You know, back then when you asked about a Unix license the reply was something like "well let's fly a consultant out to you to right-size your licensing to optimize your ROI". That may have been a wee bit off-putting for folks who just wanted to do a few spreadsheets for their small business.
For Stephen Hawking speaking is a painful and long process. He knows he's going to die soon, and that the things he can say to us are limited so he takes care to avoid trivia in a way we can't. He's one of the greatest minds the world has ever known. If he takes some of the few words available to him to say "get off this rock or die" we should listen to him. Unlike most of our other sources of information he can't be compromised nor exploited. He's telling it like it is. The choice is simple: we explore the stars, or some future alien race digs up our bones and makes of it what they will.
The launch was a rush. That railgun they drilled through the planetoid accelerated me at 50G, or 490m/s/s. With only 487km of railgun it was over in just a few seconds and I was off to the stars. It's cold out here and dark, with not much to do as I sleep almost all of the time. They keep pushing. The high-energy lasers in orbit around Venus still fluff my solar sail and deliver power so I don't have to activate my nuclear engine. I'm supposed to be seeing some time dilation at this point, but really, not so much that it can't be accounted for.
I understand launching so much mass shifted the orbit of the planetoid significantly, but was timed to do so in a way that moved it into a more convenient orbit around the sun. Not that they fill me in on the details.
They laid my way with resupply years before of course. I'll be docking with one of those probes soon to boost my xenon and hydrogen - that's why I'm awake to make this log. I've five of these resupplies to do, and this next one is the fourth. I'm halfway to my destination, and still have all of this resupply inventory. It's for deceleration, and I may not need any of it if the L2 solar sails work to spec. I'm glad for the backup plan because we all know how low bidder contracts kill.
It's been 40 years, and it feels like a week.
There's not much to do out here except wonder if tech innovations will have people stopping by to pick me up on their way to the stars with new drive tech. It's nice that my mental donor wasn't too introspective - some replayed vids and a little virtual dolphin flogging and we're ready for sleep again. That will be handy when we get to Tau Ceti if we've got to do some terraforming before it's fit for men. That could take a few million years even with my well-designed spore toolkit. Sleep will be a blessing.
Twenty years and it seems like a week. Frankly I'm glad they vary my clock at need. I wonder what meat people would feel like by turnaround. Perhaps it's best not to go there. It's not like they could survive the launch acceleration anyway.
They said this personality is rated for 18 months of subjective time before it's overcome by a psychotic desire to kill the manipulative bitch that made me volunteer for this program. That may have been optimistic.
The energy storage capacity of a solar thermal plant varies based upon the tons of salt employed. We have many gigatons of salt available. More than enough to compensate for periods of dark, periods of winter. We have cubic kilometers of salt.
I do know how expensive it is to drill. And a lot more things about your questions. You're way off. You're thinking about this on a "what you might expect" level. It turns out what it is is very much different than you might expect.
Geothermal is baseload power. It can reliably generate up to 98% of its capacity 100 percent of the time - day or night, maintenance or no maintenance. This is even better than nuclear, which has reactors that must be periodically shut down for maintenance. Better than that, since an EGS plant can overextract the heat available it can moderate its consumption of this resource to compensate for variability of other energy resources like wind and solar in a way that nuclear plants can't.
Nuclear takes 10x as much water, and coal needs as much. The geothermal resource must not be at the surface - in fact, a dry well from oil drilling will often do for a start and to prove the resource. Frequently oil and gas exploration terminates with "too hot to drill" conditions that indicate the explorer has found a different kind of energy. The US Department of Energy places the new enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) at about $0.05/KWh, which compares favorably to nuclear. Plant investment is less than nuclear too, but not less than coal. Sometimes geothermal drilling accidentally finds oil, gas or coal resources incidentally, as was recently the case in Britain with a well that found all four. All the major energy drilling companies probably have huge data on geothermal resources they've categorized as "unfit to drill because the rock is too hot" and dry holes to start at. For 50 years or more they call these dry holes and cap them and walk away. There's maybe drillers in receivership you could get with this data for under a million dollars. It's lost data come useful.
The new EGS systems are a closed loop: water is injected into deep dry hot rock, typically after opening up a large surface area for thermal transfer with fracking. When the water comes back up hot the heat is transferred to a second closed loop system that uses another fluid with a low boiling point, much like your refrigerator. This allows conversion of the energy retrieved from water that's not necessarily above 100c when it reaches the surface. The cooler (but still warm) water is then reinjected back into the well, resulting in a closed subterranean loop, and incidentally injecting this warmer water increases the efficiency and lifespan of the well, meaning there are no emissions whatever, ever, except for the precipitates of dissolved minerals that rain out during cooling.
Google, which has been doing some research into minimal footprint power because they use so much of it, funded a study you can find here that allows you to explore geothermal resources with a Google Earth interface. To put it simply, the US has vast amounts of subsurface energy available to be tapped. It costs less than nuclear, has no carbon emissions like coal does, requires no fuel that might fluctuate in cost or availability, is clean available baseload power, but it can be moderated to counteract the variations of wind and solar dynamically on a moment's notice, so it can help integrated those sources into the grid removing the risk.
Over-exploitation can overcool the hot rock to the point where it's not useful, but it doesn't halt the energy flow. Ultimately a level is found that delivers an average use that can be varied in the short term.
Best of all there's no mountain of toxic fly ash to be rid of, no spent fuel you can't find a home for. There is no waste - at all. There's no fuel cost commodity spikes, shortages, embargoes, import levies or restrictions because there is no fuel and this reduces the risks associated with building a plant that must generate power for 50 years or more, and the cost of insurance against such risks. Men don't need to toil miles beneath the ground to
We've had a lot of these threads. Forgive me for turning this one away from the well-worn path. We can resume the nuclear vs. coal flamewar in the next one a few days from now, for the folk who prefer tradition.
The "If it's not nuclear, it's coal" fiends are below us now, ranting their "coal is evil" rants as if there were no other options. I'll call that a win.
Coal and nuclear are both proven bad. Why not look at something else?
The only alternative is coal. Nucular and coal is all there is. And coal is worse. Coal ash has more radioactive emissions than nucular plants, and arsenic and landslides too.
Apparently you're not paying attention to the Android patent trolling, or the games they're playing with Nokia. Nothing has changed on the niceness front - they're just not as good at not getting caught.
I support computers and work on websites. I hate IE 6 and XP.
Life is short. I wish you luck finding work you enjoy more.
You do know that it's a tracking device, right? That's how they know which tower to route the call from? If the battery is in the phone they know who you are and where you are - even with a dumb phone.
People put aside some fraction of their earnings to ward against an uncertain future, or a certain inability to produce. The word for folk like this who entrust their output to an investment manager is "victim". Far more lose all than gain anything.
My favorite all-time Microsoft investor Q&A question was a confused investor who asked why Bill Gates didn't just give his shares back to the company instead of selling them and giving his charity the cash. I figure that's right about when he stopped pretending to care.
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You know, back then when you asked about a Unix license the reply was something like "well let's fly a consultant out to you to right-size your licensing to optimize your ROI". That may have been a wee bit off-putting for folks who just wanted to do a few spreadsheets for their small business.
For Stephen Hawking speaking is a painful and long process. He knows he's going to die soon, and that the things he can say to us are limited so he takes care to avoid trivia in a way we can't. He's one of the greatest minds the world has ever known. If he takes some of the few words available to him to say "get off this rock or die" we should listen to him. Unlike most of our other sources of information he can't be compromised nor exploited. He's telling it like it is. The choice is simple: we explore the stars, or some future alien race digs up our bones and makes of it what they will.
The launch was a rush. That railgun they drilled through the planetoid accelerated me at 50G, or 490m/s/s. With only 487km of railgun it was over in just a few seconds and I was off to the stars. It's cold out here and dark, with not much to do as I sleep almost all of the time. They keep pushing. The high-energy lasers in orbit around Venus still fluff my solar sail and deliver power so I don't have to activate my nuclear engine. I'm supposed to be seeing some time dilation at this point, but really, not so much that it can't be accounted for.
I understand launching so much mass shifted the orbit of the planetoid significantly, but was timed to do so in a way that moved it into a more convenient orbit around the sun. Not that they fill me in on the details.
They laid my way with resupply years before of course. I'll be docking with one of those probes soon to boost my xenon and hydrogen - that's why I'm awake to make this log. I've five of these resupplies to do, and this next one is the fourth. I'm halfway to my destination, and still have all of this resupply inventory. It's for deceleration, and I may not need any of it if the L2 solar sails work to spec. I'm glad for the backup plan because we all know how low bidder contracts kill.
It's been 40 years, and it feels like a week.
There's not much to do out here except wonder if tech innovations will have people stopping by to pick me up on their way to the stars with new drive tech. It's nice that my mental donor wasn't too introspective - some replayed vids and a little virtual dolphin flogging and we're ready for sleep again. That will be handy when we get to Tau Ceti if we've got to do some terraforming before it's fit for men. That could take a few million years even with my well-designed spore toolkit. Sleep will be a blessing.
Twenty years and it seems like a week. Frankly I'm glad they vary my clock at need. I wonder what meat people would feel like by turnaround. Perhaps it's best not to go there. It's not like they could survive the launch acceleration anyway.
They said this personality is rated for 18 months of subjective time before it's overcome by a psychotic desire to kill the manipulative bitch that made me volunteer for this program. That may have been optimistic.
End log.
Personally I prefer Ceres. Or Phobos. Less of that costly gravity well nonsense.
That's precognition. Canada wasn't absorbed into the US until the resource wars of 2023.
The energy storage capacity of a solar thermal plant varies based upon the tons of salt employed. We have many gigatons of salt available. More than enough to compensate for periods of dark, periods of winter. We have cubic kilometers of salt.
I do know how expensive it is to drill. And a lot more things about your questions. You're way off. You're thinking about this on a "what you might expect" level. It turns out what it is is very much different than you might expect.
Geothermal is baseload power. It can reliably generate up to 98% of its capacity 100 percent of the time - day or night, maintenance or no maintenance. This is even better than nuclear, which has reactors that must be periodically shut down for maintenance. Better than that, since an EGS plant can overextract the heat available it can moderate its consumption of this resource to compensate for variability of other energy resources like wind and solar in a way that nuclear plants can't.
Nuclear takes 10x as much water, and coal needs as much. The geothermal resource must not be at the surface - in fact, a dry well from oil drilling will often do for a start and to prove the resource. Frequently oil and gas exploration terminates with "too hot to drill" conditions that indicate the explorer has found a different kind of energy. The US Department of Energy places the new enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) at about $0.05/KWh, which compares favorably to nuclear. Plant investment is less than nuclear too, but not less than coal. Sometimes geothermal drilling accidentally finds oil, gas or coal resources incidentally, as was recently the case in Britain with a well that found all four. All the major energy drilling companies probably have huge data on geothermal resources they've categorized as "unfit to drill because the rock is too hot" and dry holes to start at. For 50 years or more they call these dry holes and cap them and walk away. There's maybe drillers in receivership you could get with this data for under a million dollars. It's lost data come useful.
The new EGS systems are a closed loop: water is injected into deep dry hot rock, typically after opening up a large surface area for thermal transfer with fracking. When the water comes back up hot the heat is transferred to a second closed loop system that uses another fluid with a low boiling point, much like your refrigerator. This allows conversion of the energy retrieved from water that's not necessarily above 100c when it reaches the surface. The cooler (but still warm) water is then reinjected back into the well, resulting in a closed subterranean loop, and incidentally injecting this warmer water increases the efficiency and lifespan of the well, meaning there are no emissions whatever, ever, except for the precipitates of dissolved minerals that rain out during cooling.
Google, which has been doing some research into minimal footprint power because they use so much of it, funded a study you can find here that allows you to explore geothermal resources with a Google Earth interface. To put it simply, the US has vast amounts of subsurface energy available to be tapped. It costs less than nuclear, has no carbon emissions like coal does, requires no fuel that might fluctuate in cost or availability, is clean available baseload power, but it can be moderated to counteract the variations of wind and solar dynamically on a moment's notice, so it can help integrated those sources into the grid removing the risk.
Over-exploitation can overcool the hot rock to the point where it's not useful, but it doesn't halt the energy flow. Ultimately a level is found that delivers an average use that can be varied in the short term.
Best of all there's no mountain of toxic fly ash to be rid of, no spent fuel you can't find a home for. There is no waste - at all. There's no fuel cost commodity spikes, shortages, embargoes, import levies or restrictions because there is no fuel and this reduces the risks associated with building a plant that must generate power for 50 years or more, and the cost of insurance against such risks. Men don't need to toil miles beneath the ground to
You've found a place to put the spent fuel?
Let's pretend there is no geothermal. Because it's base load power, and that screws up our arguments.
So I'm guessing the "nucular" spelling wasn't enough of a sarcasm clue for you. I'll work on being less subtle. Thanks.
We've had a lot of these threads. Forgive me for turning this one away from the well-worn path. We can resume the nuclear vs. coal flamewar in the next one a few days from now, for the folk who prefer tradition.
100 years isn't very long in geological time.
Cancer is not cost-effective.
The "If it's not nuclear, it's coal" fiends are below us now, ranting their "coal is evil" rants as if there were no other options. I'll call that a win.
Coal and nuclear are both proven bad. Why not look at something else?
The only alternative is coal. Nucular and coal is all there is. And coal is worse. Coal ash has more radioactive emissions than nucular plants, and arsenic and landslides too.
There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.
Sometimes we remember things that didn't happen.
Got a 4 then? A shame that. Now you can't even transfer to a division that makes money.
Maybe just a new Google Doodle.
Besides doing a fat license deal, you're probably thinking about Baystar. Though there were others.
And then some nerd who's teed off about getting his domain seized or something puts together a replacement for DNS and it's all good again.
MS seems much nicer and tamer today.
Apparently you're not paying attention to the Android patent trolling, or the games they're playing with Nokia. Nothing has changed on the niceness front - they're just not as good at not getting caught.
I support computers and work on websites. I hate IE 6 and XP.
Life is short. I wish you luck finding work you enjoy more.
Welcome to offshore hosting.
You do know that it's a tracking device, right? That's how they know which tower to route the call from? If the battery is in the phone they know who you are and where you are - even with a dumb phone.
People put aside some fraction of their earnings to ward against an uncertain future, or a certain inability to produce. The word for folk like this who entrust their output to an investment manager is "victim". Far more lose all than gain anything.
My favorite all-time Microsoft investor Q&A question was a confused investor who asked why Bill Gates didn't just give his shares back to the company instead of selling them and giving his charity the cash. I figure that's right about when he stopped pretending to care.