If we get that far it makes a vast amount of sense to use that energy to do something on the moon. The gravity ignoring fantasy doesn't go far enough - if you are going to have delusions, they may as well be grand delusions. It's like seeing the solution to 19th century transport as being a cyborg horse with a motor instead of a better road+rail and things zooming about on wheels.
The "one true energy" bullshit is the stuff of people who benefit from that form of energy production or cargo cult fanboys that know next to nothing about that form of energy production. Nothing covers every niche without having vulnerable points of failure. A few dry years and even hydro has trouble.
It's not global data but there's a graph here showing the trend since international coal markets are linked fairly tightly: http://www.mining.com/us-coal-... Expect a bit more of a drop when the 2015 data is added, but 2013-4 tells the story alone.
Also Figure 1 on that link you gave shows the dropoff in terms of planning less that demands coal than in the previous year, even if it is greater than 2004. A graph of new wind capacity, solar and probably even nuclear with China's new reactors would probably have a similar shape - the big bulge was due to rapid expansion that was not limited to coal fired plants. If demand for coal was increasing it is unlikely that the price would be falling as much as it is: http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/coal/all/
It's not 2012 - the price is way down because consumption reduced since then. Figures more than a year or two old will include vast amounts of Chinese consumption that is currently not occurring. Coal mines are laying off people, being shut down or not going ahead for a reason.
That came off badly the "Rusted on Republicans take note" is not an insult - it's a suggestion to tell people running your party to start working for America and not British Petroleum or the House of Saud. I'm not that fond of Democrats either so it was not a partisan comment.
The denial of the ubiquitous examples - as you very well know. There's not much point reading the rest of your post since you stated that way. What is it with you political freaks - now one as an apologist to genocidal fascists FFS. The Jewish people of the 1940s would look in horror at the people running Israel today.
Nuclear is not relevant in the west since nobody wants to put up the capital. There's no point whining about it, just pay attention to the actual progress that is happening with nuclear in China, Russia and India, pay attention to fusion if you wish and hope for the future instead of putting up a suggestion that is not going to be taken seriously.
Mostly getting something new into production is a hell of a lot more work than a promising prototype so the new technologies falter at that step instead of being actively stopped by anyone.
Another thing to add is a lot of stuff actually works but is not considered worth putting into production to compete against current oil and coal prices. When the oil price doubles or more again you'll see a few interesting things coming into production a few years after that jump.
Plausible? Well sometimes it happens, sometimes even for very benign reasons (eg. the Shell Oil alternative energy stuff) but the competence and focus required for it to happen on the massive conspiracy level is not there. Mostly getting something new into production is a hell of a lot more work than a promising prototype.
You can be sure of one thing though, they certainly would buy technology that carries a risk of doing so and leave that one on the shelf.
That requires noticing the technology and understanding it's implications. Also they have limited influence globally - political donors could get solar manufacturing killed off in the USA but that just resulted in the Chinese making a fortune from selling US developed technology to US citizens. The third thing, which I think you dealt with above, is only the sort of oil company run by creationists (yes, selling fossil fuels - weird isn't it) would turn up their nose at making money out of something else. A company near me that started off with coal and natural gas power generation is now making a killing with their windmills. As seen with the extreme of Enron, they are not really in the oil business, they are in the money business and if they can get plenty of money another way they will do it.
It was the equivalent of saying if I have any examples of water being wet please tell you elsewhere - and you know it - deliberate belittling insult pretending reality is not real just to push your agenda. A newspaper will give you plenty of examples where the current Israeli government has used propaganda and has applied pressure to media outlets to force their view. For example today it's the BBC being given a hard time for perceived bais. You denial of something so blatant, obvious and ongoing for years of course inspired deep disgust as does your efforts to mislead people here. This is not a political site so such disgusting games are especially annoying.
Mercedes built one - it worked, for a carefully crafted single prototype. One underlying problem is the cost of machining to tolerances tight enough to use as an engine was very high. Another is that although "tough" ceramics are used the size of acceptable flaws is very low or the components crack - so quality control and a large number of rejects becomes an issue. It looked like around a million dollars per engine would be the cost if mass produced. The commercial outcome was ceramic cylinder liners for some truck engines. The entire point, apart from a stupid boast of it being all ceramic, is to run at higher temperatures so the cylinder liners accomplished some of that without being a brittle all ceramic engine made out of a great big insulator. Little bits of insulator do the job just as well inside a nice big conductive metal block where it's easy to cast or forge water channels.
I've put "tough" in quotes because it's relative to other ceramics and not to a typical alloy used in engine parts. With ceramics you can't get away with a dent.
Take a look at the mining operation halfway down the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni
And also where the hell did you get your numbers for cost? I found $9.50/0.1kg or $95/kg if buying bulk, and in smaller amounts it's $270/kg
Why are you shifting the goalposts to a price that a battery manufacturer buying by the tonne would never pay? Maybe you could just do a google search like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=lithium+price+per+tonne
In the late 1990s a famous artist brought his "revolutionary fuel saving" device to the university mechanical engineering department I worked at for independent testing. It turns out he was tuning for idling. So his car engine used very little fuel while sitting at the lights doing nothing and produced crap performance and crap fuel economy while actually moving the vehicle. There was a lot of that going on. However there have been a small number of real advances from non-experts, I think it was sometime in the 1950s that somebody thought of running a fuel pump in the opposite direction to the normal gravity fed tradition and it made a difference. Normally it's someone who improves one thing and doesn't understand that it doesn't help the entire system at all.
A classic that wasn't actually from the layman was the all-ceramic engine. The idea was that you could run it really hot and get more out if the fuel. Fantastic performance on a testbed, but the extra mass of the more involved cooling meant that one you tried to move it around it performed worse than what it was supposed to replace. Whoops. They only thought of a part and not the implications to how it was actually going to be used, just like that artist who was paranoid about his "invention" being suppressed.
Yes but didn't JFK state an end date and Von Braun react to fit the timetable? However it does make sense - Skylab should have been first and not last to be disgustingly abandoned to deorbit due to budget cuts.
Yes, last time it kicked off the shale oil/gas boom with some pretty stupid cowboy goldrush antics that are starting to have a bit of fallout now. Meanwhile solar/wind/etc are quietly progressing worldwide to compete with the much lower price. Rusted on Republicans take note - the Chinese are making an absolute fortune selling those solar panels developed in the USA but forced offshore to keep some donors happy. America could be making a killing from that American technology if a few loud Texan oil executives had not put their interest ahead of the country. Those six million manufacturing jobs lost recently could be doing that and spinoffs instead of that many or more doing it in China.
The need to get the thing into polar orbits of a certain height and the height envelope of what was possible to build and launch without building a new spaceport resulted in that bizzare compromise of the vehicle strapped onto the side of a rocket. It's a credit to NASA that they even managed to launch something shaped like that at all. If you don't see it as a big deal look up "bending moment" for a start, without even getting into centre of mass and aerodynamics.
Had the entire payload of the launching rocket been station parts plus enough cowl to protect it for launch we could have sent up much bigger station parts
The political restriction of one single vehicle to do everything prevented that. It's kind of what we are seeing now with a military jet that is supposed to do everything. A lot of the more serious near future SF from the last few decades (and recent ISS modules in reality) has space stations built out of modules launched unmanned on dedicated rockets and the manned missions involve connecting them together. The Japanese near-future fiction "Space Brothers" has a moonbase built out of modules and assembled by remote controlled industrial robots before the first people are planned to turn up - even the wheeled vehicles are sent in to be at the landing site before the astronauts land. In that fiction they get around the lack of a Saturn V in the near future by sending the lander into Earth orbit unmanned and then docking something like a Soyuz to it on a manned flight to avoid having to lift all the stuff in one go.
Your point depends on pretending that I did not suggest the reader consider something from a viewpoint and puts words in my mouth about the company mentioned. It's both pretended stupidity and lying about what I wrote. Not nice.
OK - that's an example of research I didn't do:) For a lot of stuff it isn't so hard though, but with the rise of 4k screens there's another example where a bog standard video card is not going to be enough, which may then mean a generic case isn't going to fit it and a bogs standard power supply can't feed it. So I'll concede that it could take a bit of time at the high end, but for cheapskates it's never been easier.
Please do try to keep track of a thread before making a comment like that - try looking two posts above the "original comment" to see an earlier comment where I gave Sun the benefit of the doubt on one item and he replied with a denial of the obvious - thus leading to the form "original comment" which should be expected by anyone that deliberately tries to mislead the kiddies on this site for blatant political purposes.
In the form of an accusation that what I stated never happens despite it being very frequent and obvious to all. You asked me to "elaborate" by calling me a lair and treating me like a naive idiot. I know that in war the "lesser evil" becomes the necessary, but pretending everything is sunshine and roses with the evil never happening is the act of disgusting scum.
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If we get that far it makes a vast amount of sense to use that energy to do something on the moon.
The gravity ignoring fantasy doesn't go far enough - if you are going to have delusions, they may as well be grand delusions. It's like seeing the solution to 19th century transport as being a cyborg horse with a motor instead of a better road+rail and things zooming about on wheels.
The "one true energy" bullshit is the stuff of people who benefit from that form of energy production or cargo cult fanboys that know next to nothing about that form of energy production. Nothing covers every niche without having vulnerable points of failure. A few dry years and even hydro has trouble.
It's not global data but there's a graph here showing the trend since international coal markets are linked fairly tightly:
http://www.mining.com/us-coal-...
Expect a bit more of a drop when the 2015 data is added, but 2013-4 tells the story alone.
Also Figure 1 on that link you gave shows the dropoff in terms of planning less that demands coal than in the previous year, even if it is greater than 2004. A graph of new wind capacity, solar and probably even nuclear with China's new reactors would probably have a similar shape - the big bulge was due to rapid expansion that was not limited to coal fired plants.
If demand for coal was increasing it is unlikely that the price would be falling as much as it is:
http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/coal/all/
It's not 2012 - the price is way down because consumption reduced since then. Figures more than a year or two old will include vast amounts of Chinese consumption that is currently not occurring.
Coal mines are laying off people, being shut down or not going ahead for a reason.
Globally sales are down. A lot.
That came off badly the "Rusted on Republicans take note" is not an insult - it's a suggestion to tell people running your party to start working for America and not British Petroleum or the House of Saud. I'm not that fond of Democrats either so it was not a partisan comment.
The denial of the ubiquitous examples - as you very well know.
There's not much point reading the rest of your post since you stated that way. What is it with you political freaks - now one as an apologist to genocidal fascists FFS. The Jewish people of the 1940s would look in horror at the people running Israel today.
Nuclear is not relevant in the west since nobody wants to put up the capital.
There's no point whining about it, just pay attention to the actual progress that is happening with nuclear in China, Russia and India, pay attention to fusion if you wish and hope for the future instead of putting up a suggestion that is not going to be taken seriously.
Mostly getting something new into production is a hell of a lot more work than a promising prototype so the new technologies falter at that step instead of being actively stopped by anyone.
Another thing to add is a lot of stuff actually works but is not considered worth putting into production to compete against current oil and coal prices. When the oil price doubles or more again you'll see a few interesting things coming into production a few years after that jump.
That requires noticing the technology and understanding it's implications. Also they have limited influence globally - political donors could get solar manufacturing killed off in the USA but that just resulted in the Chinese making a fortune from selling US developed technology to US citizens. The third thing, which I think you dealt with above, is only the sort of oil company run by creationists (yes, selling fossil fuels - weird isn't it) would turn up their nose at making money out of something else. A company near me that started off with coal and natural gas power generation is now making a killing with their windmills. As seen with the extreme of Enron, they are not really in the oil business, they are in the money business and if they can get plenty of money another way they will do it.
Did you read my post before replying?
It was the equivalent of saying if I have any examples of water being wet please tell you elsewhere - and you know it - deliberate belittling insult pretending reality is not real just to push your agenda. A newspaper will give you plenty of examples where the current Israeli government has used propaganda and has applied pressure to media outlets to force their view. For example today it's the BBC being given a hard time for perceived bais.
You denial of something so blatant, obvious and ongoing for years of course inspired deep disgust as does your efforts to mislead people here. This is not a political site so such disgusting games are especially annoying.
Mercedes built one - it worked, for a carefully crafted single prototype. One underlying problem is the cost of machining to tolerances tight enough to use as an engine was very high. Another is that although "tough" ceramics are used the size of acceptable flaws is very low or the components crack - so quality control and a large number of rejects becomes an issue. It looked like around a million dollars per engine would be the cost if mass produced.
The commercial outcome was ceramic cylinder liners for some truck engines. The entire point, apart from a stupid boast of it being all ceramic, is to run at higher temperatures so the cylinder liners accomplished some of that without being a brittle all ceramic engine made out of a great big insulator. Little bits of insulator do the job just as well inside a nice big conductive metal block where it's easy to cast or forge water channels.
I've put "tough" in quotes because it's relative to other ceramics and not to a typical alloy used in engine parts. With ceramics you can't get away with a dent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni
Why are you shifting the goalposts to a price that a battery manufacturer buying by the tonne would never pay? Maybe you could just do a google search like this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=lithium+price+per+tonne
I do know. There's a lot and it's very easy to get to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In the late 1990s a famous artist brought his "revolutionary fuel saving" device to the university mechanical engineering department I worked at for independent testing. It turns out he was tuning for idling. So his car engine used very little fuel while sitting at the lights doing nothing and produced crap performance and crap fuel economy while actually moving the vehicle. There was a lot of that going on.
However there have been a small number of real advances from non-experts, I think it was sometime in the 1950s that somebody thought of running a fuel pump in the opposite direction to the normal gravity fed tradition and it made a difference. Normally it's someone who improves one thing and doesn't understand that it doesn't help the entire system at all.
A classic that wasn't actually from the layman was the all-ceramic engine. The idea was that you could run it really hot and get more out if the fuel. Fantastic performance on a testbed, but the extra mass of the more involved cooling meant that one you tried to move it around it performed worse than what it was supposed to replace. Whoops. They only thought of a part and not the implications to how it was actually going to be used, just like that artist who was paranoid about his "invention" being suppressed.
Need a heavier heavy - maybe a later model designed for it could do it, but the heavy is a tool designed for a different job.
Yes but didn't JFK state an end date and Von Braun react to fit the timetable?
However it does make sense - Skylab should have been first and not last to be disgustingly abandoned to deorbit due to budget cuts.
Coal production is down.
You may a point about damage but at least attempt to tie your points to reality.
Yes, last time it kicked off the shale oil/gas boom with some pretty stupid cowboy goldrush antics that are starting to have a bit of fallout now. Meanwhile solar/wind/etc are quietly progressing worldwide to compete with the much lower price.
Rusted on Republicans take note - the Chinese are making an absolute fortune selling those solar panels developed in the USA but forced offshore to keep some donors happy. America could be making a killing from that American technology if a few loud Texan oil executives had not put their interest ahead of the country. Those six million manufacturing jobs lost recently could be doing that and spinoffs instead of that many or more doing it in China.
The political restriction of one single vehicle to do everything prevented that. It's kind of what we are seeing now with a military jet that is supposed to do everything.
A lot of the more serious near future SF from the last few decades (and recent ISS modules in reality) has space stations built out of modules launched unmanned on dedicated rockets and the manned missions involve connecting them together. The Japanese near-future fiction "Space Brothers" has a moonbase built out of modules and assembled by remote controlled industrial robots before the first people are planned to turn up - even the wheeled vehicles are sent in to be at the landing site before the astronauts land. In that fiction they get around the lack of a Saturn V in the near future by sending the lander into Earth orbit unmanned and then docking something like a Soyuz to it on a manned flight to avoid having to lift all the stuff in one go.
Your point depends on pretending that I did not suggest the reader consider something from a viewpoint and puts words in my mouth about the company mentioned.
It's both pretended stupidity and lying about what I wrote.
Not nice.
OK - that's an example of research I didn't do :)
For a lot of stuff it isn't so hard though, but with the rise of 4k screens there's another example where a bog standard video card is not going to be enough, which may then mean a generic case isn't going to fit it and a bogs standard power supply can't feed it. So I'll concede that it could take a bit of time at the high end, but for cheapskates it's never been easier.
Please do try to keep track of a thread before making a comment like that - try looking two posts above the "original comment" to see an earlier comment where I gave Sun the benefit of the doubt on one item and he replied with a denial of the obvious - thus leading to the form "original comment" which should be expected by anyone that deliberately tries to mislead the kiddies on this site for blatant political purposes.
In the form of an accusation that what I stated never happens despite it being very frequent and obvious to all. You asked me to "elaborate" by calling me a lair and treating me like a naive idiot.
I know that in war the "lesser evil" becomes the necessary, but pretending everything is sunshine and roses with the evil never happening is the act of disgusting scum.