Well, I assumed that you have to replace the energy contained in Oil by electric energy. The litre contains ~35MJ of energy and the daily production in 2009 was something like ~90Mio barrel. Other people have come up with the same area but I did go ahead and produced my own spreadsheet.
You could argue that most oil goes into transportation and therefore we would have to look at inefficient ICEs replacements and possible gains in efficiency - maybe. You are off though by multiple orders of magnitude which can't be explained by efficiency gains.
Try to cover the area of France with solar cells and play with parameters like silicon thickness 500-50um or annual Silicon production (1.7Mega tonnes). Then you can figure out that we don't have enough time until we run out of other important resources. With solar you won't be able to achieve a smooth transition away from oil. Same probably goes for wind.
How it will pan out I find hard to say, I just hope we can get by on much less energy. Given that the developed world uses the most oil and half of mankind gets by with barely any I guess there is hope.
You should think about how many new oil fields were found over time. Peak exploration is behind us, here is a slide show on the topic:
www.aspo-australia.org.au/PPT/HarperBP.ppt
Deep water exploration seems to be on the rise but the Oil there requires more energy to recover. This may ultimately limit oil production, I mean there is no point to get it out of the ground if the amount of energy spent on production is as large as the energy embodied in the oil. (The EROI must be higher than 1:3, there is a paper about this somewhere).
The overall available energy through oil will probably go down no matter what and this is what ultimately counts.
Solar energy is ultimately resource limited and insufficient to replace oil in time to keep society going the way it is going now.
Yes, I found that a good one too. I mean an engineer should know about exponential growth but I needed a refresher course.
Also it should be noted that we are not running out of humans rather the opposite of that is happening. That population pressure enables exponential growth of resource usage or at least demand.
If you look at our politicians effectively doing nothing you can despair but you could also ponder the scarcity of options they have. The financial crisis is still the best mechanism of limiting our appetite for more and more resources.
If you think that renewables can replace Oil you are mistaken too the presentation also makes an attempt to explain that.
Maybe fusion could temporarily save us for a while but I doubt that it comes in time and that people will stop multiplying and begging for growth.
"Fifty years ago, discovery and innovation was much easier and the things invented were just lying around (like oil) to be simply picked up and applied"
Well some argue that way back then we achieved peak energy per person. Since you are mentioning oil, the peak oil crowd is nowadays not limited to the greens and lefties who seem to have fallen prey to confirmation bias at times but also includes the British National Party who is just as interested in the breaking down of society. If it comes to pass the normal parties preaching normalcy will fall behind. So your favouring socialism seems to follow the currents of the time as far as the extremes are concerned.
Regarding your complex social systems needed for complex projects, they tend to need energy, no wonder we see declining numbers of them.
Then you should also notice that there is no point to go to space other than for publicity stunts or short term exploration, mining isn't since the ores in space are not concentrated enough to make the effort of spending energy on extraction worthwhile.
I find this energy centric view depressing, but it explains a lot of things so I will go with it, maybe I wont need to vote for the socialists some day.
I'm amused, I'm still having the impression that learning English was a worthwhile endeavour. I also learn't Russian and from the Copyright point of view this was the better choice, all other aspects probably suck however. Although Russia is not densely populated, has low public debt, some resources, and high tax, which might be good things. Thinking about it though, I would only go there for vacation.
On the whole I find this drive for protecting intellectual property a pointless undertaking (too little bang for the buck spent on enforcement). A society doesn't just live on ideas and money transfers, this will become especially obvious in the face of rising oil and food prices, when discretionary spending on entertainment will go away. You really can run employment projects for white collar workers only if there is a temporary lull in the economy and resources are available.
Fluorescence will ruin your cover. Some biological things including your teeth will emit some greenish whitish light, paper will look the typical blue, and then there are some minerals that could be lying around that show fluorescence.
But I admit these were cutting edge people, like early adopters or something. The best is that Arrhenius estimates are close to contemporary simulations. You would think that making people understand the paper should be easier than one of these complicated computer models.
"The European Union is considering new regulations that would require an independent evaluation of the board every three years"
Sounds like a bureaucratic solution to me. In the olden days they just waited until a mismanaged company went under. Nowadays you need additional people and laws to prevent inefficiencies. I'm wondering whether the bureaucratic solution will cost more than the gains from spanking the CEOs will bring in.
"The business cycle is initially generated by some sort of monetary intervention in the market, typically in the modern world by bank credit expansion to business. However, this monetary intervention could be in the form of the following, listed by Gottfried Haberler: (a) An increase of gold and legal tender money. (b) An increase of banknotes. (c) An increase of bank deposits and bank credits. (d) An increase in the circulation of checks, bills, and other means of payment which are regularly or occasionally substituted for ordinary money. (e) An increase of the velocity of circulation of one or all these means of payments."
I don't exactly understand how the velocity of trading increases the money supply but we sure gonna find out with that cable.
>Freezer in an unheated room, freezes two liter bottles of water to put in coolers used as refrigerators in the houses.
I was pondering some similar idea where I put bottles with water and alcohol in the freezer to bridge potential solar power outages. The alcohol is meant to reduce the melting point so the heat required for melting is drawn at -16ÂC instead of at 0ÂC.
I'm wondering whether it would work and how much booze I would need.
Well many things in it go over my head, but I have used it for random number generator related work, and sorting and searching was also helpful. I certainly didn't go through it while trying to do every exercise.
Plus you could also learn that other stone age language called Fortran. But hey, there will be no better number crunching system than Matlab.
Over all it makes sense. Learning C that other slighty more modern language can help too.
Also there is the issue of array indices starting with 1 In both stone age languages despite there beeing an EWD discussing the benefits of starting at 0.
Technically they should be able to build a solar breeder and print money with all this free sunlight. Maybe I don't need to buy solar panels if they can't do it.
You might want to figure out what mineralogical barrier means and why because of that we don't have centuries left for a space program with our current energy sources.
So it is either fusion and total environmental destruction or stone age in a few centuries.
Read Georgescu-Roegen's works and a paper called something like "Elements of hope" by A. Diederen.
I heard that my grandfather had to use an ox on the field when the Russians took the horses. He wasn't happy about it. Contrary to the author of the above article speed does matter on the field, especially when you are being squeezed by an energy starved society that doesn't wan't to work on the fields.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I assumed that you have to replace the energy contained in Oil by electric energy. The litre contains ~35MJ of energy and the daily production in 2009 was something like ~90Mio barrel. Other people have come up with the same area but I did go ahead and produced my own spreadsheet.
You could argue that most oil goes into transportation and therefore we would have to look at inefficient ICEs replacements and possible gains in efficiency - maybe. You are off though by multiple orders of magnitude which can't be explained by efficiency gains.
So where did you find your numbers.
Try to cover the area of France with solar cells and play with parameters like silicon thickness 500-50um or annual Silicon production (1.7Mega tonnes). Then you can figure out that we don't have enough time until we run out of other important resources. With solar you won't be able to achieve a smooth transition away from oil. Same probably goes for wind.
How it will pan out I find hard to say, I just hope we can get by on much less energy. Given that the developed world uses the most oil and half of mankind gets by with barely any I guess there is hope.
Since EROI means energy returned on energy invested I should have written:
"The EROI must be higher than 3:1, there is a paper about this somewhere."
You should think about how many new oil fields were found over time. Peak exploration is behind us, here is a slide show on the topic:
www.aspo-australia.org.au/PPT/HarperBP.ppt
Deep water exploration seems to be on the rise but the Oil there requires more energy to recover. This may ultimately limit oil production, I mean there is no point to get it out of the ground if the amount of energy spent on production is as large as the energy embodied in the oil. (The EROI must be higher than 1:3, there is a paper about this somewhere).
The overall available energy through oil will probably go down no matter what and this is what ultimately counts.
Solar energy is ultimately resource limited and insufficient to replace oil in time to keep society going the way it is going now.
Yes, I found that a good one too. I mean an engineer should know about exponential growth but I needed a refresher course.
Also it should be noted that we are not running out of humans rather the opposite of that is happening. That population pressure enables exponential growth of resource usage or at least demand.
The result of this is that we are running out of planet in general.
here is an interesting presentation on the topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqURsUMHTOI
If you look at our politicians effectively doing nothing you can despair but you could also ponder the scarcity of options they have. The financial crisis is still the best mechanism of limiting our appetite for more and more resources.
If you think that renewables can replace Oil you are mistaken too the presentation also makes an attempt to explain that.
Maybe fusion could temporarily save us for a while but I doubt that it comes in time and that people will stop multiplying and begging for growth.
"Fifty years ago, discovery and innovation was much easier and the things invented were just lying around (like oil) to be simply picked up and applied"
Well some argue that way back then we achieved peak energy per person. Since you are mentioning oil, the peak oil crowd is nowadays not limited to the greens and lefties who seem to have fallen prey to confirmation bias at times but also includes the British National Party who is just as interested in the breaking down of society. If it comes to pass the normal parties preaching normalcy will fall behind. So your favouring socialism seems to follow the currents of the time as far as the extremes are concerned.
Regarding your complex social systems needed for complex projects, they tend to need energy, no wonder we see declining numbers of them.
Then you should also notice that there is no point to go to space other than for publicity stunts or short term exploration, mining isn't since the ores in space are not concentrated enough to make the effort of spending energy on extraction worthwhile.
I find this energy centric view depressing, but it explains a lot of things so I will go with it, maybe I wont need to vote for the socialists some day.
I'm amused, I'm still having the impression that learning English was a worthwhile endeavour. I also learn't Russian and from the Copyright point of view this was the better choice, all other aspects probably suck however. Although Russia is not densely populated, has low public debt, some resources, and high tax, which might be good things. Thinking about it though, I would only go there for vacation.
On the whole I find this drive for protecting intellectual property a pointless undertaking (too little bang for the buck spent on enforcement). A society doesn't just live on ideas and money transfers, this will become especially obvious in the face of rising oil and food prices, when discretionary spending on entertainment will go away. You really can run employment projects for white collar workers only if there is a temporary lull in the economy and resources are available.
Fluorescence will ruin your cover. Some biological things including your teeth will emit some greenish whitish light, paper will look the typical blue, and then there are some minerals that could be lying around that show fluorescence.
400nm is still not dramatic though.
Just a minor nitpick, they have been arguing for more than a century.
http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k32227/f808.image.r=memoires+de+l'academie+des+sciences.langEN
But I admit these were cutting edge people, like early adopters or something. The best is that Arrhenius estimates are close to contemporary simulations. You would think that making people understand the paper should be easier than one of these complicated computer models.
I thought of renaming it to Palliabook, but then look what I found at Wikipedia:
"Palliative care (from Latin palliare, to cloak) is a specialized area ..."
I guess Cloakbook would also be correct.
"The European Union is considering new regulations that would require an independent evaluation of the board every three years"
Sounds like a bureaucratic solution to me. In the olden days they just waited until a mismanaged company went under. Nowadays you need additional people and laws to prevent inefficiencies. I'm wondering whether the bureaucratic solution will cost more than the gains from spanking the CEOs will bring in.
Hmm, spirals of spirals eh?
From here:
mises.org/books/bubbles.pdf
"The business cycle is initially generated by some sort of monetary intervention in the market, typically in the modern world by bank credit expansion to business. However, this monetary intervention could be in the
form of the following, listed by Gottfried Haberler:
(a) An increase of gold and legal tender money.
(b) An increase of banknotes.
(c) An increase of bank deposits and bank credits.
(d) An increase in the circulation of checks, bills, and other
means of payment which are regularly or occasionally
substituted for ordinary money.
(e) An increase of the velocity of circulation of one or all
these means of payments."
I don't exactly understand how the velocity of trading increases the money supply but we sure gonna find out with that cable.
>Freezer in an unheated room, freezes two liter bottles of water to put in coolers used as refrigerators in the houses.
I was pondering some similar idea where I put bottles with water and alcohol in the freezer to bridge potential solar power outages. The alcohol is meant to reduce the melting point so the heat required for melting is drawn at -16ÂC instead of at 0ÂC.
I'm wondering whether it would work and how much booze I would need.
Hear, hear a conspiracy theory. Care to share?
Well many things in it go over my head, but I have used it for random number generator related work, and sorting and searching was also helpful. I certainly didn't go through it while trying to do every exercise.
You could just read http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ . Slashdot doesn't quite cut it anymore since the great dumbing down of 2008.
You could figure out where all your materials come from and study something like geology and mineralogy.
Plus you could also learn that other stone age language called Fortran. But hey, there will be no better number crunching system than Matlab.
Over all it makes sense. Learning C that other slighty more modern language can help too.
Also there is the issue of array indices starting with 1 In both stone age languages despite there beeing an EWD discussing the benefits of starting at 0.
Technically they should be able to build a solar breeder and print money with all this free sunlight. Maybe I don't need to buy solar panels if they can't do it.
You might want to figure out what mineralogical barrier means and why because of that we don't have centuries left for a space program with our current energy sources.
So it is either fusion and total environmental destruction or stone age in a few centuries.
Read Georgescu-Roegen's works and a paper called something like "Elements of hope" by A. Diederen.
Good night and good luck.
How? Is there Oil on Mars?
We could use the remaining half of Oil reserves to do this for instance.
Some argue hat oxen are more patient with clueless geeks on the field than draft horses:
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-08-09/our-future-our-past
I heard that my grandfather had to use an ox on the field when the Russians took the horses. He wasn't happy about it. Contrary to the author of the above article speed does matter on the field, especially when you are being squeezed by an energy starved society that doesn't wan't to work on the fields.
But coders run on Oil.