A nice review, but what I really want to do is to calibrate it against a known standard. How did it compare to the market leaders in this segment, the newest generation of Archos handhelds?
Ask any person over the age of 90 what the greatest invention of their lifetime was and they will almost certainly say something that was made made possible by electricity, or our understanding ofatomic physics.
I actually had the opportunity to do just this a couple of years ago when I was having a conversation with some in-laws (a brother and a sister) who were in their late 90s and still totally alert. They were old enough to tell me of their travails of having to "score" liquor from dealers in dodgy neighbourhoods in the US during prohibition.
Anyway, being young and naive of course I asked the "what was the greatest invention or discovery or change" in the 20th century? I was expecting, of course, something different from their unanimous answer: Radio. I responded with "What about TV?" Their answer? One of them said, moe or less, "TV was nothing special, just radio with pictures. We'd already got used to broadcasting". Sadly, both of these great people are now dead.
Radio was magic stuff - binding together huge communities cheaply and effectively and "magically" without visible wires. People would huddle together and listen to words and music, exercising their imagination to create pictures within their heads that corresponded to the active narrative coming out of the little magic box.
Remember in the 1920s that the science fiction genre got started within the pages of radio electronics magazines!
Radio was the zeitgeist of the times. Just look through any magazine of the time and you see endless classifieds for radio operator/engineer classes, certifications, and so on. Radio in the 1920s was like the Internet in the 1990s - everyone wanted a piece of it, it was the new frontier of communications. In fact, without radio it's doubtful that the Nazis would so effectively have seized control and indoctrinated so many millions of people in Germany.
I note in passing that radio continues to be a huge agent of social change, for good or ill. The genocide in Rwanda was orchestrated and performed using "talk radio" hosts to coordinate the decentralized death squads. In a country with little infrastructure or reputation for efficiency, the Tutsi butchers in Rwanda killed over a million people at a rate more than five times faster than the best extermination efforts of the stereotupically efficient Nazis during World War 2.
Futurists shouldn't really try to predict what things will be like 17 millenia from now. That is perhaps a bit of an overzelous attempt.:-)
Some wild'n'crazy older scifi books that look several million years into the future:
Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men.
Sun dying in Red Giant phase, humans try to evolve a group mind.
William Hope Hodgson's The Nightland.
Sun and all stars dead. Last humans living in nuclear-powered cities... their nuclear fuel is dwindling. Naive traveller explores a weird Earth now controlled by monsters of the dark.
Brian Aldiss's Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand
Deliberate "Stapeldonian" style. All stars dying. Naive galactic travellers explore a weird Galaxy, last humans meet their posthuman successors.
Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.
Sun dying. Naive traveller explores a weird Earth.
These books span a century of science fiction but all share a common theme: thermodynamic inevitability. It's been a common theme for far-futurists since the mid-19th century. Here's what the ever-cheery Wells had to say about the ultimate fate of mankind after the Sun's extinction in the Time Machine:
I think Gibson caught the essence of the 19340s corporatist, gigantist, fascist dreams of futurity in his short story The Gernsback Continuum. When I was a kid visiting my Grandfather, I got to read through his collection of *huge* AmazingAstounding science fiction mags from the 1920s and 1930s. They had some wild covers indeed. For the longest time I believed there were *already* flying cars.
We live in a Capitalistic society, it's not the government's job to play Robin Hood.
First of all, you don't live in a pure capitalistic system - you live in a tightly regulated market economy where the Government engages in massive redistributive programs. You ant a pure "Capitalistic" system go back to the 19th century, eliminate social programs, eliminate progressive taxation, eviscerate your middle classes, and reintroduce slavery and debt bondage. Oh, and bring back hanging for larceny and petty theft.
Secondly, does the phrase "of the people, by the people, for the people" mean anything to you? Governments serve people and provide for the common good; they are not mere rubberstamps for corporations or capital - despite what many fringe ideologues in the US would have you believe.
Trees are solar collectors that are self replicating, produce their own power, and use solar panels so cheap they may throw them away annually and make new ones each spring. They may even produce fruit free for the lunch-time picking! So there is plenty of proof of concept here for cheap solar collectors.
Self-replicating photovoltaics. Ah the raw material of so many sci-fi replicator dystopias...
Therefore the massive investments in mining, silicon manufacturing plants, operation, and cleanup are obfuscated and hidden in these calculations. There really is no such thing as a free lunch.
I am reminded of calculations in a similar vein that demonstrate for every Kg of beef produced we burn approximately 5.5 L of petrol (for USians that's around 3/4 of a gallon for every pound of beef). That makes around 5 barrels of oil per cow consumed as fertiliser, transport costs, materials. We are, literally, eating oil. However we rarely notice such obfuscated inputs because they are so deeply embedded within our industrial infrastructure as to become well-nigh invisible to a casual glance.
Nazism was an outgrowth of socialism combined with nationalism.
Dude, fascism is an expression of corporatism, which emerged as a reaction to the leftist revolutionary tendencies unleashed in France in 1789, and which erupted like wildfire across Europe in 1848 and whose flames are still smouldering. Fascism always has and always will be seen as a purely reactionary emergent property of capitalist or oligarchical systems when "threatened" by social or political progress of the poorest members of society. The only thing "socialist" about Nazism was in its title - it was a classic example of bait and switch marketing. For other examples of nominative misdirection, see "Greenland".
It is cost competitive in many situations right now, and it would be just about everywhere right now if the end user had to pay the true cost of fossil fuels... with no theoretical reason PV panels should ultimately cost much more than glass, shingles, or sheet plastic.
People say this and yet the best estimates for the return from photovoltaics is that they take around 40-50 years to output an equivalent amount of energy to the (mainly) fossil fuel inputs required for their manufacture. This has improved from 50-60 years from two decades ago. This is slow progress and unless the nanotech fairies produce some miracle, PVs are a long way from being a solution given our increasing constraints on fresh water (required for manufacture) and dwindling cheap energy supplies.
One of those is that the petrochemical-saturated fossils we find are so saturated because they (or their relatives) were the source of the oil rather than simply being crushed under the same debris which traps rising petroleum.
I have seen theories that oil is created as a byproduct of weird subterranean deep lithospheric extremophiles, or by exotic geologic processes.
However the *rate* of creation of oil in these theories is still glacially slow by human standards. This enabless you to calculate oil's rate of expression in terms of renewable biomass. Which still leads to an oil crunch as oil's slow putative genesis runs up against an expanding, developing global economy.
more efficient solar or use of hydrogen might come about.
Solar is inefficient, and with global dimming its prospects are not improving. Also, making solar cells is extremely fresh-water intensive, and consumes dramatic amounts of energy produced by, yes, fossil fuels.
And hydrogen is not a fuel, but a storage medium. And quite a low-yield storage medium at that, especially compared to gasoline. ALso, the economics and physics of fuel cells are more suited to continuous consistent demand (think houses) rather then episodic, high-drain devices with long furlough periods (think cars).
Finally, considering the wastage introduced in every stage of energy conversion, the "well-to-wheel" efficiency and pollution output of hydrogen (even considering a ten-fold improvement in fuel cell yields and reduction in costs) is bested by current hybrid gas-electric engines.
So even with a wunderbar new fuel source, the prospect for cars as we know them (large, individualized, multi-KKg highs-speed transport pods) is problematic.
which IS the assumption that you make when you say we cant get past fossil fuels
I'd love to be proved wrong and that there is a useful, compact energy source on earth that hasn't yet been tapped. But it's a long time since fission became viable - and that is a distinctly finite source as well. Fusion seems to present intractable problems. Perhaps dark energy will come along to save us all, but that seems to me a bit like waiting for Santa Claus.
Still a Peak
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
few doubt it will come (except those who buy into Thomas Gold's hypothesis that most hydrocarbons originate from primordial methane dating from the earth's formation rather than the breakdown of organic material).
Even if you accept this hypothesis, you still run into a crunch because the rate of metabolysis for oil is incredibly slow over human timescales. Whereas our economic growth rate and thirst for oil is incredibly rapid by comparison. Waiting for new petrol to be squeezed out of rocks is not going to keep those Hummers on the roads!
Dismally Realistic Science
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have a degree in economics and I've done a lot of environmental economic research.
Bully for you!
In the long run, of course, we are all dead, but also in the long run human cultures can and will adapt to a world of incredibly expensive, rare oil.
The question is whether that is a world that can sustain 8+ billion people at anything like the current astonishing consumption rate.
I'm given to understand that economists spend a lot of time measuring the theoretical epiphenomenon known as "productivity" within an "economy". I put it to you that a major input into measurements of productivity is in fact trapped solar energy in the form of fossil fuels.
The transition from a medieval society based on slaves/serfs and water/wind power to the consumption of fossil fuels on a vast, increasing scale over past few centuries is what has enabled us to move from agrarian to an urban societies. We no longer require vast armies of slaves and serfs to till our fields and shit in them - instead we burn fossil fuels to till the, and convert more fossil fuels into fertiliser. By burning 400 years worth of solar energy input every year, we have increased producitivty massively, freeing up hundreds of millions of bodies to work in urban manufacturing and service jobs. We have created our economies, literally, by burning fossil fuels.
Unlike economics, physics and geology doesn't work in a vacuum or a finely divisible continuum of graduated, switchable inputs. There is a finite limit to growth, dictated by several realities: total solar output, diameter of the earth, effectiveness of photosynthesis, energy conversion efficiencies, and so on. We could, as you say, transition our cultures to move from fossil fuels to other power sources, but what are the consequences?
Nope, one is a rather large and slow PDF, the other a rather quick and precise HTML summary. Hence the attribution. You lost me at "nitwit" - I don't respond seriously to such rudeness.
Seems to me that one of the largest concerns is that plant life will be receiving less light which would obviously decrease the amount photosyntesis that occurs.
Slashdot Mirror
All in all, an excellent device.
A nice review, but what I really want to do is to calibrate it against a known standard. How did it compare to the market leaders in this segment, the newest generation of Archos handhelds?
For Tutsi, read Hutu!
Ask any person over the age of 90 what the greatest invention of their lifetime was and they will almost certainly say something that was made made possible by electricity, or our understanding ofatomic physics.
I actually had the opportunity to do just this a couple of years ago when I was having a conversation with some in-laws (a brother and a sister) who were in their late 90s and still totally alert. They were old enough to tell me of their travails of having to "score" liquor from dealers in dodgy neighbourhoods in the US during prohibition.
Anyway, being young and naive of course I asked the "what was the greatest invention or discovery or change" in the 20th century? I was expecting, of course, something different from their unanimous answer: Radio. I responded with "What about TV?" Their answer? One of them said, moe or less, "TV was nothing special, just radio with pictures. We'd already got used to broadcasting". Sadly, both of these great people are now dead.
Radio was magic stuff - binding together huge communities cheaply and effectively and "magically" without visible wires. People would huddle together and listen to words and music, exercising their imagination to create pictures within their heads that corresponded to the active narrative coming out of the little magic box.
Remember in the 1920s that the science fiction genre got started within the pages of radio electronics magazines!
Radio was the zeitgeist of the times. Just look through any magazine of the time and you see endless classifieds for radio operator/engineer classes, certifications, and so on. Radio in the 1920s was like the Internet in the 1990s - everyone wanted a piece of it, it was the new frontier of communications. In fact, without radio it's doubtful that the Nazis would so effectively have seized control and indoctrinated so many millions of people in Germany.
I note in passing that radio continues to be a huge agent of social change, for good or ill. The genocide in Rwanda was orchestrated and performed using "talk radio" hosts to coordinate the decentralized death squads. In a country with little infrastructure or reputation for efficiency, the Tutsi butchers in Rwanda killed over a million people at a rate more than five times faster than the best extermination efforts of the stereotupically efficient Nazis during World War 2.
Some wild'n'crazy older scifi books that look several million years into the future:
Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men
Sun dying in Red Giant phase, humans try to evolve a group mind.
William Hope Hodgson's The Nightland
Sun and all stars dead. Last humans living in nuclear-powered cities... their nuclear fuel is dwindling. Naive traveller explores a weird Earth now controlled by monsters of the dark.
Brian Aldiss's Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand
Deliberate "Stapeldonian" style. All stars dying. Naive galactic travellers explore a weird Galaxy, last humans meet their posthuman successors.
Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun
Sun dying. Naive traveller explores a weird Earth.
These books span a century of science fiction but all share a common theme: thermodynamic inevitability. It's been a common theme for far-futurists since the mid-19th century. Here's what the ever-cheery Wells had to say about the ultimate fate of mankind after the Sun's extinction in the Time Machine:
The 1936 movie of HG Wells' Shape of Things to Come is good for this sort of thing. Captures that 30s "futuristic" look perfectly.
The 1936 movie of HG Wells' Shape of Things to Come is good for this sort of thing. Captures that 30s "futuristic" look perfectly.
I am still waiting for my own personal airship that I can tether to tall buildings.
We live in a Capitalistic society, it's not the government's job to play Robin Hood.
First of all, you don't live in a pure capitalistic system - you live in a tightly regulated market economy where the Government engages in massive redistributive programs. You ant a pure "Capitalistic" system go back to the 19th century, eliminate social programs, eliminate progressive taxation, eviscerate your middle classes, and reintroduce slavery and debt bondage. Oh, and bring back hanging for larceny and petty theft.
Secondly, does the phrase "of the people, by the people, for the people" mean anything to you? Governments serve people and provide for the common good; they are not mere rubberstamps for corporations or capital - despite what many fringe ideologues in the US would have you believe.
Trees are solar collectors that are self replicating, produce their own power, and use solar panels so cheap they may throw them away annually and make new ones each spring. They may even produce fruit free for the lunch-time picking! So there is plenty of proof of concept here for cheap solar collectors.
Self-replicating photovoltaics. Ah the raw material of so many sci-fi replicator dystopias...
Here's a paper on payback time by Alsema, Frankl, & Kato.
From your link: Therefore the massive investments in mining, silicon manufacturing plants, operation, and cleanup are obfuscated and hidden in these calculations. There really is no such thing as a free lunch.
I am reminded of calculations in a similar vein that demonstrate for every Kg of beef produced we burn approximately 5.5 L of petrol (for USians that's around 3/4 of a gallon for every pound of beef). That makes around 5 barrels of oil per cow consumed as fertiliser, transport costs, materials. We are, literally, eating oil. However we rarely notice such obfuscated inputs because they are so deeply embedded within our industrial infrastructure as to become well-nigh invisible to a casual glance.
Nazism was an outgrowth of socialism combined with nationalism.
Dude, fascism is an expression of corporatism, which emerged as a reaction to the leftist revolutionary tendencies unleashed in France in 1789, and which erupted like wildfire across Europe in 1848 and whose flames are still smouldering. Fascism always has and always will be seen as a purely reactionary emergent property of capitalist or oligarchical systems when "threatened" by social or political progress of the poorest members of society. The only thing "socialist" about Nazism was in its title - it was a classic example of bait and switch marketing. For other examples of nominative misdirection, see "Greenland".
It is cost competitive in many situations right now, and it would be just about everywhere right now if the end user had to pay the true cost of fossil fuels ... with no theoretical reason PV panels should ultimately cost much more than glass, shingles, or sheet plastic.
People say this and yet the best estimates for the return from photovoltaics is that they take around 40-50 years to output an equivalent amount of energy to the (mainly) fossil fuel inputs required for their manufacture. This has improved from 50-60 years from two decades ago. This is slow progress and unless the nanotech fairies produce some miracle, PVs are a long way from being a solution given our increasing constraints on fresh water (required for manufacture) and dwindling cheap energy supplies.
You may be on to something here...
humans have no incentive to knowingly destroy their own environment. Not in the long run.
Tell that to the Mayans. Or the Polynesians. Or the Aborigines.
One of those is that the petrochemical-saturated fossils we find are so saturated because they (or their relatives) were the source of the oil rather than simply being crushed under the same debris which traps rising petroleum.
I have seen theories that oil is created as a byproduct of weird subterranean deep lithospheric extremophiles, or by exotic geologic processes.
However the *rate* of creation of oil in these theories is still glacially slow by human standards. This enabless you to calculate oil's rate of expression in terms of renewable biomass. Which still leads to an oil crunch as oil's slow putative genesis runs up against an expanding, developing global economy.
more efficient solar or use of hydrogen might come about.
Solar is inefficient, and with global dimming its prospects are not improving. Also, making solar cells is extremely fresh-water intensive, and consumes dramatic amounts of energy produced by, yes, fossil fuels.
And hydrogen is not a fuel, but a storage medium. And quite a low-yield storage medium at that, especially compared to gasoline. ALso, the economics and physics of fuel cells are more suited to continuous consistent demand (think houses) rather then episodic, high-drain devices with long furlough periods (think cars).
Finally, considering the wastage introduced in every stage of energy conversion, the "well-to-wheel" efficiency and pollution output of hydrogen (even considering a ten-fold improvement in fuel cell yields and reduction in costs) is bested by current hybrid gas-electric engines.
So even with a wunderbar new fuel source, the prospect for cars as we know them (large, individualized, multi-KKg highs-speed transport pods) is problematic.
which IS the assumption that you make when you say we cant get past fossil fuels
I'd love to be proved wrong and that there is a useful, compact energy source on earth that hasn't yet been tapped. But it's a long time since fission became viable - and that is a distinctly finite source as well. Fusion seems to present intractable problems. Perhaps dark energy will come along to save us all, but that seems to me a bit like waiting for Santa Claus.
few doubt it will come (except those who buy into Thomas Gold's hypothesis that most hydrocarbons originate from primordial methane dating from the earth's formation rather than the breakdown of organic material).
Even if you accept this hypothesis, you still run into a crunch because the rate of metabolysis for oil is incredibly slow over human timescales. Whereas our economic growth rate and thirst for oil is incredibly rapid by comparison. Waiting for new petrol to be squeezed out of rocks is not going to keep those Hummers on the roads!
Bully for you!
In the long run, of course, we are all dead, but also in the long run human cultures can and will adapt to a world of incredibly expensive, rare oil.
The question is whether that is a world that can sustain 8+ billion people at anything like the current astonishing consumption rate.
I'm given to understand that economists spend a lot of time measuring the theoretical epiphenomenon known as "productivity" within an "economy". I put it to you that a major input into measurements of productivity is in fact trapped solar energy in the form of fossil fuels.
The transition from a medieval society based on slaves/serfs and water/wind power to the consumption of fossil fuels on a vast, increasing scale over past few centuries is what has enabled us to move from agrarian to an urban societies. We no longer require vast armies of slaves and serfs to till our fields and shit in them - instead we burn fossil fuels to till the, and convert more fossil fuels into fertiliser. By burning 400 years worth of solar energy input every year, we have increased producitivty massively, freeing up hundreds of millions of bodies to work in urban manufacturing and service jobs. We have created our economies, literally, by burning fossil fuels.
Unlike economics, physics and geology doesn't work in a vacuum or a finely divisible continuum of graduated, switchable inputs. There is a finite limit to growth, dictated by several realities: total solar output, diameter of the earth, effectiveness of photosynthesis, energy conversion efficiencies, and so on. We could, as you say, transition our cultures to move from fossil fuels to other power sources, but what are the consequences?
They're both the same you nimwit.
Nope, one is a rather large and slow PDF, the other a rather quick and precise HTML summary. Hence the attribution. You lost me at "nitwit" - I don't respond seriously to such rudeness.
Yes, you're right.
Summary: