At the heart of the issue is the morality of using tissue intended to create human beings for matters of lesser dignity.
If someone donates a frozen IVF embryo that they don't intend to use and would otherwise be flushed down the drain, or creates a clone to use for stem cells to make new tissues and organs for the donor, isn't that the intent?
I predicted:
... you are basing your position on nothing more than the unsupported opinions of your peers, parents or preacher...
You confirm that you're just a crypto-theocrat who wants everyone to follow YOUR idea of divine intent. Screw that. Mind your own business, follow your own religion, eschew the fruits of the research if it makes you feel virtuous, but if you can't justify your feelings with anything better than appeals to your religion you have no business trying to make rules for anyone else (and I mean anyone).
I differ with that. Hydrogen is bulky enough that you really need some way of handling it other than as a gas or liquid, and attaching it to carbon is proven way of rendering it compact and easily handled. Unless you are willing to carry the carbon with you for another cycle, you're effectively burning a hydrocarbon fuel again.
If you're just using hydrogen to fix carbon that you've captured from the atmosphere then the carbon cycle is closed again and it's not a problem.
This shows clearly what the real problem is. We are mining carbon from underground in the form of crude oil, and have no way of getting it back down there. Therefore we will always have a positive sum of carbon.
Easy process, just add hydrogen!
Seriously, there are industrial processors you can buy which convert hydrogen and CO2 into methanol (CO2 + 3 H2 -> CH3OH + H2O). If you have any process which can generate enough hydrogen cheaply enough, you can use it to "fix" carbon into methanol. From there you can convert it into other things, if desired; polymerizing it into heavy waxes and pumping it underground to freeze would effectively put it back where the original oil and coal came from, and in a form that's not terribly difficult to retrieve either.
Where and how do you get the hydrogen? Aye, there's the rub...
Actually, calling embryos merely a "ball of cells" is treating as equal things inherently unequal.
Is it? What's the big... nay, only difference? You said:
It is not the fact that this "ball of cells" is human, but rather that it is a fundamental part of a process, which will, if left uninterrupted, produce a human being.
Let's follow this and see what conclusions are forced by this "logic":
Sperm are a fundamental part of the process which produces human beings, so it would follow that they cannot be tampered with, studied or killed.
Ova are a fundamental part of the process which produces human beings, so it would follow that they cannot be tampered with, studied or killed.
Right there you've prohibited everything from in-vitro fertilization to masturbation, and perhaps made nocturnal emissions into a crime. Indeed, if everything that might become a human being has to be given the chance to go through the process, it would be wrong to allow any woman to have a menstrual cycle in which she does not try her best to become pregnant.
The conclusions which follow from your premise are absurd, and it is silly bordering on insane to hold to it.
If we claim to value human life, we must certainly be bound to honor the process by which human life comes about.
Is sex a sacrament in your religion? If you really believe what you say, it ought to be. (Aside from Hindus and neopagans I don't know anyone who truly believes that.)
But if you really want to honor something, you should know it for what it is. In the case of human reproduction, the process is very lossy. Between 2/3 and 3/4 of all fertilized human ova fail to implant, spontaneously abort, or otherwise fail to result in a live birth. The process appears to have the purpose of weeding things out, not of nurturing everything for its own sake. "Honoring it" would appear to mean doing our own weeding where the process misses something, instead of mindless insistence that every instance have a result which is normally an outcome in only a minority of cases.
Of course, that misses something too. Mankind is the only material agent in the world which conducts conscious investigations into the nature of things, constructs and tests theories of how they work, and then acts based on the knowledge acquired. It's so phenomenally successful at improving our lives and reducing suffering that it seems almost sacreligious to claim that we ought not to apply it to everything, including ourselves. We should certainly honor that process and place it in high esteem.
However, a scientist genuinely working for the good of all people would recognize that we can't claim to have altruistic motives if we're willing to kill one class of humans for the sake of curing another. If we are really committed to helping humanity, we must settle the question of when life begins, because if left unanswered, we risk committing murder in the name of scientific research.
You're opposed to heart transplants, then? The brain-dead are beyond feeling, thought and suffering but they are certainly human; by your postulates the activities in transplant units around the world are murder.
Ironically, it's the research into stem cells (all kinds) and human cloning which holds the promise of growing replacement tissues and organs without having to take them from a complete human body. You are standing in the way of the goal that your reasoning leads to.
And given that humanity's best "scientific" thinkers believed the Earth to be the center of the Universe for nearly 2,000 years, I don't have much faith in science.
It seems obvious that you don't even know what's wrong with that statement, so I'll try to enlighten you against your will:
Science as a system of inquiry is only a bit over 300 years old.
Remember, the goal of this is... to perfect genetic engineering.
Do you read the literature on this? Even the accessible literature, like Science News? There is no such goal, as it's way too far ahead of where the science is; the genetic engineering thus far has been in things like curing Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Syndrome (SCID) by adding working copies of the broken gene to bone-marrow cells (adult cells, BTW).
The stem-cell work right now appears to be concentrated on two fronts:
Finding out what makes a stem cell, period; if we can create them from other cells, all the ethical complaints go away.
Finding ways to use them to cure disease, build replacements for damaged organs and tissues, and so forth. This is why researchers built the framework of an ear under the skin of a mouse not long ago.
Projecting scary things like "genetic engineering" onto stem-cell research is irresponsible blather.
The major opposition to embrionic stem cell research, as opposed to adult stem cell research, is that the former kills a human being.... embrionic stem cell research is akin to killing toddlers to find a cure for juvenile diabetes.
I would suggest that your moral and intellectual development is embryonic. There is nothing more unfair than the equal treatment of unequal things, and the elevation of a ball of cells to the status of "human being" trivializes humanity. A toddler has memory and sensation, thinks and learns. When a body no longer has the systems to sense and remember, think and learn we call it "brain dead" and allow the organs to be donated to people who still can.
The ball of cells has a lot more in common with the brain-dead than it does with a toddler, and you have not even tried to make a case for treating it as a human being. I'll bet my signature for a week that you are basing your position on nothing more than the unsupported opinions of your peers, parents or preacher and your gut reaction to the mental images this creates. It would be good if you would reason your way to a properly-supported position, and by that I mean more than just rearranging your prejudices.
The majority of all human embryos (about 2/3 under the best of natural conditions, perhaps as many as 3/4) fail to be carried to term. The majority of those lost simply fail to implant, or implant but fail to adhere. Most of these are not abnormal as far as science can tell, they just don't "take".
If you are looking for an ethical or metaphysical meaning to take from this, it's that small bundles of cells just aren't important; it is much more important to make sure that babies, children and adults are healthy than to obsess over the welfare of a sub-microgram blastocyst.
If the drive/polling signal cannot get in, what does it matter if things can get out?
The truth is that you are wrong. The equations are symmetrical; whatever gets in can get out (and vice versa), and grounding is irrelevant. Yes, I am a double-E and I studied wave mechanics and waveguides.
A faraday cage has to be grounded. A piece of aluminum foil in a cloth pocket is not.
Wrong. A Faraday cage does not have to be grounded to isolate anything inside, any more than a dipole antenna has to be grounded to radiate. What the foil surfaces would provide is a pair of "image planes" which suppress currents in anything nearby; a pair of them spaced closely is going to provide a very large amount of attenuation.
If you want an example of this, cut out a small piece of aluminum foil, one inch by four or so. Tune a hand-held AM radio to a strong station. Now put the foil over the housing near the loopstick antenna; the reception will die. Doesn't take much, does it?
Laminate some aluminum foil to card stock with spray glue. Fold in half. Keep your RFID cards inside unless they're in use; the pair of ground planes will make it effectively impossible to get signal to or from the cards. If you want to be able to flash your card/DL without allowing it to be read without extreme difficulty, put foil on one side of a clear envelope or card holder and keep the card inside.
Another thing to do would be to make a reader-detector, to see who is trying to scan your cards surreptitiously. That would be a great way to embarass people and businesses trying to play Big Brother, and you might even be able to get such snooping prohibited by law.
The data I can find for Cd-Te claims a peak of about 16.5%, about the same as silicon. Gallium-arsenide cells have been the real efficiency champs for some time, but they're far too expensive for anything but space applications and the like.
(And how can/. moderators keep giving up-mods to something that's wrong?)
The 200w/sq. m is based on monocrystalline silicon PV. This is the cheapest but also almost the least efficient PV...
Wrong (completely backwards). It's the most efficient of the consumer-grade solutions; polycrystalline is less efficient and cheaper, and amorphous is the least efficient but cheapest.
The real advantage here is that the efficiency of hydrogen as the energy storage is much greater than the efficiency of chemical batteries.
Backwards again. Hydrogen production is about as efficient as a battery's overall efficiency, then you have conversion losses again going back to electricity, plus losses in compression for storage, etc. Hydrogen is a boondoggle. The only good reason to use hydrogen is to exploit sources which yield it directly or semi-directly (the green algae trick).
Solar losses on a clear day amount to about 1/4, so your ~1350 watts at the top of the atmosphere becomes about 1000 watts at the surface (normal to the incoming sunlight). The numbers I get for 47 degrees N, 90 W and July 1 claim ~482 W/m^2 average over the day (that's AVERAGE). If 75% of that reaches the surface, that's ~360 W/m^2; at 15% conversion efficiency, you'd get 54 W/m^2 * 24 hr/day = ~1.3 KWH/m^2/day. At 340 WH/mile (EPRI's number for energy required to run an electric car) you'd get about 3.8 miles per day out of each square meter of collector. If you can use something like the ballistic-electron scheme to boost efficiency to 50%, that becomes 4.3 KWH/m^2/day and 12.7 miles/m^2/day; at that rate, 3 square meters of collector on the car could power the average daily commute with energy left over. Food for thought.
The Prius turned out to be too small, and so is the Jetta for an only car (it would be great as a second car). The Passat will carry me and my stuff and can burn biodiesel, potentially making its ecological impact even smaller than the Prius. Besides, the Passat isn't that much worse than the Prius; something like 38 MPG highway vs. 46 (and I've beaten 38 on several occasions).
And it makes you wonder. When you've got a very limited amount of power input, you want to get it to your load (the axle) as efficiently as possible. Is electrolysis and an internal-combustion engine even remotely competitive with batteries for that purpose?
From what I've seen, the answer is no (electrolyzer @ ~70%, engine @ 25%, overall efficiency ~18%; batteries ~70%). It appears that you could get 4x as much range out of a solar-battery system, even more than you can get out of an electrolysis/fuel cell cycle.
Re:VW is already importing Passat and Toureg diese
on
A Viable Biofuel?
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· Score: 2, Informative
The 2.0l I-4 yields something like 247 ft-lb of torque (more than the 6-cylinder gas), and the vehicles I saw were 2004's. Quantities were limited, for certain.
I bought one. It's not as economical as a Prius, but you can't get a Prius without waiting 10 months.
Thanks for the data... I think
on
A Viable Biofuel?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I doubt I'm going to have time to read a 328 page PDF (my "fun time" is going toward Quicksilver, and I've got 4 other dead-tree tomes and the Lovins' old "Brittle Energy" on my list where most of them have been for months), but I'll take a minute to ask questions about the points you raise:
In principle, why is it impractical to constrain the energy-production habitat to the desired species by e.g. harvesting everything in an area and re-seeding with a population grown from your best producers? This is how zymurgists keep their beer from getting contaminated too badly, it's not rocket science.
If that's too much of a difficulty, why can't you use species with a different product (e.g. hydrogen instead of oil) and hold them under conditions which kill their competition (sulfur-deficient and in the dark)? Anything which adopts the same metabolic pathway to survive the stress periods would have the same product.
What, exactly, is the problem with 10% efficiency when it's really, really cheap? 10% efficiency at 50 cents a square meter yields something like 1/10 cent per peak watt!
If you can point me to parts of the report which address these issues, I'd appreciate the savings of my time. ADVthanksANCE.
VW is already importing Passat and Toureg diesels
on
A Viable Biofuel?
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· Score: 1
I should know, I've seen both of them on the dealer lot.
Okay, it's another bio-oil source.
on
A Viable Biofuel?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Unless this plant is extraordinarily productive, it's not going to address anyone's petroleum dependency or carbon emissions (and it's hard to believe that a plant which grows on wasteland could be as productive as e.g. sugar cane). The reason for growing this plant is that it may make it possible to reclaim wasteland (increasing the carbon content of the soil, perhaps removing salt) while supporting the effort with a cash product (biofuel).
If you want to change the world's energy cycles you're going to need something with at least 20 times the productivity of standard farm crops, like the UNH biodiesel-from-algae thing.
Why nuclear? The U.S. could get more than 95% of its electricity demand from wind turbines on less than 3% of its farmland.
Not until you have solved one of two issues:
Storing electrical energy at high efficiency and at a few cents per KWH at most.
Scheduling the wind to correspond to demand.
If you don't understand the difference between supplying energy and supplying load, your conclusions will be faulty.
The law of averages over the continent's grid smooths out the inherent unreliability of localized wind power, and the rest of the shaping can be taken care of with existing hydropower.
Let me see if I have this straight. You are arguing for a massive (10x? 50x?) expansion of power transmission (figuring the multiple of capacity and length)... and you think that the people who don't want a powerline in their back yard or their home bulldozed for a right-of-way are going to just roll over for you. Yeah, right.
Wind is great stuff, but we're probably going to use it to offset our dwindling natural gas supplies instead. The full potential of wind is going to require technologies well beyond current electric transmission systems.
There is no need for coal or nuclear.
False premise, false conclusion. Maybe 30 years from now, but not with anything that'll be a product in the next 10.
I would rather have the mountain than something flat enough for conventional farming. There is a reason that people are more eager to live in the Cascades than Iowa and Kansas.
When farms are being abandoned because farm products are in surplus, destroying a mountain to make another field is waste several times over.
... the AC is right. There is not enough cropland in the USA to replace the diesel fuel the nation burns, let alone the gasoline, coal and natural gas (at least not using conventional crops; salt-water algae may be able to change that).
Wrong question gives you the wrong answer
on
Can Coal Be Green?
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· Score: 1
The question should be "Can coal be green enough that we should choose it over other 'green' technologies?'
I suggest that the question should be "Given that we cannot eliminate coal use in less than 20 years, what are the greenest technologies available for using it?"
I expect that we are going to wind up powering our transportation with coal again (but via electric power rather than on-board coal-fired steam; it only takes 200 GW or so) before we can move to nuclear and renewables. We'll do this to deal with the geopolitical problems caused by the oil dictatorships.
Slashdot Mirror
I predicted:
You confirm that you're just a crypto-theocrat who wants everyone to follow YOUR idea of divine intent. Screw that. Mind your own business, follow your own religion, eschew the fruits of the research if it makes you feel virtuous, but if you can't justify your feelings with anything better than appeals to your religion you have no business trying to make rules for anyone else (and I mean anyone).If you're just using hydrogen to fix carbon that you've captured from the atmosphere then the carbon cycle is closed again and it's not a problem.
Seriously, there are industrial processors you can buy which convert hydrogen and CO2 into methanol (CO2 + 3 H2 -> CH3OH + H2O). If you have any process which can generate enough hydrogen cheaply enough, you can use it to "fix" carbon into methanol. From there you can convert it into other things, if desired; polymerizing it into heavy waxes and pumping it underground to freeze would effectively put it back where the original oil and coal came from, and in a form that's not terribly difficult to retrieve either.
Where and how do you get the hydrogen? Aye, there's the rub...
Is it? What's the big... nay, only difference? You said:
Let's follow this and see what conclusions are forced by this "logic":
Right there you've prohibited everything from in-vitro fertilization to masturbation, and perhaps made nocturnal emissions into a crime. Indeed, if everything that might become a human being has to be given the chance to go through the process, it would be wrong to allow any woman to have a menstrual cycle in which she does not try her best to become pregnant.
The conclusions which follow from your premise are absurd, and it is silly bordering on insane to hold to it.
Is sex a sacrament in your religion? If you really believe what you say, it ought to be. (Aside from Hindus and neopagans I don't know anyone who truly believes that.)
But if you really want to honor something, you should know it for what it is. In the case of human reproduction, the process is very lossy. Between 2/3 and 3/4 of all fertilized human ova fail to implant, spontaneously abort, or otherwise fail to result in a live birth. The process appears to have the purpose of weeding things out, not of nurturing everything for its own sake. "Honoring it" would appear to mean doing our own weeding where the process misses something, instead of mindless insistence that every instance have a result which is normally an outcome in only a minority of cases.
Of course, that misses something too. Mankind is the only material agent in the world which conducts conscious investigations into the nature of things, constructs and tests theories of how they work, and then acts based on the knowledge acquired. It's so phenomenally successful at improving our lives and reducing suffering that it seems almost sacreligious to claim that we ought not to apply it to everything, including ourselves. We should certainly honor that process and place it in high esteem.
You're opposed to heart transplants, then? The brain-dead are beyond feeling, thought and suffering but they are certainly human; by your postulates the activities in transplant units around the world are murder.
Ironically, it's the research into stem cells (all kinds) and human cloning which holds the promise of growing replacement tissues and organs without having to take them from a complete human body. You are standing in the way of the goal that your reasoning leads to.
It seems obvious that you don't even know what's wrong with that statement, so I'll try to enlighten you against your will:
The stem-cell work right now appears to be concentrated on two fronts:
- Finding out what makes a stem cell, period; if we can create them from other cells, all the ethical complaints go away.
- Finding ways to use them to cure disease, build replacements for damaged organs and tissues, and so forth. This is why researchers built the framework of an ear under the skin of a mouse not long ago.
Projecting scary things like "genetic engineering" onto stem-cell research is irresponsible blather.The ball of cells has a lot more in common with the brain-dead than it does with a toddler, and you have not even tried to make a case for treating it as a human being. I'll bet my signature for a week that you are basing your position on nothing more than the unsupported opinions of your peers, parents or preacher and your gut reaction to the mental images this creates. It would be good if you would reason your way to a properly-supported position, and by that I mean more than just rearranging your prejudices.
If you are looking for an ethical or metaphysical meaning to take from this, it's that small bundles of cells just aren't important; it is much more important to make sure that babies, children and adults are healthy than to obsess over the welfare of a sub-microgram blastocyst.
Anyone who thought they were people probably wouldn't be working in the field.
(Hey, they're both Russian, they all look the same from the USA right? Dead poet, live almost-dictator, can't be bothered with trivial distinctions.)
The truth is that you are wrong. The equations are symmetrical; whatever gets in can get out (and vice versa), and grounding is irrelevant. Yes, I am a double-E and I studied wave mechanics and waveguides.
If you want an example of this, cut out a small piece of aluminum foil, one inch by four or so. Tune a hand-held AM radio to a strong station. Now put the foil over the housing near the loopstick antenna; the reception will die. Doesn't take much, does it?
The idea of seeing who is snooping your data by listening for retching noises is entertaining.
Another thing to do would be to make a reader-detector, to see who is trying to scan your cards surreptitiously. That would be a great way to embarass people and businesses trying to play Big Brother, and you might even be able to get such snooping prohibited by law.
The data I can find for Cd-Te claims a peak of about 16.5%, about the same as silicon. Gallium-arsenide cells have been the real efficiency champs for some time, but they're far too expensive for anything but space applications and the like.
Solar losses on a clear day amount to about 1/4, so your ~1350 watts at the top of the atmosphere becomes about 1000 watts at the surface (normal to the incoming sunlight). The numbers I get for 47 degrees N, 90 W and July 1 claim ~482 W/m^2 average over the day (that's AVERAGE). If 75% of that reaches the surface, that's ~360 W/m^2; at 15% conversion efficiency, you'd get 54 W/m^2 * 24 hr/day = ~1.3 KWH/m^2/day. At 340 WH/mile (EPRI's number for energy required to run an electric car) you'd get about 3.8 miles per day out of each square meter of collector. If you can use something like the ballistic-electron scheme to boost efficiency to 50%, that becomes 4.3 KWH/m^2/day and 12.7 miles/m^2/day; at that rate, 3 square meters of collector on the car could power the average daily commute with energy left over. Food for thought.
The Prius turned out to be too small, and so is the Jetta for an only car (it would be great as a second car). The Passat will carry me and my stuff and can burn biodiesel, potentially making its ecological impact even smaller than the Prius. Besides, the Passat isn't that much worse than the Prius; something like 38 MPG highway vs. 46 (and I've beaten 38 on several occasions).
From what I've seen, the answer is no (electrolyzer @ ~70%, engine @ 25%, overall efficiency ~18%; batteries ~70%). It appears that you could get 4x as much range out of a solar-battery system, even more than you can get out of an electrolysis/fuel cell cycle.
I bought one. It's not as economical as a Prius, but you can't get a Prius without waiting 10 months.
- In principle, why is it impractical to constrain the energy-production habitat to the desired species by e.g. harvesting everything in an area and re-seeding with a population grown from your best producers? This is how zymurgists keep their beer from getting contaminated too badly, it's not rocket science.
- If that's too much of a difficulty, why can't you use species with a different product (e.g. hydrogen instead of oil) and hold them under conditions which kill their competition (sulfur-deficient and in the dark)? Anything which adopts the same metabolic pathway to survive the stress periods would have the same product.
- What, exactly, is the problem with 10% efficiency when it's really, really cheap? 10% efficiency at 50 cents a square meter yields something like 1/10 cent per peak watt!
If you can point me to parts of the report which address these issues, I'd appreciate the savings of my time. ADVthanksANCE.I should know, I've seen both of them on the dealer lot.
If you want to change the world's energy cycles you're going to need something with at least 20 times the productivity of standard farm crops, like the UNH biodiesel-from-algae thing.
- Storing electrical energy at high efficiency and at a few cents per KWH at most.
- Scheduling the wind to correspond to demand.
If you don't understand the difference between supplying energy and supplying load, your conclusions will be faulty. Let me see if I have this straight. You are arguing for a massive (10x? 50x?) expansion of power transmission (figuring the multiple of capacity and length)... and you think that the people who don't want a powerline in their back yard or their home bulldozed for a right-of-way are going to just roll over for you. Yeah, right.Wind is great stuff, but we're probably going to use it to offset our dwindling natural gas supplies instead. The full potential of wind is going to require technologies well beyond current electric transmission systems.
False premise, false conclusion. Maybe 30 years from now, but not with anything that'll be a product in the next 10.When farms are being abandoned because farm products are in surplus, destroying a mountain to make another field is waste several times over.
... the AC is right. There is not enough cropland in the USA to replace the diesel fuel the nation burns, let alone the gasoline, coal and natural gas (at least not using conventional crops; salt-water algae may be able to change that).
I expect that we are going to wind up powering our transportation with coal again (but via electric power rather than on-board coal-fired steam; it only takes 200 GW or so) before we can move to nuclear and renewables. We'll do this to deal with the geopolitical problems caused by the oil dictatorships.