Synfuels

I believe that the sun shines upon the earth as well as in space. Id hate to be zapped by some "power ray" from a satellite in a decaying orbit.


However, there may be some added value of keeping lots of "infrastructure" in space. Its been predicted that within 1.5 Billion years the sun will increase in energy about 10%. This will be enough to boil away the seas, perhaps we can build a "power grid shield" out in space. A series of about 6 large "eclipse discs" that , in a sun tracking orbit, they would shadow the sun

Perhaps you will understand that one and half billion years greatly exceeds the half life of my compassion.

and your span of attention. Cmon, a measly billion an a half, Atsa Matta you?

What was the question?

'Sides . . . in one and a half billion years, we'll have colonized the entire galaxy, right? Like what Fermi said?

SHut up and deal.

Cut first?

lemme get ma machete

I agree that only part of the problem is technical. If a useful synthetic car fuel is possible, then it will probably take funding to develop it. The funding would have to come from politicians who probably care more about what the oil industry can do for them than about the people they claim to represent.

Yeah, but who wants to cover those nice deserts with black fabric?

There's a nice way of transmitting the power securely. You have your receiver surrounded by a ring. If the power beam touches the outside ring, you shut it off.

And you use microwaves, so there's no ionizing radiation.



Once you have a laser launching system, just stick your industries on the moon. Less gravity, but enough to hold things in place. Regolith makes great plant food....

Then you can harvest He3 for fusion processes as well.



Enough cheap power, and you can make the entire Earth a paradise.

Possibly so, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

When we get the air cleaned up, you won't have to.

I'm just very concerned by our economic dependence on the people who happened to be born on top of this stuff, with no apparent way out of our predicament, and little to no discussion of finding a way out other than using less.

WTF?

The only way to eliminate the dependency on foreign oil is to use less foreign oil....

Have you never heard of electric vehicles? Fuel cells? Plug-in electric hybrids?

Those are all part of the discussion of finding a way out.

I'm looking forward to they day my in-town car is all electric.

So far, I've failed to sell my boss on buying me a Tesla Roadster...

In the vast scheme of things America's problem with sourcing and paying for oil is a minor problem. The big picture problem is that man insists on trying to have a high energy consumption technical society, and we power it by burning carbon. A lot of our energy usage, maybe half, comes from our economic system which demands that we make and use as much stuff during our lifetime as possible. We could live very well on half our energy usage, but to do so we would need to replace free market capitalism and end consumer culture.

We can only live this life if we find a safe, non polluting, cheap, and abundant energy source. We don't seem to be close to finding it. In the mean while we will thrash around and continue the process of killing our host (the earth).

This brings me back to the post with which I opened the thread. Are we trying particularly to find it? Speaking only of automobiles, I see no news ever of a serious search for a way to run cars with a substitute fuel, although some of the chemists here seem to be seeing some discussion.

Nobody has even begun to figure out the energy problem that man faces, one need only look to today's WP to see this clearly
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/19/AR2008031903859.html?hpid=topnews

RE transportation; cars probably are not the best way to go. It would be much better to have metro and intercity transit up to 1000 miles done with rail, traditional rail for the cities and High Speed Rail for intercities. Rail would be powered by electricity, which would likely be nuclear to start and latter hopefully something more safe and cheaper.

The thing that scares me is many of the up-and-coming V6 an straight-6 turbo-diesels are DOHC. As if screwing with the exhausts to make it work wasn't bad enough, extra cam-lines? I prefer bio-diesel to ethanol since it expels water and I've got nothing against the power curve - but this DOHC thing, it's like making Uncle Hanno pay for someone else to drive emotionally, as if the insurance companies don't do well enough at it.

I can dig ethanol too, but it looks like we've got a snowman's chance in hell of seeing that in a pushrod engine either (I mean, if I were going to let it loose at $5 a gallon I'd want that torque to come like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, not just be there at 3.2K rpm in case I want to shift at the wrong time for god-knows why) and since we'd need significant amounts of it just to keep the valves opening and closing at optimal blah-blah-blah to make the most out of the tiny displacement when we could just use a bigger block and not drive like a pansy and/or burn it down in 100K miles... Damn it anyway - I'll not be baited into over-consuming so easily.

The important thing though, since I've got half a mind to retro-fit something with an open 10-bolt and a stick shift anyway is that we will be able to welcome agriculture back to the GDP and stop feeding people just to overpopulate the globe (where's TinyGiraffe at?) and displace various species...

Here you go Brandon.

http://www.able2know.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=114760

It looks interesting, but if such a large revolution is in the offing, why do we hear nothing about it?