(I personally believe that that's the empty set, but WTF...)
For example, what if it could be scientifically proven, without a doubt, that race A was in many ways superior to race B?
Presumably this proof would come along with documentation of its genetic/biochemical basis. This would almost inevitably lead to methods of adjusting the biochemistry, first in animal models and then in humans. The "inferior" race would have the option of changing the characteristics in question, perhaps to become superior to the other - you can adjust the dose of a drug which modifies the activity of an enzyme much more easily than you can fix an over/underexpressed gene which eventually leads to a disease.
the rest of the world may see this as an excuse or reason to treat race B as inferior.
Once you have nailed down the biochemistry and there is a method of adjusting it, the inferiority disappears except for those who choose to "go natural". Ignorance is natural too, but I don't see anyone arguing that people who've learned nothing should be considered equal to those who have studied extensively and developed important intellectual skills.
The research is based on the assumption that the test returns repeatable results over sufficiently large groups. I believe that this assumption has been tested and proven correct, so the variation that individuals see between their own test scores on different occasions and between themselves and others has no bearing.
Also, the difference between some groups is not just 5 points on the test; I understand that it is closer to 20 points between different ethnic groups in the USA alone.
Algae biomass doesn't waste resources on creating leaves, stalks, roots, flowers, etc. that a conventional plant needs
True.
It also takes a great deal less energy in terms of farm equipment to grow. Algae is pumped to harvest through pipes and channels, farm crops require farm machinery that has to move itself to the crops.
I don't think so. Do you have any idea how expensive a thousand hectares of glass tubing is, compared to expanses of soil? Greenhouses are great for plants, but there are good reasons why corn isn't grown under them.
Then you've got to consider the other apples/oranges comparison here: the algae is supposed to be consuming the CO2 output of a fossil-fired powerplant. The carbon being shipped out as biodiesel is fossil, not renewable; if you were going to grow algae on carbon pulled from the atmosphere you'd have to drop the whole glass-tube scheme and grow it in open ponds with evaporation, contamination and all kinds of other fun.
With respect to electric cars, just how ecofriendly are currently available batteries?
Current hybrids are using NiMH, but their days are numbered; the world is going to lithium-ion.
Valence Technology is making cells based on iron lithium phosphate; I'm not sure what the other electrode is but I believe it's carbon. The electrolyte is some strange lithium-phosphorus-fluorine thing, which probably becomes something insoluble not long after it hits the environment (it ought to be recyclable too).
Its key advantage over photovoltaics and batteries is that it stores the energy in a way which will work with our existing infrastructure (internal combustion engines).
Except that biodiesel has enormous inefficiencies compared to PV and batteries.
Canola is a popular oilseed crop for biodiesel. I did a quick look, and found that the yield of canola is around 1.26 tonnes/ha and is around 40% oil by weight. This means that a hectare of canola will give about 0.50 tons of oil; if the weight of oil and the product biodiesel are approximately equal (MW of glycerol = 92, MW of methanol * 3 = 96) you'll get.50 tonne/ha/year. If it's equal in energy content to #2 petroleum diesel [119,110 BTU/lbm] (which it isn't, but this favors biodiesel) that half-tonne yields 6170 kWh of chemical energy; burned in an engine at 40% efficiency, the output is ~2470 kWh.
If the efficiency of a PV/battery electric vehicle is 65% from panel output to wheels, getting 2470 kWh to the road requires 3800 kWh at the panel. If you average 5 hours sunlight for a year (1825 hours), you'd need only 2.1 kW of average PV output to get that 3800 kWh.
Growing the canola takes a hectare (10,000 m^2) plus fertilizers and cultivation. The 2.1 kW PV system would fit on a 100 m^2 roof with plenty of space left over and requires an occasional rinsing if rain doesn't wash the dust off. The key advantage is that you can power most of your transport on next to nothing once you have made the investment in a GO-HEV, and conversion of "standard" hybrids to GO-HEVs is something that can be done by amateurs.
The whole point of this is that they are taking harmful waste products (CO2 and Nitrous compounds in smokestacks which purportedly lead to global warming and acid rain) and breaking them down. The biodiesel is just a happy side benefit that makes the whole project worthwhile. Being environmentally friendly isn't always bad for business.
Except that this process is not "environmentally friendly". Even if it could consume the entire exhaust of a coal-fired powerplant, it is still an open-cycle system running on fossil fuel. Yes, the carbon output would leave the plant as biodiesel rather than carbon dioxide; it would still wind up in the atmosphere a short time later. Displacing the petroleum that would otherwise be used is a good thing, but it doesn't change the underlying truth.
Might be more efficient to just use the fossil fuels to power the bus and use solar energy to power the electric grid.
The bus makes regular stops. Why not put overhead contacts at those stops and let the bus recharge batteries or spin up a flywheel? For the distance that can't be covered on stored electricity, use biodiesel grown on atmospheric carbon.
Otherwise you would be able to use the diesel created through this to run the powerplant, and that just sounds like a violation of some of the laws of thermodynamics to me.
No it's not a 2nd Law violation (solar energy in, most of it comes out as waste heat, entropy goes up as physics demands). Despite that, your second thoughts are much better than your first ones.
These batteries run on tritium. The beta emissions from tritium are so weak, they can't even be detected by conventional geiger counters; the electrons don't penetrate paper.
This is actually a problem for spill detection and cleanup, because you need special sensor gear just to find the spill.
Consider the restrictions involved in that, both in velocity and launch windows.
Then consider that you're still limited to one impulse; you can't get onto any trajectory that doesn't pass by the Earth (most interesting and useful trajectories do not; you need at least one more impulse, perhaps a big one).
The Orion is a general-purpose heavy-lift spacecraft with a very high delta-V. Mass drivers are special-purpose high-volume devices. They satisfy very different needs.
Your investment is determined by the size of the load to be launched; if you want to launch a big honkin' load like a full-up ship, you need a huge investment.
You can only hit the trajectories which are reachable with a single impulse along the line of your rail from the Moon... and at the exact time of the month that the alignment allows you to hit them.
Good deal for launching a lot of little loads to the same place. Lousy idea for heavy objects or varied destinations.
So now instead of one assembly and checkout facility, you need two. One of them is in a place where labor is EXTREMELY expensive, and downright dangerous.
Greater freedom in craft design (far less gravity and no atmosphere to deal with on launch)
You still need to launch it out of the atmosphere, either whole or in pieces. No gain.
Why not!?
On top of this, you have to use more fuel; IIRC, it requires less delta-V to go from Earth to Mars than to go from Earth to a Moon landing. Then you have to take off from the Moon again! There is only one way this could possibly pay off.
Mine the moon for some of the materials
This is the only thing that might be worthwhile.
If you could get oxygen from the Moon and deliver it cheaply to LEO (in steel or aluminum tanks, aerobraked using heat shields of foamed lunar rock) you might get some cost reductions for a large and on-going Mars program. The cost you get is a large increase in risk; if your lunar fuel operation has problems, your transport shuts down.
If you can get enough lunar iron (say, by going over the regolith with magnetic robots and extracting the bits left over from billions of years of bombardment by nickel-iron asteroids) you could build the chassis of an Orion. This could be launched from the Moon without contaminating the Earth, and would require relatively little in the way of material shipped up; the nuclear material would amount to a few tons.
I expect a death by gamma ray burst would be drawn out and deeply unpleasant. Dying of radiation poisoning whilst watching everyone around you do the same thing will be a pretty nasty event.
Unless you were in orbit or in an aircraft at the time, you probably wouldn't notice anything directly. Gamma rays are easily blocked by mass, and Earth has about ten metric tons of shielding per square meter. What you would notice is the nitric oxide formed by the breakup and recombination of molecules in the stratosphere; it would probably tint the sunsets detectably. Then ozone would go way down, and UV would go way up; you'd definitely notice that.
A random gamma ray burst on the other hand I can do nothing about.
Two things about that:
Supernovae may not be predictable, but mergers of neutron stars may be. If theory of gravity waves is correct, we could detect the orbital spin-ups before mergers using laser interferometers.
If you can stick enough mass in the path of the burst to scatter the gamma rays to lower-energy photons or deflect them entirely, you could prevent this problem. This means having a disc of material at least 8000 miles across in the exact right place to shadow the Earth at the moment of the burst, but I never said it would be a small job.
From this, it follows that long-baseline laser interferometers and GRB research are good things for now. Aiming for serious space-construction capability is a good long-term goal.
One of the first things Bush II did upon getting into office was end the Clinton administration's PNGV (Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles) program. PNGV was supposed to deliver a full-sized passenger sedan capable of getting 80 MPG by about 2001. It got close, but the last bits of efficiency required adiabatic (uncooled) diesel engines and the EPA lowered the NOx emissions limits to something that couldn't be met. On the other hand it would have been easy to throw in a gasoline engine and get 60 MPG, or go plug-in hybrid.
Plug-in hybrids are a huge threat to the oil industry. The electric utilities could cut them almost completely out of the energy business, and it was imperative that they prevent this from happening. So they bought a favor: Bush killed PNGV and started a hydrogen-vehicle program. This did two things:
It pushed off the date for actual conversion by up to 20 years.
It changed the energy source from something supplied over wires to something made in chemical plants and supplied through pipelines... something oil companies already do a lot of.
If we had to wait for the government to do everything, we'd be at OPEC's mercy for the next two decades; fortunately, these CalCars folks are showing how it can be done differently, and there's very little that the oil lobbyists in Washington can do to prevent it. I expect that plug-in hybrids are going to be very big within 5 years, and hydrogen cars are going to slowly go the way of vaporware.
Cost of a kWh at the wheels, from gasoline:
$2.309/gallon / (119,000 BTU/gallon / 3414 BTU/kWh ) /.17 efficiency = 39 cents.
Cost of a kWh at the wheels, from electricity:
$0.10/kWh /.9 charger efficiency /.9 battery efficiency /.9 controller efficiency /.9 motor efficiency = 15.2 cents.
Battery replacement depends a lot on the technology and how deep they're cycled; drain lead-acid to 80% discharge and you'll get a few hundred cycles out of them, or drain them to 22% and get thousands of cycles out of them. Toshiba's new miracle li-ion battery will apparently go 1000 cycles to very deep discharge and only lose 1% of its capacity.
Even if the raw energy at the wall socket costs about the same as at the gas pump, the socket->wheels efficiency is a lot higher than the pump->wheels efficiency (the electric powerplant has taken all the heat-engine losses already).
If you look at the per-mile cost of electricity (and battery depreciation), solar electricity is already about the same cost as gasoline. There's a tsunami about to take huge amounts of the world's fossil energy consumption and wash it away, leaving a very different landscape behind it. That tsunami may be solar, or cogeneration, or wind with cogeneration backup and conventional fuels for what remains; the dominoes haven't fallen yet.
I would want strict legislation preventing corporations/insurance providers/employers from getting the results of said tests.
Insurance is based on risk; when you buy insurance you are essentially placing a bet that you will have a claim and the insurance company is betting against you that you won't. The oddsmakers are the actuaries.
If you could find out with high certainty that you would or would not get a particular disease, you would only buy insurance for those risks which apply to you (or low-deductible insurance; high-deductible would do for low probabilities). But when everyone is doing this, the odds of anyone buying insurance NOT making a claim would sink toward zero. Either the cost of insurance rises toward the cost of treatment, or the insurance company goes broke. You either stop being able to get insurance or having any reason to buy what's available (if you needed it, you'd be better off paying out of pocket and skipping the middleman).
That's not 15 or 20 miles before you have to stop and recharge.
It's 15 or 20 miles before the engine has to kick on. Then you can go another 500 miles (highway speeds) before you have to stop, but that mileage isn't all-electric.
If you commute 20 miles a day and you can power even 10 miles with electricity from the outlet in your garage, you've cut your gas-station visits in half. 15 miles a day, and you've cut them by 3/4, say from one fill-up every two weeks to one every two months. That's a lot of hassle you don't have anymore.
Too bad you don't consider the cost of getting RID of a solar panel. Disposing of one without harming the environment further is expensive (processing) and a waste of energy...
The panel is mostly low-iron plate glass by weight. Elemental silicon is a very large part of the remainder. Potentially toxic dopants (arsenic) are parts per billion.
The most dangerous stuff that's present in any quantity is lead in the solder. Solution: recycle today's panels along with the rest of the electronics waste stream. Mfgr's are already moving to lead-free solder.
Oh and another thing - producing them isn't enough, they need to be transported and installed as well.
So do the plywood and shingles that make your roof. I don't see you complaining about it.
(In spite of the fact that other Prius owners are modifying their batteries so that they can plug it in, which to me seems pointless and a waste of resources.)
And this lets them tool around town without having to burn gasoline, and potentially lets them generate their "motor fuel" with a solar panel, wind turbine or a generator running off fermenting cow flop. Their energy supply is potentially 100% renewable. All I can say is more power to them!
An electric car is often ultra-efficient. If you use 200 watt-hours per mile (out of the batteries), it might mean 250 Wh per mile at the wall. Average transmission efficiency is about 92%, so that would take 272 Wh/mile at the powerplant. 33% powerplant efficiency means 816 Wh(thermal) at the boiler; for a 55%-efficient combined cycle plant, it would be 495 Wh(thermal) per mile.
A 30 MPG car burning 6.167 lbm/gal gasoline at 18640 BTU/lbm lower heating value (what you get without condensing the water vapor) would be using 1122 Wh(thermal) mile. The electric is definitely better, marginally better than even a 40 MPG car... and you can rachet up the efficiency of the electric long after manufacture by changing the powerplant mix. Try THAT with your gas car!
If the powerplant is burning natural gas, it won't even be close. If the powerplant is nuclear, solar or wind, you have zero emissions. Check my blog for more.
Slashdot Mirror
(I know, you were kidding.)
Also, the difference between some groups is not just 5 points on the test; I understand that it is closer to 20 points between different ethnic groups in the USA alone.
How would the military have misled him about his own speed and ease with the test on the two different occasions?
Then you've got to consider the other apples/oranges comparison here: the algae is supposed to be consuming the CO2 output of a fossil-fired powerplant. The carbon being shipped out as biodiesel is fossil, not renewable; if you were going to grow algae on carbon pulled from the atmosphere you'd have to drop the whole glass-tube scheme and grow it in open ponds with evaporation, contamination and all kinds of other fun.
Current hybrids are using NiMH, but their days are numbered; the world is going to lithium-ion.Valence Technology is making cells based on iron lithium phosphate; I'm not sure what the other electrode is but I believe it's carbon. The electrolyte is some strange lithium-phosphorus-fluorine thing, which probably becomes something insoluble not long after it hits the environment (it ought to be recyclable too).
Canola is a popular oilseed crop for biodiesel. I did a quick look, and found that the yield of canola is around 1.26 tonnes/ha and is around 40% oil by weight. This means that a hectare of canola will give about 0.50 tons of oil; if the weight of oil and the product biodiesel are approximately equal (MW of glycerol = 92, MW of methanol * 3 = 96) you'll get .50 tonne/ha/year. If it's equal in energy content to #2 petroleum diesel [119,110 BTU/lbm] (which it isn't, but this favors biodiesel) that half-tonne yields 6170 kWh of chemical energy; burned in an engine at 40% efficiency, the output is ~2470 kWh.
If the efficiency of a PV/battery electric vehicle is 65% from panel output to wheels, getting 2470 kWh to the road requires 3800 kWh at the panel. If you average 5 hours sunlight for a year (1825 hours), you'd need only 2.1 kW of average PV output to get that 3800 kWh.
Growing the canola takes a hectare (10,000 m^2) plus fertilizers and cultivation. The 2.1 kW PV system would fit on a 100 m^2 roof with plenty of space left over and requires an occasional rinsing if rain doesn't wash the dust off. The key advantage is that you can power most of your transport on next to nothing once you have made the investment in a GO-HEV, and conversion of "standard" hybrids to GO-HEVs is something that can be done by amateurs.
This is actually a problem for spill detection and cleanup, because you need special sensor gear just to find the spill.
Unfortunately, the drop-off in popularity of SUVs makes it likely that it will be the efficient cars that get recycled there.
Halliburton has beat you to it (and might hold the patent).
Then consider that you're still limited to one impulse; you can't get onto any trajectory that doesn't pass by the Earth (most interesting and useful trajectories do not; you need at least one more impulse, perhaps a big one).
The Orion is a general-purpose heavy-lift spacecraft with a very high delta-V. Mass drivers are special-purpose high-volume devices. They satisfy very different needs.
- Your investment is determined by the size of the load to be launched; if you want to launch a big honkin' load like a full-up ship, you need a huge investment.
- You can only hit the trajectories which are reachable with a single impulse along the line of your rail from the Moon... and at the exact time of the month that the alignment allows you to hit them.
Good deal for launching a lot of little loads to the same place. Lousy idea for heavy objects or varied destinations.- If you could get oxygen from the Moon and deliver it cheaply to LEO (in steel or aluminum tanks, aerobraked using heat shields of foamed lunar rock) you might get some cost reductions for a large and on-going Mars program. The cost you get is a large increase in risk; if your lunar fuel operation has problems, your transport shuts down.
- If you can get enough lunar iron (say, by going over the regolith with magnetic robots and extracting the bits left over from billions of years of bombardment by nickel-iron asteroids) you could build the chassis of an Orion. This could be launched from the Moon without contaminating the Earth, and would require relatively little in the way of material shipped up; the nuclear material would amount to a few tons.
But as for anything else... forget it.- Supernovae may not be predictable, but mergers of neutron stars may be. If theory of gravity waves is correct, we could detect the orbital spin-ups before mergers using laser interferometers.
- If you can stick enough mass in the path of the burst to scatter the gamma rays to lower-energy photons or deflect them entirely, you could prevent this problem. This means having a disc of material at least 8000 miles across in the exact right place to shadow the Earth at the moment of the burst, but I never said it would be a small job.
From this, it follows that long-baseline laser interferometers and GRB research are good things for now. Aiming for serious space-construction capability is a good long-term goal.One of the first things Bush II did upon getting into office was end the Clinton administration's PNGV (Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles) program. PNGV was supposed to deliver a full-sized passenger sedan capable of getting 80 MPG by about 2001. It got close, but the last bits of efficiency required adiabatic (uncooled) diesel engines and the EPA lowered the NOx emissions limits to something that couldn't be met. On the other hand it would have been easy to throw in a gasoline engine and get 60 MPG, or go plug-in hybrid.
Plug-in hybrids are a huge threat to the oil industry. The electric utilities could cut them almost completely out of the energy business, and it was imperative that they prevent this from happening. So they bought a favor: Bush killed PNGV and started a hydrogen-vehicle program. This did two things:
If we had to wait for the government to do everything, we'd be at OPEC's mercy for the next two decades; fortunately, these CalCars folks are showing how it can be done differently, and there's very little that the oil lobbyists in Washington can do to prevent it. I expect that plug-in hybrids are going to be very big within 5 years, and hydrogen cars are going to slowly go the way of vaporware.
It's not only possible, it's been tested. Read some of these white papers if you don't believe me.
$2.309/gallon / (119,000 BTU/gallon / 3414 BTU/kWh ) /
Cost of a kWh at the wheels, from electricity: .9 charger efficiency / .9 battery efficiency / .9 controller efficiency / .9 motor efficiency = 15.2 cents.
$0.10/kWh /
Battery replacement depends a lot on the technology and how deep they're cycled; drain lead-acid to 80% discharge and you'll get a few hundred cycles out of them, or drain them to 22% and get thousands of cycles out of them. Toshiba's new miracle li-ion battery will apparently go 1000 cycles to very deep discharge and only lose 1% of its capacity.
If you look at the per-mile cost of electricity (and battery depreciation), solar electricity is already about the same cost as gasoline. There's a tsunami about to take huge amounts of the world's fossil energy consumption and wash it away, leaving a very different landscape behind it. That tsunami may be solar, or cogeneration, or wind with cogeneration backup and conventional fuels for what remains; the dominoes haven't fallen yet.
If you could find out with high certainty that you would or would not get a particular disease, you would only buy insurance for those risks which apply to you (or low-deductible insurance; high-deductible would do for low probabilities). But when everyone is doing this, the odds of anyone buying insurance NOT making a claim would sink toward zero. Either the cost of insurance rises toward the cost of treatment, or the insurance company goes broke. You either stop being able to get insurance or having any reason to buy what's available (if you needed it, you'd be better off paying out of pocket and skipping the middleman).
If you commute 20 miles a day and you can power even 10 miles with electricity from the outlet in your garage, you've cut your gas-station visits in half. 15 miles a day, and you've cut them by 3/4, say from one fill-up every two weeks to one every two months. That's a lot of hassle you don't have anymore.
The most dangerous stuff that's present in any quantity is lead in the solder. Solution: recycle today's panels along with the rest of the electronics waste stream. Mfgr's are already moving to lead-free solder.
So do the plywood and shingles that make your roof. I don't see you complaining about it.A 30 MPG car burning 6.167 lbm/gal gasoline at 18640 BTU/lbm lower heating value (what you get without condensing the water vapor) would be using 1122 Wh(thermal) mile. The electric is definitely better, marginally better than even a 40 MPG car... and you can rachet up the efficiency of the electric long after manufacture by changing the powerplant mix. Try THAT with your gas car!
If the powerplant is burning natural gas, it won't even be close. If the powerplant is nuclear, solar or wind, you have zero emissions. Check my blog for more.