I think that this shows that our species, homo sapiens, is an intimate part of the natural world. We, the natural world, have the material and the intelligence, to 'do things together'.

This rebuts the old modernist view that separates nature from culture, and also, rebuts the postmodernist view that sees everything as 'cultural'. Instead, our species and its analytic and scientific capacities, are an integral part of the natural world.

You might be amazed a some of the technologies we have under development. For example, making photovoltaic cells out of nano-dots looks likely to dramatically increase their efficiency. Also, we may yet replace chemical batteries with hyper-capacitors, by making them out of nano-tubes, resulting in a huge effective surface area (remember that the energy stored in a capacitor is a function of its surface area and dialectric constant). These are the sorts of things being worked on at the University of Alberta's new nano-technology research center.

These two technologies could, in a time frame on the order of ten years, dramatically reduce our dependency on hydrocarbons for generating electricity and heat. Since about half of all hydrocarbon usage is for those results (the other half being for chemicals and plastics feedstocks), Alberta's hydrocarbon resources are unlikely to be consumed for 500 years.

Not counting the massive amount of good coal we have, which we can now process almost 100 % cleanly, and will do even better with nano-scrubbing. You should see the robot mining work being done by the departments of Computing Science and Mining Engineering at the University of Alberta. Why, we won't even have to disturbe the surface to the earth to extract the coal, and we can use the nice caves we create, with nano-material linings and casings, to store our garbage (such as the nuclear waste produced by the new super-safe pebble-bed reactors we're beginning to roll out).

Yesterday in the reader tips thread I mentioned "Getting machines to think like us," an interview with John McCarthy, who coined the term "Artifical Intelligence" for the 1956 Dartmouth conference attended by Claude Shannon & Marvin Minsky - www.tinyurl.com/ndsgp - which contains the following exchange at the end:

--quotes--

CNET: I've been reading through some writing you'd done on progress and sustainability. You seemed to be very optimistic about the future--that material progress is sustainable. But it's a very pessimistic age we live in.

McCarthy: Public moods and journalistic moods can change very fast. Let us suppose that the only really short-term practical way of maintaining automotive transportation is to use liquid hydrogen as a fuel and to produce liquid hydrogen by nuclear reactors. That may very well be the case. I think that if the public, the Congress and the journalists are suddenly faced with really not being able to use cars (unless we) adopt this new technology, then all of a sudden, the mind will be concentrated, as Samuel Johnson says.

CNET: So as the problem gets to a point where we really need to deal with it, we'll deal with it.

McCarthy: Yes, I think so. I don't think that we will let ourselves suffer a real disaster if there is a way of doing something about it. You can look at the response of the U.S. and other countries in time of war as an example that shows that ideas can change very fast when there is a necessity.

CNET: You've also written that you think global warming can be avoided or even reversed, if it turns out to be a serious problem. You wrote that a few years ago--do you still think that's the case, given current research?

McCarthy: I think there is pretty good evidence that there is some warming. I guess there is controversy about the cause, but it can be reversed, if necessary. But it still isn't clear that it's harmful. The way of thinking, even among the scientists, is predominantly doom-oriented. Not entirely, but predominantly. They still are not thinking of how we can fix things other than to refrain. I mean, scientists are affected by the same moods that affect the rest of the public.

--end quotes--

Why then do our statist politicians, NGOs, and main-stream media constantly preach that the sky is falling? Because fear-mongering is how they make their money. They're professional ambulance chasers.

Exactly, vitruvius - and it's not merely the statist politicans and MSM who are 'ambulance chasers'. Much of the humanities and social science academic world (primarily postmodernists trapped within their verbal haze) are the same.

But, our species has the capacity-of-reason. Even when it is denied, as it is within postmodernism, within socialism, within fundamentalism - there are still enough people who can reason and come up with solutions.

Actually, this capacity-to-come up with reasoned solutions is, in my view, a natural property of the physical, chemical, biological (and human) realm. Shades of Aristotle and Charles Peirce.

The Electric car that should be common by now but for political and economic reasons is being held back.

The downsizing of oil refineries and retail gas and oil sales and auto engine steel casting, cutting and grinding, transmissions, [Electric is direct drive].

http......TonyGuitar.blogspot.com

Also, no need for fuel tanks, lines, injectors, ignition timing, fuel mixing, engine cooling, anti-freeze, coolant pumps, exhaust and catalytic conversion and there are dozens more of auto systems the simple elecric wheel drive makes obsolete. The unemployment will be HUGE!

With all of those complex systems eliminated in the electric drive, the electric car should require almost no expensive service except for power steering, brakes and wheel bearings. Longer lasting and More unemployment.

Losing the buggy whip was nothing compared to the employment shifts coming with the electric car. TG

The electric car has not caught on yet, TG, simply because due to the limited capacity of current battery technology, which limits the range of the vehicle, they are not yet cost-effective for most users. That is starting to change with some of the lithium battery technology comming on line, and will be a done deal if the new nano-capacitor batteries work.

The electric car has not been held back by any grand conspiracy theory. And there won't be any massive unemployment, we'll just rejig the robots that make the current parts to have them make new the new parts. Internal combusion motors => electric motors, fuel tanks => batteries, fuel lines => cables, injectors => regulators, timing => control computers, and cooling is still required (though less so, except today, when it's on its way to 32 C in Edmonton ;-)

Finally, there will not necessarily be a huge drop in hydrocarbon consumption, for the electricity must still be generated to charge the vehicles. The former will only happen when we switch to generating most of our electricity to nuclear and solar, which will happen in this century. At that point we will have reduced our hydrocarbon usage by about 50 %, which will be more than made up for increasing usage in the rest of the world.

Fortunately, around the middle of this century, global population will begin to decline. Within 200 years, there will be on the order of a total of a billion or two people living on Earth, all in luxury.

I agree with you, ET. We humans are just a part of what makes nature go 'round. And when you've got them by their engineers, their hearts and minds will follow. Or to put it in the vernacular: Wilderness is the least natural part of this planet.

As Alan Charles Kors wrote in "Can There Be an 'After Socialism'?" at The Objectivist Center on 2003-10-19:

"The cognitive behavior of Western intellectuals faced with the accomplishments of their own society, on the one hand, and with the socialist ideal and then the socialist reality, on the other, takes one's breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry "caste." In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either "poverty" or "consumerism." In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry "alienation." In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry "oppression." In a society of boundless private charity, they cry "avarice." In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the "exploitation" of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry "injustice." In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like "liberty" in quotation marks when these refer to the West."

Or if you don't like that, how 'bout the words of Matt Ridley, in the Guardian, on 2003-04-08:

"For the past century the world has got steadily better for most people. You do not believe that? I am not surprised. You are fed such a strong diet of news about how bad things are that it must be hard to believe they were once worse. But choose any statistic you like and it will show that the lot of even the poorest is better today than it was in 1903. [...] All this has been achieved primarily by that most hated of tricks, the technical fix. By invention, not legislation."

no electric drive car ever exploded in flames and burned all the occupants in a fireball.

but theyve never roared down a city street at 150 klicks in a street race either.

its all priorities.

we have the research funds, technology, brainpower etc etc to finally come up with a decent alternate fuel car but we still dont have the priorities.

hard to believe we're still using friggin inefficient piston engines after a century. and rapidly running out of oil. in a very recent year oil consumption for the first time outpaced new discoveries.

bad sign. we really REALLY dont need to be using ultra high energy gasoline in out passenger vehicles. planes, large trucks (well, diesel in that case) even lawn mowers to get enough rpm's, but we REAAAAAAALLY need to wean ourselves from oil for routine transportation before theres nothing to wean ourselves from.

vivtrius and et up a tree........

Right, vitruvius. And add to that, the accomplishments in health and medicine, pharmaceutical research,biological research to produce more and more nutritious food, and so on.

The west's explosion of innovation came about because it moved out of the collectivism of tribalism and recognized the individual. The individual. The only, the only, source of innovation on this planet. And with the focus on the individual, comes an insistence on responsibility.

The socialist brain-deads run from innovation; they prefer the LCD dead end of the collective. That also removes all responsibility; you aren't responsible for yourself, or anyone else in a collectivist morass. The state is responsible, or fate, or the gods. But not you. That's why socialists prefer that system. No responsibility.

So, three cheers for the West. And for the USA today, born as it was, with its focus on the individual.

Yeah, and nobody has ever died from a 100 amp electrocution from an internal combustion engine, Robert.

It is a complete fallacy that Earth is short of hydrocarbon stocks on the scale humans consume them at. The priorities are already here, we are adjusting and improving, and the sky is not only not falling, it's not even lowering.

The peak-oil fanatics are professional peddlers of fradulent dooms. Look in the professional engineering literature. Or don't, if you like, you can just leave it to us and relax, which would have the added advantage of dramatically improving the signal to noise ratio of public discourse.

Don't believe me on the S/N ratio? On the front page of today's Edmonton Journal there's a story related to the conjecture that global mean temperatures may go up a degree or two in a hundred years, so we'll be back to where we were before the lastest cold spell we've been coming out of for the last 100s of years. Nobody's sure yet. It could just as easily go the other way. And what's the headline on the story?

"Warming Earth Will Spit Fire"

I tell you, there's one born every minute.

Indeed, ET. As Pope John Paul II wrote in "Centesimus Annus": "The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism."

"For example, making photovoltaic cells out of nano-dots looks likely to dramatically increase their efficiency. Also, we may yet replace chemical batteries with hyper-capacitors, by making them out of nano-tubes,..."

All true, but...as usual, the problem is a viable fabrication technology that can hit the required cost points. PV cells via exotic variants of traditional semiconductor growth processes are approaching 50% efficiency under certain application conditions. Expensive.

As for nanotube (properly, nanowire) applications to capacitor technology...Yes, there is a lot of work going on this area. Not only is there a comparable fab issue, but there is the challenge of getting charge in and out.

Current tech is likely to continue slowly expanding niche markets, but a lot of people are looking for alternate ways (colloidal/bio/chem).

And hydrothermal core taps. I'm with you Henry. There's no magic bullet. But there never has been, and look where we've got to so far.

There are a lot of people who want to be afraid (a lot of the brain is about fear handling, and they are addicted to stimulating it), and who at the same time want to eliminate the source of their fear immediately, which ain't gonna' happen, and which would have the unfortunate disadvantage of not allowing them to satisfy their desire for fear in the first place. It's a horrible positive feedback loop.

Some of us aren't, though, so we spend our lives looking after them.

Are you a Martha's child too, Vitruvius?

If it is relevant to the discussion, Henry, per the posted SDA commenting rules, could you, um, please buy me a clue? I'm, like, totally drawing blanks on your reference to "Martha's child". (Why do I get the feeling that I'm going to look silly when we get the answer to this?)

"Sons of Martha" - Rudyard Kipling

I think he's asking if you're an engineer. I'm not but I play one in reality. No ring, 10 years experience.

Steve

Oh, boy. See, I told you I'd feel silly. Yes, I've earned an iron ring, EE, '77, UofA. As it says on the bottom of my copy of the Ritual of the Calling: "Upon Honour and Cold Iron, God helping me, by these things I purpose to abide" (typed from the original). I'm not a P.Eng though, I've been doing software development since '71, (M.Sc CS '80) and the guilds don't really handle that.

But look, according to the posted SDA commenting rules, we're not supposed to be talking about this sort of stuff here, so if you would like to know more about who I am, please just check www.tinyurl.com/jk4n7 - and if you want to talk about it further, just email me via vitruvius2 at gmail dot com (vitruvius1 died about 2000 years ago ;-)

Cryptic is an art form... :-)

Steve reference is correct, although I would not limit it only to engineers (since I'm technically not - don't tell my dean!).

Kipling's usually spot on, but this one has an unjustified weary undertone. In reality, Martha's son's have all the fun, Mary's bored stiff...

I think, Henry, that you meant that "Mary is suffering from a high Young's modulus" (it's that damn Pauli exclusion principle for fermions, I tell you). But look you guys, we better cut this out, or Kate is gonna' smack us upside the head.

Right, back to the topic. You know that incandescent vacuum-tube light bulb you are all familiar with, folks? She's on her death bed.

Within 10 years or so, most of the currently incandescent electrically driven photon sources will be based on light-emitting diode and organic light-emitting diode technology. Which means we'll be spending on the order of one tenth of the resources we are currently spending on powering photon generating devices.

Why? Well, there was this guy, Shuji Nakamura, who while standing on the shoulders of his predecessors, invented [paraphrased from Wikipedia:] commercially viable blue LEDs, based on the wide band gap semiconductor gallium nitride and indium gallium nitride, while working in Japan at Nichia Corporation in 1993. From that base, we have been able to produce white LEDs, which have been growing in applicability since 1996, by adding to the blue LEDs a yellowish phosphor coating usually made of cerium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet crystals.

Mr. Nakamura brings us back to ET's point: "The west's explosion of innovation came about because it moved out of the collectivism of tribalism and recognized the individual. The individual. The only source of innovation on this planet."

I think it is important to remember that Archimedes said "Give ME a long enough lever and I'll move the world." He didn't say give the state, the Liberal Party of Canada or the CBC. Power to the individual.

Interestingly, Vitruvius1 was a big fan of Aristotle (as mentioned by ET) and Archimedes (as mentioned by Rebarbarian), as elucidated in his Des Architectura, the Ten Books of Architecture, circa 25 BC.

And Archimedes did say, hey baby, have I got a screw for you.

Alas, I am simply Vitruvius2; I'd be happy to carry Archimedes' fulcrum.

uh, well vitrius, the voltage across the spark plug wires is very roughly 10,000. come to think of it Im not sure if its AC or DC. the 12V battery on the other hand is capable of pushing up to 700 amps ( winter oil gets real syrupy). no one ever croaked shorting out a car battery across their fingers.

on the other hand, Im sure electric cars could be built using oh, say in the neighborhood of 50 volts, very very safe.

its the voltage that does you in. not the amperage capacity (I know, I know, ya ya ya, its actually the amperage BUT you need to reach about 100 volts to PUSH sufficient amps to electrocute).

my point stands.

why use up billions of barrels/tons/whatever of fossil fuels when we could have 10s of 1000s of acres covered in solar panels rigged to generate electricity, load it onto the power grid and then send it off to millions of homes with their electric car battery chargers?

the energy is free thereafter; just need to pay for the equipment once plus ongoing maintenance as usual. aaaaaand seeing as energy ie barrel = 75 bucks is EXPENSIVE, this too proves my point.

about half of the energy in the gasoline coursing thru your fuel system is WASTED as heat. again my point stands.

piston engines are 100 years old. the early manufacturers NEEDED highly volatile gasoline because it would much more readily spark in the primitive engines and keep things going. ignition systems are vastly more reliable now. we dont need to be still using ultra high energy ultra high volatile gasoline. an exceptionally efficient totally computer controlled engine with real big fuel tank of this low energy fuel will scuttle the plans of the big oil boys to get our addiction to the point where they make off with the lion's share of the money.

and there it is.

all about: oil = lots of money.

now do you all get it?

"The peak-oil fanatics are professional peddlers of fradulent dooms. Look in the professional engineering literature. Or don't, if you like"

?

so vivitus, do you dispute the ever increasing consumption figures? or maybe the falling rate of new discovery . . . we have after all been using oil in large quantities for well over 100 years and looking for it in earnest about 100 years. it cant go on forever, and readers feel free to google 'somewhere' and satisfy themselves that the 2 lines on the graph, use vs discovery have indeed crossed. within the past 2 years or so.

youre talking engineering, Im talking economics. who's view is the more relevant and 'closer to home' to the avg joe q public?

awwwwh, you just being a troll there? tsk tsk tsk.

Relax, Robert. We're working on it. Things take time. Nature has inertia.

But I should like to point out that money is simply a semiotic handle for time. The single greatest resource available to any human being is the time between their birth and their death. That time can be put to productive use. And in particular, the fruits of that time can be traded
for the fruits of others' time. Since it is difficult to actually trade seconds (due to market value considerations), or actually trade, say, sheep (due to sheep shit, if you'll pardon my language), humans have intelligently evolved a proxy mechanism known as money. You'll get used to it.

Life's like that. So is death. The single greatest cause of death is birth. Nothing which has never been born has ever died. Things change, time passes, transactions happen. Biologists have a word for stasis, they call it death. That's how existence works. Enjoy it.

Vitruvius:

You raised an excellent point about LED's. Virtually all the busses and crosswalk signs are using them now in Toronto. With the prices of super-bright white LEDs coming down, we are starting to see a lot of products emerging using them(i.e. flashlights, garden lights, etc).

The OLEDs are giong to be amazing (imagine the futuristic wall/T.V. combo). They can be fabricated using a printing like method.

As far as FNSM goes, it was always the ability to stick to anything, even glass, that was the most 'amazing' to me. Well that, and suspending himself from clouds. "ambient temperatures using only water" - sounds like Parker's technology is going mainstream.

Happy 4th of July, neighbours!

Steve

"we could have 10s of 1000s of acres covered in solar panels"

Hey, do you know how much it would cost to illuminate the area underneath in order to grow good weed? :-)

Put the solar panels in the desert. Weed doesn't grow there.

So, a priest, a doctor, and an engineer were out golfing. And there was a group ahead of them that was playing frightfully slowly. Round about that point, George, the club's groundskeeper, came wandering by.

George, they said, what's up with these folks ahead of us? Well, George said, they're the firemen that were blinded trying to save our clubhouse last year.

Well, needless to say, the priest quickly noted that he would say a prayer for them, and the doctor quickly noted that he would canvas his colleagues to see what they could do. But the engineer looked off into space, and, slowly, thought about it.

Then, he lowered his eyes, and asked: Why can't they play at night?

Don't like that? How 'bout this: A mathematician, scientist, and engineer are each asked: "Suppose we define a horse's tail to be a leg. How many legs does a horse have?" The mathematician answers "5"; the scientist "1"; and the engineer says "But you can't do that!"

How much would you pay for that? But wait, there's more: An optimist sees the glass half full. A pessimist sees the glass half empty. An engineer sees that the vessel is inappropriately sized for the fluid level.

Thank you Robert J. Slowly people will understand the vast advantages of the electric car and begin to ask for it, demand it.

Once in production, it will quickly refine to levels of performance and economy that will permanently eclipse the antiquated piston engine.

There is a temporary bottleneck in the area of silicone process but that should be overcome soon. Just as the computer memory bottleneck of three years ago is now forgotten and solid state storage gets cheaper to buy daily. TG

I presume you are referring, TG, to the silicate electrolyte batteries being experimented with by the Guangdong Jiangmen Yuyang Special Batteries Company in China (unless of course you are referring to making electric cars for Pamela Anderson).

Assuming the former, sure, silicone batteries may help (I don't know a lot about them, but I'm assuming they're not a fraud), as might sodium nickle chloride batteries, the lithium batteries I mentioned above, or perhaps the hyper-capacitors.

(I'm not sure what you meant about solid-state electronics, TG, silicon is not silicone, it's only a component of silicone, and we've got lots of silicon, it's called sand.)

However it turns out, I suspect that we'll end up using a fuel-cell / battery hybrid. As Professor Nigel Schofield from Manchester University said at the the IEEE International Electric Machines and Drives Conference, in Austin, Texas: "Accelerating a 2.5-tonne London taxi from a set of lights requires something like 80kW peak power. If you went to a total fuel cell solution, you would have to have 80–100kW worth of installed fuel cell on the vehicle, and the cost, mass and volume of that would not be commercially competitive, as compared to a hybrid solution." - www.tinyurl.com/jony6

Or maybe the pure EV approach will work. The folks at the Hybrid Technologies Company in the US have got something like that going with lithium batteries: 300 miles per charge, 100 mph, 5 hour recharge, 35,000 USD - www.tinyurl.com/rxnwx

However it pans out, we're working on it, and it takes time. No matter what kind of motors we use, we will still have to produce the energy they consume, be that electricity, hydrogen, or maybe even something else.

Just remember, there's a lot of hype and fear mongering and conspiracy theorists out there. If all we needed to do was make tin-foil hat cars and heat/cool tin-foil hat buildings, the problem would have been solved long ago.

There may be an over stuffed Pamela look to some long range electric cars, possibly, but once in production, sleek will be the norm.

The 80kwh power requirement for decent performance may be for a normal motor. The wheel mounted electric drive developed by Quebec Hydro is direct drive and more powerful and efficient than other drive forms.

-http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic52441-pg1.html&pp=20

Discussion at Techspot.com or my site makes it clear that performance is not a problem.

Thanks for the excellent references and background. TG

Vitruvius,

You forgot tin-foil hat conservatives.

BTW 24 VAC capable of .8 to 1.8 amps continuous peak is enough to stop a human heart...permanently

Kilo-watts, peak power, TG, not kilo-watt-hours. Watt-hours are units of energy, not power. Power is the first derivative of work with respect to time (as delta-t goes to zero). 746 watts = 1 horsepower.

Work, on the other hand, is the integral of force over distance. Force = mass times acceleration. The mass of a London taxi is 2.5 tonnes.

The rest is just math. You and your TechSpot buddies should try it some day, you'll like it.

It's more fun than a barrel of conspiracy theories.

RobertJ, thankfully for you we can also look forward to great strides in the area of orthopedic surgery. Your biases must have been steadily ossifying since the mid-1980s.

Hey, you have a BA AND a BSc - golly, I'll bet you had a religous experience when watching "Bowling For Columbine", right? Then why didn't YOU "get it": fear addiction is bad for children and other living things. Go prophesy The End somewhere else please.

Some suggestions too RobertJ (or, since you insist on deliberately and provocatively misspelling Vitruvius's name, JobertR), so you don't keep embarrassing yourself in forums like this:

1) Put down the bong and learn to communicate like an adult - something you apparently managed to avoid while obtaining two degrees.

2) Display some becoming humility in the presence of your intellectual betters. Pretend for a change that you know how to LEARN, and that you don't know everything already.

You should consider returning your degrees, it would be an admirable leap forward in your entry to adulthood.