World production of CaO ( white lime powder, not the fruit ), is around 200 megatons/yr
World CO2 is about 40 billion tons/yr.
That's a mismatch of about 200 times.
Also making lime is not free, it now costs about $60/ton. That's $240 buillion per year just for the lime, never mind the cost of moving it to the oceans.
Perhaps somebody should look at the efficiency claims. LED's are somewhat more efficient than incandescent bulbs, but far far less than fluorescents.
That is why every laptop has two or more fluorescent bulbs, and no LEDs to light up the display.
And the economic claims are ludicrous. Nothing has ever come out at a far lower price than what it replaces. The greed of the marketplace will ensure just enough middlemen, distributors, jobbers, and salesmen to bring up the price to just a bit under the competition.
Physics:
Wave energy is high-pressure, low-volume, low-speed, with insane peaks a few times a year, and in a super corrosive liquid. The high pressure means you need strong materials. The low speed and volume means you have to use a very large, expensive, heavy, and inefficient turbine. The corrosion raises the initial costs and limits the useful life. The storms mean the whole thing has to be overbuilt by a factor of 50 in strength that is only used for a few hours per year.
Economics:
"1 MW", if it were true, would be about $100 an hour of electricity. Assuming that's 1MW when the waves are about average, the yearly average will be maybe 400 KW, or $40 an hour of electricity, about $300,000 a year. This thing would have to be buildable, installable, and maintainable for under $2M each and $100K/yr maintenanceand last for 10 years just to break even. Sounds very unlikely.
Hint: Most smelting processes are not perfect at extracting their goal and they leave behind "tailings". Some simple math will show when it's profitable to run the tailings again through the process. It's happened before and will likely happen again. No sweat, and no running out. Just higher prices for miniscule amounts of certain elements.
First of all, the "rare earths" are not all thst rare.
Secondly, none of the elements mentioned in the sd story are in any way even near to being a rare earth, i.e. an element in that row of the periodic table.
And of course it's unlikely we will "run out" of anything, or that it will matter. Things seem to turn up when the price goes up, or we find substitutes.
It would be mighty surprising if this chicken-little themed story was correct.
Most things when in short supply, their price goes up. People notice this and they either cut back on their use of the stuff, find a substitute, or go out digging for it.
We do have a terrible shortage of celluloid shirt collars, ivory piano keys, whale oil and pyramid shims. Who cares?
It's very likely the original auroral noise is much closer to your basic interstation FM hiss than "piercing chirps and whistles". Somebody put the noise through a FFT-like process which pretty much made up all the coherent beeps out of random noise.
But studying random noise seems a whole lot less interesting than trying to make out words from the chirps.
Not one single usable tidbit of info in this video clip. The "expert" could not even convert Mach numbers to MPH. Amazing.
In general pulse combustion is a poor idea compared to continuous combustion. You have huge variations in pressures, temperatures, and mixture ratios, all non-optimum for large parts of each cycle. You have poor efficiency as things are generating power for only part of each cycle, the rest of the time is wasted. and you have tremendous vibration and noise. Typical ramjet engines, even made of Hastelloy X and other exotic metals, burn up in just a few minutes, so you're talking about very short bursts of Mach 10, not any kind of extended cruise.
You don't need anything so fancy. The quanta are, like packets, not guaranteed to get tot he destination every time. All you have to do is sidetrack every random(N)'th photon to your receptor.
Ah, no. A flywheel has this generally useful but in this case, harmful tendency to tend to remain in its plane of rotation. So you can't mount it directly in a vehicle. You could mount it on 3D gimbals, but the cost and complexity and maybe the flywheel tend to go through the roof.
Actually the Navy has been down to the Thresher and Scorpion sites several times, with cameras, many decades ago.
While the Navy may have funded Ballard's research, it's unlikely that a "cover story" would fool anybody. Those thingies are expensive to build and run, nobody does that just for fun.
It seems unlikely that removing 70 tons of soil and replacing it with concrete is going to do anything. You've got 11,000+ tons of tower with a looong lever arm. Doing anything with under 1% of that mass at the base does not sound too effective.
If one looks at the past research on palladium, there are many explanations for energy release, all chemical, none nuclear.
Using Occam's razor, it's a whole lot more likely this guy's results are due to well-known chemical reactions, not anything nuclear.
Nuclear reactions are easily discerned by the generation of Gamma rays and neutrons. The fact that these were not mentioned in the article suggests nothing exciting is going on.
The rule of thumb among engineers is: One square inch of flat aluminum surface will dissipate one watt at room temperature and rise about 20 degrees Farenheit.
A CPU chip with 900+ pins run a bit cooler as it's a it more than one square inch if you an include the substrate, and a certain percentage of the heat will conduct itself down the pins.
I have been informed that neutrinos do have mass. And therefore I'm a dummy for saying they don't respond to gravity.
Well they do, but extremely weakly.
You see the amount of neutrino mass is somewhere around a few electron volts, and only circumstantial. An electron, considered very light, is 511,000 ev.
I'm too dense to drag out the math, but if you wanted to focus a beam of neutrinos you still have quite a task ahead of you. I guess you could harness them with a little mass, say a galaxy of neutron stars.
Super. What you didn't mention is the number of neutrinos in the beam compared to the background flux. I suspect it's somewhere under 180db below the solar neutrino noise level. Hard to chit-chat with the Sirians that way.
Yes, and if my grandma had subspace thrusters, she'd be a starship.
Perhaps you don't understand anything about neutrinos. They don't respond to electromagnetism, gravity, or the strong force. That means it's really hard to get a hold of them, like impossible.
So you can't use diffraction, reflection, refraction, or the other techniques for filtering and capturing objects.
And numerically there are a whole lot more neutrinos than photons. Like by a factor of 10^10 at least. That's nothing to sneeze at.
So a neutrino lens, or diffraction grating, or speed trap, or siphon, or spectrograph, or pinhole camera, they're all impossible unless we discover a new force of Physics.
Big problem, you can't aim, focus, or do anything other with neutrinos than create them.
That means that 99.9999% of all neutrinos ever created are still zoooming around the universe.
And there are a billion billion stars all making 10^37 neutrinos every second.
That's what's called "background noise".
Now there are several noise-reduction strategies, like narrow filters (which don't work well when the endpoints are moving). But still, it's hard to make a signal make a dent with all that background noise.
Going up a few floors does not change the air pressure by a few PSI. They got that wrong, by a factor of nearly 100.
And supersonic air travel did not pay when oil was $20 a barrel, how can it ever pay at $120 ?
And there seems to be some insurmountable obstacles in softening up a sonic boom-- you've already exhausted all options by traveling faster than the air can move out of the way....there's no t much wiggle room or time left.
In the movie V.I. Warshawski , Kathleen Turner is some sort of hit-woman. Her catch phrase, something like "Sure I've killed a few dozen people, but that's insignificant compared to the population".
You're right if you pick very expensive projects like Hubble, the launch costs are not a large part of the total, so cutting the project cost would be a big win.
That is, if you get the same reliability with going the cheaper route. Which if you remember, circumstantially, did not work out so well for Hubble.
Another point I forgot to mention is the opportunity cost-- if you can only launch every 18 months to hit Mars, there's a disproportionate cost to launching something that may take 18 months to fail. Even if the launch was free, you've lost 18 months if the spacecraft fails.
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of getting anything to Venus is somewhere around $200,000 per kilogram.
A "space colony", to be any fun, would need as a rough guess, maybe 3,000 people.
To be comfortable, they'd require something like the size of the Queen Mary to live in.
That's about 20 million kilos.
So just to loft it you better have $4 trillion just for the boosters.
And the more basic problem: how is it going to stay up? Floating in sulfuric acid drizzle and CO2 will be quite a trick.
Er, Um, there seems to be a wide gulch here.
World production of CaO ( white lime powder, not the fruit ), is around 200 megatons/yr
World CO2 is about 40 billion tons/yr.
That's a mismatch of about 200 times.
Also making lime is not free, it now costs about $60/ton. That's $240 buillion per year just for the lime, never mind the cost of moving it to the oceans.
Perhaps somebody should look at the efficiency claims. LED's are somewhat more efficient than incandescent bulbs, but far far less than fluorescents.
That is why every laptop has two or more fluorescent bulbs, and no LEDs to light up the display.
And the economic claims are ludicrous. Nothing has ever come out at a far lower price than what it replaces. The greed of the marketplace will ensure just enough middlemen, distributors, jobbers, and salesmen to bring up the price to just a bit under the competition.
It's going to be a recursive problem, as it cramps and hurts my wrist too to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete.
Let's go over a few flies in the ointment:
Physics:
Wave energy is high-pressure, low-volume, low-speed, with insane peaks a few times a year, and in a super corrosive liquid. The high pressure means you need strong materials. The low speed and volume means you have to use a very large, expensive, heavy, and inefficient turbine. The corrosion raises the initial costs and limits the useful life. The storms mean the whole thing has to be overbuilt by a factor of 50 in strength that is only used for a few hours per year.
Economics:
"1 MW", if it were true, would be about $100 an hour of electricity. Assuming that's 1MW when the waves are about average, the yearly average will be maybe 400 KW, or $40 an hour of electricity, about $300,000 a year. This thing would have to be buildable, installable, and maintainable for under $2M each and $100K/yr maintenanceand last for 10 years just to break even. Sounds very unlikely.
Hint: Most smelting processes are not perfect at extracting their goal and they leave behind "tailings". Some simple math will show when it's profitable to run the tailings again through the process. It's happened before and will likely happen again. No sweat, and no running out. Just higher prices for miniscule amounts of certain elements.
apparently the metal dealers, the guys whose livelyhood depends on knowing what's up with metals, they don't know that these elements are kaput.
a little googling shows that Hafnium you can buy on the internet, no sweat, at about $12 a gram. Many times cheaper than HP printer ink.
First of all, the "rare earths" are not all thst rare.
Secondly, none of the elements mentioned in the sd story are in any way even near to being a rare earth, i.e. an element in that row of the periodic table.
And of course it's unlikely we will "run out" of anything, or that it will matter. Things seem to turn up when the price goes up, or we find substitutes.
Otherwise, the story was okay.
It would be mighty surprising if this chicken-little themed story was correct.
Most things when in short supply, their price goes up. People notice this and they either cut back on their use of the stuff, find a substitute, or go out digging for it.
We do have a terrible shortage of celluloid shirt collars, ivory piano keys, whale oil and pyramid shims. Who cares?
It's very likely the original auroral noise is much closer to your basic interstation FM hiss than "piercing chirps and whistles". Somebody put the noise through a FFT-like process which pretty much made up all the coherent beeps out of random noise.
But studying random noise seems a whole lot less interesting than trying to make out words from the chirps.
Not one single usable tidbit of info in this video clip. The "expert" could not even convert Mach numbers to MPH. Amazing.
In general pulse combustion is a poor idea compared to continuous combustion. You have huge variations in pressures, temperatures, and mixture ratios, all non-optimum for large parts of each cycle. You have poor efficiency as things are generating power for only part of each cycle, the rest of the time is wasted. and you have tremendous vibration and noise. Typical ramjet engines, even made of Hastelloy X and other exotic metals, burn up in just a few minutes, so you're talking about very short bursts of Mach 10, not any kind of extended cruise.
You don't need anything so fancy. The quanta are, like packets, not guaranteed to get tot he destination every time. All you have to do is sidetrack every random(N)'th photon to your receptor.
Ah, no. A flywheel has this generally useful but in this case, harmful tendency to tend to remain in its plane of rotation. So you can't mount it directly in a vehicle. You could mount it on 3D gimbals, but the cost and complexity and maybe the flywheel tend to go through the roof.
Actually the Navy has been down to the Thresher and Scorpion sites several times, with cameras, many decades ago.
While the Navy may have funded Ballard's research, it's unlikely that a "cover story" would fool anybody. Those thingies are expensive to build and run, nobody does that just for fun.
It seems unlikely that removing 70 tons of soil and replacing it with concrete is going to do anything.
You've got 11,000+ tons of tower with a looong lever arm. Doing anything with under 1% of that mass at the base does not sound too effective.
If one looks at the past research on palladium, there are many explanations for energy release, all chemical, none nuclear.
Using Occam's razor, it's a whole lot more likely this guy's results are due to well-known chemical reactions, not anything nuclear.
Nuclear reactions are easily discerned by the generation of Gamma rays and neutrons. The fact that these were not mentioned in the article suggests nothing exciting is going on.
The rule of thumb among engineers is: One square inch of flat aluminum surface will dissipate one watt at room temperature and rise about 20 degrees Farenheit.
A CPU chip with 900+ pins run a bit cooler as it's a it more than one square inch if you an include the substrate, and a certain percentage of the heat will conduct itself down the pins.
I have been informed that neutrinos do have mass. And therefore I'm a dummy for saying they don't respond to gravity.
Well they do, but extremely weakly.
You see the amount of neutrino mass is somewhere around a few electron volts, and only circumstantial. An electron, considered very light, is 511,000 ev.
I'm too dense to drag out the math, but if you wanted to focus a beam of neutrinos you still have quite a task ahead of you. I guess you could harness them with a little mass, say a galaxy of neutron stars.
Super. What you didn't mention is the number of neutrinos in the beam compared to the background flux. I suspect it's somewhere under 180db below the solar neutrino noise level. Hard to chit-chat with the Sirians that way.
Yes, and if my grandma had subspace thrusters, she'd be a starship.
Perhaps you don't understand anything about neutrinos. They don't respond to electromagnetism, gravity, or the strong force. That means it's really hard to get a hold of them, like impossible.
So you can't use diffraction, reflection, refraction, or the other techniques for filtering and capturing objects.
And numerically there are a whole lot more neutrinos than photons. Like by a factor of 10^10 at least. That's nothing to sneeze at.
So a neutrino lens, or diffraction grating, or speed trap, or siphon, or spectrograph, or pinhole camera, they're all impossible unless we discover a new force of Physics.
Big problem, you can't aim, focus, or do anything other with neutrinos than create them.
That means that 99.9999% of all neutrinos ever created are still zoooming around the universe.
And there are a billion billion stars all making 10^37 neutrinos every second.
That's what's called "background noise".
Now there are several noise-reduction strategies, like narrow filters (which don't work well when the endpoints are moving). But still, it's hard to make a signal make a dent with all that background noise.
EDS: 16?
HP: No, how about 12?
EDS: 15?
HP: You're getting warmer, how about 13?
EDS: 14?
HP: Okay, that sounds good, but we don't have 14 ink cartridges here, how about 14 billion in cash?
EDS: Well, ok......
And supersonic air travel did not pay when oil was $20 a barrel, how can it ever pay at $120 ?
And there seems to be some insurmountable obstacles in softening up a sonic boom-- you've already exhausted all options by traveling faster than the air can move out of the way....there's no t much wiggle room or time left.
One could make a similar statement about SP3.
Not that I'm a MS fan-boy, far from it.
That is, if you get the same reliability with going the cheaper route. Which if you remember, circumstantially, did not work out so well for Hubble.
Another point I forgot to mention is the opportunity cost-- if you can only launch every 18 months to hit Mars, there's a disproportionate cost to launching something that may take 18 months to fail. Even if the launch was free, you've lost 18 months if the spacecraft fails.