, it's not an engineering problem. . . It's a manufacturing problem. I like to compare with LCD panels. Color LCD panels are some of the most difficult items to manufacture that have ever been invented, and I'm sure you'll recall how expensive they were at first. Companies like Samsung and Matsushita saw the demand, invested huge sums of money to build large, sophisticated, automated factories, worked hard at refining the production process, and now LCDs are almost given away in boxes of cereal. The price reduction has been about 90%.
The same thing can and should happen with lithium-ion batteries. They are made out of common elements, mostly lithium and carbon. (That's unlike hydrogen fuel cells, for example, which require a platinum catalyst.) It's just a question of investing the capital in large-scale production and refining the process.
Honestly, I can't understand why I would ever even consider a DVR not integrated into my satellite receiver. How would it get guide listings? How would it turn the receiver on and off, or set the channel? How could it record two shows at once? It just doesn't make sense.
My DISH 942 has been working very well. Tivo has never been a plausible option for me.
My only real complaint is that I can't copy saved shows off the 942 and onto my computer. There have been times when I wanted to grab a snippet of video and show to my friends, but there's no way to do it digitally. I'd have to drag out the digitizer which is a big nuisance.
I'm with you. This is most definitely not what they should be saying if they want me to buy a Bluray player.
Ehh? I have no idea. I'm no Scientologist, I don't even have a vague idea of what their beliefs are.
I was expressing more of a transhumanist or extropian viewpoint. Think of Hans Moravec, rather than L. Ron Hubbard.
Terraforming Mars is neither necessary nor desirable. Within perhaps 50 years we could easily have human-level AI and advanced robotics. Such robots could be designed for the Martian environment as it exists now. It will prove much easier to adapt our descendants -- our mind children -- to Mars (and many other environments that are hostile to humans) than it would ever be to adapt Mars to us.
In fact, the more optimistic transhumanists would tend to assume that people alive today may see a time when they can upload or upgrade into an advanced robotic form themselves -- so it wouldn't even necessarily be our remote sort-of-descendants who colonize Mars, it could be us, suitably transformed.
Conventional wisdom is that Mars will be explored by robots, then colonized by humans. I turn that idea on it's head. Humans will explore Mars -- today's robotic probes are too crude and limited, so that a single manned expedition could do scientific work that would take decades, maybe centuries, with robots. The other side of that coin is that 50-100 years from now humans will become obsolete for space travel and colonization. The people who actually live on Mars and build a society there will be synthetic people, not homo sapiens.
We've reached the point where li-ion cells have the energy density needed for a practical electric car. Of course more energy is always better. . . but the batteries now have crossed the line into adequacy. The only thing holding them back is cost. The Tesla has something like $20,000 worth of batteries. The Phoenix SUT has more advanced batteries with a much longer service life, but they reputedly cost $70,000. These costs have to come down, and I believe they will come down. It's going to require a huge capital investment in automated factories to produce them.
It's the same thing that happened with LCD displays, for example, which are incredibly difficult items to manufacture. Big companies like Samsung invested in huge factories and they brought the cost down. The same will happen with li-ion batteries, but it will take several years.
Sorry, but I find those toys far less impressive than these: http://www.glbarnes.com/
These are some of the most steampunk-ish actual working devices I've seen. Some are fancier than others, with the more ornate models looking like they came right out of Myst. They aren't movie or vidgame props, they are some of the most powerful and accurate (and expensive) air rifles in the world -- and all hand-made by Gary Barnes himself. Although not technically (or legally, in the USA) considered to be firearms, these air rifles have been used successfully for hunting deer, wild hogs, and in at least one case a buffalo.
Yes, VHS to DVD was a huge step. . . But LD (LaserDisc) to DVD wasn't a huge step. DVD really offers very little -- aside from a smaller disc -- that LD hadn't already offered for years. So why did everyone abandon the excellent and long-established LD format for something minimally better? For that matter, why didn't LD ever really take off and displace VHS for pre-recorded content years before DVD even came along? There's no logic.
I do think LD was ahead of its time. People were beginning to appreciate the format's advantages, and it finally was starting to show signs of taking off in a big way, right up until DVD took all the wind out of its sails. It was particularly frustrating how many people were gushing over the "amazing new" DVD technology without even knowing that LD existed and had offered most of the same features for years and years already.
Also consider. . . Now we have many people chiming in to say that DVD is "good enough" and that improved picture quality isn't enough to justify the move to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Again I ask, where's the logic? If improved image quality isn't enough to move them, then why did we all move from LD to DVD when it didn't even offer that much?
I've often felt that in a logical world DVD would never have existed. LD would have become popular and widespread, until it was possible to make a real leap forward to HD discs (which IMHO should have happened some years before now). The success of DVD really threw everything out of whack, from my standpoint. It not only made LD players and disc collections obsolete before their time, but it also stunted the development of HD discs because the industry didn't want to introduce them while DVD was still considered relatively new.
HD discs are something I've wanted badly for several years. I'm already on my *second* HD set, and I've got HD satellite, a HD hard drive based recorder, an ATSC tuner, and the only missing element is HD discs. My frustration is, they are arriving years behind all the other HD components, plus we get an unwanted "format war", plus all the DRM nonsense on top of that. It's very disappointing. It didn't have to be this way.
You've got it all wrong, and I'll be happy to explain why. :)
The Tesla Roadster starts at $92,000 which is much less than other exotic sports cars it can run with -- Porsches and Ferraris. It's not intended to be "basic transportation" and any attempt to compare its price tag with cars that are basic transportation is pointless.
The batteries don't lay down and die at the end of five years. By then the estimate is that they'll be reduced to about 80% of their original capacity -- which means even a "worn out" battery will still take you about twice as far as a brand new GM EV1 could go. Also, if the price trends of li-ion cells continue, the cost will be about $12,000 by then, not $20,000. If battery durability continues to improve as many in the industry (including GM) foresee, that first replacement battery pack you swap into the car might very likely be the last one it ever needs.
I am not sure what "hazardous chemicals" you think a li-ion cell contains. According to the EPA they are not hazardous and are considered safe to chuck into a landfill -- unlike lead-acid batteries or even used motor oil. (But chucking them into a landfill would make no sense, because they can be profitably recycled.) Why don't I hear people crying about all the toxic used motor oil that has to be disposed of every year?
The comparison with an Aveo is pointless. It's not a high-performance car at all, it's a car produced in large numbers and targeted at a price point with mass appeal. Someday there will be electric cars in that category too -- and the Tesla Roadster is paving the way for them. A lot of electric car companies have gone out of business because they thought they could save the world with their first product, they thought they were going to start by producing an electric Model T or an electric VW Beetle. It didn't work. They forget that the Model T was preceded by some very expensive cars that were basically toys for the wealthy, but that's where the technology grew from.
Li-ion cells are known for holding up better in cold temperatures than other battery chemistries. Tesla have posted some great videos of their car blasting around a frozen lake in Sweden, so it appears they have a handle on cold weather operation.
As for the cars you "looked at" years ago, like the EV1 or the various homebrew conversions, those were powered with lead-acid batteries and the conversions probably had simple DC motors. Technology has moved on since then.
Others have already jumped to answer this, but just to make it official. . .
When I wrote that my whole music collect is in iTunes, I'm talking about stuff ripped from CDs and acquired from. . . ah, other sources. I haven't bought music from ITMS thus far because I didn't want my music collection contaminated with DRM. When the non-DRM tracks become available, then I plan to give ITMS a spin.
And yeah. . . It's a convenience thing. I could live without a dock connector for my car, but I would be missing something highly convenient. I could live with a player that doesn't sync with iTunes, but it would be a pain in the neck. Why should I subject myself to a pain in the neck rather than simply buy an iPod?
Using iTunes to store and organize my whole music collection was a revelation to me. I can't imagine going back to the multiple shelves of CDs that I used to have stacked here.
1. Okay. . . You think people simply won't buy the cars if they can't recharge quickly. I don't think most people will be hung up on that issue, particularly as the range-per-charge increases. We'll just have to agree to disagree on this point -- or wait and see what the marketplace decides.
:)
2. Electric cars have potentially a much longer service life than gasoline-powered cars, due to the simplicity of the electric motor. If the car lasts twice as long, then the "dust to dust" energy consumption (per mile driven) should improve considerably. Also, lithium-ion batteries use much less toxic materials than lead-acid batteries and will be recycled.
3. I don't understand what you mean by that?? My point was that the electric grid we have today can support tens of millions of electric cars. There is no need to construct new power plants or lay out new power lines to support them.
And getting back to 4, the video you couldn't watch. . . It shows a Tesla Roadster blasting around a frozen lake in Sweden while the temperature is -30F. Check it when you get a chance! It's a thing of beauty.
As for hydrogen. . . I'm not optimistic about it. It's much less efficient than a battery-electric vehicle, and the whole hydrogen distribution infrastructure has to be built. I'm not against hydrogen research, and I'm not against research into flywheels or compressed air or any other idea. They should all get their chance. However, I think hydrogen has been over-promised; there has been too much hyperbole.
I think biofuels have a lot of potential if they can get away from food crops and move to algae-derived or cellulose-derived fuels.
It's about time to replace my ancient (1st gen) iPod, which has given heroic service. What would it take for me to consider another brand, any other brand, beside Apple?
1. must play MP3 and M4A (AAC)
2. must play nice with my Power Mac
3. must sync with iTunes (practically my entire music collection is in iTunes)
4. must work with the iPod dock connector in my car
Zune should have no problem with 1, might possibly be okay with 2, but is locked out of 3 & 4 -- along with every other non-Apple player on the market, thus far, to the best of my knowledge. If anyone knows differently, please correct me!
(And before anyone says anything. . . . No, my 1st gen iPod doesn't have a dock connector. In fact, my car stereo has only an aux input, it doesn't yet have an iPod dock connector either. My next one will. I'm looking to the future here.)
Quick and dirty rebuttal. . . .
1. fast recharge isn't needed if driving range becomes long enough (say 300 to 500 miles)
2. electric cars pollute much less than gasoline cars, due to their energy efficiency
3. tens of millions of electrics can be charged using off-peak power without building any new power plants
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5kkU23bfEc
I have to disagree with your leading statement. The energy density of lithium-ion batteries today is adequate for making practical electric cars. Of course more is always better, and I'm optimistic that it can be improved further -- but energy density is no longer the big sticking point that it was.
The little two-seat Tesla Roadster with a 250-mile range has been demonstrated, and multiple companies are now working on more practical four-door cars which can have a 200-mile driving range. This doesn't require any breakthroughs, and it will get you "to the next town" with very few exceptions.
The critical areas that need improvement are cost and service life. Tesla Motors are projecting a life span of five years or 100,000 miles for their carefully managed battery pack. That's much better than the two years you stated. I think with the research that is ongoing, service life will further improve over the next several years. (And GM are betting on this happening to make their Chevy Volt concept workable.)
I think the requirement that cars be "refueled quickly" is overstated. The longer the range becomes, the less you need to refuel or recharge it quickly. With a dependable 200-mile driving range between charges, and the ability to recharge overnight at home, most people won't need to stop at a charging station mid-trip all that often. If you can get the range up to about 500 miles, then rapid charging would become moot for the great majority of people. (At least speaking for myself, I don't think I've ever driven more than 300 miles in a day's time, and I wouldn't want to drive more than 500 in a day if I could possibly avoid it.)
I have looked into flywheel storage technology. It looked promising several years ago, but battery technology advanced faster and has left flywheels behind. Notable problems you have with flywheels are: energy density, energy losses while the flywheel is spinning idle, and safety concerns about its failure modes.