Re: What would Jesus say and do
I suspect he would be looking deeply into evolutionary psychology to understand what drives strife. It is fairly clear what causes the problems. It is fairly clear what we need to do about them. But it is really unlikely that people will. Keith ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Smaller government, climate change
At 03:43 PM 9/8/2009, you wrote: snip Energy is a far more serious problem than climate change because of the close coupling between energy and food. If we don't solve the energy crisis, there will be awful problems such as wars and famines. If we do solve the energy crisis in a way that gets rid of fossil fuels, then we might still have climate change, but it isn't likely to be a big problem. Enough energy and we can even pull CO2 out of the air. Work it out, 300 TW years will convert 100 ppm of CO2 to synthetic oil which could be stored in empty oil fields. Keith ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Space based solar power
Sept. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and IHI Corp. will join a 2 trillion yen ($21 billion) Japanese project intending to build a giant solar-power generator in space within three decades and beam electricity to earth. A research group representing 16 companies, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., will spend four years developing technology to send electricity without cables in the form of microwaves, according to a statement on the trade ministry's Web site today. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101sid=aJ529lsdk9HI http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080sid=aF3XI.TvlsJk I responded on a closed mailing list. Here is a copy with deletions. snip Transporting panels to the solar station 36,000 kilometers above the earth=92s surface will be prohibitively costly, so Japan has to figure out a way to slash expenses to make the solar station commercially viable, said Hiroshi Yoshida, Chief Executive Officer of Excalibur KK, a Tokyo-based space and defense-policy consulting company. =93These expenses need to be lowered to a hundredth of current estimates,=94 Yoshida said by phone from Tokyo. I get the same number close enough. Current price to GEO $20,000/kg; required for space based solar power to displace fossils by being substantially less expensive (1-2 cents per kWh) is $100/kg, a factor of 200. Step 1: Rocket Equation... Needed 100 t/hr to GEO, $100/kg. Try a two stage to GEO. Required 14 km/sec, get the first 4 km/sec with a mass ratio 3 hydrogen/oxygen rocket. To get the remaining 10 km/sec with a mass ratio 2 means an average exhaust velocity of 15km/sec. Because you stage far short of LEO, the second stage must have relatively high thrust so 60 km/sec ion engines won't do. Ablation laser propulsion (well understood physics) with an average exhaust velocity of 15 km/sec will provide over a g at 4 GW. The suborbital path keeps the second stage out of the atmosphere long enough (15 minutes) for the laser to push the second stage into geosynchronous transfer orbit. At 4 payloads an hour (working the laser full time), each payload to GEO needs to be 25 t. So the laser stage is 50 t, the first stage 50 t (16%structure) and 200 t propellant. On takeoff it masses 300 tons, less than a 747. A large airport handles a lot more traffic than 8 747 takeoffs and landings an hour. Step 2: A miracle occurs... Hard engineering, no miracles permitted. Not easy, the laser might eventually cost $40 billion. To get started (to positive cash flow) came out to $60 billion on a first cut proforma analysis. Step 3: snip A UK company, Reaction Engines, has an inordinately clever approach to boost the effective exhaust velocity so as to actually put positive payloads into LEO with hydrogen/oxygen single stage to orbit. What they are doing is recovering a lot of the energy that goes into liquefying hydrogen and using that to compress air to rocket chamber pressures up to 26km and Mach 5+. Google for them. Also see http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5485 Keith PS. A lot of the mass of a thermal power satellite is heat sink fluid. That can be made from finely ground rock and a little gas. Decouples gas pressure from the amount of heat the pseudo fluid can carry. Seems a shame to be shipping up sacks of cement dust. We are looking into the payback time for a moving cable space elevator through L1 to the lunar surface. Existing materials are good enough for the cable--without taper. 15 MW is enough to lift 33 tons per hour. Feed lunar dirt through a vibratory ball mill and presto heat sink fluid. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
ARPA-E-Announcement
A friend sent me this. The DOE people need to be educated, given the losers they funded on the last round. I don't know if it is possible, but they are asking for input. Keith ARPA-E-Announcement arpa-e-announcem...@hq.doe.gov 31-Aug-09 2:29 PM Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy Techline ARPA-E Requests Input on Future Funding Opportunities Washington, DC, August 31, 2009 - The Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) announced today a formal Request for Information (RFI) for future funding opportunities. The RFI requests public input on potential ARPA-E programmatic areas and opportunities to overcome technological roadblocks to the development of transformational technologies relevant to the ARPA-E mission. The information collected through this process will assist ARPA-E in developing new programs and funding opportunities. ARPA-E's first Funding Opportunity Announcement, released on April 27, 2009, and solicited a broad range of ideas for transformational energy technology development. With this RFI, ARPA-E is now reaching out to the public for input on specific programmatic energy technology areas that may be well-suited to provide transformational impacts on ARPA-E's mission areas of reducing foreign energy imports; decreasing energy related emissions, including those of greenhouse gases; increasing energy efficiency across the U.S. economy, and ensuring that the U.S. maintains a technological lead in developing and deploying advanced energy technologies. Responses to the RFI are due to ARPA-E by September 25, 2009. To review the RFI, please visit http://arpa-e.energy.gov/PI.html For more information about ARPA-E, please visit http://arpa-e.energy.gov/ http://arpa-e.energy.gov/ ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Drinking Water From Air Humidity
At 07:05 AM 7/13/2009, Dan M wrote: snip Because it clearly won't work well at any time but the pre dawn hours in the desert. The collectors have to be cooled below the dew point. Let me give a US example. In Las Vegas yesterday, in the heat of the day, the temperature was 42C, while the dew point was -1C. Even shaded, it takes tremendous power to keep collectors that cold while deliberately being exposed to a very hot wind. Obviously they would not build them this way. Think about dehumidifiers. In a damp basement this one will put out 33 l of water a day on 750 watts http://cgi.ebay.com/FRIGIDAIRE-70-PINT-POWER-DEHUMIDIFIER_W0QQitemZ330340172232QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item4ce9cf01c8_trksid=p3286.c0.m14_trkparms=65%3A7|66%3A2|39%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A50 Dehumidification: 33.1 Litres/Day EEV (L/KW/H): 1.6 I have not looked into one for years, but they have been built as counter current back to the 50s. The cold air dry air is used to cool the incoming air so the main energy drain is pumping out the heat from condensing the water. You are not going to get much water out of one on a hot dry day in Las Vegas. But there are deserts where the typical humidity is high, it just doesn't rain. Keith ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Mention of David Brin
At 11:00 AM 7/11/2009, Charles Bell wrote: And anyway - reducing populations by lowering breeding rates is just as effective, and as has been shown the world over, as populations become more affluent and better educated they breed later and less (often choosing to have none or one child). So the answer to the population crisis is development and education, not culling. The problem is the time constant to reduce the population by reduced breeding. It is going to be very hard to increase affluence in an energy crisis, it may even become impossible to feed the world population if the supply of energy largely fails. Various system dynamic models that don't include a large input of energy show the population falling from a peak of about 7 billion to one or two billion by the end of the century. No country on earth is immune to such a drop in population. The US for example might be blessed with only half the population starving, other places would get hit much harder. Keith Henson PS www.htyp.org/dtc for the details on an energy proposal. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Mention of David Brin
snip (considerable) On the other hand, also coming into my screen today was a blog entry from The Oildrum, specifically ahttp://www.theoildrum.com/node/5485#more guest blog under the byline of Gail the Actuary in which an expert on space-based solar power explained how a new approach to the launch of vehicles may be able to cut the cost enough that space-based solar energy would become an answer, even the answer, to our future energy problems. Space-based solar arrays are one of those technologies that are always somewhere over the horizon, and some would say over the rainbow. If you take a few minutes to read this blog, and again the comments, you find the dissonance on full display. On the one hand you have a person saying that there may be an energy answer after fossil fuels. On the other hand you have lots of people not only saying it is not possible, but directly arguing that a human die-back is more desirable than cheap energy. And so it goes. At the end of the http://www.tapsns.com/blog/index.php/2009/06/world-on-fire-notes-and-impressions-from-fire-2009/Fire 2009 conference, an audience member said he felt depressed, that the environmental problems discussed there seemed too large and the time seemed to late to respond. David Brin, the great science fiction writer, also in the audience, responded that we have to hope that humans come up with the breakthroughs, technological and social and values-based, that enable the enterprise of civilization to continue. The alternative is despair. I thought this summed up things quite well. http://www.futurist.com/2009/06/15/energy-and-the-future-space-based-power-and-cognitive-dissonance/ ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
power sat progress
You might be amused. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5485 Took lots of flack Comment about it here http://www.futurist.com/2009/06/15/energy-and-the-future-space-based-power-and-cognitive-dissonance/ On the other hand, also coming into my screen today was a blog entry from The Oildrum, specifically ahttp://www.theoildrum.com/node/5485#more guest blog under the byline of Gail the Actuary in which an expert on space-based solar power explained how a new approach to the launch of vehicles may be able to cut the cost enough that space-based solar energy would become an answer, even the answer, to our future energy problems. Space-based solar arrays are one of those technologies that are always somewhere over the horizon, and some would say over the rainbow. If you take a few minutes to read this blog, and again the comments, you find the dissonance on full display. On the one hand you have a person saying that there may be an energy answer after fossil fuels. On the other hand you have lots of people not only saying it is not possible, but directly arguing that a human die-back is more desirable than cheap energy. And so it goes. * Keith ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Power satellite draft analysis
As some of you know, I have been working on power satellites as a way to solve the energy and carbon dioxide problems for more than a year. This last weekend I gained access to some hundreds of man-years of related work. With that, some relatively simple physics, and a spread sheet, I now have a rough analysis of the finances good enough for a draft business plan. The analysis makes the case for solving both problems by undercutting the cost of energy from oil, coal and nuclear. In addition, it makes money on a scale large enough to put a dent in the US national debt. This on an investment of only two GM bailouts. The background information isn't public and in any case not many can understand the physics and financial analysis If you do grok this level, will actually study and comment on it and agree not to make the background information public let me know and I will send you the package. Keith ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: A proposed solution to the problem of space flight
At 11:00 AM 4/1/2009, John Williams wrote: Keith wrote: I don't know who on this list is up to understanding the technical parts . . . . I think I am. Or I was. Probably now I switched from being one of the good guys (working in the space industry) to become one evil minion (working in the oil industry) :-) The root problem is the same space flight has had all along--the rocket equation. All sins flow from the fact that at best one part in 60 of the liftoff mass gets to GEO or lunar orbit with chemical fuels. Here it is in graphical form. If you want to play with the rocket equation, just use this javascript: http://www.geocities.com/albmont/relroket.htm It's a relativistic rocket equation, but it works (obviously) for v c. The whole problem is that you need energy/power/speed/name-it to get the rocket away from Earth's athmosphere. Right now, the only way to do it is by chemical rockets. There are other ways that would almost certainly work. Laser ablation, which takes a GW/ton of payload, and various methods that accelerate a vehicle to escape plus enough to get through the atmosphere. But your point is correct in that rockets or something closely related seem to be the current and possibly the best way to get above the atmosphere. Though in the long run (and assuming we can get the cable) you can't beat a moving cable space elevator for efficiency. 15 cents of electric power per kg to GEO. Now comes the second problem. Suppose you get to LEO. Ah, but you didn't read the specifications. The first stage in this design does not go to LEO, and the second (laser) stage doesn't either. It heads directly to GEO on one continuous burn. Amazing what you can do with 12-17 km/sec exhaust velocity and over a g of thrust. The energy in the laser beam is equal to a ton of TNT per second. Theoretically, it's possible to use more efficient ways to transfer to GEO. One way is to continously thrust with a high-specific-impulse engine. But this would make the transfer take eons - and now economy plays a very important part in the equation: It's not as bad as you think. Ion engines will take a power sat constructed in LEO to GEO in a few months. Unfortunately by the time it got there it would be full of holes and in dire need of repair. They are big enough to intercept a *lot* of space junk. you don't want to _wait_! Time is money. If you put another batch of lasers on the ground or build a set at GEO, then lift off to GEO is 5 hours. Initially, with only one set of bounce mirrors, we let the laser stage go around the Hohmann transfer orbit one and a half times. This puts the laser and bounce mirrors in the right place to circularize the laser stage to GEO. The time is money is certainly true. The design to cost criteria is to have parts delivered to GEO be incorporated into a finished satellite in a week or less. Starting at GW of power sat every day or two, ramping up over time to 2 GW/day or more. The intent is to displace fossil fuel entirely by mid century. So, the pretty little mathematical and physics of transfer bows to the implacable and ruthless laws of economics, and we use chemical rockets. They are ok for the first step, but using high exhaust velocity laser propulsion for the second stage reduces the lift off mass by a factor of 5 and the cost by a factor of 6. It's the difference between 5 cent per kWH which won't really compete with nuclear and 1 cent, which takes over even the oil market. Keith ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
A proposed solution to the problem of space flight
I don't know who on this list is up to understanding the technical parts . . . . The root problem is the same space flight has had all along--the rocket equation. All sins flow from the fact that at best one part in 60 of the liftoff mass gets to GEO or lunar orbit with chemical fuels. Here it is in graphical form. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rocket_mass_ratio_versus_delta-v.pnghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rocket_mass_ratio_versus_delta-v.png And here is what you need in delta V. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deltavs.svghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deltavs.svg People say correctly that fuel is a small part of the cost of space flight. That's true, but the rocket wrapped around massive amounts of fuel is not cheap. I have been talking for some time about a way to get cost down. I call it pop up and push. (Better name suggestions welcome.) The idea is to stack a low performance first stage with a high exhaust velocity laser stage. Of the 10 km/sec needed to LEO, the rocket stage will provide about 2 km/sec. So the laser stage has to provide about 12 km/sec of the 14 needed to get to GEO. For a mass ratio of 3, this would require an exhaust velocity of 12 km/sec, for a mass ratio of 2 about 17 km/sec. 12-17k/sec is not hard to get with laser ablation. That's between 1/3 and 1/2 payload. The laser stage is about 1/6th of the mass ratio 3 chemical stage. Everybody who has looked at the rocket equation knows that matching delta V to the mission profile is the way to go. The problem is that the combination of high thrust and high exhaust velocity takes ferocious amounts of power to lift anything substantial. Ion engines have exhaust velocities that range up to 60 km/sec, but thrust in the milli-gee range--not useful if you have to do a high delta V maneuver in a hurry. Ablation lasers have been considered for earth launch because they can provide high thrust but the lasers are either really huge or lift small payloads. Using a chemical stage under a laser stage does not add much to the cost per kg because the rocket is relatively small, relatively low performance and thus can be reusable like an aircraft, i.e., fly it twice a day for 20 years. The performance of the chemical stage is low enough that a Mach 5 winged vehicle might do the job. The laser stage does require a substantial amount of power, 4-5 GW (equal to a ton of TNT per second). But the hang time you get from the chemical stage allows a low acceleration, just over a g, and the payload size can be in the 15-25 ton range. The laser stays on the ground and is bounced from focusing mirrors in GEO. The laser stage goes round the Hohmann transfer orbit one and a half times so the laser and mirrors will be in the right place to circularize its orbit to GEO. The rockets launch every 15 minutes to keep the laser busy. This provides a flow of materials to GEO of 60-100 tons per hour, just what is needed for serious power sat construction. That's enough materials over a few decades to replace all fossil fuels with low cost space based solar power, even liquid fuels can be made from CO2 pulled out of the air and hydrogen from water for a dollar a gallon. The short version is here: http://www.operatingthetan.com/SpaceBasedSolarPower/SpaceAccess.pptwww.operatingthetan.com/SpaceBasedSolarPower/SpaceAccess.ppt The only one besides the delta v and mass ratio slides above needed to understand this proposal is the Optimum flight angle slide. Dr Jordin Kare (most of the detail in this is from his work) thinks a 1/1000th scale (5 MW) test laser could be built for a reasonable sum. Not only would it prove out ablation laser propulsion above the atmosphere, but it would be able to de-orbit 500 tons of space junk a year. The amount of money being talked about in carbon cap and trade is so high that this project could be funded to profitability on perhaps 1/3rd of it. There are a lot of people getting interested in this concept. I could use advice as to where to take it next. Keith ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Freeman Dyson on climate
At 11:00 AM 3/30/2009, Bruce Bostwick wrote: Food security is a fairly significant worry, all things considered. It's nearly impossible to build up safety margin in the food distribution systems of most countries on earth because within one or two generations of any increase in the ability to produce food, the population has expanded to fill the gap, so the nature of the system as a whole is to operate near or at its limit to deliver at all times. Yep. Though there are countries where this is not likely to be a problem. The moment global warming starts to impact food production to any significant degree, people somewhere on earth will begin starving. I agree, though you don't even need that. Lack of low cost fossil energy alone could cause the population to fall by the end of the century to one or two billion people. And consider what diverting corn into alcohol production did to food supplies in Mexico. It won't affect people of our generation in the wealthiest countries (and the USA is still one of the wealthiest, even in its current weakened state), but it will affect people elsewhere on the planet almost from the moment food production starts feeling any sort of pinch. If it were possible to maintain a margin of production capacity without triggering an immediate population growth in response that eats up that margin completely, then it would be possible to ride out a lot of secondary effects of even fairly major climate change. But the dynamics of the existing systems and population growth together don't allow that margin .. Most of the world has not escaped from the Mathusian trap. Some parts have. It's going to be a rough situation for a while as one or the other modes prevails. Keith ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Talk about a comprehensive energy and climate solution (and David Brin too)
This is draft www.operatingthetan.com/SpaceBasedSolarPower/March18Talk.ppt So if anyone spots something wrong, please let me know. Keith Henson ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: biofuels and Li Batteries.
At 01:00 PM 1/13/2009, Dan M wrote: I agree, but bioengineered fuels are not ethanol. There are algae that exist right now that produce aviation fuel with 1000x the efficiency of ethanol. I have a hard time with this statement. Corn comes fairly close to 3% sunlight to fixed carbon. If you lose 2/3rd of it in the process of making ethanol, then it's still 1% efficient. 1000x would mean you are getting ten times as much energy out as is going into the process. That's against the law. I suppose over a year corn could be less than 0.1% efficient, but you would still be talking about 100% efficient conversion of sunlight to fuel. snip No, there are breakthroughs in many fields that are never mass marketed. What I am saying is that we don't know until we know. In my own career, there have been many times, before I ran an experiment, I was pretty sure I knew how something would work, but it didn't, and I had to scramble. Take for example, scaling up the recent Stanford breakthrough of increasing the Li-I battery capacity 10x. Is that possible from an energy standpoint? Lithium Ion batteries currently are 25 times worse than gasoline. So a 10x improvement would be 2.5 times less energy than gasoline. But gasoline gets 65% of the mass that goes into tapping it for energy from the air. Thus a Li-I battery with this kind of performance would be darn near as energetic as a tank full of gasoline and oxygen. Have a URL for this report? Keith Henson ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: What is wealth?
There are two authors who have a decent handle on historical wealth. Azar Gat is one of them, http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf Gregory Clark is the other, one http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf If you prefer hearing to reading, try here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYspzYiX_kg Keith Henson ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Space based solar power
Charles Miller has proposed legislation be passed similar to that in Germany which provides that the utilities have to buy solar power at a high per kWh rate for a limited amount and pass on the cost to their customers. We are still tuning the economic model, for one thing, we are still trying to reach a consensus that $350 billion is enough to finance the operation through profitability . I have been trying to draft something that makes an international cooperative possible. Try this for size. Please comment. International provisions It is in the national interest of the United States for all countries to have access to abundant, low cost, renewable energy, particularly non nuclear energy. Therefore the market guarantee provisions of this legislation are open on a reciprocal basis to companies based in any country that enacts provisions essential identical market guarantees to those in the above financing model for the purchase of space based solar energy. Because world wide energy security contributes greatly to US national security, it is the intent of this legislation to remove barriers to shared technology to solve shared energy problems. In particular, all technologies related to space based solar power are exempted from ITAR. Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
New Documentary Sheds Light On Space Based Solar Power
New Documentary Sheds Light On Space Based Solar Power by Staff Writers Burbank CA (SPX) Nov 17, 2008 [] File image. Space-based Solar Power - the concept of collecting high-intensity http://www.solardaily.com/reports/New_Documentary_Sheds_Light_On_Space_Based_Solar_Power_999.html#solar energy in space, beaming it to Earth, and feeding it into existing power grids - is getting a closer look. Groups studying the idea, including the Pentagon, think the project could create as many as 1.2 million jobs in addition to enormous energy benefits. The Futures Channel's latest online documentary, Powering the Planet, introduces the concept to the future designers, engineers and scientists who would make it a reality: students in math and science classrooms across the country. Tens of thousands of educators use the company's video programs to help students make the link between their studies and exciting, real-world careers. Through Powering the Planet, students will gain exceptional insight into one of the most exciting alternatives for meeting global energy demand, said Alan Ladwig, space consultant and former NASA official. The documentary describes the history, concept and technical requirements for this cutting-edge energy source, and introduces students to the leading scientists and engineers who are guiding current research. It's going to be the new generation of students coming through the system now that are going to be the engineers, the designers, the builders of these systems, Air Force Col. Michael CoyoteSmith, a space-based solar power strategist, says in his interview. A program to build space-based solar power technology would require people across hundreds of career tracks, ranging from electrical, mechanical, and aerospace engineers to metallurgists and welding technicians, he explains. Our objective was mainly to pose the concept to today's students, says Steve Heard,Executive Producer. They would be the initial builders, and the idea is to deliver a sort of '101'on the concept of space-based solar power, so they can include it in their discussions on energy. Since 1999, The Futures Channel has brought hundreds of fascinating, real-world science,technology, engineering and math applications into classrooms through its engaging micro-documentary videos. Pamela Fazel, a teacher at Kentucky's Butler County Middle School, previewed the program. This video is a powerful tool for teachers to inspire and empower students to believe that theycan be the scientists of the future. Here we see real people like us working together to solve one of the world's biggest dilemmas-energy. I can't wait to show this to my students. The documentary features the late, world-renowned physicist and space visionary Gerard O'Neill, in excerpts from a 1991 interview. Things like mathematics and physics and engineering-the hard scientific subjects-those are the subjects which are going to be of the most use to you in getting a job, whether it's on the earth or in space, O'Neill explains. The documentary was premiered last week for delegates at the annual meeting of the Japan-US Science, http://www.solardaily.com/reports/New_Documentary_Sheds_Light_On_Space_Based_Solar_Power_999.html#Technology and Space Applications Program (JUSTSAP), an international forum of scientists, educators, government officials and business professionals working to identify and explore opportunities for international collaboration in http://www.solardaily.com/reports/New_Documentary_Sheds_Light_On_Space_Based_Solar_Power_999.html#space exploration. Adam Newman, a former teacher, longtime education industry analyst and current director of the education group at Berkery Noyes, noted that Powering the Planet underscores the power of video in the classroom. The Futures Channel's newest video captures one of the most critical issues facing our planet-renewable energy sources, while helping to address one of our country's greatest education challenges: driving student interest in and awareness of the STEM disciplines. This type of web-delivered educational programming is gaining greater traction in K-12 schools, engaging students with real-world challenges and opportunities that they will one day help ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Space Based Solar Power
Little over two weeks ago I was at a military conference in Florida on power satellites. I was talking about the pup up and push idea of sending a laser stage up to 260 miles and while it's above the atmosphere push it into geosynchronous transfer orbit with a 4 GW ablation propulsion laser. (Half payload because the ISP is so high.) At dinner with a couple of officers and Charles Miller, Charles made a case (obvious only in retrospect) that there is a simple, already tried, way to finance even a few hundred billion dollars for power satellites. Miller had tentatively discussed this back in May at the International Space Development Conference but at the time I missed it. This kicked off about a hundred emails last week on a private email list after a telephone conference call. The combination of vast amounts of cheap and very clean energy from power satellites and (more important) a way to finance them would certainly change future prospects. I will probably put up a web page about the idea this week. Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
ITAR and space based solar power.
I have a problem where I could really use some advice--or at least put my qualms on the record. I have been talking about ITAR with some of my friends after one of them brought it up citing this horror story. http://www.globaltradeexpertise.com/news_files/category-itar.phphttp://www.globaltradeexpertise.com/news_files/category-itar.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_Regulations Another friend relates that you can get into trouble for accepting a piece of Russian space hardware into the US for an exhibit. When the guy returned it after the exhibit the State Dept told him that act was an export. Then another guy was told he'd be charged under ITAR if he told the Russians working on his satellite launch that they could go to a particular US textbook to find out how to do a reliability analysis. One of my friends thinks my concept work on reducing the cost of materials transport by sub orbital rocket and multi GW propulsion laser would not cause me any trouble even if I went on a lecture tour about it in China. Others think I would be arrested and jailed for decades like the retired professor if I talked about it in China. A propulsion laser able to lift 100 tonnes/hr to GEO is unavoidably a weapon and counter weapon. I make an economic case for building it for non-military reasons, but it's definitely dual use. The energy problem is world wide so solving it anywhere solves it everywhere. I am on record as saying I think the Chinese are more likely to build power sats than the US. (Then the US could import electric power, synthetic crude oil *and* lead painted toys from China.) The reason this has become urgent is that I have been invited to this military conference on space based solar power next week. http://www.upcomingevents.ctc.com/sbsp/sbsp.htmlhttp://www.upcomingevents.ctc.com/sbsp/sbsp.html I would love to go. I have a lot of the physics and engineering at my fingertips. http://htyp.org/Dollar_a_gallon_gasolinehttp://htyp.org/Dollar_a_gallon_gasoline http://htyp.org/Penny_a_kWh http://htyp.org/Hundred_dollars_a_kghttp://htyp.org/Hundred_dollars_a_kg The conference is open to US citizens only. What agreements are required, I don't know. It seems a shame to give up on a possible solution to the energy problems, but I really don't want to spend more time in jail. I don't know what to do. Keith Henson ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin-l Digest, Vol 397, Issue 4
At 12:00 PM 9/4/2008, Jon Louis Mann wrote: (Jon) snip (re Pascal's Wager) I'm placing my bet on cryonics... That's interesting. I didn't know there were any others of us freezer folks on this list. Keith i guess it's just you and i, keith... i haven't run into the alcor folks at any recent conventions and have not actually signed up. i'm waiting to find out how to do it other than by buying the insurance. If you are reasonably young and don't have serious health problems, it's hard to beat insurance for financing a suspension. maybe i'll buy my own thermos and make sure it's equipped with backup solar and wind energy. Do it yourself cryonics is really hard. You should visit Alcor to see just how complicated it is. Removing your own appendix is easy compared with doing your own perfusion. http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=1621 i wonder if there is an interface for freezer folks... Interface?? Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Cryonics
At 12:00 PM 9/4/2008, jamespv wrote: Naw Naw you are not the only freezer folks count me in but I have one problem its not solar or wind energy back-up. It is those who are left behind to operate the freezers and start the coolant and dip me into the deep freeze. I would much rather a self-activativating machine which I can start myself on one of my best days and in my best mood with a switch that is not controlled by an insurance policy or wayward child. I think by the time we have self-activating machines of this capacity the time for cryonics will be past. After some rather gruesome experiences, descendants have no control over a person who is in suspension. We have a saying in the cryonics world, being suspended is the _second_ worse thing that can happen to you. The insurance companies would prefer you never collected. Alcor has about 80 in storage at this time and around 850 signed up. Some of them are known SF writers. Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
cryonics
At 12:00 PM 8/30/2008, Jon Louis Mann wrote: snip (re Pascal's Wager) I'm placing my bet on cryonics... That's interesting. I didn't know there were any others of us freezer folks on this list. Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Social science was Comparative Religion
At 12:00 PM 8/30/2008, Nick Arnett wrote: On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 11:10 AM, Jon Louis Mann [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: I took an anthropology class in college; I believe it was called Comparative Religion. I consider it social science, rather than real science. Jon Aw, c'mon. Social sciences are real science, just messier. I expect they will become real science, but at the moment they are this disconnected blob floating out there. Real sciences like physics, chemistry and biology merge a the edges into a seamless whole of science. Can't say that about social science yet. EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION Can evolution really explain how humans think and behave? A prolific new breed of thinkers has taken centre stage in this debate, championing the attempt to understand our mental faculties in the light of evolutionary processes. Christopher Badcock told Fathom that the insights that the social sciences once had into human behaviour are now defunct. He argues that the burgeoning discipline of evolutionary psychology, with its potentially unique combination of genetics, neuroscience, psychology and other disciplines, is the only realistic path to take toward understanding human nature. Introducing Evolutionary Psychology From: London School of Economics and Political Science | By: Christopher Badcock http://www.fathom.com/feature/35533/index.html Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Denvention
I was there, on a panel with Jordin Kare. We kept the interest of 160 people for a full hour. It was taped. Perhaps it should go up on Google. http://htyp.org/Dollar_a_gallon_gasoline Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin-l Digest, Vol 391, Issue 5
At 12:00 PM 7/25/2008, Bruce Bostwick wrote: On Jul 24, 2008, at 2:27 PM, hkhenson wrote: At 12:00 PM 7/23/2008, Bruce Bostwick wrote: Pretty sure we're headed for a population crash at least that drastic regardless. it's obvious to me that the earth cannot support 6-7 billion sustainably no matter what we do. With a lot of low cost, low environmental damage energy the earth could support somewhat more than the current population--in style. That's been obvious enough to me that it's the premise of at least one book I'm working on. Energy is everything -- without it, we can't produce food (on anything like the scale it's being produced on now, at least), we can't get to and from work or do most of the kinds of work we do, we can't transport goods from where they're made to where they're needed, etc. With more of it, with lower cost and less to zero environmental impact, yes, we could make Earth look like Coruscant and sustain it indefinitely. (Tangential: That was one of the things that always bugged me the most about the Star Wars movies .. the enormous amount of energy obviously being consumed with no explanation as to the energy sources, other than they obviously had nearly limitless supplies of it.. :) But the if that energy source exists is a BIG if. I'm hoping it's found very soon. It comes up every morning. Gravity confinement fusion generator. Good for another few billion years. The trick is to collect the radiation in space at $800 a kW or less. snip This would worry me more except I think the age of genes is about over. Eh? Extropian dream, or perhaps nightmare. When I started laying out a post singularity novel it dawned on me that the most likely human population for 2100 was zero. Had to cheat to get a story with characters. http://www.terasemjournals.org/GN0202/henson2.html (The footnotes were the editor's idea.) Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Dollar a gallon gasoline
I don't know why this failed to post the first time, try again. At 12:00 PM 7/23/2008, Bruce Bostwick wrote: Pretty sure we're headed for a population crash at least that drastic regardless. it's obvious to me that the earth cannot support 6-7 billion sustainably no matter what we do. With a lot of low cost, low environmental damage energy the earth could support somewhat more than the current population--in style. And there are certain parts of the population doing their best to outbreed everyone else just to skew future demographics. So it's likely to be a hard crash, and not a very well controlled one at that. This would worry me more except I think the age of genes is about over. Ronn! Blankenship wrote: snip No. I was just thinking that in the current situation, there would probably be investors who would be very interested in getting in on something which looked like it really would provide even a partial solution. So far, have not found any interest. But on the other hand, I don't know a lot of VC. (keith wrote) The only drawback is the size, it's on a par with the cost of a few years of the Iraq War. I was thinking that what you would want to do would be to find investors willing to fund a pilot facility and show that it worked locally (city? county? state? whatever . . . ). If it did work as predicted, it would be an easy matter to sell it to those willing to expand it to larger areas. That's one problem with some of the suggestions out there: they talk about savings (resource or financial) to be realized only after the whole energy infrastructure (at least of the entire US if not the world) has been converted from what it is at present to the proposed new version. The problem is one of optics that has been understood for more than 200 years. The Airy disk (or Airy disc) is a phenomenon in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opticsoptics. Owing to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#Wave_theorywave nature of light, light passing through an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apertureaperture is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffractiondiffracted and forms a pattern of light and dark regions on a screen some distance away from the aperture (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferenceinterference). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk For microwaves that get through the atmosphere that we can make and turn back into electricity, the antennas on both ends are huge, a km in space and 10 km on the ground. For economic power levels that's in the 5-10 GW. A power sat that large weighs something like 10,000 tons. You could build one that delivered a few watts to the ground, but it would cost almost as much as a multi GW unit. Few people seem to be talking with any specificity about how to accomplish the individual intermediate steps to get from here to there and what the incremental savings or other advantages to be gained from those intermediate steps will be. And the proposals which require the whole system to be replaced before any advantages might be realized Advantages or not, we will be exiting the oil era over the next decade or so. Oil is huge. The solution has to be the same. are so costly that the only way they could be funded is by the government with taxpayer money, and we have seen for the past 40 years how well that works. With a good proposal, hopefully private industry would be interested in funding the initial local facility and then expanding from there when it shows results. I agree with how you feel about governments and taxpayer money. I don't know how a project of this scale can be funded on private money or taxpayer money either. Pat Mathews wrote: From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Showing again that the underlying problem is that people must renounce greed and selfishness and replace them with cooperation and altruism. Great idea. Wrong species. E.O. Wilson To the point. :-) Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Dollar a gallon gasoline
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Re: Dollar a gallon gasoline
At 12:00 PM 7/22/2008, Alberto Monteiro wrote: hkhenson wrote: It's not even a particularly risky project. If you have electrical energy to burn, making syngas is easy from coal, even from trash. Sasol knows two ways to turn syngas into oil. H... And how much do you think _coal_ and _trash_ will cost, if they can be turned into any useful thing? Since we would still be pumping some oil but burning no coal with space based solar, the cost of coal is likely to do down some. It is currently selling for between $14 and $140 a ton. Since in this method a ton of coal makes about 6 bbls of oil, at $60 a ton, the coal would cost $10 per bbl. Trash, currently has a -$60 a ton cost called tipping fees. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/coalnews/coalmar.html The only reason coal is cheaper than oil is that coal pollutes more, kills more people to extract, and generates a hell lot more of CO2 (did I forget anything else?). Made into synthetic oil via syngas, there is no pollution and it makes as much CO2 as oil does. The coal the US burns in power plants and 450 GW could be used to make about 21 million barrels of oil a day. In places where these things are irrelevant, like China, coal is used to the maximum. They are well aware of the problems from coal and are expected (if this goes live) to be the largest customers. On the other hand, they might own the space manufacturing setup and we would be buying power from them. I am not optimistic that this will be done. If this or some other really huge supply of primary energy is not found, we are going to be in for some nasty times. The other way the energy crisis will be solved is for the world population to fall to about a billion. Keith Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Dollar a gallon gasoline
At 12:00 PM 7/21/2008, you wrote: Keith wrote If someone in the area can think of another venue to talk about dollar a gallon gasoline, I can make a case and I have slides. Why don't you make a case to some venture capitalists and/or industry representatives who can get started immediately on actualizing the project? It's my understanding that projects are not funded unless the people are known to the VC's. If you know some and want to be part of the project, let me know. It's not even a particularly risky project. If you have electrical energy to burn, making syngas is easy from coal, even from trash. Sasol knows two ways to turn syngas into oil. The only drawback is the size, it's on a par with the cost of a few years of the Iraq War. On the other hand the oil market is about $3000 billion Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Denver/Denvention
It's a bit late to be mentioning this, but sometimes there are reasons not to let certain people get organized. I expect to be in Denver during the Worldcon. As most of you know, I have been working on an energy project that's large enough to replace all the fossil fuel use in the world (after a few decades). I made this decision so late that it's not clear I will be speaking on any panels. If someone in the area can think of another venue to talk about dollar a gallon gasoline, I can make a case and I have slides. Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Nature Assumption (was Asbergers)
At 12:00 PM 6/25/2008, Dan M wrote: I read that, and found holes large enough to drive a tank through. It's true that, once kids have a peer group, that group becomes much more influential on their behavior outside the home than the parents. Well, you got the main point of the book anyway. But, she doesn't even address the obvious question: how does a kid end up in a particular peer group? If it is, and does not involve things about the kids that exist outside of and before the joining of a particular peer group, than moving should totally shuffle the deck. It does. One example she used was a kid whose parents moved from Poland to Missouri. Did he wind up speaking Polish? But, we know it doesn't. It is true that, if you haven't done effective parenting before the kid is old enough to get into real big trouble than the deck is staked against you. But, parents have tremendous influence in the bag of tools they give their kids to handle life's problems. I remember a significant problem with self esteem that caused Beth to pick the wrong peer group and allow them to pressure her into doing some rather stupid things (like stop up our toilet with a pine cone) when she was young. To what extent was this group the result of the neighborhood in which you lived? That is (to an economically limited extent) under parents control and Judith discusses that influence in depth. But, we worked hard and gently on that problem, and she is now a very self assured adult, who seemed to have been known by everyone at college and is genuinely liked. It took years to convince her that she didn't need other peoples approval to be OK, and that other people actually would respect her for that view. Once she got it, she dumped the kids who were mistreating her although they were her friends and hung out with a much better group of kids. Now, she has tremendous people skills. Judith Harris talks about kids switching groups without any parental input. It's not like parents are without influence, my ghod, in most cases they contribute all the genes the kids have. But her point was that by the time you factored out the genetics, there just wasn't room for parents to make a claim either for the successes of their offspring *or* their failures. Much of this came out of the twin studies which are by now undisputed. There is an innate EQ, I don't deny that. However, there are still things that can be taught. My wife has taught me to read body language. I can walk into a room and read it fairly easily. But, I worked hard to acquire that skill set. Parents can give similar skill sets to their kids by talking about this when the time is right (if you have the skill set, you usually know when the right time is). We still screw up (at least I do), but we can help a lot. So, in conclusion, the Nurture Assumption made a tacit assumption...and it was false. The prevailing assumption for many decades is that parents have huge influence over how their kids turn out. (This assumption isn't the case either in our deeper history *or* in other cultures.) The data just don't support this view in spite of the invaluable skills parent *can* teach kids. If the kids are adopted out, chances are they will find some other way to pick up the skills biological parents provide if they are so inclined. Keith Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Asbergers (Was Gates)
At 12:00 PM 6/24/2008, Jon Louis Mann wrote: my ex-wife has aspergers and fit in well at sf cons, where inappropriate behavior is often either tolerated, or ignored. the problem is that she is raising our son the same way her mother raised her, without any boundries. Turns out parents have a lot less influence on kids than their playmates. You might want to read _The Nurture Assumption_ by Judith Rich Harris. Within the rather sharp limits she describes there are things parents can do, you might be able to do. i see this more and more with the paris hilton generation. Actually Paris Hilton is a sharp woman with decent business skills. Keith Henson ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: quality of life...
At 12:00 PM 5/14/2008, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: snip I agree. I think there technological fixes are possible that can bring less developed (which I think is the current PC term for what used to be called third world and fourth world) countries up to a par with developed countries Dr. Gregory Clark makes a case that's hard to refute that it's not possible to bring these areas of the world up to par at all, not without something like gene surgery. http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf without the amount of pollution and waste and such which accompanied the rise of the first people to get to that level. The Chinese are *NOT* a case in favor of this point. No, I can't list them here now because I think many of them need to be developed. I do think that like many other things (frex the overworked examples of the Manhattan Project and putting a man on the Moon) they are the kind of things which _can_ be developed if we as humanity in general and the appropriate leaders (government, business, religious and other charitable organizations, etc.) in specific set the goal of raising everyone up to equality without waste, including frex steps such as sharing new technology with everyone rather than looking for the way to maximize profit from and power over their customers. Obviously it will take a shift in the mindset of many toward altruism rather than selfishness, but that mindset shift is what we should be doing anyway as members of a civilization. The singularity will do that. But it's not without danger. An AI with godlike powers could be tasked with reducing human misery or simply decide it was a good idea. The problem is, it might well chose to accomplish this mission by killing off the entire race. Or seducing them out of existence like the story in The Clinic Seed-Africa. Keith Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin-l Digest, Vol 381, Issue 3
At 12:00 PM 5/14/2008, Kevin B. O'Brien wrote: snip Now, do we conclude from this that there are *no* limits to growth? I think not. Just because the Club of Rome had a flawed analysis does not mean that there are no limits. What does the analysis look like if we say that resources will never completely run out, but will instead become progressively more expensive? If the price of food depends tightly on energy (and it does) then the effect is that one heck of a lot of people die. http://www.drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm I strongly recommend this web site, it is the only one I have seen that takes into account the big picture of the race between the singularity and population collapse. Depending on the assumptions, the population could decline from 7.5 peak to 1.8 or even 1 billion people by 2100. North America and Europe would not see as drastic a reduction, but you would expect them to lose half their populations. Does paying $10/gallon for gas look a lot better than running out? How about $20/gallon? At what prices is gas effectively unobtainable to most people? Milk, you might note, has been about the same price as gasoline all my life. We are starting to see food riots. It isn't just gasoline that's going to be hit by high energy costs. Further, as I have argued, there is a growing crisis over water supplies. This is a renewable resource, of course. but there are serious issues about the rate of use relative to the rate of replenishment. That's an easy to solve problem from an engineering standpoint *if* you have really low cost energy. Put reverse osmotic membranes deep in the ocean where the pressure is high enough to force fresh water through them. If you go really deep you can get the difference in density to power part of the process. There is plenty of energy around if we can figure out how to get it. For example, a solar power satellite repays the energy needed to lift it to GEO in about a day (at 100% efficiency). Five percent efficient rockets would replay the lift energy in 3 weeks. In this case the scale works in our favor. Either offer the possibility of penny a kWh electricity and dollar a gallon synthetic gasoline. Unfortunately I think resource wars (like Iraq), famines and epidemics are more likely. Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Economists
At 12:00 PM 5/13/2008, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: At 01:28 PM Tuesday 5/13/2008, Kevin B. O'Brien wrote: But the most interesting critique I can recall was by Michael Porter, who wrote a pretty well-received book called The Competitive Advantage of Nations. He simply pointed out that anyone who advocated reducing the standard of living of our citizens as a sound policy was not living in a reality-based community. How do the demands^H^H^H^H^H^H^H recommendations of the environmentalists fare under that analysis? I can remember a related group, the Club or Rome. They sponsored the Limits to Growth Conference in (I think) 1975. A contingent from the just created L5 Society was there promoting solar power satellites as a way out. The argument was that the advanced countries had to drop their standard of living to the level of third world countries because the resources for the rest of the world to come up to the US level did not exist. To some extent this has come about in the hollowing out of the US middle class and the third world extremes of income distribution. They didn't want to hear that there might be a technological/engineering fix. It was kind of weird. Thinking back, the people at that meeting were the elite of the elite (except for our bunch). Maybe that had something to do with it. Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re:2000 ton per day space transport
At 12:00 PM 5/1/2008, Dan wrote wrote: (Keith wrote) At 12:00 PM 4/17/2008, Dan M wrote: (Keith wrote) What do you want? The current 747 cost about $300 million and dry masses out to about 185 mt or $1.6 million a ton. Produced in similar tonnage, do you see any reason these rockets would cost more than per ton than a 747? If so, why? For the rocket itself, not counting all the other expenses associated with launches, that's not an unreasonable cost. Agreement! Right, but that's for the rocket itself. Not a shuttle, a rocket. A rocket in the shape of a space capsule using a water cooled heat shield. 39 tons of water. The .pdf was recommended as a good reference by Hu Davis of Eagle Engineering. Look him up. What has he built? The Eagle as in the Eagle has landed. OK, I asked because I've seen so many experts who never had to do things. He does have great experience leading successful space design teams. So, I looked up the website of the space company he and Buzz Aldrin are leading http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/rlvs/starbooster_sum.shtml From my perspective, this shows the difficulties inherent in reusable craft. He is not discussing a rocket that can hit near orbit, launch a system to geocentric orbit, and then re-enter the atmosphere. Rather, he is presenting a far more modest goal: salvaging the first stage of a present system. The cost of doing this His company has nothing to do with the Neptune rocket he pointed me to. snip As of two years ago, the owner has spent 100M of his own money, and has had two failed launches. RDTE for this monster, go look it up, was $24 billion. More than two orders of magnitude more. snip I think a recoverable, reworkable first stage, with a parachute drop and an ocean retrieval, might be workableand save some money in the long run. Out of the question. Water landing, yes, but *fresh* water. But, re-entry is an extremely harsh environment. Dry yes, wet, no. snip So, the step which I strongly disagree with is assuming that such a vehicle can be built for the cost of a disposable rocket. It's not my opinion, take it up with the folks who designed it. I was just taking Hu Davis' stamp of approval. snip If you were flying them every day instead of ever 100 days could you do it with the same number of people? They were suppose to fly once a week...with far fewer people than are needed to fly them once every 100 days. And yet airlines fly planes several times a day with small crews. How do they do it? Can it be translated to space operations? If not, why not? Part of the cost is the very low production rate for spare parts. Another big chunk is paper pushing. NASA is inefficient, I won't argue with that. But, the fundamental problems remain. If it were easy, don't you think one of 7 non-NASA groups would have done something by now? Some years ago I read that the effort to recover and refurbish the segments cost more than just letting them sink. 2000 tons per day is an entirely different model. You can't apply much of what we know about government space programs to it. But, in areas where costs have dropped like a rock (e.g. computers, big screen flat panel TVs, etc., we've seen a pattern of price drops funded by the early implementers. Right now, launching commercial satellites is a multi-billion dollar industry. A simple 30% price drop for the same reliability would be a big deal. They are all talking about less than 2 tons to GEO every few months. This is 100 times larger and 10 times per day. Different situation entirely. snip What gives you the idea space is harsh? Now a wind generator standing in salt water, that's harsh. I was referring to my own work. Oil platforms have stood in salt water for generations. Sea water is not very corrosive. I've had to design for far worse environments. I beg to differ. Turn off the cathodic protection and how long does it take to fall apart? My own experience has been with MWD (Measurement While Drilling). Our standard qualification test is temperature to 175C, 20 g RMS random vibration for 2 hours in each of the three axis, and 1500 g shock. With that random vibration one does get the 3 sigma 60 g vibration from time to time. I am not impressed. Back when I was bonding chips we subjected all of them to 10,000 g in -Z to see if we had any marginal bonds. I don't remember a single time we did. snip When power sats are not considered (and they usually are not) then you get statements like this: No combination of renewable energy systems have the potential to generate more than a fraction of the power now being generated by fossil fuels. -- Jay Hanson Nuclear power is a green alternative that's already price competitive (unless PC demands raise the price artificially). Nuclear power is not a renewable. Without heavy breeding we don't have a lot more uranium than we do
Re: Brin-l Digest, Vol 377, Issue 3
At 12:00 PM 4/17/2008, Dan M wrote: (Keith wrote) What do you want? The current 747 cost about $300 million and dry masses out to about 185 mt or $1.6 million a ton. Produced in similar tonnage, do you see any reason these rockets would cost more than per ton than a 747? If so, why? For the rocket itself, not counting all the other expenses associated with launches, that's not an unreasonable cost. \ Agreement! First and second stage mass 619 tons, (third stage is mostly power sat parts) so if they cost on a par with a 747, they would cost just a hair over a billion each, with one coming off the production line every 20 days, or about 31 mt a day. That might sound like a lot, but I have worked in a locomotive factory that made 30 times that much a day in product (8-9 locomotives a day at 113 mt each). At peak production 747s were coming off the line at a slightly higher tonnage per year. If you use them for 200 flights the capital cost per flight is $5 million /200,000kg or $25/kg. Here's where you throw in the unspecified assumption. A simple disposable rocket, like the ones being used by all launch facilities but the shuttle, could cost about what you said. But, then you talk about reusable rockets and assume that the initial capital cost is the critical factor. No, that *is* the capital cost. I just have not discussed operating and maintenance costs which I have not estimated. This design uses 49 SSME in it and they are only expected to last 40 flights. How much labor is it going to take to pull 40 engines out of the first stage and 9 out of the second stage every 40 flights? On average they would be changing out 12 a day so they should get good at it. What's the closest model we have for airline operations? Or for that matter, railroad operations? A SSME has got to weigh less than a locomotive engine! The fantasy of the space shuttle was that it could be reused easily. 10 years into the mission, it was supposed to require a very small ground crew, getting lift costs to near earth orbit down to about $25/kg or some such number. But, the maintenance is very high and expensive. If you were flying them every day instead of ever 100 days could you do it with the same number of people? Part of the cost is the very low production rate for spare parts. Another big chunk is paper pushing. There is a neat trick using recent technology to virtually eliminate paper pushing. And a lot of the cost is for crew training. These things would be no crew, and maybe only one a week would carry passengers, if that. The shuttle costs a lot of money to fly, even though we are not buying new shuttles, the big fuel tank is the cheapest part of the assembly, and the solid fuel rockets are recoverable. Some years ago I read that the effort to recover and refurbish the segments cost more than just letting them sink. So, I've seen no estimates for this, just the same arm waving I heard about the shuttle years ago. I can think of Russia, Japan, the EU, the US, and China all having significant lift capacity, and Russia is the cheapest available one I know of. I tend to look at actual costs and their trends as a guideline, not estimates that make unproven assumptions. 2000 tons per day is an entirely different model. You can't apply much of what we know about government space programs to it. I realize that I'm considered a nay-sayer because of this, but I would argue it's because I've had to design hardware/software systems that work remotely under harsh conditions. What gives you the idea space is harsh? Now a wind generator standing in salt water, that's harsh. snip The .pdf was recommended as a good reference by Hu Davis of Eagle Engineering. Look him up. What has he built? The Eagle as in the Eagle has landed. snip The main point is that there are very few options that are big enough and possibly low enough in cost to replace the bulk of fossil fuels. It depends on what type of calculation one uses. If one uses hard engineering numbers for project X and arm waving unsubstantiated numbers for project Y, then project Y should win virtually every time. When power sats are not considered (and they usually are not) then you get statements like this: No combination of renewable energy systems have the potential to generate more than a fraction of the power now being generated by fossil fuels. -- Jay Hanson http://www.drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm I can think of a number of different projects that are far more feasible for the 20-200 year time frame. After 200 years, I'd argue that fundamental discoveries will be sufficient to radically change what is practical. It would surprise me if there were any physical state humans left on the planet by 2100. Even though you sell it to the investors as long term, I can see it being abandoned when the singularity hits. This is about a project to start in the next few years and having the
Re: An interesting response
At 12:00 PM 4/17/2008, Dan M wrote: Nothing works 100% of the time, but lets assume a 95% efficiency, or running 8322 hours/year. The cost is, then, about $39 per kWh. If you do it this way, the cost the next year is zero. That's not good accounting. These things should run for decades. If you wrote it off in 10 years, it would be $3.90 a kWh. And what kind of a deal would the Russians give you if you wanted to launch 110 of these a day? Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
An interesting response
At 12:00 PM 4/16/2008, Dan M wrote: (Keith wrote) At 12:00 PM 4/11/2008, Dan M wrote: (Keith wrote) Takes 10 200 ton payload rockets each flying once a day to do it and with a blank check perhaps under 5 years to work up to this production rate and 6-7 years from start to get to a $50 billion a year revenue stream increasing at $25 billion a year. OK, let's do the math on that. At the present time, the cost of lift to geosynchronous orbit is $20,000 per kg or $20M per metric ton. Ten 200 ton payloads would be about 40 billion per day or 14.6 trillion per year. That's roughly the GDP of the US. And the analogy would be how impossible it is to build a dam sending all the contents in Fed Ex envelopes. The trick is, as it always has been, to lower launch costs. Unfortunately, even in inflation adjusted dollars, launch costs haven't dropped much over the past 40 years. I agree with you. The question is why? I wrote a blog on that general topic at the Scientific American website http://science-community.sciam.com/blog-entry/Dan-Ms-Blog/Unfortunate-Promin ent-Misconception-Concerning-Tech/34870 It was an interesting blog, though *social problems* are in a very different class than engineering ones like going to the moon. At least they are now. Ask and I will point you to a dark story about how they might be solved. The essence is that when the engineering community starts working on something, it starts working on the obviously solvable problems first. Then, progress slows as the easy problems are solved and harder problems are faced. The point at which this happens, and the manner in which it happens is based on what is found. The speed of sound barrier is rather significant, and we have not found a way to develop efficient planes that go at Mach 1.1 almost 60 years after we first went above Mach 1. It's not the cost of energy. No, it's the cost of the system. A nearly hundred percent efficient space elevator lifts about 2400 mt a day (on less than a GW) snip I've invented a few things that are used worldwide and am still engaged in practical science/engineering. I've worked close to guys who's inventions have reduce world costs for producing oil by about 250 million/day. Since there are around 80 million barrels a day produced, that's a reduction of about 3%. So, I think I'm fairly familiar with processes that are economical and that work. I have not seen anything in what you have written on this subject that gives an indication of an understanding of the nature of practical solutions to problems. What do you want? The current 747 cost about $300 million and dry masses out to about 185 mt or $1.6 million a ton. Produced in similar tonnage, do you see any reason these rockets would cost more than per ton than a 747? If so, why? First and second stage mass 619 tons, (third stage is mostly power sat parts) so if they cost on a par with a 747, they would cost just a hair over a billion each, with one coming off the production line every 20 days, or about 31 mt a day. That might sound like a lot, but I have worked in a locomotive factory that made 30 times that much a day in product (8-9 locomotives a day at 113 mt each). At peak production 747s were coming off the line at a slightly higher tonnage per year. If you use them for 200 flights the capital cost per flight is $5 million /200,000kg or $25/kg. This number is excessively rough, but could be refined without a lot of trouble. At a nickel a kWh, a kg of power sat generates $200 of electricity a year. Done with rockets of this sort http://www.ilr.tu-berlin.de/koelle/Neptun/NEP2015.pdf the energy input is about 15 times that high, or from $15 /kg down to $1.50 as you get less and less expensive energy. I went to this website, and it looked like a speculative conference. Vaporware is easy to build. Doing something that works is hard. Most things we wish we could do we do not know how to do. The .pdf was recommended as a good reference by Hu Davis of Eagle Engineering. Look him up. I think that this is the absolutely fundamental difference you have with folks who argue for nuclear reactors vs. space based solar power. We've demonstrated safety mechanisms, Can you be specific about what you mean here? Sure, to be effective, power would have to be transmitted down in a fairly dense fashion. One needs mechanisms that provide feedback to turn the power off should the aim stray. The power level for power sats was set at about 1/4kW/square meter back in the 70s so it could not be used as a weapon. There was also concern that the ionosphere could go non-linear and short out the beam. As far as sending the beam down densely, it's an optical problem--see the math behind Airy's disk. If you want to get a tighter beam you have to go to a larger transmitter or higher frequency or both. The beam requires a pilot beam up from
RE: An interesting response
At 12:00 PM 4/11/2008, Dan M wrote: (Keith wrote) Takes 10 200 ton payload rockets each flying once a day to do it and with a blank check perhaps under 5 years to work up to this production rate and 6-7 years from start to get to a $50 billion a year revenue stream increasing at $25 billion a year. OK, let's do the math on that. At the present time, the cost of lift to geosynchronous orbit is $20,000 per kg or $20M per metric ton. Ten 200 ton payloads would be about 40 billion per day or 14.6 trillion per year. That's roughly the GDP of the US. And the analogy would be how impossible it is to build a dam sending all the contents in Fed Ex envelopes. The trick is, as it always has been, to lower launch costs. Unfortunately, even in inflation adjusted dollars, launch costs haven't dropped much over the past 40 years. I agree with you. The question is why? It's not the cost of energy. A nearly hundred percent efficient space elevator lifts about 2400 mt a day to GEO on an input of about a GW. That's 2.4 million kg/24 million kWh. At ten cents a kWh that's a dollar a kg. At the target sales price of a penny a kWh it's ten cents a kg. Of course you have the cost of the elevator and cleaning up the space junk as capital costs. It can't be done at all now because we don't have the cable, but just for analysis put a $1000 billion price tag on it. Since it is going to be used at least ten years, write it off at $100 billion a year. 2.4 million kg x 365 is close enough to a billion kg. So the capital cost would be around $100 a kg. Done with rockets of this sort http://www.ilr.tu-berlin.de/koelle/Neptun/NEP2015.pdf the energy input is about 15 times that high, or from $15 /kg down to $1.50 as you get less and less expensive energy. The rockets are only assumed to make 200 trips before being junked. At 200 tons payload, they deliver 40,000 mt or 40 million kg. The mass of one of them is about 3 times a 747. If they cost a billion dollars each (produced at 20 a year), $1000 million/ 40 million is $25 a kg. I.e., there is no reason for large volume space travel to cost more than $100 a kg even with rockets. What we need is a transcontinental railroad. What we have in NASA is the Pony Express. Incidentally, the energy returned from a kg of power sat is 4000 kWh. At a penny a kwh that's $40 a year, at ten cents, $400. The income stream (which you estimate at 25 billion/year) Actually it was rising at $25 billion a year from selling power. If you sold the satellites for ten years power production the income stream would be $250 billion a year. would also have to support ground receivers, Rectennas are (from a cost standpoint) installed chicken wire over farmland and inverters (the diodes are almost free). Collecting 1/4 kW from 400 square meters would give you a hundred kW. At pc power supply prices, the inverters are $60 a kW. Counting the chicken wire, poles, diodes and power collecting grid, a 5 GW rectenna would cost $500 million or less and deliver $400 million to $2 billion a year at the bus bars. It would take decades to saturate the market, which for oil alone is about $3 trillion a year. safety mechanisms, Can you be specific about what you mean here? transmission lines, etc. At least for a while you could site the rectennas near existing transmission lines. Plus, it costs money to build the actual arrays. That's true, but with just mild concentration you can get at least 10 times more power out of a solar cell in space. If you can find a way to drop launch costs a factor of 100 to 500, then space based solar becomes a player. There is nothing like that on the horizon. There doesn't seem to be any reason a really huge throughput transport system should not be able to give you that much reduction. However, I don't thing NASA is the right organization to do it. Keith Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin-l Digest, Vol 376, Issue 5
At 12:00 PM 4/11/2008, Alberto wrote: snip Maybe even if launch costs were _zero_, orbital power satellites could still have a negative energy net production. Last time I heard (when I was working in the Space Industry, and not in the Oil Industry), solar arrays required more energy to be built than the energy they produced during their lifetimes. It's under a decade now. But if you take the same cells into space and just do a mild 3 to one concentration, you get more than a factor of ten more energy out than you do on the ground. Alberto 'oil rulez, fsck space!' Monteiro Completely correct. But what do you do when you run out of oil? Try this web site. http://www.drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm The part on what it takes to replace the cubic mile of oil per year we are now using is instructive as well as the concept of net energy which you mention. Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin-l Digest, Vol 376, Issue 4
At 12:00 PM 4/10/2008, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: (Keith wrote) So my question to you, is which be an easier project to sell, a demonstration project for a small number of billions over 10 or 15 years, or a really huge project in the high hundreds of billions to massively displace coal and oil with solar energy from space in under ten years? Or perhaps the real question is which of the following is the case? (1) Your figures and their figures disagree that much, in which case it might be worthwhile to have someone else independently check both sets of figures (probably a good idea in \\any\\ case), or We don't disagree on any figures. I would defer to them if we did, they are the experts. (2) There is more on the agenda than simply finding longer-lasting, less-polluting sources of energy to replace oil. I am sure of that. The entire community seems to have been beaten down for so long they don't know what direction up is. I really don't think the initiative is going to come from the engineering community any more than it did back before Kennedy decided we would go to the moon. Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
An interesting response
I have recently been discussing the scope of a space based power satellite project with a bunch of high powered space engineers. They are all accomplished, one of them was the project engineer for the first moon lander. This started when I scaled a moving cable space elevator large enough (2000 tons a day) to put a real dent in the carbon/energy problems (300 GW/year production rate, displacing all the coal fired plants in the US in one year). So when one of them posted a study of a rocket with about twice the payload of a Saturn V, I extrapolated how many of them and what rate of launches it would take to ferry 2000 tons per day to GEO using rockets instead of a much more questionable space elevator. To my surprise, the energy payback went from under a day for the elevator to 15 days for rockets. You would have to dedicate the first 3 power satellites (15 GW) to making rocket propellants. Hardly a deal breaker. Takes 10 200 ton payload rockets each flying once a day to do it and with a blank check perhaps under 5 years to work up to this production rate and 6-7 years from start to get to a $50 billion a year revenue stream increasing at $25 billion a year. I didn't expect a response other than something like that's interesting but they reacted almost with horror, saying the best they could hope for is an almost useless 1 GW demonstration power sat in the next 10 or 15 years and that the only choice we have is to build lots of nuclear power plants. Now countries and companies in the world for the most part realize that there is a serious problem with energy, and that it isn't going to get better as we slide down the far side of oil production. It seems to me that a project that really could displace all fossil sources of energy with renewable solar energy and (using penny a kWh electricity) reduce the price of synthetic gasoline to a dollar a gallon would get a lot more support than a tiny demonstration project no matter how few in billions it cost. There is no doubt it's a big project, on a par with what we have spent on the Iraq war. But the market for energy is massive, oil alone is $3,000 billion a year. And there is no lack of money to fund it, Exxon can't figure out what to do with their profits so they are buying back $30 billion of their stock a year. The Chinese have a few thousand billions in US notes they would spend on a secure energy source large enough to meet their growing needs. So my question to you, is which be an easier project to sell, a demonstration project for a small number of billions over 10 or 15 years, or a really huge project in the high hundreds of billions to massively displace coal and oil with solar energy from space in under ten years? Keith Henson ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin-l Digest, Vol 369, Issue 6
At 01:00 PM 2/23/2008, William T Goodall wrote: Religion has a vested interest in discouraging critical thinking. I think it's *much* worse than that. In Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War I make a case that the psychological trait(s) for religion arose as part of the complex set of traits for wars. Religions are seed xenophobic memes. In times where the population sees a bleak future, they become more influential. Eventually they served to synch up the warriors for a do or die attack on neighbors. Even though the warriors may have died, the genes were always better off than starving. One of the effect of this complex of traits is to shut off rational thinking. It's not rational at the personal level to go out and try to kill neighbors, but in some circumstances the interest of a person and their genes diverge. Religions give reason to take such chances. Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Polygamy
At 01:00 PM 2/6/2008, David Hobby wrote: Keith wrote: This does not square with field anthropology. Polygamy is well known in cultures where female infanticide and distorted sex ratios are prevalent. Polygamy greatly exacerbated women's scarcity and direct and indirect male competition and conflict over them. Indeed, a cross-cultural study (Otterbein 1994: 103) has found polygamy to be ... Sorry to shoot down your thoughts. Please try again because I would really like to understand it and am clean out of ideas. Keith Keith-- Hi. This is interesting. First, just for clarification, do the studies have direct evidence of female infanticide, or do they deduce it from the skewed sex ratio? Both. It's robust. http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdfhttp://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1a.pdf. (There is some evidence that the ratio can be made to vary from the norm without infanticide. Just checking...) The normal ration at birth is 105 males to 100 females. Because boys are more likely to die, the ratio is close to 1 to 1 by reproductive age. Evolutionary theory says that the ratio will be pulled back close to one because the less common sex then has a better chance of reproducing. (There are well understood exceptions.) The part I have trouble with is why it would be in the parent's interest to have male children rather than females. You can see a progression in Azar Gat's collected data. With the exception of China, the female infanticide cultures are hunter gatherer and/or warlike. And the more extreme the environmental problems get the more skewed the ratio. As a guess, such peoples value male hunters or warriors in the clan more than females. Females you can always steal from other groups if you have enough warriors to carry out the task. With the Chinese, I guess it's because the culture expects males to support old parents while the females leave home. It's really worth reading this http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf because the Malthusian era existed right up to 1800. In that time there was a tight coupling between the number babies women had and how long the average person could expect to live. Infanticide, especially of female infants, reduced the effective number. In terms of number of descendants, snip In that era, the average woman had 2 surviving children plus or minus a tiny fraction. It's weird, but Clark shows that in that time disease *improved* how well off people were on average. snip It takes a certain mindset to do this kind of analysis, doesn't it? : ) Definitely. If you like the Clark paper, I highly recommend his book Farewell to Alms. Lots of stuff the chew over there, especially since the predictions are for most of the world to return to Malthusian times. Have you looked at how thin the grain reserves are? Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Polygamy
At 01:00 PM 2/4/2008, Alberto wrote: Keith Henson wrote: Considering that polygamy is the norm for the vast majority of the cultures in the world, it's an interesting question how the western countries, and a few others, became monogamous. It seems to be associated with settled agriculture but I don't know if there is a connection or why. I would guess that it's peace that doomed polygamy. There can't be polygamy unless there's more women than men, otherwise the men without women will revolt. This does not square with field anthropology. Polygamy is well known in cultures where female infanticide and distorted sex ratios are prevalent. Polygamy greatly exacerbated women's scarcity and direct and indirect male competition and conflict over them. Indeed, a cross-cultural study (Otterbein 1994: 103) has found polygamy to be one of the most distinctive correlates there is of feuding and internal warfare. Female infanticide was another factor contributing to women's scarcity and male competition. Although the number of male and female babies should be nearly equal at birth (105:100 in favour of the boys), a surveys of hundreds of different communities from over a hundred different cultures (of which about one fifth were hunter-gatherers) has shown that juvenile sex ratios averaged 127:100 in favour of the boys, with an even higher rate in some societies (Divale and Harris 1976). The Eskimos are known to have been one of the most extreme cases. They registered childhood sex ratios of 150:100 and even 200:100 in favour of the boys. No wonder then that the Eskimo experienced such a high homicide rate over women, even though polygamy barely existed among them. Among Australian Aboriginal tribes childhood ratios of 125:100 and even 138:100 in favour of the boys were recorded (Fison and Holt 1967 [1880]: 173, 176). Among the Orinoco and Amazonian basin hunters and horticulturalists childhood boy ratio to every 100 girls was recorded to be: Yanomamo 129 (140 for the first two years of life), Xavante 124, Peruvian Cashinahua 148 (Dickemann 1979: 363-4). In Fiji the figure was 133. In tribal Montenegro it was estimated at 160 (Boehm 1984: 177). Although the evidence is naturally weaker, similar ratios in favour of the males have been found among the skeletons of adult Middle and Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, indicating a similar practice of female infanticide that may go back hundreds of thousands of years (Divale 1972). Polygyny and female infanticide thus created women scarcity and increased men's competition for them. snip Page 14 http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf And in any case, all societies, including the western ones and Japan, were engaged in war long after the switch to monogamy. Sorry to shoot down your thoughts. Please try again because I would really like to understand it and am clean out of ideas. Keith ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Polygamy
At 01:00 PM 2/3/2008, William T Goodall wrote: snip It's interesting that the USA with its supposed religious freedom suppressed LDS polygamy and also doesn't recognise Islamic polygamy although men having (up to) four wives is a part of the religion of 1.61 billion Muslims. There is an interesting discussion about which sex benefits from monogamy in Robert Wright's _Moral Animal_. I can't find my copy at the moment, but as I remember his analysis said women were more likely to benefit where men differ a lot in quality. I.e., better a fraction of a top ranked man than all of a loser. Considering that polygamy is the norm for the vast majority of the cultures in the world, it's an interesting question how the western countries, and a few others, became monogamous. It seems to be associated with settled agriculture but I don't know if there is a connection or why. Keith Henson ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: David Brin on History Channel
At 01:00 PM 1/21/2008, David Brin wrote: Just a heads-up - Catch me on the History Channel's Life After People - January 21 at 9pm. A pretty cool show about how all our works may crumble, if we humans ever... well... vanish. I worked out a mechanism for this to happen. http://www.terasemjournals.org/GN0202/henson.html This is part of an unfinished longer story that describes a world carefully maintained by AIs that were designed from motivation up to *like* taking care of human works--especially historical ones. It isn't a very good story in the usual sense of such things, but if some of you want to read the chapters in draft that kind of drift through a post singularity world, ask for it. I would appreciate comment. 143kb Word file. Keith Henson ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Recent human selection
Being much influenced by the concepts of evolutionary psychology, I have tended to discount the idea of humans being much shaped by recent evolution. Exceptions have been accumulating, the taming of wild foxes in as few as 8 generations, and the acquisition of genes (a number of them!) for adult lactose tolerance in peoples with a dairy culture. Yes, you can get serious population average shifts if the selection pressure is high enough. Now Dr. Gregory Clark, in one of those huge efforts that lead to breakthroughs, has produced a study that makes a strong case for recent (last few hundred years) and massive changes in population average psychological traits. It leaves in place that a huge part of our psychological traits did indeed come out of the stone age, but adds to that recent and very strong selection pressures on the population of settled agriculture societies in the Malthusian trap. I came a bit late to this party, Dr. Clark's book _A Farewell to Alms_ peaked at 17 on Amazon's sales months ago. My copy has not come yet so I read this paper off his academic web site. http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Capitalism%20Genes.pdf Genetically Capitalist? The Malthusian Era, Institutions and the Formation of Modern Preferences. There is lots of other material here: http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/research.html but this paper is just stunning because of how much light it shines on a long list of mysteries. Such as: Why did the modern world grow out of a small part of Europe and why did it take so long? Why are the Chinese doing so well compared to say Africa? The upshot of his research was that in the Mathusian era in England people with the personality characteristics to become well off economically had at least twice as many surviving children as those in the lower economic classes--who were not replacing themselves. This, of course, led to downward social mobility, where the numerous sons and daughters of the rich tended to be less well off (on average) than their parents. But over 20 generations (1200-1800) it did spread the genes for the personality characteristics for accumulating wealth through the entire population. In the institutional and technological context of these societies, a new set of human attributes mattered for the only currency that mattered in the Malthusian era, which was reproductive success. In this world literacy and numeracy, which were irrelevant before, were both helpful for economic success in agrarian pre-industrial economies. Thus since economic success was linked to reproductive success, facility with numbers and wordswas pulled along in its wake. Since patience and hard work found a new reward in a society with large amounts of capital, patience and hard work were also favored. Fascinating work, memes that slot right in to the rest of my understanding of the world and the people in it. I very strongly recommend reading this paper at least. Keith Henson ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
EP/Meme/War model was Correlation v. causality
At 01:00 PM 12/5/2007, Nick Arnett wrote: On Dec 4, 2007 3:10 PM, hkhenson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 01:00 PM 12/4/2007, Nick Arnett wrote: snip You've set an impossibly high burden of proof by claiming that religion causes evil. You'll never prove it. I don't think that's the proper model. My argument there is really about the squishiness of psychology and sociology. The *claim* made by EP figures such as Buss, Cosmides, Tooby and company is that EP provides a way to link these sciences into the rest of science. Evolutionary psychology states that *every* human psychological trait is either the result of direct selection or a side effect of direct selection. (With a bit of possibility of something being fixed due to random genetic drift.) This is arguing from a conclusion. The conclusion is that everything that exists in living organisms arose via evolution, therefore everything has an evolutionary explanation. I'll certainly allow that it *may* be true, but it certainly isn't proved -- our understanding of evolution is far from complete. We can only work with the best explanations we have now. For the moment evolution or as it was known, natural selection, is the best unifying explanation for all of biology we have. Furthermore, I think pure Darwinian explanations are generally wrong. Everything doesn't arise from competition and we have mathematics (complexity) that demonstrates that, or at least very strongly suggests that Darwinian models are substantially incomplete. Until Hamilton came up with the concept of inclusive fitness, there was a big hole in Darwinian theory that even Darwin was aware of. But I am not aware of any other holes. (Nothing in this is an argument for or against God; like the majority of people, I don't think religion has anything much to say about evolution.) I agree with the last point. Evolution, however, may have a *great deal* to say about religion. I think we can agree that the psychological mechanisms behind religion are a species wide psychological trait. It's known from twin studies to be at least as heritable as other personality traits. That's interesting and certainly speaks to causes. You have a choice of directly selected (like the psychological mechanism behind Stockholm syndrome) or a side effect like drug addiction. (In the EEA being wiped out on plant sap was a formula for experiencing the intestines of a predator from the inside.) I favor direct selection via a primary mortality mode in the EEA, wars between groups of humans. Here is the background: http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf I have gone a little further than Dr. Gat and propose that the psychological mechanism leading to wars starts with a population average bleak outlook. Under circumstances where parents can see they won't be able to feed the kids through the next dry season, it makes genetic sense for an evolved behavioral switch to flip. So the future looks bleak enough, it is cost effective from the gene's viewpoint for a group of related males to go to war and take the high risk of dying. Hmmm. Are you suggesting that this mechanism directly explains, for example, our invasion and occupation of Iraq? Yes. I go into it in some detail in Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War. War mode which a population can get into either by a long buildup of xenophobic memes in response to a bleak future *or* by being attacked inhibits rational thinking. The reason is that when people get into war mode there is a divergences in interests between the individual and his/her genes. I can't explain this unless you are up on inclusive fitness and the human EEA, in which case it is fairly obvious. Or is war simply a leftover from a time of scarcer resources? Have you looked at the price of gasoline lately? You ask: How do religions fit in here? What are religions? They are memes of course, Ouch. Though I love the concept of a meme, it is at best vaguely defined. Clever, but not obviously useful, at least to me. So it's very little help to me to postulate that religions are memes. Memes are elements of culture, replicating information patterns and dozens of other equal ways to define them. They are at the root information and could be measured in bits if you want. but in particular religions are *xenophobic* memes. When times are good they are relatively inactive seed xenophobic memes. What we see today as religions are the result of evolved psychological mechanisms that induce groups to go to war as needed by conditions. By this model religions don't _cause_ wars. How does this explain non-warring religions? How could they have anything meaningful left over? You can show me a very few religions that were not involved with war. My response would be to say wait and that distinction will go away. If you consider killing people evil or at least
Re: Correlation v. causality
At 01:00 PM 12/4/2007, Nick Arnett wrote: snip You've set an impossibly high burden of proof by claiming that religion causes evil. You'll never prove it. I don't think that's the proper model. Evolutionary psychology states that *every* human psychological trait is either the result of direct selection or a side effect of direct selection. (With a bit of possibility of something being fixed due to random genetic drift.) I think we can agree that the psychological mechanisms behind religion are a species wide psychological trait. It's known from twin studies to be at least as heritable as other personality traits. You have a choice of directly selected (like the psychological mechanism behind Stockholm syndrome) or a side effect like drug addiction. (In the EEA being wiped out on plant sap was a formula for experiencing the intestines of a predator from the inside.) I favor direct selection via a primary mortality mode in the EEA, wars between groups of humans. Here is the background: http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf I have gone a little further than Dr. Gat and propose that the psychological mechanism leading to wars starts with a population average bleak outlook. Under circumstances where parents can see they won't be able to feed the kids through the next dry season, it makes genetic sense for an evolved behavioral switch to flip. So the future looks bleak enough, it is cost effective from the gene's viewpoint for a group of related males to go to war and take the high risk of dying. Of course genes want the tribe to go to war as a *group* because coordinated attacks on neighbors are a lot more likely to succeed. Even chimps agree on this point (see Goodall). I have proposed that the mechanism works thus: Detection of bad times a-coming turns up the gain on the circulation of xenophobic memes. The memes synch the tribe's warriors to make do or die attacks on neighbors, which (in the EEA) almost always solved the problem of a bad ratio of mouths to food. You ask: How do religions fit in here? What are religions? They are memes of course, but in particular religions are *xenophobic* memes. When times are good they are relatively inactive seed xenophobic memes. What we see today as religions are the result of evolved psychological mechanisms that induce groups to go to war as needed by conditions. By this model religions don't _cause_ wars. It's easy to see how religions and wars or other social disruptions are associated with religions because some meme (often a religion class meme) will be amplified up to serve as a synchronizing reason to go to war. Evil is a difficult concept in this model. Humans became the top predator a *long* time ago. So if conditions are such that a population anticipates a kill or starve situation, humans have to be their own predator. Do we consider lions killing zebras evil. If you consider killing people evil or at least undesirable, and want to get back to a cause, it's population growth in excess of economic growth. Malthus with method if you like. Religions are just xenophobic memes. When people feel the need to thin out the overpopulation, some meme (including memes like communism) will gain enough influence over enough people to serve as a reason for a war. Since they bear the children, you can blame women for wars. grin Of course you also have to give them credit for peace. In this model the low birth rate is the reason Western Europe has been so peaceful since WW II. If you wonder about the recent Sudan and the school teacher incident or the Danish cartoons a few years ago, it because population growth has generated a bleak future for these people. That turned up the gain on xenophobic religious memes. A substantial fraction of the population is now primed for war or related social disruptions. It wouldn't help if there were no religious memes circulating beforehand because some warrior synchronizing meme would be amplified out of the noise. That doesn't mean you're wrong, but it means you're acting on faith in your intuitions and experience, not reason. Meanwhile, it's BORING to hear the same thing over and over. Do you really imagine that one day, anybody will be enlightened by your repetition? In hopes of going somewhere more interesting with this topic, let me offer this challenge -- can you (or anybody else who can stomach the subject) come up with external causalities when religion and evil co-occur? If we're going to argue about whether or not faith is anti-scientific, how about if we do so in a reasonably logical manner? It only seems fitting. Is this model logical enough for you? Keith Henson ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Pointer to a Keith Henson story
If you go here http://www.kuro5hin.org/ (You may have to sign up, but it's free to read, and only $5.00 for lifetime posting rights.) and click on Moderate Submissions on the right side, there is a story I wrote while really pissed off in jail. My work isn't very popular on that place, so if you want to read it, better do it before it gets voted down. Keith Henson PS. There is another thing I wrote on the singularity unfolding that's here: http://www.terasemjournals.org/GN0202/henson.html Before I put gave it to this web site, several editors told me it was unpublishable, two of them saying it didn't have enough violence. Great Ghod, the story has the entire population of Africa being wiped out! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
