Thank You in advance, Good sir, for the lengthy response essay 😉 looks like I need to respond in kind and type up a 13,200 word response essay to address your 10,000+ worder here.
In the meantime (before I compose it), I will keep this comment up and start a thread of comments below it to make some observations and running commentary regarding a lot of your preliminary points in this essay.
Think of it as me ‘thinking out loud’ 😊
Anyhow, this has been bookmarked and I will be going through it multiple times… so give it sometime and expect some feedback in a bit 😘
32.5 Trillion cubic feet is about 920 Cubic Kilometres. (Source: Conversions)
In 2021, Gas Consumption was about 977 Cubic kilometres per Annum.
17,710 Cubic kilometres is what America's Proven Reserves are.
This is back from late 2022. Let's use these numbers (I know things like Gas reserves bump up a bit every now & then, but this should suffice to make the point):
This is around 625.423 Trillion cubic feet... so just over 18 years of Production Reserve... & these numbers are from early 2021, using 2021 conversion numbers, so subtract 4 & we get... a bit over 14 years of Production Reserve.
Now, The 32.5 Trillion will probably jiggle up & down a bit in that range (i.e. 31 to 35), so for all intents & purposes, we are looking at a bit over a decade & a half. I will attach the EIA charts below (which indicate this stagnation since around 2018)...
But there aren't 'loads of Natural Gas left in the US.'
Addendum: I did another check, and the Reserves have increased to around 691 Trillion Cubic Feet since 2021. That may buy another 2+ years or so... but that's it.
Moral of the Story: 32.5 Trillion Cubic Feet per annum is not a sustainable consumption level. It needs to be decreased (preferably via individual choices); otherwise, people will run short of the cheap, affordable stuff. (Recall: Not everything has to run out; you only need higher-quality, affordable stuff 'on top' to go away for things to go bad.)
Proven reserves are what we know for sure ‘are out there.’ The 4 quadrillion number meanwhile has yet to be Geologically surveyed. It’s similar to the additional 3.5 billion metric tonnes for copper number which people say has ‘yet to be found.’ ‘Yet to be found,’ is not a good foundation for taking care of resources prudently.
“Ahnaf… if the money is not in your bank account, it’s not yours… it’s fantasy & make believe.”
I view this the exact same way. Until geological surveys are done and we get verification that yes, this larger 4 quadrillion cubic feet is “in the bank,” ready to be used, it’s fantasy.
And this is before we factor in outages and shortages of metals, oil, etc which will act as Asymptotes in a few decades… courtesy of which the 691 trillion number I noted earlier, may shrink (as opposed to grow).
>> The world may be running out of energy, but the United States is not. <<
The issue is not ‘running out’. The issue is Margin. We do not get to choose (say) at what speed, scale & scope oil can be dug out, gas can be retrieved, etc.
Here’s what I mean by that. If An Apple is at the top of a Barrel, you simply have to reach out with your hand… & there it is. If it’s at the bottom, you need to bend down and grab it.
The trouble is that the cheap, quality sources of Oil, Coal, & Gas have run out.
For Oil in particular:
Alaskan Oil peaked ages ago, and so did conventional Oil in the 48 states making up the Continental USA. What is responsible for all increases in American Oil is Shale (which is unconventional and directly from the Source Rock that birthed all the other Oil... so there is nothing left after it) and some Offshore capability.
Art Berman, John Peach, and others expect Shale and this remaining offshore stuff to peak as well later this decade to early next decade. The other stuff (conventional Oil) peaked a while ago. And because Oil is the Master Resource that makes transport and logistics possible… you will not have the margin for grabbing coal, gas, etc. and moving it around. This is not in the ‘far future’. This is later this decade to early next decade.
In fact, even Exxon Mobil, in their Outlook for 2050… has admitted that Current Wells are depleting at 15% per annum (far worse than the 8% estimate people gave a while ago).
Just to underscore how nutty that number is... a 15% per annum decay for 6 consecutive years... gets you to All Existing Oilfields & projects declining by over 60%.
Exxon Mobil (in their Global Outlook) emphasize this point in particular, whereby 'No New Investment' (Hint: This is a Euphemism for Global War) will see Global Production drop down from over 100 million bbl/day for 'all sorts of Oils & substitutes of Oil'... to just around 30 million bbl/day. If you wanna know what that number means, it means the deaths (via war, famine, etc., before the Nukes go off) of 100+ million people worldwide.
As price goes up, alternative fuels and conservation measures become economical. I'm all for excise taxes on fossil fuels so that we move towards the alternatives before we need to.
Prices simply make human beings focus on other things. It will not magically make (say) solar panels more efficient in capturing additional TWh from the sun. What pricing does is it makes Demography (‘more human bodies’ if you will) change their attention from one thing to another. It won’t change the availability of things in the crust. Technology is like a straw… you can make it wider and more efficient, but the milkshake is a finite amount.
22% at fifteen cents per Watt is good enough. Not good enough for me to get off the grid, but definitely viable where fossil fuels are reliably more expensive. RIGHT NOW.
Back when I was in high school 14% efficient solar cells were super expensive. Putting them in orbit and beaming down the energy with microwaves looked like the way to go.
For going off grid, we still need cheap, safe batteries. Such batteries do not have to be lightweight, however. Prussian blue sodium ion batteries are already on the market for use in data centers. Researchers around the world are madly working on other alternatives.
And the cool thing is that emergency government funding of such research is not necessary. Better batteries are very useful for reasons which have nothing to do with global warming or running out of fossil fuels. Good batteries are great to have during power outages. I REALLY would like to have a UPS which would give me a few hours of lighting in the event of a storm blowing down a power line. Bass fishermen use electric boat motors to avoid scaring off fish. Battery powered power tools rock. While the thought of spending hours to charge my car makes me hate electric cars, I'd definitely go with electric lawnmowers and leaf blowers if the price wasn't astronomical.
Solar is basically alive for 3-4 months of the year (rest of the time it is dormant). It is intermittent and does not run at those numbers you cite for most of the year.
Yes, you can deploy them out in the desert and elsewhere and get those nice numbers for more often and longer… but that’s not good enough when compared to (say) a coal powered plant that runs 92% of the whole year at near peak efficiency. The gap is massive once we factor in the intermittency and variability of solar.
And all of this is before we consider the buffers for mass solar deployment, which (as Dr Simon shows in the GTK paper) requires millions of metric tonnes of metals that do not exist on 🌍
As I wrote in the article, I consider solar cells in Germany to be a rather silly project. Stick them down in the tropics where you have year around light and be willing to waste half or more of the energy in order to convert it into a storeable fuel, such as methanol. The numbers I used for area to cover are for using solar that's mostly away from population centers and not connected to reliable grids. (For refining aluminum, copper, and magnesium, cheap intermittent electricity is better than "clean" grid energy. Ditto for mining bitcoins.)
>> Those who are freaking out over global warming -- including Ahnaf's main source, Dr. Simon P. Michaux -- are trying to replace fossil fuels long before they run out. <<
The timeline for Dr Simon is the next 3+ decades or so.
In that timeframe, per the UN & other international bodies… the World Population will hit 9.8+ billion, & Global Electricity Demand will be just under 90,000 TWh due to population increases & social mobility. Dr Simon shows that to go from today’s 30,000 TWh to under 90,000 TWh in just under 3 decades… is impossible.
Hence, because ‘the plan’ sucks, A New plan ought to be drawn up going forward. & this one involves *lowering* energy consumption at the individual level of Human Choices & whatnot. That's basically what his GTK paper argues for at the very end.
Keep in mind that partial success extends the timeline. (Which is why I like carbon taxes.) If we linearly deploy alternatives, then if we cut fossil fuel consumption in half by the time of projected running out, we have that time again to finish the job. (Visualize a triangle.)
In the real world, deployment of alternatives will accelerate over time for two reasons: 1. Improvements in the tech. 2. Higher prices for the fossil fuels.
If we can get to the point of decent pilot plants before the fertilizer hits the fan, all is good.
Fossil fuels make up nearly 80% of current consumption of electricity…. So a cut of half (given the 30,000 TWh electricity number) means 12,000 TWh gets cut. That’s basically 40% of present day electricity usage. You’re not building that much stuff (in terms of wind, solar, nuclear, etc) in 2-3 decades; it’s logistically impossible.
CDs replaced vinyl records in less than a decade. Once digital photography became better than film, the transition happened rather rapidly.
When people are motivated, change can happen rapidly. Look at what happened in China.
We could replace all our coal fired nuclear plants with nuclear in a couple of decades if motivated. We currently are not motivated because fossil fuels remain cheap.
Innovation will certainly happen. But there are limits. When I say logistically impossible, I’m talking about what 12,000 TWh physically looks like. As in the sheer mass needed.
Human Civilization (from past to present) is 1.1 trillion tonnes. That’s it. Here’s what 12,000 TWh will involve (feel free to estimate the sheer mass and volume of such a thing):
Equivalents for 12,000 TWh of Electricity:
1. Solar: ~6.86 million MW (6,860 GW) or ~23 billion solar panels.
2. Wind: ~4 million MW (4,000 GW) or ~1.3 million large (3 MW) turbines.
3. Coal: ~2.29 million MW (2,290 GW) or ~3.6 billion tons of coal per year.
4. Oil: ~2.74 million MW (2,740 GW) or ~2.1 billion barrels of oil per year.
5. Natural Gas: ~1.95 million MW (1,950 GW) or ~1.6 trillion cubic meters of gas per year.
6. Nuclear: ~1.52 million MW (1,520 GW) or ~1,520 large reactors (1 GW each).
7. Geothermal: ~1.61 million MW (1,610 GW).
8. Biofuels: ~2.29 million MW (2,290 GW) or ~10.8 billion tons of biomass per year.
Mass production happens. Consider how many houses are built every year.
Look up how many coal fired power plants China creates per year to get a sense of scale.
We have eight billion people on the planet. To build 2000 nuclear power plants, you need a population of 4 million people to support each power plant.
Some populations are more productive than others. I don't expect the Bushmen of the Kalahari to contribute to making nuclear reactors. But there are other populations which could produce more nuclear engineers and workers.
And if we are taking 20 years to make the transition...
I'm a bit more optimistic. Some of these ideas nearly happened. Storing hydrogen in depleted gas wells has been tried. George W. Bush did propose a hydrogen economy. I think Iceland sells some of their geothermal energy as methanol and I recall an Australian experiment to do solar to methanol.
Hydrogen leaks everywhere. Once you try to Store it (at scale), it doesn't work since the Giant reservoirs have very poor retention rates. Hydrogen is not an Energy Source; it's an Energy Carrier. And if you can't carry it at Scale... well, that is a Moot point, is it not?
Exxon and others have looked at these proposals. It’s a cute science project, but it does nowhere near enough to stall the 15%+ rates at which existing fields are presently decaying per annum.
Dr Simon has shown in the GTK paper that Hydrogen retention is variable (the 80% is not a surefire thing in many cases), and meanwhile you’re talking about a lot more mass and whatnot compared to conventional systems which store something normal like Ammonia.
You cannot outrun chemistry and physics. NH3 (ammonia) is heavier than H2 (hydrogen) and is thus less diffusive… you’re not gonna be getting the latter to leak less and be more efficient than the former.
Certainly ammonia compressed into a liquid is compact compared to hydrogen. As a gas, it's not that big a difference. According to Wikipedia, hydrogen's enthalpy of combustion is -286 kJ/mol, ammonia is -382 kJ/mol, Methane, on the other hand is -891 kJ/mol, so yes, hydrogen is roughly three times as bulky as methane.
Very extensive essay! Couple of small points in response:
1. you might enjoy this short youtube about a man who built his own particle collider to make a special type of electrolyte with which to electrolyze water from solar power which hydrogen is put into pressurized tank in his corvette. It all works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytg23mDd1a4
2. The Japanese are doing green hydrogen stuff involving nuclear station > electrolysis > hydrogen. Existing combustion engine automobiles can be easily converted to run on hydrogen. I suspect pressurized tanks are better then extensive pipes, at least for cars, but that's all over my head.
Decades ago a friend of mine tried to get in the business of promoting Japanese incinerators to North American municipalities. He got nowhere but I watched his 30 minute promotional video and was convinced: they can burn 99.99% of anything, including toxic metals, turning it into harmless ash. Basically it boils down to efficiency. Yes, they are more expensive to build but the bottom line is that rather than inefficient recycling and huge landfills etc. just burn everything up. Presumably they have good industrial controls to reduce pollution, but between that and incineration they have a clean country - barring occasional nuclear station melt-downs!
The Japanese run a very crowded uber-modern society and are a deeply intelligent people. I trust them to figure out the energy problem just as they figured out the pollution problem with incinerators. And the Chinese are going over all this stuff too and no doubt soon will settle on an excellent way forward. The West is so caught up with red tape that innovation is no longer in our wheelhouse generally, but maybe DOGE is about to change that. Actually, that single initiative has the potential to revolutionize the entire West, so am greatly looking forward to see how 2025 goes.
Anyway. I enjoyed your treatment of the various issues. Thanks.
Lithium hydride storage was featured in Popular Science articles back when I was in high school. I don't recall them mentioning needing to transmute the lithium to lithium 6. But the prototypes they had back then had bigger tanks if memory serves.
Hydrogen to lithium hydride to fuel cells is not as efficient as batteries. Might be lighter, however, since you aren't hauling around your oxidizer. Needing overnight to fill you tank is a major inconvenience. And also: the system requires quite a bit of lithium.
Well, I thought it pretty cool this chap built a particle accelerator in his backyard to make a material that was prohibited by sale for Defence reasons but was perfectly legal (if too difficult for most) to make.
Electrolysis is the way, I suspect. But water falls from the sky and comes up from the earth so hard to monopolize. Won't stop them trying, though. The Japanese approach is centralized in that it depends on a large power station. They say they could run the entire nation on a handful of these stations.
Yes, the backyard particle accelerator thing was truly wild. I wonder if he was simply messing with the interviewer's head, or if bombarding the lithium with high speed particles served the purpose of creating nanoscale tunnels in the lithium to make it like a sponge.
I don't see how transmutation to a lighter isotope would have that much effect. And if he needed to transmute a large fraction of his lithium, the amount of energy would be significant. Thinking of a particle beam as a current, we need about 100,000 Coulombs for each mole of lithium, and a particle energy on the order of tens of thousands of volts if memory serves. At a super optimistic 10 kilovolts and 100% efficiency, that's a billion Joules per 7 grams of input lithium or about 300 kilowatt hours.
Transmutation using particle beams is not an efficient process. Otherwise, we'd have transmutation based power plants.
I watched it years ago, but I think there was an article too and if I recall correctly he worked for the USG in nuclear physics. In your post though you mentioned a 98% efficient electrolyte which seems pretty decent.
I suspect 90% of the energy issues are not so much about efficiency etc. as control/monopoly capitalism. For example water is a lousy fuel because any old fool can gather it from his gutters and store enough fuel for a year in a one hundred gallon drum. So impossible to control. So it is verboten. But that is going back to the substance-technology angle again.
What we really need is uncorrupted polities. Something that throughout human history is very, very rare. Meanwhile, we will make do with crappy energy systems, though to be fair I think what we have now is working very well at a reasonable cost and people perhaps protest too much. I am not convinced about your figures about when the oil runs out. Need more drilled-down info on the Russian deep wells (abiotic theory). Some say we have enough for a few centuries accessing that way, plus the abiotic generation of oil makes it a renewable. Has something to do with deep pressures within the earth which change substances from one thing to another in the periodic table. Plus they have found hydrocarbons in space where presumably no dinosaurs roamed. And just like with Darwin's theory, nobody has found intermediates (rotting stuff that is halfway to oil).
So back we go again to politics - or rather whatever underlies societal ethos, which is bedrock values transmitted multi-generationally. We need sanity in our societies. With sanity and decency all problems will be easily solved. Without, everything will always be corrupted. So corruption is by far and away the biggest problem. It comes from vice. The antidote to vice is virtue. Some things never change.
We also write symphonies, develop incredibly advanced technology and spend million - I repeat, millions - of dollars to save the life of one prematurely born child, even going so far as to operate on them in the womb to save them. We develop incredibly sophisticated systems of mathematics, the Ruling Queen of the Sciences - to develop abstract formulations that, in time, allow us greater understanding, and manipulation, of the material world, and, in time, the Multiverse.
We are the only animal that looks up. We do so all of the time, and at night, a universe, hidden by the Light of Day, is revealed to us.
And, we intuitively WANT to understand it, and become a more significant part of it.
The lowest organisms are all undifferentiated. You've see one paramecium, you've seen them all. With evolution, you get differentiation, and, in time, specialization. You see one Human Being, you are just getting started.
Countless virtually small quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes, and in time, Civilization. Remember, the first steps a child makes are away from his parents. Away from his parents, and, in time, to the Stars.
Just a matter of Time, really.
Time, Discipline, and Focus, Focus, Focus.
I finished reading "The History Of Science And Civilization In China" by Dunphy (the two volume abridged version). Imagine our shock to discover, on the other side of the world (Mars, for all practical purposes in that place and time) an advanced, totally alien Civilization, that accomplished all of that, it's advance only halted, temporarily, by Genghis Khan.
What must be Out There, waiting for the Children to leave their Cradle?
THIS is a masterful summary of what we could become:
And, to "quote" Colonel Quaritch's fictitious, but excellent AI speech to the Nav'i,
"... You will remain in your trees, hunting your prey, communing with your goddess, until your sun burns out, and and your world dies. And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us."
THAT picture makes a wonderful desktop picture for Windows, by the way.
Mars, at its best, is just a way station, the second step from the Cradle.
And, if we have to live in Greer's Retropolis while we sort out our economies, that's a very small, and pleasant, price to pay, indeed.
(Parenthetically, those problems are also being solved. Tree Of Woe's excellent reformulation of the Principles of the Physiocratic Society are a masterful place to start.)
Let me be gracious, and constructively critical, of your formulations.
You see the (undifferentiated) rocks and stones, all part of the Soil, if you will..
I see the Cathedral of Civilization waiting to be built, building on, and using, rocks, stones, and the Arch, the Prime Symbol of the Aenean Civilization.
Good article, but you might want to look into fast chloride salt reactors. No Na, and all the advantages of FilBe but in a fast spectrum. (so running a U238->Pu239 breeding cycle)
Very interesting! Not as detailed as Kirk Sorenson's descriptions of thorium reactors so a few head scratchers. Am I correct in assuming that the plutonium is burned in place without the need of a separation/refinement stage?
I seem to recall they developed a hydroelectric dam a DAY over the last twenty years or so.
I also seem to recall that someone in the Leadership has advanced education in hydropower generation and distribution from Tsinghua, their version of MIT.
They seem to know what they are doing, and why they are doing it.
An excellent if rather long post. I agree with just about everything, but only a few quibbles:
If methanol becomes a commodity, it will quickly be discovered that methanol made from natural gas is cheaper than methanol produced through electrolysis, unless the electrochemical cell efficiency is closer 100%. I haven't heard about this capillary electrode technology, but a link would be helpful. Still, even moving to fossil methane (excuse me, "geological" methane) would stimulate the development of methanol infrastructure, which would be in place when solar or nuclear methanol became competitive.
Nuclear fusion technologies would be best used synergisticly. Current reactors using enriched Uranium are themselves breeders for LFTR systems. We already have plenty of cooling tanks at nuclear power plants filled with spent fuel rods. All it takes is a sufficient addition of a neutron emitter like P239 to jump start the T232 to U233 reaction. No U233 breeders are necessary. It only takes a small number of operating Light Water Reactors to produce the necessary "nuclear waste" to enrich the thorium fuel.
The original LFTR was built at Oak Ridge in 1954 to power aircraft (Maybe they wanted a bomber that could circle the globe for a year?). The reactor worked quite well, and the research team would shut it down at the end of the day by switching off the power. One reason the technology was not developed for power production is that it DID NOT produce a suitable weapons grade bomb material (U233 is touchy stuff). Uncle Sammy in the 1950s had bomb fettish. That we cannot reproduce and improve on this technology and put it into production is baffling. I believe floride salt corrosion might be one of the problems.
I tossed most of my debate notecards many years ago but kept a small stack as a memento. When I last looked at the stack, the top card was a quote from the Union of Concerned Scientists about the proliferation problems with thorium breeders.
Agree on the nuclear waste. Jimmy Carter put an end to fuel rod reprocessing out of proliferation fears. Plutonium is chemically different from Uranium so it's much easier to concentrate than sorting Uranium isotopes.
I did a web search trying to find a recent source on the corrosion problem. I couldn't find anything. What I found on the Flibe Energy site was work on materials accounting so no one runs off with fissionable materials. The government still is worried about the proliferation aspect.
Thank you. I forgot mention, high-tension power cabless are made with a steel core for tensile strength, and wrapped with aluminum cable conduction. It makes sense because 1) it has a higher conductivity per unit mass and 2) it's much less 3xp3nsive than copper.
Yes, it's "Interesting Engineering", which is a modern incarnation of what Popular Science was for years: techno hopium. But the idea here is potentially huge: recovering the hydrogen given off from an inefficient battery and using it. The groups cited is using Edison's nickel-iron battery, which has a long history of being robust, but not energy dense enough for electric cars to compete against gasoline powered cars.
But with this idea established a whole host of other battery chemistries are opened up. An aqueous battery with too high a cell voltage breaks down the water as it charges. Inefficient and potentially dangerous. But if you are set up to use the hydrogen and oxygen...
2.39 Quintillion Tonnes... This is then comprised of the following:
1. Carbonaceous (C-type) Asteroids
These asteroids are rich in carbon compounds and water-bearing minerals, representing a significant portion of the asteroid belt (about 75% of the asteroids).
• Carbon (C) – ~20% to 30%
• Oxygen (O) – ~15% to 20%
• Silicon (Si) – ~10% to 15%
• Iron (Fe) – ~5% to 10%
• Magnesium (Mg) – ~5%
• Nickel (Ni) – ~1% to 5%
• Hydrogen (H) – ~3% to 5%
2. Silicaceous (S-type) Asteroids
These asteroids are more rocky and are composed of silicate minerals, particularly silicates of iron and magnesium. They account for about 17% of asteroids.
• Oxygen (O) – ~40% to 50%
• Silicon (Si) – ~25% to 35%
• Iron (Fe) – ~10% to 15%
• Magnesium (Mg) – ~5% to 10%
• Nickel (Ni) – ~2% to 5%
3. Metallic (M-type) Asteroids
These are primarily composed of metallic elements, including significant amounts of iron and nickel, and account for a smaller fraction of the asteroid belt.
• Iron (Fe) – ~80% to 90%
• Nickel (Ni) – ~5% to 10%
• Cobalt (Co) – ~1% to 5%
General Composition of the Entire Asteroid Belt (Average)
Taking into account the proportions of C-type, S-type, and M-type asteroids, the average composition of the asteroid belt might look like this:
• Oxygen (O) – ~20%
• Silicon (Si) – ~18%
• Iron (Fe) – ~15%
• Carbon (C) – ~10%
• Magnesium (Mg) – ~8%
• Nickel (Ni) – ~5%
• Hydrogen (H) – ~3%
• Calcium (Ca) – ~2%
• Other elements (including cobalt, sulfur, potassium) – ~10%
Basically (to keep it very simple):
It's far more profitable to Dig up stuff Down Here on Earth. There's more Stuff (& Mass) in the Crust & Seafloor, and what is 'up there' is not (by Mass & Volume) sufficient to continue the Mass Consumptive Habits of Mankind... even if we waved a Magic Wand & teleported all 2.39 Quintillion Tonnes of the Asteroid Belt onto the Surface of the Earth.
A single cubic mile metallic asteroid would be a stupendous amount of useful metals.
Asteroids can be prospected in parallel with robot probes. With reusable Saturn V level boosters coming online within a few years, we can send out hundreds, or even thousands of such probes. And the vultures of Wall St. will fund such missions if we have a legal claim system in place.
Such an asteroid would be one in a million or even rarer. Energy, money, etc must be paid upfront (for research, development, etc) and deployment…
You then have to get there, grab the stuff and come back… after which the stuff competes with markets down here for price, EROI and other metrics. The math doesn’t work.
We have metallic asteroids hitting Earth all the time. And astronomers have already identified asteroids which are far denser than nickel-iron meteorites. Indeed, there's at least one asteroid which is denser than anything on the periodic chart -- if calculations are correct.
The asteroid belt is not the same thing as the breakup of Earth's crust. It like the breakup of a complete planet.
Finding mass sources of light elements like nitrogen to make atmosphere is more challenging. You have to go out to where such volatiles freeze such as the rings of Saturn.
The asteroids will burn up significantly during descent.
If the plan meanwhile is to mine them after bringing them closer and into LEO, the margins for EROI and cost don’t exist either.
As for mining the stuff “at location” (so several million km away), you need to now factor in even more costs and even weaker EROI numbers.
…. And again, you’re now (after getting back the stuff down) competing with people who simply dug the earth’s crust.
Also (something to remember) : metals have variable prices. Increasing their supply down here means price drops and related effects … which may also eat into the margins of miners.
When you're 55, tell me how great it will be to work to 65. Do the same at 65 for 75. And at 75 for 85. The 'workers' you talk about working into (very) later years are craftspersons, not your average industrial drudge.
Your enthusiasm for the masses working in the fields at dawn is no doubt a result of you doing so yourself.
As for going to space *and staying there*, I seem to recall that life on planet earth depends on gravity to work properly. How much ersatz gravity can you create in space? Or even Mars? Enough for a 100 people? A thousand? Ten thousand?
What's the largest continuous centrifugal gravity facility currently in existence? How many people does it hold? What are *its* energy requirements to maintain spin?
Seniors and the Elderly are Great to have as Advisors and patriarchs, but they are not the ones who can Toil and work in the Fields (and beyond) to maintain society.
Most of the world's industrial nations (I expect Europe to do this first after their 'Remigration' silliness fails) will soon be engaging in Mandatory Euthanasia to make their societies more 'efficient' ... that's the endgame for their vapid, Evil, materialist ideology.
There will not be any of The Elderly 'innovating,' engaged in brutal labour-intensive work, etc., because *they don't have the Muscle & Physical & Mental Acumen for it.*
Mandatory Euthanasia is a fantasy. There's two factors that make it self-limiting. The first is that making anything 'mandatory' is not how liberalism works. The goal is voluntary euthanasia (or at least the semblance of it). The second is that the consumer market for voluntary euthanasia is likely to be very limited.
The Elderly aren't needed for 'innovation' or 'brute force labor'. Wiping out the elderly has a very good chance of inducing a chain reaction with the 'near-Elderly' and the 'near-near-Elderly' and the 'near-near-near-Elderly' all resisting the Soylent future.
Anyone who knows anything about how real privilege works will know that the ruling class will always be except from any 'duty' that is actually onerous.
I don't think there's anything more vapid that people *who assume a policy will not apply to them* arguing for a policy.
You can convince yourself and your adjacents of anything, but if you want the outcome you're seeking, you're going to need to convince more than each other.
Liberalism ended a while ago. Today’s western societies are de facto managerial regimes who have no problem with mass carnage, if it means trying to secure their positions of power.
I agree with you that there are self-limiting aspects to madness known as mandatory euthanasia… but just because something is nutty doesn’t mean that these people won’t pursue it (many such cases exist in human history, especially from the far past to recent history). They will delude themselves to think “it won’t apply to us, because we are special!”… and then one fine day , they too are cut down by the warlord and warband men 😉
I'm in my early 60s and am both job hunting and looking for funding for a startup. One of my summer jobs in high school was doing construction work with a couple of men in their 60s.
I agree that there are jobs which are not suited to continuing late in life. There are lower intensity jobs out there which don't pay as much -- because they are lower intensity. The last time I moved I overheard a couple of the movers chatting about retiring from moving furniture to bagging groceries and ogling the teenage checkout girls. What I proposed above is that people who delay taking Social Security through such options should get a higher payment when they do truly retire -- even if their contributions during the slow down phase is negligible.
I agree that the Moon's gravity is too low for residing permanently -- though it might be better than living on earth for those too weak to talk in Earth's gravity. I don't know what would happen to someone born on Mars.
You cannot make social policy based upon anecdote. I’m in my mid-60s and cannot think of a single job I would want to do. Every ‘senior’ in a job is taking away an entry-level job from a younger. Putting everybody to work at something sounds great until you actually go looking at what happens when the system is flooded with labor: wages go down, jobs get crappier.
How much crappier does life need to be for workers before the Tech-Right is happy with the misery-level of everyone not in the uberclass?
The ordinary person doesn’t care about ‘space’ and even resists space exploration because there’s nothing in it for them.
I grew up on science fiction, but I stopped mistaking science fiction plots for good social policy a long time ago.
Based upon the arguments that people have made associated with the ‘Aenean Age’, it’s just more of the same talk that I heard in the 70s. It’s all top down, ‘everybody needs to pitch in but only some people will benefit’ Paul Erlich neo-communism. You guys are like Pol Pot with space-ships.
First imagine how you can get the ordinary person to enjoy pitching in to ‘conserve resources’ because it benefits them in some way. If not materially, they emotionally or communally or spiritually. Then build a policy program around that.
If the idea is that we have to get off the planet for some elite humanity to survive, then it’s that elite humanity’s problem to achieve it. Not anyone else’s.
I don’t see any difference between elite capital space communism and the good old fashioned ‘kill the peasants’ communism of the good old day.
You’ve already decided everyone else is expendable. You’re just trying to figure out how to get ordinary folks not to fight you too hard as you push them into the killing fields.
> You cannot make social policy based upon anecdote. I’m in my mid-60s and cannot think of a single job I would want to do. Every ‘senior’ in a job is taking away an entry-level job from a younger.
1. There are a tremendous number of people who are "surplus to requirements." Let's not mince words - the combined education budget (K-12) in the US wasn't all that far from the DoD and IC budgets, combined. Chat GPT-3 could replace all of the "educators" tomorrow at 0900 hrs. We still make work for them. For now. Economic growth would allow a graceful retirement, working at jobs within their capabilities, if they are so inclined. Many work simply out of habit, or for some structure to their daily lives, or simply out of loneliness.
2. The "ordinary person" does not know what "space exploration" has done. Cheap, ubiquitous computing - "too cheap to met" - and the ubiquitous Internet Computer, for openers.
3. We aren't at all like "Pol Pot with space ships." He killed off his best. We simply don't foster and encourage ours. Two diametrically opposed worlds. I have my suspicions as to why this is, but at that point we are stepping into Anarchonomicon's territory.
4. As to the "elite humanity," for the first time in history, it is a meritocratic elite. Look at Singapore, and read "From Third World To First," by Lee. Look - and here I will push the hot buttons of the ignorant (too bad!), at Mainland China's ruthlessly meritocratic bureaucracy. Singapore is beautiful, well-managed, and expensive. And worth it. As for social engineering, they "simply" took ruthlessly meritocratic Confucianism, and merged it with the best European institutions.
Consider that China after WWII had an essentially medieval economy. When Nixon went to China, the finest hotel in Beijing did not have flush plumbing. Now, go to any plumbing supply, and look at the "Made In" label.
Look at, say (one more hot button!) Tibet. Now, high speed rail runs to Lhasa, which has 5G most everywhere, and where the average life expectancy has doubled, I repeat, doubled, since the change in Management.
Certainly, the "Voluntary Simplicity" of Greer's Retropolis - still within easy reach - lends itself to our future, one way or another.
The economy of Brother Minarchus can be done, not by the Old Men, who dream dreams of a Yesterday that never really was, but the Young Men, who see Visions of a Better Tomorrow, and ask, "Why not?'
Our highest duty is to those who come after us.
Now, if you will excuse me, I'm going to go outside, call my friend Bud Barclay, and fire up the Sky Queen. I'll be in Singapore or New Beijing, if you need me.
You are misinterpreting much. My article is about maintaining our standard of living despite running low on resources. I prefer methanol and ethanol cars because they aren't top down. I'm all for people going off-grid, but the tech is still not quite there -- but getting close.
People complained about space travel sucking resources back in the 1970s. NASA was a significant part of the federal budget during the space race. It's a shadow of it's old self.
But we got a lot of interesting technical spin-offs from the Apollo program, and space tech has given us much better weather reports, GPS navigation, communication satellites, and it made arms limitations treaties verifiable.
Elitists going into space holds the promise of solving a great many mineral shortages.
This is a good discussion, but overall, the energy/resources debate disregards the fundamental issue.
What's the point of all this phantasmagoria? The phantasmagoria being the unbridled consumption for consumption's sake.
It does make sense for humans to have a certain level of technology to allow their atrophied bodies to survive, since they mostly wouldn't be able to without doodads and gizmos, since we've separated ourselves from natural nature, and our habitat is all the human-made crap, like buildings, machines, etc. Survival, a certain level of comfort is OK.
It doesn't make a sense, however, to take this to the current batshit crazy level where the consumption/disposal cycle has become crazy fast, not to mention that the vast majority of shit people consume is useless. Plus, it makes people no happier, it does FUCK ALL, apart from a quick dopamine fix that lasts like five nanoseconds.
What's the end game? Have a new car every other week instead of every few decades, which was the case when I was a kid? Why? What's the point of flying to Mars? So some fucking asshole can take a selfie up there and post in on fucking Instagram?
Given the current state of mind of the average human idiot, it doesn't matter whether this source of energy can be replaced with that source of energy - there will never be enough.
While approaching the issue from the technological viewpoint is okay, what humans really need is a new raison d'etre. A new philosophy of life. Maybe religion. A new culture. People need to come out of stuporously craving yet another piece of shit and figure out something else. Ideally something that will align them with nature, its cycles, other living species. Instead of the bible and the bullshit about having dominion over the world, people need to be given a simple manual that will contain simple instructions along the lines of 'though shall not fuck around with the world around you, you stupid fuck, for you're liable to fuck it up". Anybody will understand that.
We have an economy which *demands* ever greater consumption. This needs to be fixed, which is something I alluded to towards the end of the article. We dispose instead of repair because we import manufactured items from far away, from where labor is much cheaper. And we tax the crap out of domestic labor. A switch from depending on income an other labor taxes towards tariffs and excises would make repairing things worth the bother.
(I will take issue about cars. They last a lot longer than they used to. Prior to the combination of computers controlling the mix and mass Japanese imports, you were lucky to keep a car past 100,000 miles.)
Cars DO NOT last longer. They're made to make it through warranty and a bit thereafter. But that's a minor point, as is the notion of economy.
The economy reflects the fucked up nature of the human mind, the philosophy, or lack thereof, that spins the wheels of this whole circus. Nobody will "fix the economy", there are deep underlying forces that dictate how it operates.
People simply gotta stop looking for happiness through the acquisition of useless shit.
We already have a religion. As a student of Anthroposophy, I argue it is poorly understood, and the implementation is pretty much directly antagonistic to the philosophy of Christ.
Now, as to what would help make it what it SHOULD become:
With Masculine power, we can make the Feminine its effective complement, and develop Christianity into what it should be - "One Law, Under God, Mediated by Christ, His Son."
With my copies of "Factor Four" and "Retropolis"by my side to assist in developing the New Economy!
Doesn't the Bible instruct man to have dominion over Earth, the most stupidly fucking idiotic thing somebody could say? How about living in harmony with Nature instead, eh? Nature being everything in this world. This dominion shit gotta go.
‘Hypergravity’ isn’t an ‘answer’ to anything regarding the issue of providing centrifugal ‘gravity’ to a thousand or ten-thousand persons. Or a million.
‘Spin’ isn’t that easy to maintain, even in zero gravity. Mass is still mass. Maybe it isn’t as hard an engineering and energy problem as it seems, but ‘hypergravity’ isn’t solving it.
What’s needed is something more akin to ‘massive artificial gravity’ within the energy resources available to ‘space enjoyers’.
What’s the most number of people ever served by any centrifugal gravity system? How long were these individuals using such gravity? What did it cost (energetically) to maintain the artificial gravity?
I’m not saying the problem cannot be solved.
I’m just wondering if anyone has actually even tried to solve the problem of low or no gravity for a hundred or a thousand people?
Pretty paintings and science fiction stories don’t count.
Friction is really low in space. Have a round shape where the principal moments of inertia are far enough apart, and what starts spinning stays spinning.
But to feel like gravity, the spinning station does need to be BIG. And that is a true challenge. Lot's of intermediate steps to get to that point. Moonbase staff will need to rotate back to Earth to restore bone mass.
My guess is, if you look at any serious technology over the last century - a blip in the history of the West, much less Humanity - you will see vast improvements taking place.
For example, the internal combustion. From Diesel's first to the latest and greatest, we have increased the power and reliability by orders of magnitude. Take electricity, from basic, DC dynamos only affordable by Morgan, to polyphase creation and transmission, greater power, MUCH more reliable power, available to many more people at dramatically lower cost.
Look at our national rail system over the last century. We STILL won't mandate the installation of affordable, massively effective, breaking systems for rail. Now, look what China has done with reliable, high-speed rail over the last TWENTY years. We said it couldn't be done. China tool a lot of really smart people, and did, uniting Lhasa - literally the middle of Nowhere - with the world.
I can only assume they are studying hypergravity for two reasons: one, they read "Cities In Flight," by the Spenglerian science fiction writer James Blish, or, two, they saw Frazetta's pictures of Deja Thoris, and figured it was worthwhile to find some way to pay her a visit.
When contemplating the future, we should not be thinking about things like energy consumption but about race, selection and breeding. All else can take care of itself. The fact that you are apparently seriously concerned about how we can feed ten billion sub-Saharan Africans tells me that you have not yet slipped the mental shackles that school and the media put on us.
The combination of prosperity and feminism has been shown to lead to a drop in birth rates. This is where Malthus got proven wrong.
Also, any solution has to be politically viable. Create good paying jobs in the Sahel, and the mass migration into Europe stops, and the bleeding hearts lose political clout.
And there is something about caring for the poor in the Bible...
Respectfully, the Invasion of Europe by Islam has become the Conquest of Europe by Islam. Perhaps it is only one generation until the British National Anthem ends with the words "Innnnnshaaaaaallllaaaaahhhhh."
They can then unite with France under the Green Flag with the Star and Crescent.
Now, solar power generation in, say, the vast deserts of Northern and Central Mexico, offers substantial rewards to the members of the Returnista.
*Looks at word count & read time*
Thank You in advance, Good sir, for the lengthy response essay 😉 looks like I need to respond in kind and type up a 13,200 word response essay to address your 10,000+ worder here.
In the meantime (before I compose it), I will keep this comment up and start a thread of comments below it to make some observations and running commentary regarding a lot of your preliminary points in this essay.
Think of it as me ‘thinking out loud’ 😊
Anyhow, this has been bookmarked and I will be going through it multiple times… so give it sometime and expect some feedback in a bit 😘
Just a quick comment on Natural Gas:
32.5 Trillion cubic feet is about 920 Cubic Kilometres. (Source: Conversions)
In 2021, Gas Consumption was about 977 Cubic kilometres per Annum.
17,710 Cubic kilometres is what America's Proven Reserves are.
This is back from late 2022. Let's use these numbers (I know things like Gas reserves bump up a bit every now & then, but this should suffice to make the point):
This is around 625.423 Trillion cubic feet... so just over 18 years of Production Reserve... & these numbers are from early 2021, using 2021 conversion numbers, so subtract 4 & we get... a bit over 14 years of Production Reserve.
Now, The 32.5 Trillion will probably jiggle up & down a bit in that range (i.e. 31 to 35), so for all intents & purposes, we are looking at a bit over a decade & a half. I will attach the EIA charts below (which indicate this stagnation since around 2018)...
But there aren't 'loads of Natural Gas left in the US.'
Addendum: I did another check, and the Reserves have increased to around 691 Trillion Cubic Feet since 2021. That may buy another 2+ years or so... but that's it.
Moral of the Story: 32.5 Trillion Cubic Feet per annum is not a sustainable consumption level. It needs to be decreased (preferably via individual choices); otherwise, people will run short of the cheap, affordable stuff. (Recall: Not everything has to run out; you only need higher-quality, affordable stuff 'on top' to go away for things to go bad.)
Relevant https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9140us2a.htm
Try 4 quadrillion cubic feet. https://www.aogr.com/web-exclusives/exclusive-story/north-america-holds-vast-oil-and-gas-reserves
Proven reserves are not the same as ultimately extracted fuel.
Proven reserves are what we know for sure ‘are out there.’ The 4 quadrillion number meanwhile has yet to be Geologically surveyed. It’s similar to the additional 3.5 billion metric tonnes for copper number which people say has ‘yet to be found.’ ‘Yet to be found,’ is not a good foundation for taking care of resources prudently.
Proven reserves are known, developed, and economical. This is why proven reserves usually grow over time. We learn more and the price goes up.
My dad taught me something long ago:
“Ahnaf… if the money is not in your bank account, it’s not yours… it’s fantasy & make believe.”
I view this the exact same way. Until geological surveys are done and we get verification that yes, this larger 4 quadrillion cubic feet is “in the bank,” ready to be used, it’s fantasy.
And this is before we factor in outages and shortages of metals, oil, etc which will act as Asymptotes in a few decades… courtesy of which the 691 trillion number I noted earlier, may shrink (as opposed to grow).
>> The world may be running out of energy, but the United States is not. <<
The issue is not ‘running out’. The issue is Margin. We do not get to choose (say) at what speed, scale & scope oil can be dug out, gas can be retrieved, etc.
Here’s what I mean by that. If An Apple is at the top of a Barrel, you simply have to reach out with your hand… & there it is. If it’s at the bottom, you need to bend down and grab it.
The trouble is that the cheap, quality sources of Oil, Coal, & Gas have run out.
For Oil in particular:
Alaskan Oil peaked ages ago, and so did conventional Oil in the 48 states making up the Continental USA. What is responsible for all increases in American Oil is Shale (which is unconventional and directly from the Source Rock that birthed all the other Oil... so there is nothing left after it) and some Offshore capability.
Art Berman, John Peach, and others expect Shale and this remaining offshore stuff to peak as well later this decade to early next decade. The other stuff (conventional Oil) peaked a while ago. And because Oil is the Master Resource that makes transport and logistics possible… you will not have the margin for grabbing coal, gas, etc. and moving it around. This is not in the ‘far future’. This is later this decade to early next decade.
In fact, even Exxon Mobil, in their Outlook for 2050… has admitted that Current Wells are depleting at 15% per annum (far worse than the 8% estimate people gave a while ago).
Just to underscore how nutty that number is... a 15% per annum decay for 6 consecutive years... gets you to All Existing Oilfields & projects declining by over 60%.
Exxon Mobil (in their Global Outlook) emphasize this point in particular, whereby 'No New Investment' (Hint: This is a Euphemism for Global War) will see Global Production drop down from over 100 million bbl/day for 'all sorts of Oils & substitutes of Oil'... to just around 30 million bbl/day. If you wanna know what that number means, it means the deaths (via war, famine, etc., before the Nukes go off) of 100+ million people worldwide.
Relevant: https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/-/media/global/files/global-outlook/2024/global-outlook-executive-summary.pdf
As price goes up, alternative fuels and conservation measures become economical. I'm all for excise taxes on fossil fuels so that we move towards the alternatives before we need to.
Prices simply make human beings focus on other things. It will not magically make (say) solar panels more efficient in capturing additional TWh from the sun. What pricing does is it makes Demography (‘more human bodies’ if you will) change their attention from one thing to another. It won’t change the availability of things in the crust. Technology is like a straw… you can make it wider and more efficient, but the milkshake is a finite amount.
22% at fifteen cents per Watt is good enough. Not good enough for me to get off the grid, but definitely viable where fossil fuels are reliably more expensive. RIGHT NOW.
Back when I was in high school 14% efficient solar cells were super expensive. Putting them in orbit and beaming down the energy with microwaves looked like the way to go.
For going off grid, we still need cheap, safe batteries. Such batteries do not have to be lightweight, however. Prussian blue sodium ion batteries are already on the market for use in data centers. Researchers around the world are madly working on other alternatives.
And the cool thing is that emergency government funding of such research is not necessary. Better batteries are very useful for reasons which have nothing to do with global warming or running out of fossil fuels. Good batteries are great to have during power outages. I REALLY would like to have a UPS which would give me a few hours of lighting in the event of a storm blowing down a power line. Bass fishermen use electric boat motors to avoid scaring off fish. Battery powered power tools rock. While the thought of spending hours to charge my car makes me hate electric cars, I'd definitely go with electric lawnmowers and leaf blowers if the price wasn't astronomical.
The market exists.
Solar is basically alive for 3-4 months of the year (rest of the time it is dormant). It is intermittent and does not run at those numbers you cite for most of the year.
Yes, you can deploy them out in the desert and elsewhere and get those nice numbers for more often and longer… but that’s not good enough when compared to (say) a coal powered plant that runs 92% of the whole year at near peak efficiency. The gap is massive once we factor in the intermittency and variability of solar.
And all of this is before we consider the buffers for mass solar deployment, which (as Dr Simon shows in the GTK paper) requires millions of metric tonnes of metals that do not exist on 🌍
As I wrote in the article, I consider solar cells in Germany to be a rather silly project. Stick them down in the tropics where you have year around light and be willing to waste half or more of the energy in order to convert it into a storeable fuel, such as methanol. The numbers I used for area to cover are for using solar that's mostly away from population centers and not connected to reliable grids. (For refining aluminum, copper, and magnesium, cheap intermittent electricity is better than "clean" grid energy. Ditto for mining bitcoins.)
>> Those who are freaking out over global warming -- including Ahnaf's main source, Dr. Simon P. Michaux -- are trying to replace fossil fuels long before they run out. <<
The timeline for Dr Simon is the next 3+ decades or so.
In that timeframe, per the UN & other international bodies… the World Population will hit 9.8+ billion, & Global Electricity Demand will be just under 90,000 TWh due to population increases & social mobility. Dr Simon shows that to go from today’s 30,000 TWh to under 90,000 TWh in just under 3 decades… is impossible.
Hence, because ‘the plan’ sucks, A New plan ought to be drawn up going forward. & this one involves *lowering* energy consumption at the individual level of Human Choices & whatnot. That's basically what his GTK paper argues for at the very end.
Keep in mind that partial success extends the timeline. (Which is why I like carbon taxes.) If we linearly deploy alternatives, then if we cut fossil fuel consumption in half by the time of projected running out, we have that time again to finish the job. (Visualize a triangle.)
In the real world, deployment of alternatives will accelerate over time for two reasons: 1. Improvements in the tech. 2. Higher prices for the fossil fuels.
If we can get to the point of decent pilot plants before the fertilizer hits the fan, all is good.
Fossil fuels make up nearly 80% of current consumption of electricity…. So a cut of half (given the 30,000 TWh electricity number) means 12,000 TWh gets cut. That’s basically 40% of present day electricity usage. You’re not building that much stuff (in terms of wind, solar, nuclear, etc) in 2-3 decades; it’s logistically impossible.
CDs replaced vinyl records in less than a decade. Once digital photography became better than film, the transition happened rather rapidly.
When people are motivated, change can happen rapidly. Look at what happened in China.
We could replace all our coal fired nuclear plants with nuclear in a couple of decades if motivated. We currently are not motivated because fossil fuels remain cheap.
Innovation will certainly happen. But there are limits. When I say logistically impossible, I’m talking about what 12,000 TWh physically looks like. As in the sheer mass needed.
Human Civilization (from past to present) is 1.1 trillion tonnes. That’s it. Here’s what 12,000 TWh will involve (feel free to estimate the sheer mass and volume of such a thing):
Equivalents for 12,000 TWh of Electricity:
1. Solar: ~6.86 million MW (6,860 GW) or ~23 billion solar panels.
2. Wind: ~4 million MW (4,000 GW) or ~1.3 million large (3 MW) turbines.
3. Coal: ~2.29 million MW (2,290 GW) or ~3.6 billion tons of coal per year.
4. Oil: ~2.74 million MW (2,740 GW) or ~2.1 billion barrels of oil per year.
5. Natural Gas: ~1.95 million MW (1,950 GW) or ~1.6 trillion cubic meters of gas per year.
6. Nuclear: ~1.52 million MW (1,520 GW) or ~1,520 large reactors (1 GW each).
7. Geothermal: ~1.61 million MW (1,610 GW).
8. Biofuels: ~2.29 million MW (2,290 GW) or ~10.8 billion tons of biomass per year.
9. Tidal: ~3.43 million MW (3,430 GW).
Mass production happens. Consider how many houses are built every year.
Look up how many coal fired power plants China creates per year to get a sense of scale.
We have eight billion people on the planet. To build 2000 nuclear power plants, you need a population of 4 million people to support each power plant.
Some populations are more productive than others. I don't expect the Bushmen of the Kalahari to contribute to making nuclear reactors. But there are other populations which could produce more nuclear engineers and workers.
And if we are taking 20 years to make the transition...
Here's a link I should have put in the article: https://carbonrecycling.com/
They are creating 214,000 tonnes of methanol per year using Icelandic geothermal energy.
None of these policies can be implemented by a liberal democracy.
Doing even half of this requires an Augustus.
But it all should be done. Which means we must pray for that man.
I'm a bit more optimistic. Some of these ideas nearly happened. Storing hydrogen in depleted gas wells has been tried. George W. Bush did propose a hydrogen economy. I think Iceland sells some of their geothermal energy as methanol and I recall an Australian experiment to do solar to methanol.
I’m bullish on getting an Augustus so, in a way, so am I.
Hydrogen leaks everywhere. Once you try to Store it (at scale), it doesn't work since the Giant reservoirs have very poor retention rates. Hydrogen is not an Energy Source; it's an Energy Carrier. And if you can't carry it at Scale... well, that is a Moot point, is it not?
Also, if you pump it into oil wells, it might hydrogenate remaining gunk over time and make it pumpable in the future.
Exxon and others have looked at these proposals. It’s a cute science project, but it does nowhere near enough to stall the 15%+ rates at which existing fields are presently decaying per annum.
Preliminary studies had an 80% retention rate. That's good enough.
Dr Simon has shown in the GTK paper that Hydrogen retention is variable (the 80% is not a surefire thing in many cases), and meanwhile you’re talking about a lot more mass and whatnot compared to conventional systems which store something normal like Ammonia.
You cannot outrun chemistry and physics. NH3 (ammonia) is heavier than H2 (hydrogen) and is thus less diffusive… you’re not gonna be getting the latter to leak less and be more efficient than the former.
Certainly ammonia compressed into a liquid is compact compared to hydrogen. As a gas, it's not that big a difference. According to Wikipedia, hydrogen's enthalpy of combustion is -286 kJ/mol, ammonia is -382 kJ/mol, Methane, on the other hand is -891 kJ/mol, so yes, hydrogen is roughly three times as bulky as methane.
From the GTK Paper, Page-38:
>> 9.2 The use of hydrogen as a power storage
It has been proposed to use hydrogen as a store of
energy (Zhang et al. 2016), where power generation
in excess to demand load could be used to produce
hydrogen with electrolysis (Menton 2022). Given
it requires 52.5 kWh to produce 1 kg of hydrogen,
but that 1 kg of hydrogen can only deliver 15 kWh
of electricity, hydrogen as an energy storage would
be 28.6% efficient. While the use of excess available
power is a useful task, it is recommended that other
power storage methods are considered.<<
This is unviable.
Very extensive essay! Couple of small points in response:
1. you might enjoy this short youtube about a man who built his own particle collider to make a special type of electrolyte with which to electrolyze water from solar power which hydrogen is put into pressurized tank in his corvette. It all works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytg23mDd1a4
2. The Japanese are doing green hydrogen stuff involving nuclear station > electrolysis > hydrogen. Existing combustion engine automobiles can be easily converted to run on hydrogen. I suspect pressurized tanks are better then extensive pipes, at least for cars, but that's all over my head.
Decades ago a friend of mine tried to get in the business of promoting Japanese incinerators to North American municipalities. He got nowhere but I watched his 30 minute promotional video and was convinced: they can burn 99.99% of anything, including toxic metals, turning it into harmless ash. Basically it boils down to efficiency. Yes, they are more expensive to build but the bottom line is that rather than inefficient recycling and huge landfills etc. just burn everything up. Presumably they have good industrial controls to reduce pollution, but between that and incineration they have a clean country - barring occasional nuclear station melt-downs!
The Japanese run a very crowded uber-modern society and are a deeply intelligent people. I trust them to figure out the energy problem just as they figured out the pollution problem with incinerators. And the Chinese are going over all this stuff too and no doubt soon will settle on an excellent way forward. The West is so caught up with red tape that innovation is no longer in our wheelhouse generally, but maybe DOGE is about to change that. Actually, that single initiative has the potential to revolutionize the entire West, so am greatly looking forward to see how 2025 goes.
Anyway. I enjoyed your treatment of the various issues. Thanks.
Lithium hydride storage was featured in Popular Science articles back when I was in high school. I don't recall them mentioning needing to transmute the lithium to lithium 6. But the prototypes they had back then had bigger tanks if memory serves.
Hydrogen to lithium hydride to fuel cells is not as efficient as batteries. Might be lighter, however, since you aren't hauling around your oxidizer. Needing overnight to fill you tank is a major inconvenience. And also: the system requires quite a bit of lithium.
Well, I thought it pretty cool this chap built a particle accelerator in his backyard to make a material that was prohibited by sale for Defence reasons but was perfectly legal (if too difficult for most) to make.
Electrolysis is the way, I suspect. But water falls from the sky and comes up from the earth so hard to monopolize. Won't stop them trying, though. The Japanese approach is centralized in that it depends on a large power station. They say they could run the entire nation on a handful of these stations.
Yes, the backyard particle accelerator thing was truly wild. I wonder if he was simply messing with the interviewer's head, or if bombarding the lithium with high speed particles served the purpose of creating nanoscale tunnels in the lithium to make it like a sponge.
I don't see how transmutation to a lighter isotope would have that much effect. And if he needed to transmute a large fraction of his lithium, the amount of energy would be significant. Thinking of a particle beam as a current, we need about 100,000 Coulombs for each mole of lithium, and a particle energy on the order of tens of thousands of volts if memory serves. At a super optimistic 10 kilovolts and 100% efficiency, that's a billion Joules per 7 grams of input lithium or about 300 kilowatt hours.
Transmutation using particle beams is not an efficient process. Otherwise, we'd have transmutation based power plants.
I watched it years ago, but I think there was an article too and if I recall correctly he worked for the USG in nuclear physics. In your post though you mentioned a 98% efficient electrolyte which seems pretty decent.
I suspect 90% of the energy issues are not so much about efficiency etc. as control/monopoly capitalism. For example water is a lousy fuel because any old fool can gather it from his gutters and store enough fuel for a year in a one hundred gallon drum. So impossible to control. So it is verboten. But that is going back to the substance-technology angle again.
What we really need is uncorrupted polities. Something that throughout human history is very, very rare. Meanwhile, we will make do with crappy energy systems, though to be fair I think what we have now is working very well at a reasonable cost and people perhaps protest too much. I am not convinced about your figures about when the oil runs out. Need more drilled-down info on the Russian deep wells (abiotic theory). Some say we have enough for a few centuries accessing that way, plus the abiotic generation of oil makes it a renewable. Has something to do with deep pressures within the earth which change substances from one thing to another in the periodic table. Plus they have found hydrocarbons in space where presumably no dinosaurs roamed. And just like with Darwin's theory, nobody has found intermediates (rotting stuff that is halfway to oil).
So back we go again to politics - or rather whatever underlies societal ethos, which is bedrock values transmitted multi-generationally. We need sanity in our societies. With sanity and decency all problems will be easily solved. Without, everything will always be corrupted. So corruption is by far and away the biggest problem. It comes from vice. The antidote to vice is virtue. Some things never change.
Water is not fuel. It's what hydrogen (including the hydrogen portion of hydrocarbons) becomes after being burnt.
We also write symphonies, develop incredibly advanced technology and spend million - I repeat, millions - of dollars to save the life of one prematurely born child, even going so far as to operate on them in the womb to save them. We develop incredibly sophisticated systems of mathematics, the Ruling Queen of the Sciences - to develop abstract formulations that, in time, allow us greater understanding, and manipulation, of the material world, and, in time, the Multiverse.
We are the only animal that looks up. We do so all of the time, and at night, a universe, hidden by the Light of Day, is revealed to us.
And, we intuitively WANT to understand it, and become a more significant part of it.
The lowest organisms are all undifferentiated. You've see one paramecium, you've seen them all. With evolution, you get differentiation, and, in time, specialization. You see one Human Being, you are just getting started.
Countless virtually small quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes, and in time, Civilization. Remember, the first steps a child makes are away from his parents. Away from his parents, and, in time, to the Stars.
Just a matter of Time, really.
Time, Discipline, and Focus, Focus, Focus.
I finished reading "The History Of Science And Civilization In China" by Dunphy (the two volume abridged version). Imagine our shock to discover, on the other side of the world (Mars, for all practical purposes in that place and time) an advanced, totally alien Civilization, that accomplished all of that, it's advance only halted, temporarily, by Genghis Khan.
What must be Out There, waiting for the Children to leave their Cradle?
THIS is a masterful summary of what we could become:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caxiX38DK68
And, to "quote" Colonel Quaritch's fictitious, but excellent AI speech to the Nav'i,
"... You will remain in your trees, hunting your prey, communing with your goddess, until your sun burns out, and and your world dies. And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us."
I'll make it easy for you to study these profound words. Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsp59vwI5kg
THAT picture makes a wonderful desktop picture for Windows, by the way.
Mars, at its best, is just a way station, the second step from the Cradle.
And, if we have to live in Greer's Retropolis while we sort out our economies, that's a very small, and pleasant, price to pay, indeed.
(Parenthetically, those problems are also being solved. Tree Of Woe's excellent reformulation of the Principles of the Physiocratic Society are a masterful place to start.)
Let me be gracious, and constructively critical, of your formulations.
You see the (undifferentiated) rocks and stones, all part of the Soil, if you will..
I see the Cathedral of Civilization waiting to be built, building on, and using, rocks, stones, and the Arch, the Prime Symbol of the Aenean Civilization.
"It is the drive that motivates preachers, priests, and pharisees to add to the Laws of God."
Now that is a lovely phrase, which I very well might steal.
Feel free.
Credit for the sentiment goes to C.S. Lewis and his Ethical Hedonism.
Good article, but you might want to look into fast chloride salt reactors. No Na, and all the advantages of FilBe but in a fast spectrum. (so running a U238->Pu239 breeding cycle)
E.g.: https://www.corepower.energy/nuclear-technologies/msr ; https://www.terrapower.com/future/;
https://thoriumenergyalliance.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Elysium-MCSFR-TEAC10-Update.pdf
Full disclosure, I've known Ed Phiel for years but do not work for Elysium.
Very interesting! Not as detailed as Kirk Sorenson's descriptions of thorium reactors so a few head scratchers. Am I correct in assuming that the plutonium is burned in place without the need of a separation/refinement stage?
Correct. No actinide separation, just fission product removal.
Look up MCFR reactor- lots to look at. 😁
"We are talking redneck compatible technology -- which makes managerialists sad."
LOL!
“Redneck-compatible” is a fantastic metric for technology that is robust and decentralized.
Humanity-compatible, as well, very clean and very affordable.
Look at the red flag with the stars in the animated graphic.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2022-10-06/Graphics-How-has-China-led-the-world-in-hydropower-generation--1dHkNNPa0co/index.html
I seem to recall they developed a hydroelectric dam a DAY over the last twenty years or so.
I also seem to recall that someone in the Leadership has advanced education in hydropower generation and distribution from Tsinghua, their version of MIT.
They seem to know what they are doing, and why they are doing it.
We can learn from that.
An excellent if rather long post. I agree with just about everything, but only a few quibbles:
If methanol becomes a commodity, it will quickly be discovered that methanol made from natural gas is cheaper than methanol produced through electrolysis, unless the electrochemical cell efficiency is closer 100%. I haven't heard about this capillary electrode technology, but a link would be helpful. Still, even moving to fossil methane (excuse me, "geological" methane) would stimulate the development of methanol infrastructure, which would be in place when solar or nuclear methanol became competitive.
Nuclear fusion technologies would be best used synergisticly. Current reactors using enriched Uranium are themselves breeders for LFTR systems. We already have plenty of cooling tanks at nuclear power plants filled with spent fuel rods. All it takes is a sufficient addition of a neutron emitter like P239 to jump start the T232 to U233 reaction. No U233 breeders are necessary. It only takes a small number of operating Light Water Reactors to produce the necessary "nuclear waste" to enrich the thorium fuel.
The original LFTR was built at Oak Ridge in 1954 to power aircraft (Maybe they wanted a bomber that could circle the globe for a year?). The reactor worked quite well, and the research team would shut it down at the end of the day by switching off the power. One reason the technology was not developed for power production is that it DID NOT produce a suitable weapons grade bomb material (U233 is touchy stuff). Uncle Sammy in the 1950s had bomb fettish. That we cannot reproduce and improve on this technology and put it into production is baffling. I believe floride salt corrosion might be one of the problems.
I tossed most of my debate notecards many years ago but kept a small stack as a memento. When I last looked at the stack, the top card was a quote from the Union of Concerned Scientists about the proliferation problems with thorium breeders.
Agree on the nuclear waste. Jimmy Carter put an end to fuel rod reprocessing out of proliferation fears. Plutonium is chemically different from Uranium so it's much easier to concentrate than sorting Uranium isotopes.
I did a web search trying to find a recent source on the corrosion problem. I couldn't find anything. What I found on the Flibe Energy site was work on materials accounting so no one runs off with fissionable materials. The government still is worried about the proliferation aspect.
Sorry about the missing link on the capillary action. We had some technical issues. LibreOffice ate all the pictures and links when I emailed the document to our host. He had to put them back in manually after I resent as a Word doc and then I checked things over. We probably missed more than one. Here's the link: http://hysata.com/news/hysatas-electrolyser-breaks-efficiency-records-enabling-world-beating-green-hydrogen-cost/
Thank you. I forgot mention, high-tension power cabless are made with a steel core for tensile strength, and wrapped with aluminum cable conduction. It makes sense because 1) it has a higher conductivity per unit mass and 2) it's much less 3xp3nsive than copper.
Some of this post may already be obsolete. Technology marches on. See this article: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/green-hydrogen-battery-battolyser
Yes, it's "Interesting Engineering", which is a modern incarnation of what Popular Science was for years: techno hopium. But the idea here is potentially huge: recovering the hydrogen given off from an inefficient battery and using it. The groups cited is using Edison's nickel-iron battery, which has a long history of being robust, but not energy dense enough for electric cars to compete against gasoline powered cars.
But with this idea established a whole host of other battery chemistries are opened up. An aqueous battery with too high a cell voltage breaks down the water as it charges. Inefficient and potentially dangerous. But if you are set up to use the hydrogen and oxygen...
Maybe I will also make this general point as I continue to 'think aloud' on this piece...
(I just used some quick estimates from the AI, coupled with some research by myself):
Estimated Mass of the Earth's Crust & Rough Elemental Composition:
27.7 Quintillion Tonnes- Oxygen: 46.6%, Silicon: 27.7%, Aluminum: 8.1%, Iron: 5%, Calcium: 3.6%, Sodium: 2.8%, Potassium: 2.6%, Magnesium: 2.1%, All other elements: ~1.5%
Estimated Mass of the Entire Asteroid Belt:
2.39 Quintillion Tonnes... This is then comprised of the following:
1. Carbonaceous (C-type) Asteroids
These asteroids are rich in carbon compounds and water-bearing minerals, representing a significant portion of the asteroid belt (about 75% of the asteroids).
• Carbon (C) – ~20% to 30%
• Oxygen (O) – ~15% to 20%
• Silicon (Si) – ~10% to 15%
• Iron (Fe) – ~5% to 10%
• Magnesium (Mg) – ~5%
• Nickel (Ni) – ~1% to 5%
• Hydrogen (H) – ~3% to 5%
2. Silicaceous (S-type) Asteroids
These asteroids are more rocky and are composed of silicate minerals, particularly silicates of iron and magnesium. They account for about 17% of asteroids.
• Oxygen (O) – ~40% to 50%
• Silicon (Si) – ~25% to 35%
• Iron (Fe) – ~10% to 15%
• Magnesium (Mg) – ~5% to 10%
• Nickel (Ni) – ~2% to 5%
3. Metallic (M-type) Asteroids
These are primarily composed of metallic elements, including significant amounts of iron and nickel, and account for a smaller fraction of the asteroid belt.
• Iron (Fe) – ~80% to 90%
• Nickel (Ni) – ~5% to 10%
• Cobalt (Co) – ~1% to 5%
General Composition of the Entire Asteroid Belt (Average)
Taking into account the proportions of C-type, S-type, and M-type asteroids, the average composition of the asteroid belt might look like this:
• Oxygen (O) – ~20%
• Silicon (Si) – ~18%
• Iron (Fe) – ~15%
• Carbon (C) – ~10%
• Magnesium (Mg) – ~8%
• Nickel (Ni) – ~5%
• Hydrogen (H) – ~3%
• Calcium (Ca) – ~2%
• Other elements (including cobalt, sulfur, potassium) – ~10%
Basically (to keep it very simple):
It's far more profitable to Dig up stuff Down Here on Earth. There's more Stuff (& Mass) in the Crust & Seafloor, and what is 'up there' is not (by Mass & Volume) sufficient to continue the Mass Consumptive Habits of Mankind... even if we waved a Magic Wand & teleported all 2.39 Quintillion Tonnes of the Asteroid Belt onto the Surface of the Earth.
A single cubic mile metallic asteroid would be a stupendous amount of useful metals.
Asteroids can be prospected in parallel with robot probes. With reusable Saturn V level boosters coming online within a few years, we can send out hundreds, or even thousands of such probes. And the vultures of Wall St. will fund such missions if we have a legal claim system in place.
Such an asteroid would be one in a million or even rarer. Energy, money, etc must be paid upfront (for research, development, etc) and deployment…
You then have to get there, grab the stuff and come back… after which the stuff competes with markets down here for price, EROI and other metrics. The math doesn’t work.
We have metallic asteroids hitting Earth all the time. And astronomers have already identified asteroids which are far denser than nickel-iron meteorites. Indeed, there's at least one asteroid which is denser than anything on the periodic chart -- if calculations are correct.
The asteroid belt is not the same thing as the breakup of Earth's crust. It like the breakup of a complete planet.
Finding mass sources of light elements like nitrogen to make atmosphere is more challenging. You have to go out to where such volatiles freeze such as the rings of Saturn.
The asteroids will burn up significantly during descent.
If the plan meanwhile is to mine them after bringing them closer and into LEO, the margins for EROI and cost don’t exist either.
As for mining the stuff “at location” (so several million km away), you need to now factor in even more costs and even weaker EROI numbers.
…. And again, you’re now (after getting back the stuff down) competing with people who simply dug the earth’s crust.
Also (something to remember) : metals have variable prices. Increasing their supply down here means price drops and related effects … which may also eat into the margins of miners.
Relevant: https://youtu.be/BEuFNzEVncg?si=Dol1XcTAm3YFVWCz
Fashion into gliders. Surround the expensive minerals with cheaper stuff that ablates upon entry.
When you're 55, tell me how great it will be to work to 65. Do the same at 65 for 75. And at 75 for 85. The 'workers' you talk about working into (very) later years are craftspersons, not your average industrial drudge.
Your enthusiasm for the masses working in the fields at dawn is no doubt a result of you doing so yourself.
As for going to space *and staying there*, I seem to recall that life on planet earth depends on gravity to work properly. How much ersatz gravity can you create in space? Or even Mars? Enough for a 100 people? A thousand? Ten thousand?
What's the largest continuous centrifugal gravity facility currently in existence? How many people does it hold? What are *its* energy requirements to maintain spin?
Seniors and the Elderly are Great to have as Advisors and patriarchs, but they are not the ones who can Toil and work in the Fields (and beyond) to maintain society.
Most of the world's industrial nations (I expect Europe to do this first after their 'Remigration' silliness fails) will soon be engaging in Mandatory Euthanasia to make their societies more 'efficient' ... that's the endgame for their vapid, Evil, materialist ideology.
There will not be any of The Elderly 'innovating,' engaged in brutal labour-intensive work, etc., because *they don't have the Muscle & Physical & Mental Acumen for it.*
Mandatory Euthanasia is a fantasy. There's two factors that make it self-limiting. The first is that making anything 'mandatory' is not how liberalism works. The goal is voluntary euthanasia (or at least the semblance of it). The second is that the consumer market for voluntary euthanasia is likely to be very limited.
The Elderly aren't needed for 'innovation' or 'brute force labor'. Wiping out the elderly has a very good chance of inducing a chain reaction with the 'near-Elderly' and the 'near-near-Elderly' and the 'near-near-near-Elderly' all resisting the Soylent future.
Anyone who knows anything about how real privilege works will know that the ruling class will always be except from any 'duty' that is actually onerous.
I don't think there's anything more vapid that people *who assume a policy will not apply to them* arguing for a policy.
You can convince yourself and your adjacents of anything, but if you want the outcome you're seeking, you're going to need to convince more than each other.
Liberalism ended a while ago. Today’s western societies are de facto managerial regimes who have no problem with mass carnage, if it means trying to secure their positions of power.
I agree with you that there are self-limiting aspects to madness known as mandatory euthanasia… but just because something is nutty doesn’t mean that these people won’t pursue it (many such cases exist in human history, especially from the far past to recent history). They will delude themselves to think “it won’t apply to us, because we are special!”… and then one fine day , they too are cut down by the warlord and warband men 😉
I'm in my early 60s and am both job hunting and looking for funding for a startup. One of my summer jobs in high school was doing construction work with a couple of men in their 60s.
I agree that there are jobs which are not suited to continuing late in life. There are lower intensity jobs out there which don't pay as much -- because they are lower intensity. The last time I moved I overheard a couple of the movers chatting about retiring from moving furniture to bagging groceries and ogling the teenage checkout girls. What I proposed above is that people who delay taking Social Security through such options should get a higher payment when they do truly retire -- even if their contributions during the slow down phase is negligible.
I agree that the Moon's gravity is too low for residing permanently -- though it might be better than living on earth for those too weak to talk in Earth's gravity. I don't know what would happen to someone born on Mars.
There was much talk of huge spinning habitats back in the 1970s. I recently ran some numbers on whether they can be built with known materials. See https://conntects.net/members/GroovyRINO/postPermalinks/159/Planets-or-Orbiting-Habitats
You cannot make social policy based upon anecdote. I’m in my mid-60s and cannot think of a single job I would want to do. Every ‘senior’ in a job is taking away an entry-level job from a younger. Putting everybody to work at something sounds great until you actually go looking at what happens when the system is flooded with labor: wages go down, jobs get crappier.
How much crappier does life need to be for workers before the Tech-Right is happy with the misery-level of everyone not in the uberclass?
The ordinary person doesn’t care about ‘space’ and even resists space exploration because there’s nothing in it for them.
I grew up on science fiction, but I stopped mistaking science fiction plots for good social policy a long time ago.
Based upon the arguments that people have made associated with the ‘Aenean Age’, it’s just more of the same talk that I heard in the 70s. It’s all top down, ‘everybody needs to pitch in but only some people will benefit’ Paul Erlich neo-communism. You guys are like Pol Pot with space-ships.
First imagine how you can get the ordinary person to enjoy pitching in to ‘conserve resources’ because it benefits them in some way. If not materially, they emotionally or communally or spiritually. Then build a policy program around that.
If the idea is that we have to get off the planet for some elite humanity to survive, then it’s that elite humanity’s problem to achieve it. Not anyone else’s.
I don’t see any difference between elite capital space communism and the good old fashioned ‘kill the peasants’ communism of the good old day.
You’ve already decided everyone else is expendable. You’re just trying to figure out how to get ordinary folks not to fight you too hard as you push them into the killing fields.
> You cannot make social policy based upon anecdote. I’m in my mid-60s and cannot think of a single job I would want to do. Every ‘senior’ in a job is taking away an entry-level job from a younger.
Ah, zero-sum thinking.
These guys are doing remarkable work on addressing all of your issues in the context of family, with what is easily available and affordable, today.
https://americancompass.org/family/
Again, Greer's Retropolis seems very appropriate.
Addressing your points, paragraph by paragraph:
1. There are a tremendous number of people who are "surplus to requirements." Let's not mince words - the combined education budget (K-12) in the US wasn't all that far from the DoD and IC budgets, combined. Chat GPT-3 could replace all of the "educators" tomorrow at 0900 hrs. We still make work for them. For now. Economic growth would allow a graceful retirement, working at jobs within their capabilities, if they are so inclined. Many work simply out of habit, or for some structure to their daily lives, or simply out of loneliness.
2. The "ordinary person" does not know what "space exploration" has done. Cheap, ubiquitous computing - "too cheap to met" - and the ubiquitous Internet Computer, for openers.
3. We aren't at all like "Pol Pot with space ships." He killed off his best. We simply don't foster and encourage ours. Two diametrically opposed worlds. I have my suspicions as to why this is, but at that point we are stepping into Anarchonomicon's territory.
4. As to the "elite humanity," for the first time in history, it is a meritocratic elite. Look at Singapore, and read "From Third World To First," by Lee. Look - and here I will push the hot buttons of the ignorant (too bad!), at Mainland China's ruthlessly meritocratic bureaucracy. Singapore is beautiful, well-managed, and expensive. And worth it. As for social engineering, they "simply" took ruthlessly meritocratic Confucianism, and merged it with the best European institutions.
Consider that China after WWII had an essentially medieval economy. When Nixon went to China, the finest hotel in Beijing did not have flush plumbing. Now, go to any plumbing supply, and look at the "Made In" label.
Look at, say (one more hot button!) Tibet. Now, high speed rail runs to Lhasa, which has 5G most everywhere, and where the average life expectancy has doubled, I repeat, doubled, since the change in Management.
Certainly, the "Voluntary Simplicity" of Greer's Retropolis - still within easy reach - lends itself to our future, one way or another.
The economy of Brother Minarchus can be done, not by the Old Men, who dream dreams of a Yesterday that never really was, but the Young Men, who see Visions of a Better Tomorrow, and ask, "Why not?'
Our highest duty is to those who come after us.
Now, if you will excuse me, I'm going to go outside, call my friend Bud Barclay, and fire up the Sky Queen. I'll be in Singapore or New Beijing, if you need me.
You are misinterpreting much. My article is about maintaining our standard of living despite running low on resources. I prefer methanol and ethanol cars because they aren't top down. I'm all for people going off-grid, but the tech is still not quite there -- but getting close.
People complained about space travel sucking resources back in the 1970s. NASA was a significant part of the federal budget during the space race. It's a shadow of it's old self.
But we got a lot of interesting technical spin-offs from the Apollo program, and space tech has given us much better weather reports, GPS navigation, communication satellites, and it made arms limitations treaties verifiable.
Elitists going into space holds the promise of solving a great many mineral shortages.
This is a good discussion, but overall, the energy/resources debate disregards the fundamental issue.
What's the point of all this phantasmagoria? The phantasmagoria being the unbridled consumption for consumption's sake.
It does make sense for humans to have a certain level of technology to allow their atrophied bodies to survive, since they mostly wouldn't be able to without doodads and gizmos, since we've separated ourselves from natural nature, and our habitat is all the human-made crap, like buildings, machines, etc. Survival, a certain level of comfort is OK.
It doesn't make a sense, however, to take this to the current batshit crazy level where the consumption/disposal cycle has become crazy fast, not to mention that the vast majority of shit people consume is useless. Plus, it makes people no happier, it does FUCK ALL, apart from a quick dopamine fix that lasts like five nanoseconds.
What's the end game? Have a new car every other week instead of every few decades, which was the case when I was a kid? Why? What's the point of flying to Mars? So some fucking asshole can take a selfie up there and post in on fucking Instagram?
Given the current state of mind of the average human idiot, it doesn't matter whether this source of energy can be replaced with that source of energy - there will never be enough.
While approaching the issue from the technological viewpoint is okay, what humans really need is a new raison d'etre. A new philosophy of life. Maybe religion. A new culture. People need to come out of stuporously craving yet another piece of shit and figure out something else. Ideally something that will align them with nature, its cycles, other living species. Instead of the bible and the bullshit about having dominion over the world, people need to be given a simple manual that will contain simple instructions along the lines of 'though shall not fuck around with the world around you, you stupid fuck, for you're liable to fuck it up". Anybody will understand that.
We have an economy which *demands* ever greater consumption. This needs to be fixed, which is something I alluded to towards the end of the article. We dispose instead of repair because we import manufactured items from far away, from where labor is much cheaper. And we tax the crap out of domestic labor. A switch from depending on income an other labor taxes towards tariffs and excises would make repairing things worth the bother.
(I will take issue about cars. They last a lot longer than they used to. Prior to the combination of computers controlling the mix and mass Japanese imports, you were lucky to keep a car past 100,000 miles.)
Anyway, see this one on Sustainable Economics: https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/sustainable-economics-is-paleo
Cars DO NOT last longer. They're made to make it through warranty and a bit thereafter. But that's a minor point, as is the notion of economy.
The economy reflects the fucked up nature of the human mind, the philosophy, or lack thereof, that spins the wheels of this whole circus. Nobody will "fix the economy", there are deep underlying forces that dictate how it operates.
People simply gotta stop looking for happiness through the acquisition of useless shit.
We already have a religion. As a student of Anthroposophy, I argue it is poorly understood, and the implementation is pretty much directly antagonistic to the philosophy of Christ.
Now, as to what would help make it what it SHOULD become:
https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/marooned-in-the-deepest-darkness-bad'
With Masculine power, we can make the Feminine its effective complement, and develop Christianity into what it should be - "One Law, Under God, Mediated by Christ, His Son."
With my copies of "Factor Four" and "Retropolis"by my side to assist in developing the New Economy!
Doesn't the Bible instruct man to have dominion over Earth, the most stupidly fucking idiotic thing somebody could say? How about living in harmony with Nature instead, eh? Nature being everything in this world. This dominion shit gotta go.
Gravity, you ask?
Asked, and answered, by China.
https://thedebrief.org/china-just-activated-the-most-powerful-advanced-hypergravity-machine-ever-built-heres-what-that-could-mean/
‘Hypergravity’ isn’t an ‘answer’ to anything regarding the issue of providing centrifugal ‘gravity’ to a thousand or ten-thousand persons. Or a million.
‘Spin’ isn’t that easy to maintain, even in zero gravity. Mass is still mass. Maybe it isn’t as hard an engineering and energy problem as it seems, but ‘hypergravity’ isn’t solving it.
What’s needed is something more akin to ‘massive artificial gravity’ within the energy resources available to ‘space enjoyers’.
What’s the most number of people ever served by any centrifugal gravity system? How long were these individuals using such gravity? What did it cost (energetically) to maintain the artificial gravity?
I’m not saying the problem cannot be solved.
I’m just wondering if anyone has actually even tried to solve the problem of low or no gravity for a hundred or a thousand people?
Pretty paintings and science fiction stories don’t count.
Friction is really low in space. Have a round shape where the principal moments of inertia are far enough apart, and what starts spinning stays spinning.
But to feel like gravity, the spinning station does need to be BIG. And that is a true challenge. Lot's of intermediate steps to get to that point. Moonbase staff will need to rotate back to Earth to restore bone mass.
I have the impression that bone mass restoration is not a viable approach.
My guess is, if you look at any serious technology over the last century - a blip in the history of the West, much less Humanity - you will see vast improvements taking place.
For example, the internal combustion. From Diesel's first to the latest and greatest, we have increased the power and reliability by orders of magnitude. Take electricity, from basic, DC dynamos only affordable by Morgan, to polyphase creation and transmission, greater power, MUCH more reliable power, available to many more people at dramatically lower cost.
Look at our national rail system over the last century. We STILL won't mandate the installation of affordable, massively effective, breaking systems for rail. Now, look what China has done with reliable, high-speed rail over the last TWENTY years. We said it couldn't be done. China tool a lot of really smart people, and did, uniting Lhasa - literally the middle of Nowhere - with the world.
I can only assume they are studying hypergravity for two reasons: one, they read "Cities In Flight," by the Spenglerian science fiction writer James Blish, or, two, they saw Frazetta's pictures of Deja Thoris, and figured it was worthwhile to find some way to pay her a visit.
Probably both.
Either way, I can't blame them.
When contemplating the future, we should not be thinking about things like energy consumption but about race, selection and breeding. All else can take care of itself. The fact that you are apparently seriously concerned about how we can feed ten billion sub-Saharan Africans tells me that you have not yet slipped the mental shackles that school and the media put on us.
The combination of prosperity and feminism has been shown to lead to a drop in birth rates. This is where Malthus got proven wrong.
Also, any solution has to be politically viable. Create good paying jobs in the Sahel, and the mass migration into Europe stops, and the bleeding hearts lose political clout.
And there is something about caring for the poor in the Bible...
Respectfully, the Invasion of Europe by Islam has become the Conquest of Europe by Islam. Perhaps it is only one generation until the British National Anthem ends with the words "Innnnnshaaaaaallllaaaaahhhhh."
They can then unite with France under the Green Flag with the Star and Crescent.
Now, solar power generation in, say, the vast deserts of Northern and Central Mexico, offers substantial rewards to the members of the Returnista.
Us, as well.