From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2013 8:08 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Global warming silliness
>>I would like to see us switch away from fossil fuels completely, of
course, but the road may be long and hard. I guess if there is an
alternative to the ICE it will come on line as people replace their
vehicles, and of course as you say power plants are a major part of this -
being localised they can be replaced more easily than the vehicle
infrastructure, but at quite high initial cost.
Electric motors are far superior to ICE motors in a lot of ways. They have
far fewer moving parts, can be built to last almost forever; they deliver a
far higher percentage of their potential power into the drive shaft and
hence useful work than an ICE engine or in fact any combustion engine
including the most efficient gas turbines. An electric motor is in the area
of 80% an ICE 20%
Electric motors suffer from the Achilles Heel of low energy density of
available electric power storage. Chemical batteries basically suck as
energy stores, pound for pound. Even lithium ion batteries - while viable
even today for automobiles in most use cases - still do not have the energy
density that is really needed. But advanced battery technology is not
sitting still. Zinc-air batteries seem tantalizingly close - they have
achieved 400 Wh/kg, which is very impressive figure and would make an
all-electric vehicle equipped with them not only equivalent to a gasoline
powered ICE vehicle, but probably even superior - because one has to factor
in the much higher efficiency of electric motors.
Battery technology does not have to reach the same energy density per pound
as gasoline, at around one fourth the energy density it becomes equivalent
pound for pound to liquid fuels in terms of the amount of useful work that
can be delivered to the wheels on the ground.
About generating more petrol from the air than we burn - we'd have to
generate a lot before we got ahead of the curve on this, of course! Probably
far easier to do something else...
Perhaps if we discovered an alternate use for carbon dioxide removed from
circulation through the biosphere the operation could become a carbon sink -
as opposed to a transitional store of potential energy that returns the CO2
into the biosphere the second it is burnt. If we do stand on the cusp of the
age of carbon, with carbon fiber, and the exotic nano scale crystalline
carbon: buckminsterfullerene, nano-tubes, graphene replacing steel and many
other industrial era materials.
Some of the properties of the crystalline carbon forms are amazing and even
more so when doped or as containers of other things.
IMO - the sooner we dump the industrial era mind-sets and evolve into a more
systems aware and bio-mimetic approach to our human systems the better off
we, as well as every other remaining living thing that has not been driven
into extinction by our human greed and human folly on a grand scale. The
ways of the industrial era seem so wrong. For example things are made by
grinding away at big chunks of stuff. that is milled and otherwise produced
by removing excess material. We stand on the cusp of an era of digitally
controlled additive manufacturing. Even NASA is building complex rocket
engine sub-assemblies using additive manufacturing with exotic materials and
laser sintering. We use brute force bulk chemistry to try to make complex
molecules with limited success and purity and at great cost in terms of
pollution, waste. Plants, funghi, animals - our own cells -- have all
mastered molecular assembly. Step by step we are solving the impediments
that stand in the way of an era of molecular assembly.
Why should we all crowd the freeways twice a day? That mentality is
destructive and unproductive. The technologies for enabling the
virtualization of much of what we now do by moving physically from place to
place in order to accomplish the goal are here now.
To believe that the future is going to resemble the present - and I am not
saying that this is what you are doing, but speaking in general - is a
guarantee to be unprepared for it when it does arrive. I seriously doubt
that the future societies of earth in say fifty years from today will have
economies that look like the current day advanced industrialized world. No
matter how it turns out - because it is also possible we will go out with a
thermonuclear bang in one final war for oil - the future is not going to
resemble today. Nor will our cities.
And I wonder if we will resemble ourselves? Or will be we cyborgs with
co-nano-nets joining in a billion places with our neural cortex. tied into a
global hive mind perhaps (a dark outcome), but certainly tied into the vast
network including the interplanetary one. Could beings of this nature and us
bio-humans even be said to be of the same species? I see no particular laws
of physics or known technological limits that would prevent the current
state of the art in terms of miniaturization, self-assembly etc. to get to
the levels that would be required for a fully integrated human cyborg. Have
not even gotten to DNA mastery - we are a long way from that but making
rapid progress. Soon we may be able to dispatch carefully engineered virus
like vectors that will exactly write - or re-write very specific sequences
of DNA.
Will we even remain physical for very long or will people live on uploaded
even after their bodies have died, with such a rich set of information and
behaviors digitally preserved and evolving in virtual life that the
simulation approaches the real thing. does it ever emerge into
self-awareness (some here would argue never)
I am not sure if we will find that who we may become in fifty years will be
something recognizably like us.
>>Apparently diamonds aren't forever, they burn at some relatively low
temperature - at last I've been told Fleming got that wrong in the
helicopter crash scene.
Well is anything forever really, and is there any meaning in forever
conceptually or is it perhaps an abstract projection, an endless
extrapolation.
Chris
There is a way out of the hall of mirrors beyond what can be seen.
On 15 November 2013 16:43, Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2013 7:20 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Global warming silliness
Hi Chris
Hi Liz
I won't interleave my replies as I'm finding it quite confusing to follow
who is saying what in reply to what, so apologies in advance if I miss
anything.
>> The suggestion about synthesising petrol from the atmosphere is of course
very hypothetical at the moment. Supposing it could be done, I do of course
realise that this would be recycling. The reasons to do it (in the short
term, and assuming it's possible) would be to avoid having to reconfigure
the existing infrastructure that has been built up over decades to supply
petrol to cars, boats, planes, power plants, etc. With almost any
alternative fuel supply this would need a massive (and non carbon neutral)
overhaul to much of the world.
True for vehicles - large thermal plants are a different matter. The
existing deployed fleet of vehicles might have problems burning the
particular hydrocarbon - for example alcohol as a fuel requires engines that
can handle high ethanol content. My point: The hypothetical kinds of liquid
hydrocarbons that could be synthesized might be impossible to burn in ICE
engines designed for combusting gasoline (or diesel) I am arguing that the
current fleet of vehicles is probably going to be obsoleted - even by a
switch to a different liquid fuel (unless it is compatible with existing
engines).
Why not make the switch to all electric for ground vehicles - Ellon Musk
apparently wants to make an electric airplane so maybe in the air as well.
Of course current lithium ion battery technology does not have the
volumetric or gravimetric density required, but battery technology is moving
fast and lithium (and also zinc air) battery technologies are being
developed that promise much higher energy densities (maybe Ellon Musk knows
something).
>>Why not use the energy more directly? - only because of the storage
problem. One of petrol's big plus points is its high energy density (and
actual density). It's a lot easier to cart around a tank of petrol than a
tank of hydrogen or methane or some other gas, for example, or a battery
full of electricity.
I hear what you are saying and have said the exact same thing, when I have
mentioned energy density of liquid fuels as being a reason one could make
the argument for investing greater amounts of energy than could ever be
extracted from burning them. It is because they are a high quality energy
carrier - in terms of being able to stuff a lot of it - i.e. potential
energy -- in a tank.
>>There are many schemes afoot which could in theory revolutionise transport
- the latest I saw was a New Zealand based idea to use induction from buried
wires to charge electric cars as they move. This is fine, except that it
doesn't work for planes or boats or for cars that aren't on a road equipped
with the wires! And even getting it up and running for motorways would
require digging up thousands of miles of road and filling it in again, not
to mention equipping millions of cars with the necessary whatever.
Interesting. Zinc or Lithium air batteries though would have the energy
density to work for long distance air travel. Electric powered turbofan
jets.
>> One has the same supply problem with any power source - nuclear, solar,
etc. You have to get the energy into cars, planes, trains etc. A good
solution, in my opinion, would be to use the power plus the carbon in the
air to create a fuel that cars, planes etc can run on. And if you can do it
- very hypothetical at present - then maybe eventually you will even be able
to get more carbon out of the air than is being emitted.
How? As soon as you burn it you put it back into the atmosphere.
>>On the subject of sequestration, plants are top of my list, but assuming
that isn't possible, or not possible enough, is there no way to split the
carbon atoms off from the oxygen (assuming lots of available energy, as
usual!) and to turn it into - oh, I don't know. Diamonds, perhaps!
Now diamonds are forever LOL
Chris
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