Exactly, and not just this but early civilisations and even pre-civilisation villages and camps/outposts all lived around rivers. They had no cities pumping irrigation a great distance to safe highground, so when rivers flooded, it was *bad* for the early hunters and gatherers and first farmers.
Also, we should not forget that even conservative Sydney Anglican theologians are saying that early Genesis is largely a re-write of and theological polemic against the surrounding culture's creation myths.
This article by a personal friend of mine, Dr John Dickson, explains the history of a metaphorical and symbolic approach to early Genesis (Chapters 1-11), and interestingly much of the metaphorical approach to Genesis occurs Pre-Darwin. Understanding the literary forms of early Genesis as symbolic polemics is therefore NOT just a nervous knee-jerk reaction of the faithful to unsettling data. It does raise interesting questions and theological discussions, but evolution is not viewed as a threat to biblical Christianity, at least to the average Sydney Anglican.
http://www.iscast.org/journal/articles/Dickson_J_2008-03_Genesis_Of_Everything.pdf
Impulse power? Piccard? Surely I'm dreaming: next they'll be using subspace arrays to communicate with the thing!!! I'd had a rather strong Gin & Tonic or 2, but I had the impression "Galaxy Quest" was just a comedy... don't tell me G&T disguised the fact that is was a genuine "historical document" after all?
Oh well, look on the bright side! If my great-great-great-great grandchildren serve in Starfleet, at least one of them will have a high probability of seeing Kirk getting his shirt torn off. Be still my beating heart!
Also remember we just don't really know what is going on in Saudi Arabia except for the decades of exploration done there before they kicked out western oil companies in the 70's embargo.
4 Corners (ABC Australian documentary show) covered an interview with the DOE's researcher, Dr Robert Hirsch. He explained our dependence on Saudi Arabian information, while refusing access to any of our oil-auditors, in this way:
ALI AL-NAIMI, SAUDI OIL MINISTER 2004: On this point, I want to be clear, ladies and gentlemen. We have more than sufficient reserves to increase production capacity and are committed to do so in line with demand growth. We believe that Saudi Arabia could produce at substantially higher levels for the next 50 years.
COLIN CAMPBELL, ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF PEAK OIL: No, that's absolute rubbish. You cannot possibly believe such statements. It's absolutely beyond belief.
ROBERT HIRSCH, CONSULTANT US DEPT OF ENERGY: Basically, what they're asking us to do is to trust them. And, frankly, on something that's the lifeblood of our civilisation and the way we live, to trust somebody who won't allow any audits is extremely risky. I personally don't believe the numbers that are out there.
SADAD AL-HUSSEINI, FORMER DIRECTOR SAUDI ARAMCO: I think His Excellency, the Minister of Petroleum has said that we will meet demand as it materialises.
JONATHAN HOLMES: No senior executive of Saudi Aramco - even one recently retired - will publicly contradict his own government. But Sadad Al-Husseini, who was, for many years, head of Saudi Aramco's exploration division, admits that making good on the Minister's promises won't be easy. Saudi Arabia is no exception to a global problem.
SADAD AL-HUSSEINI, FORMER DIRECTOR SAUDI ARAMCO: The easy oil has already been produced. The - the remaining reserves, as significant and substantial as they are, are going to be more expensive and gradually more demanding to produce. Therefore the future capacity is slower to come on stream than what it has been the traditional past.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Sadad Al-Husseini agrees with Robert Hirsch that the time for consuming nations to start worrying is now.
SADAD AL-HUSSEINI, FORMER DIRECTOR SAUDI ARAMCO: Well, I think in many of the major consuming countries, the leadership has been asleep on the watch. Everybody in the industry realises that oil and gas are the backbone of global economies. Somehow, I guess politicians felt that this was not going to be an issue on their watch, that it was too far into the future, and therefore didn't pay attention to it.
Excellent! With peak oil bearing down on us, maybe "domed cities" will be the first to adopt clean "Better Place" electric vehicles with the battery-swap station system. I don't know about maintaining positive air-pressure if the cars are allowed to drive through tunnels normally... and sitting in a tunnel lift / airlock gizmo is going to suck.
Maybe they attach giant fan doovermelackeys to blow air *into* the dome via each tunnel exit?
Or more likely they just adopt cheap electric trolley bus transport under the dome, and admit the city is a unique kind of car-free zone anyway. There could even be some unique experiments in dense & diverse ecocity planning and denser than normal city zoning, with climate controlled public parks, the whole Logan's Run deal (except without death at 30?)
I totally agree. Apparently 50 thousand cars = 1 gigawatt of stored electricity... so download this 50 minute podcast and check out the claims for this scheme about to be installed in Canberra, Australia. (Only download the audio as the video is just Shai Agassi walking around in front of the audience).
Any proper scientific discipline lacks technical detail, infact he *Made Up* the science of robotics, from scratch. That's not what Hard Sci-fi writers (like Clarke) do.
But Clarke *Made Up* the Monolith, and *Made up* David Bowman flashing forward through the Star-gate into a place where he could be reborn as a "Star Child".
Clarke *Made Up* 3001 super-advanced medicine that could resurrect the vacuum-frozen Frank Poole, and *Made Up* super-advanced space elevators that could whisk you up into out-space (from a starting position of about 1k up) so fast you could actually perceive the earth shrinking beneath your feet --while not being ground into a pulp by the G-forces.
So I have trouble with placing authors into the "Hard", "Soft" and "Pulp" sci-fi categories.
Great point and I totally agree! With all the technology of the Federation in that Star Trek universe, why are they still so, well, human? Why aren't they more biomorphic with the technology like something out of Greg Bear's Eon? That's why I liked BSG. The human race is wiped out, and unlike the 70's BattleStar Galactica, the heroes in the modern BSG remake are hurting, suicidal, and totally Fraked up!
They occasionally get to blow away Cylon raiders, but lasers? Shields up? Give me a break! BSG do it right: line up side by side and commence blasting each other with huge cannons like Spanish galleons.
OK, so there's a car wreck and there is nano-dust everywhere. How hazardous is this stuff to inhale, get on your skin, etc? Asbestosis anyone? What about cleaning it up?
Is there a 'peer reviewed' medical consensus on the health effects yet? I mean, there's that scene where hostile nano-bots are being turned into 'dead toner' in Diamond Age, but forget hostile nano-bots... what about just plain nano-dust in your lungs?
OK, maybe Space 1999 is not the best source of scientific motivation for settling the moon, but there are others.
EG: It has been estimated to take $21 billion to launch Japan's space solar satellite. Wouldn't a moon base be able to handle all our satellite needs cheaper?
We could also use a moon base to build L5 colonies, which in turn could one day turn into slow boats to Mars and beyond.
Don't forget the H3 industry fusion reactors may also require.
OK, if ever we needed Moore's law to hit AI and create smart eco-bots that could get out there and harvest all these weeds, now seems to be it. Imagine ecosystems managed and assisted by smart, solar powered ecobots of various shapes, sizes, and functionality. What else could they do? Harvest the weeds and drag them to local biochar plants, generating biochar and fuel? Harvest Australian outback camels, freezing the meat and then shipping the meat to poorer African nations? (For some reason that one sounds a bit non-pc... not sure what camel meat tastes like.) Collect all the plastic in the North Pacific Gyre on automated solar powered ships? It seems that for the sake of our ecosystems we really need to create various autonomous robots for these mundane, repetitive, constant jobs, because I can't see which nation will really devote the money for people to do them....
Carbonised chicken feathers are being researched for their nano-tube like behaviour, and are being developed for steel replacement. (Especially when put together with bean-curd "glue"). True story. They've even mentioned using them to replace the blades on wind-turbines.
The fact is we may not HAVE to make the sun shine 'on queue' because solar thermal is now 'nearly' baseload (with thermal storage). CETO wave is baseload. OTEC ocean thermal technology, baseload. HDR Geothermal power in Australia, baseload. Solar PV? Peak demand 'top up'. Biogas tanks? Top up the solar thermal baseload plants after a FEW days cloud. Solar updraft towers? Baseload even IF it is cloudy. Also, wind doesn't HAVE to be baseload if it is mainly used to 'top up' the grid and charge our new fleet of "Better Place" electric cars (coming to a town near you real soon!). Check out how it will work.
Better Place V2G
So, car has 160km range.
Car drives to work in the morning.
Car plugs in & charges on peak solar output.
Car drives home 40km and plugs in.
Car sells maybe 100km worth of electrons back to the grid during afternoon/evening hours of peak demand when everyone is watching TV, cooking, etc.
Car will not sell below the charge necessary to get to the nearest "Better Place" battery swap, in case an urgent trip is suddenly required. (The Battery Swap not only means you are guaranteed an instant 'range extension' on the rare occasions you need it, but you don't have to keep buying new batteries every 4 years or so. "Better Place" sell you the car, but they own the batteries!)
Car charges later that evening after 12pm when industries and other demand on the grid starts to wean and there is more power available.
Car is fully charged by morning.
50 thousand cars = 1 gigawatt of "grid smoothing" potential. Australia has 15 million cars.
If powerlines come down in a storm, the cars can help power the grid locally for service men to have access to power.
Shouldn't it be setting up a moonbase for the "mass driver" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver cheaper launches of satellites, space-solar power, and eventually the construction of a L5 colony or even a hybrid moveable colony that could then colonise Mars?
I'm very keen to hear some of the uber-engineers & industrial chemists response to this, mainly for the electric car market. "Better Place" seems to be one of the smarter contenders for killing our oil addiction, but if it is limited because full EV's require rare earth's well just HAVE to come up with a work-around. Any ideas?
Also, the Biochar power plant cooks agricultural waste and gives us syngas energy and biochar to put back in the soil. The biochar power-plant cooker could even be solar thermal powered with CSP, saving even more of the syngas (the other 50% that is usually wasted in running the next burn). Then we put the Biochar back in the soil, and it is safely sequestered there for the next 1000 years while it also helps increase Nitrogen fixation through the growth of micro-fungi, other micro-organisms, and retention of water. Instead of so called CCS where we bury carbon deep underground where it does no-one any good, bury the carbon in our SOIL where it can help drastically reduce the fertiliser input, rejuvenate the soil, not "leak out" and basically become an income stream in its own right, especially if carbon-credits are counted. It could also be useful in suburbia. Imagine your local county collecting lawn clippings and other garden biowaste, and generating county synfuel from the biomass and then selling the biochar to local farmers AND collecting some carbon credits in the process! The county would be partly prepared for peak oil and "geoengineering" at the same time.
Hi all,
aren't there costs of launching that are just to do with the sheer amount of fuel used to get things into orbit? How will this come down in price, and isn't that just wishful thinking?
Others have written about how space solar could be made far more economical if a moon-base were built for lower launch costs. And of course, once we have a base there all sorts of other space ventures become possible. (Lagrange stations, nice retirement destination, "Ark" on the moon, etc). So while I'm all for this just as an expensive proof of concept, surely the main goal for space solar would be a moon base to radically lower launch costs?
I think I'm a moon => L5 station => Mars kind of guy, however some say once we settle the Lagrange points we won't bother with settling Mars because who wants to get stuck on a gravity well?
It's time to send in solar-powered super-tanker automated droid ships that catch the stuff with those super-fast robotic hands on slashdot last week, and then process the plastic back into usable hydrocarbons.
Doesn't it just scream out for a high-school science project?;-)
Did you listen to the podcast? It addresses many of your answers. The flexibility of the parliament responding to the issues of the day can also be seen as a STRENGTH when protecting individual rights.
EG: My right to live in a society with *less* drunks on the road is more important, in my mind, than my "right" to not be inconvenienced 5 minutes a year with random breath testing. RBT's in your country would be an outrage! Here, we just gladly suffer them so we don't suffer worse. But your "founding fathers" didn't consider the possibility of cars & alcohol, and so now privacy is a greater right than life in many cases!
And this is the great problem with bills of rights, they codify into the HIGHEST part of the law the values and prejudices and blind spots of the day, not seeing all possible outcomes in the future. So, by all means, give me the FREEDOM of a parliament reflecting my rights today, and if they don't I'll vote them out tomorrow.
One more thing: on world government.... are the Eastern block members better under Russia or the EU? What would be so bad if the EU became the WU? (A proto-type example of a truly Federal Union government for the globe?)
Nice counter argument, not that I agree but that you seem genuinely passionate about your freedom which is something I can respect.
I also admit I may have phrased the bit about those *particular* Queenslanders I disagreed with a little clumsily, although it was a particularly offensive conspiracy theory *those individuals* bought into.
Nevertheless, I'd love you to download and listen to the podcast. It makes some VERY interesting points, that says our individual freedom is best served by a flexible democratically accountable legislature NOT an unelected judiciary interpreting an ancient bit of paper with some rosy text.
Not only that, but a bill of rights can:-
* politicise the judiciary which are meant to be about interpreting law, not social policy, about which most lawyers know nothing
* promote an *absolute* formula of 'rights' as interpreted by our generation, and make them absolute for all time when 'rights' are often about social policies more appropriately held to account by the political process and democratic discussion of the day
* reflect the silly prejudices and blind spots of our day
* condense into silly summary issues that are far more complex and require weighty volumes of legal document to truly unravel. But agitators FOR a bill of rights don't want a legal document but a flowery rosy picture of the perfect society full of individual rights, yet don't give us mechanisms to get there.
* promote selfish policy at the expense of the public good, which if it suffers badly enough, can deteriorate to the point where the individuals in that public are more likely to be killed by violent crime.
Please, "Don't leave us with the bill!" Download the podcast here.
Someone who is capable of losing control during an argument and blowing someone away is equally capable of losing control and killing someone with a golf club or knife.
Yes, but it is easier for someone from the crowd to grab the knife/golf club. After our "Port Arthur massacre" a few years back our Federal government sponsored a massive gun buy back. Certain categories of self-loading weapons were banned and purchased off gun owners. It didn't stop some moronic Queensland country folk running up their web-rumours that the Fed's STAGED the massacre and killed all those people just to take our self-loading rifles, but there are always retards reacting to any good government decision. I had a friend at the Strathfield shootings. When someone is carrying a fast loading weapon on a rampage, it's just not as easy to disarm them as it might be if a few guys approached some lunatic holding a knife.
What you regard as 'paranoia' I regard as freedom. And there I was thinking sitting in a park reading a book with a nice coffee was a definition of freedom. If walking down the street with every 2nd person packing like some wild-west cliché is your definition of freedom, then you deserve your American constitution and bill of rights amendment. It just seems like some parts of your bill of rights has enshrined certain types of selfishness over the common good. Which is pretty much as our political theory has said it would. Listen to the following podcast that debunks Australia's need for a Bill of rights. We're doing fine, in fact BETTER, in that regard than you Americans.
All your lovely words on a bit of paper does not stop you invading countries on false pretexts (WMD's my arse!) or holding people for YEARS without trial. (Guantanamo bay, HELLO!?) And you're worried about our not being able to access a few kiddie porn sites? How about you get your OWN hypocritical and messed up house in order, and I'll do my best to make sure we don't vote in another sycophantic PM like John Howard that followed the USA's lead in so many illegal and anti-democratic ventures on the world stage.
Most people do not wake up one morning and decide to become murderers.
No, but when they do it is far more likely to be successful if there are guns everywhere! How many times has an argument turned into a "crime of passion" because a gun was around, or what would have been a brawl in a home invasion suddenly becomes fatal because the owner of the house immediately reaches for the gun, or in some cases the intruder finds the gun first? Your American "right to bear arms" is a historical throwback to your unique beginnings as a country. Here in Australia we're just not as paranoid.
Many of the issues of EV's limited ranges can be solved by adding charge points at work, charge points at the shops, and charge points at home. But the REAL breakthrough is an integrated renewable energy and battery swap program being marketed in various countries by "Better Place". Israel and Australia, among others, are due to have this program rolled out. Got an unexpected trip that you're not charged for? Then program your trip into the SatNav/GPS, and it will tell you where the closest automated battery-swap program is.
Also, electricity is so cheap to sell as a "fuel" that the company owns the battery, not you! (Shai Agassi makes a huge song and dance about forcing consumers to buy the battery is like forcing regular car owners to buy not just a little oil, but the whole oil-well that the car will ever drink from in its life.) So THEY wear the "risk" of the battery being overused and needing replacement... they test the batteries at the recharge station and wear the cost of recycling the lithium at the end of the batteries lifespan.
So my question is, will this car manufacturer be complying with the battery swap standards being developed by "Better Place" and Renault, or will they be forcing us to operate under the old car model of owning the battery! It's not just a new car, but a whole new business model for the car and totally changes the economics and feasibility of electric cars.(Eewww...)
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, and not just this but early civilisations and even pre-civilisation villages and camps/outposts all lived around rivers. They had no cities pumping irrigation a great distance to safe highground, so when rivers flooded, it was *bad* for the early hunters and gatherers and first farmers.
Also, we should not forget that even conservative Sydney Anglican theologians are saying that early Genesis is largely a re-write of and theological polemic against the surrounding culture's creation myths.
This article by a personal friend of mine, Dr John Dickson, explains the history of a metaphorical and symbolic approach to early Genesis (Chapters 1-11), and interestingly much of the metaphorical approach to Genesis occurs Pre-Darwin. Understanding the literary forms of early Genesis as symbolic polemics is therefore NOT just a nervous knee-jerk reaction of the faithful to unsettling data. It does raise interesting questions and theological discussions, but evolution is not viewed as a threat to biblical Christianity, at least to the average Sydney Anglican. http://www.iscast.org/journal/articles/Dickson_J_2008-03_Genesis_Of_Everything.pdf
"Soggy green is people! SOGGY GREEN IS PEOPLE!"
Thank you, thank you, I'm here every Thursday night.
Impulse power? Piccard? Surely I'm dreaming: next they'll be using subspace arrays to communicate with the thing!!! I'd had a rather strong Gin & Tonic or 2, but I had the impression "Galaxy Quest" was just a comedy... don't tell me G&T disguised the fact that is was a genuine "historical document" after all?
Oh well, look on the bright side! If my great-great-great-great grandchildren serve in Starfleet, at least one of them will have a high probability of seeing Kirk getting his shirt torn off. Be still my beating heart!
ALI AL-NAIMI, SAUDI OIL MINISTER 2004: On this point, I want to be clear, ladies and gentlemen. We have more than sufficient reserves to increase production capacity and are committed to do so in line with demand growth. We believe that Saudi Arabia could produce at substantially higher levels for the next 50 years.
COLIN CAMPBELL, ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF PEAK OIL: No, that's absolute rubbish. You cannot possibly believe such statements. It's absolutely beyond belief.
ROBERT HIRSCH, CONSULTANT US DEPT OF ENERGY: Basically, what they're asking us to do is to trust them. And, frankly, on something that's the lifeblood of our civilisation and the way we live, to trust somebody who won't allow any audits is extremely risky. I personally don't believe the numbers that are out there.
SADAD AL-HUSSEINI, FORMER DIRECTOR SAUDI ARAMCO: I think His Excellency, the Minister of Petroleum has said that we will meet demand as it materialises.
JONATHAN HOLMES: No senior executive of Saudi Aramco - even one recently retired - will publicly contradict his own government. But Sadad Al-Husseini, who was, for many years, head of Saudi Aramco's exploration division, admits that making good on the Minister's promises won't be easy. Saudi Arabia is no exception to a global problem.
SADAD AL-HUSSEINI, FORMER DIRECTOR SAUDI ARAMCO: The easy oil has already been produced. The - the remaining reserves, as significant and substantial as they are, are going to be more expensive and gradually more demanding to produce. Therefore the future capacity is slower to come on stream than what it has been the traditional past.
JONATHAN HOLMES: Sadad Al-Husseini agrees with Robert Hirsch that the time for consuming nations to start worrying is now.
SADAD AL-HUSSEINI, FORMER DIRECTOR SAUDI ARAMCO: Well, I think in many of the major consuming countries, the leadership has been asleep on the watch. Everybody in the industry realises that oil and gas are the backbone of global economies. Somehow, I guess politicians felt that this was not going to be an issue on their watch, that it was too far into the future, and therefore didn't pay attention to it.
Excellent! With peak oil bearing down on us, maybe "domed cities" will be the first to adopt clean "Better Place" electric vehicles with the battery-swap station system. I don't know about maintaining positive air-pressure if the cars are allowed to drive through tunnels normally... and sitting in a tunnel lift / airlock gizmo is going to suck.
Maybe they attach giant fan doovermelackeys to blow air *into* the dome via each tunnel exit?
Or more likely they just adopt cheap electric trolley bus transport under the dome, and admit the city is a unique kind of car-free zone anyway. There could even be some unique experiments in dense & diverse ecocity planning and denser than normal city zoning, with climate controlled public parks, the whole Logan's Run deal (except without death at 30?)
I totally agree. Apparently 50 thousand cars = 1 gigawatt of stored electricity... so download this 50 minute podcast and check out the claims for this scheme about to be installed in Canberra, Australia. (Only download the audio as the video is just Shai Agassi walking around in front of the audience).
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/fora/stories/2009/08/14/2656263.htm
Any proper scientific discipline lacks technical detail, infact he *Made Up* the science of robotics, from scratch. That's not what Hard Sci-fi writers (like Clarke) do.
But Clarke *Made Up* the Monolith, and *Made up* David Bowman flashing forward through the Star-gate into a place where he could be reborn as a "Star Child".
Clarke *Made Up* 3001 super-advanced medicine that could resurrect the vacuum-frozen Frank Poole, and *Made Up* super-advanced space elevators that could whisk you up into out-space (from a starting position of about 1k up) so fast you could actually perceive the earth shrinking beneath your feet --while not being ground into a pulp by the G-forces.
So I have trouble with placing authors into the "Hard", "Soft" and "Pulp" sci-fi categories.
Great point and I totally agree! With all the technology of the Federation in that Star Trek universe, why are they still so, well, human? Why aren't they more biomorphic with the technology like something out of Greg Bear's Eon? That's why I liked BSG. The human race is wiped out, and unlike the 70's BattleStar Galactica, the heroes in the modern BSG remake are hurting, suicidal, and totally Fraked up!
They occasionally get to blow away Cylon raiders, but lasers? Shields up? Give me a break! BSG do it right: line up side by side and commence blasting each other with huge cannons like Spanish galleons.
OK, so there's a car wreck and there is nano-dust everywhere. How hazardous is this stuff to inhale, get on your skin, etc? Asbestosis anyone? What about cleaning it up?
Is there a 'peer reviewed' medical consensus on the health effects yet? I mean, there's that scene where hostile nano-bots are being turned into 'dead toner' in Diamond Age, but forget hostile nano-bots... what about just plain nano-dust in your lungs?
Nuclear power could run the process that would make fuel from Mars!
http://videos.howstuffworks.com/tlc/30786-destination-mars-making-fuel-from-mars-atmosphere-video.htm
OK, maybe Space 1999 is not the best source of scientific motivation for settling the moon, but there are others.
EG: It has been estimated to take $21 billion to launch Japan's space solar satellite. Wouldn't a moon base be able to handle all our satellite needs cheaper?
We could also use a moon base to build L5 colonies, which in turn could one day turn into slow boats to Mars and beyond.
Don't forget the H3 industry fusion reactors may also require.
OK, if ever we needed Moore's law to hit AI and create smart eco-bots that could get out there and harvest all these weeds, now seems to be it. Imagine ecosystems managed and assisted by smart, solar powered ecobots of various shapes, sizes, and functionality. What else could they do? Harvest the weeds and drag them to local biochar plants, generating biochar and fuel? Harvest Australian outback camels, freezing the meat and then shipping the meat to poorer African nations? (For some reason that one sounds a bit non-pc... not sure what camel meat tastes like.) Collect all the plastic in the North Pacific Gyre on automated solar powered ships? It seems that for the sake of our ecosystems we really need to create various autonomous robots for these mundane, repetitive, constant jobs, because I can't see which nation will really devote the money for people to do them....
Carbonised chicken feathers are being researched for their nano-tube like behaviour, and are being developed for steel replacement. (Especially when put together with bean-curd "glue"). True story. They've even mentioned using them to replace the blades on wind-turbines.
The fact is we may not HAVE to make the sun shine 'on queue' because solar thermal is now 'nearly' baseload (with thermal storage). CETO wave is baseload. OTEC ocean thermal technology, baseload. HDR Geothermal power in Australia, baseload. Solar PV? Peak demand 'top up'. Biogas tanks? Top up the solar thermal baseload plants after a FEW days cloud. Solar updraft towers? Baseload even IF it is cloudy. Also, wind doesn't HAVE to be baseload if it is mainly used to 'top up' the grid and charge our new fleet of "Better Place" electric cars (coming to a town near you real soon!). Check out how it will work.
Better Place V2G
So, car has 160km range.
Car drives to work in the morning.
Car plugs in & charges on peak solar output.
Car drives home 40km and plugs in.
Car sells maybe 100km worth of electrons back to the grid during afternoon/evening hours of peak demand when everyone is watching TV, cooking, etc.
Car will not sell below the charge necessary to get to the nearest "Better Place" battery swap, in case an urgent trip is suddenly required. (The Battery Swap not only means you are guaranteed an instant 'range extension' on the rare occasions you need it, but you don't have to keep buying new batteries every 4 years or so. "Better Place" sell you the car, but they own the batteries!)
Car charges later that evening after 12pm when industries and other demand on the grid starts to wean and there is more power available.
Car is fully charged by morning.
50 thousand cars = 1 gigawatt of "grid smoothing" potential. Australia has 15 million cars.
If powerlines come down in a storm, the cars can help power the grid locally for service men to have access to power.
Shouldn't it be setting up a moonbase for the "mass driver" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver cheaper launches of satellites, space-solar power, and eventually the construction of a L5 colony or even a hybrid moveable colony that could then colonise Mars?
I'm very keen to hear some of the uber-engineers & industrial chemists response to this, mainly for the electric car market. "Better Place" seems to be one of the smarter contenders for killing our oil addiction, but if it is limited because full EV's require rare earth's well just HAVE to come up with a work-around. Any ideas?
Also, the Biochar power plant cooks agricultural waste and gives us syngas energy and biochar to put back in the soil. The biochar power-plant cooker could even be solar thermal powered with CSP, saving even more of the syngas (the other 50% that is usually wasted in running the next burn). Then we put the Biochar back in the soil, and it is safely sequestered there for the next 1000 years while it also helps increase Nitrogen fixation through the growth of micro-fungi, other micro-organisms, and retention of water. Instead of so called CCS where we bury carbon deep underground where it does no-one any good, bury the carbon in our SOIL where it can help drastically reduce the fertiliser input, rejuvenate the soil, not "leak out" and basically become an income stream in its own right, especially if carbon-credits are counted. It could also be useful in suburbia. Imagine your local county collecting lawn clippings and other garden biowaste, and generating county synfuel from the biomass and then selling the biochar to local farmers AND collecting some carbon credits in the process! The county would be partly prepared for peak oil and "geoengineering" at the same time.
Hi all,
aren't there costs of launching that are just to do with the sheer amount of fuel used to get things into orbit? How will this come down in price, and isn't that just wishful thinking?
Others have written about how space solar could be made far more economical if a moon-base were built for lower launch costs. And of course, once we have a base there all sorts of other space ventures become possible. (Lagrange stations, nice retirement destination, "Ark" on the moon, etc). So while I'm all for this just as an expensive proof of concept, surely the main goal for space solar would be a moon base to radically lower launch costs?
I think I'm a moon => L5 station => Mars kind of guy, however some say once we settle the Lagrange points we won't bother with settling Mars because who wants to get stuck on a gravity well?
It's time to send in solar-powered super-tanker automated droid ships that catch the stuff with those super-fast robotic hands on slashdot last week, and then process the plastic back into usable hydrocarbons.
;-)
Doesn't it just scream out for a high-school science project?
Did you listen to the podcast? It addresses many of your answers. The flexibility of the parliament responding to the issues of the day can also be seen as a STRENGTH when protecting individual rights.
EG: My right to live in a society with *less* drunks on the road is more important, in my mind, than my "right" to not be inconvenienced 5 minutes a year with random breath testing. RBT's in your country would be an outrage! Here, we just gladly suffer them so we don't suffer worse. But your "founding fathers" didn't consider the possibility of cars & alcohol, and so now privacy is a greater right than life in many cases!
And this is the great problem with bills of rights, they codify into the HIGHEST part of the law the values and prejudices and blind spots of the day, not seeing all possible outcomes in the future. So, by all means, give me the FREEDOM of a parliament reflecting my rights today, and if they don't I'll vote them out tomorrow.
One more thing: on world government.... are the Eastern block members better under Russia or the EU? What would be so bad if the EU became the WU? (A proto-type example of a truly Federal Union government for the globe?)
Nice counter argument, not that I agree but that you seem genuinely passionate about your freedom which is something I can respect.
I also admit I may have phrased the bit about those *particular* Queenslanders I disagreed with a little clumsily, although it was a particularly offensive conspiracy theory *those individuals* bought into.
Nevertheless, I'd love you to download and listen to the podcast. It makes some VERY interesting points, that says our individual freedom is best served by a flexible democratically accountable legislature NOT an unelected judiciary interpreting an ancient bit of paper with some rosy text.
Not only that, but a bill of rights can:-
* politicise the judiciary which are meant to be about interpreting law, not social policy, about which most lawyers know nothing
* promote an *absolute* formula of 'rights' as interpreted by our generation, and make them absolute for all time when 'rights' are often about social policies more appropriately held to account by the political process and democratic discussion of the day
* reflect the silly prejudices and blind spots of our day
* condense into silly summary issues that are far more complex and require weighty volumes of legal document to truly unravel. But agitators FOR a bill of rights don't want a legal document but a flowery rosy picture of the perfect society full of individual rights, yet don't give us mechanisms to get there.
* promote selfish policy at the expense of the public good, which if it suffers badly enough, can deteriorate to the point where the individuals in that public are more likely to be killed by violent crime.
Please, "Don't leave us with the bill!" Download the podcast here.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigideas/stories/2009/2596855.htm
Someone who is capable of losing control during an argument and blowing someone away is equally capable of losing control and killing someone with a golf club or knife.
Yes, but it is easier for someone from the crowd to grab the knife/golf club. After our "Port Arthur massacre" a few years back our Federal government sponsored a massive gun buy back. Certain categories of self-loading weapons were banned and purchased off gun owners. It didn't stop some moronic Queensland country folk running up their web-rumours that the Fed's STAGED the massacre and killed all those people just to take our self-loading rifles, but there are always retards reacting to any good government decision. I had a friend at the Strathfield shootings. When someone is carrying a fast loading weapon on a rampage, it's just not as easy to disarm them as it might be if a few guys approached some lunatic holding a knife.
What you regard as 'paranoia' I regard as freedom. And there I was thinking sitting in a park reading a book with a nice coffee was a definition of freedom. If walking down the street with every 2nd person packing like some wild-west cliché is your definition of freedom, then you deserve your American constitution and bill of rights amendment. It just seems like some parts of your bill of rights has enshrined certain types of selfishness over the common good. Which is pretty much as our political theory has said it would. Listen to the following podcast that debunks Australia's need for a Bill of rights. We're doing fine, in fact BETTER, in that regard than you Americans.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigideas/stories/2009/2596855.htm
All your lovely words on a bit of paper does not stop you invading countries on false pretexts (WMD's my arse!) or holding people for YEARS without trial. (Guantanamo bay, HELLO!?) And you're worried about our not being able to access a few kiddie porn sites? How about you get your OWN hypocritical and messed up house in order, and I'll do my best to make sure we don't vote in another sycophantic PM like John Howard that followed the USA's lead in so many illegal and anti-democratic ventures on the world stage.
Most people do not wake up one morning and decide to become murderers.
No, but when they do it is far more likely to be successful if there are guns everywhere! How many times has an argument turned into a "crime of passion" because a gun was around, or what would have been a brawl in a home invasion suddenly becomes fatal because the owner of the house immediately reaches for the gun, or in some cases the intruder finds the gun first? Your American "right to bear arms" is a historical throwback to your unique beginnings as a country. Here in Australia we're just not as paranoid.
What about my right to live in a country with far less firearm murders because there are far less firearms?
Many of the issues of EV's limited ranges can be solved by adding charge points at work, charge points at the shops, and charge points at home. But the REAL breakthrough is an integrated renewable energy and battery swap program being marketed in various countries by "Better Place". Israel and Australia, among others, are due to have this program rolled out. Got an unexpected trip that you're not charged for? Then program your trip into the SatNav/GPS, and it will tell you where the closest automated battery-swap program is.
Also, electricity is so cheap to sell as a "fuel" that the company owns the battery, not you! (Shai Agassi makes a huge song and dance about forcing consumers to buy the battery is like forcing regular car owners to buy not just a little oil, but the whole oil-well that the car will ever drink from in its life.) So THEY wear the "risk" of the battery being overused and needing replacement... they test the batteries at the recharge station and wear the cost of recycling the lithium at the end of the batteries lifespan.
So my question is, will this car manufacturer be complying with the battery swap standards being developed by "Better Place" and Renault, or will they be forcing us to operate under the old car model of owning the battery! It's not just a new car, but a whole new business model for the car and totally changes the economics and feasibility of electric cars.(Eewww...)
http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html