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Global Warming or Global Cooling in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Thursday, June 2 2005 14:01 Profile #23
quote:
Originally written by 4.808 x 10^3:

The only way to prove one way or another is to drill a hole...
Perhaps, even though there are less intrusive ways of doing it. The actual amount of oil projected in the area is quite small relative to US oil demand. Is it really worth the economic and environmental risk? Either way, you have to justify your answer quantitatively.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Global Warming or Global Cooling in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Wednesday, June 1 2005 13:59 Profile #21
Keep in mind that the Anwar oil reserves are far from proven. Most prudent geologists estimate only a 1/3 chance of even finding any oil there. We need more robust energy sources.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Why do you like BoE but not BoA? in Blades of Exile
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Wednesday, June 1 2005 13:56 Profile #36
fatman - Please refrain from such impulsive comments. Failure to do so will result in action possibly up to the permanent suspension of your account.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Global Warming or Global Cooling in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Monday, May 30 2005 07:20 Profile #15
quote:
Originally written by Eagle, the author soul:

Nuclear and coaldioxid have to be reduced. Once in the time when no livesform could live on earth the radiation and coaldioxid was high rated. Due to our useage of oil and nuclear, the radiation level and coaldioxid rate have increased and thereby the earth has gone to a enviorment stage that is more similiar to the old times, which of course is not good. Why does all these bad things exist then? Simply, it's because someone earns on it. War, enviroment abuse and many other problems would cease to exist if there were nothing to gain on it.

People should toy with the nature only on games. :(

Protect nature!
I've never heard of coaldioxid before, I suspect you mean carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The exact impact of this substance on global climate has yet to be truly substantiated.

As far as radiation increase from nuclear power, um, under normal operation a coal plant emits more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant does. Although high level radioactive waste is produced, the volume is quite small and is easily contained and kept out of the environment.

Even with nuclear weapons testing, the natural background on average has increased less than 1%. For scale, no negative health effects have been observed below about 200 times natural background. In fact, people in slightly higher radiation zones appear to be healthier on average than those in lower radiation zones.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
A Car For the Future in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Monday, May 30 2005 07:12 Profile #9
But where are you going to get the energy to compress the air? You don't get something for nothing.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Avernum III acting up in Tech Support
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Monday, May 30 2005 07:09 Profile #1
Well, without specific information as to your platform and operating system, any prognosis would be futile.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Do You Think They'll Ever Take The Avernum Series Online? in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Sunday, May 29 2005 03:22 Profile #8
No.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
New Scenario in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Sunday, May 29 2005 03:21 Profile #1
Get the registered version of BoA or BoE; please be specific in your message. It's easy and not too expensive considering the future value in the number of scenarios you want to play.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
SpiderWeb Glitch IV in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Saturday, May 28 2005 06:37 Profile #25
This really belongs in general.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Fixed 'kill Orois Blaze' bug in Geneforge Series
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Saturday, May 7 2005 15:24 Profile #2
Might want to inform Jeff of this bug if he doesn't know already.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Biomass Future-- Will It Replace Oil in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Wednesday, May 4 2005 13:15 Profile #51
quote:
i'd rather think Hydrogen is a much more reliable energy, although currently expensive.
but the electrolysis of water produces Hydrogen and Oxygen, together making a highly energetic mixture.

if only we had a cheaper way of producing hydrogen, we would have our energy problems solved
HYDROGEN IS NOT AN ENERGY SOURCE!!

Sorry about that, but when people equate hydrogen to energy, I tend to get a little upset. Hydrogen, or at least the reactivity of hydrogen with other elements in exothermic chemical reactions, is an energy carrier much like a battery.

Although there is plenty of free Hydrogen in the universe, most of the stuff on Earth is locked up in chemical compunds that require energy to liberate. It's not the fact that producing Hydrogen is expensive, it's the fact that as of right now the only way to economically produce it in large quantities is using the combustion of fossil fuels.

There are proposals of using Wind and Solar, but unfortunately those are quite inefficient and costly on large scales. The electrolysis process is a lot more efficent at high temperatures, so achieving those saves a lot of energy. Nuclear fission is currently the only viable non-fossil fuel emitting way of doing electrolysis at high temperatures. There are other more complicated processes of producing hydrogen other than electrolysis that are not as well understood on the industrial scale.

Given that we can produce it, now we have to store it and transport it which is very difficult to do because of its small molecular weight. It diffuses very easily through everything, so losses are expected to be frequent.

Development of economical fuel cells are another important issue in and of itself. So, all and all, hydrogen is a ways off before become the staple of our economy.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Biomass Future-- Will It Replace Oil in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Thursday, April 28 2005 09:04 Profile #41
quote:
Originally written by Toasted Basilisk on a Shish Kebab:

If we want to play the game of future energy sources. The most unwieldy of them all is the Solar Power Satellite. Basically beamed energy from space. A wonderfully dangerous and improbable source of energy.
100 years of progress can produce some pretty good advances on space travel, let's not underestimate what our descendants will be able to do.

As far as dangerous? Well, constructing it would be if we use the proposal of sattelites. If we, however, use collectors on the Moon and then beam it to Earth indirectly, the problem of construction becomes a lot less.

The collection area for a 5 GWe solar sattelite is 10 x 5 km. Quite large by today's standards, but not horribly unreasonable if assembled piece by piece. The active rectenna of such a system would be 10 x 13 km. An exclusion zone would go out an additional two km. This is a large area of land, but about 40% of the US land is suitable for such deployment.

The peak power density is 230 W/m^2 with the power density on the edge of the exclusion zone of 1 W/m^2. The peak intensity would be enough to cause heating of anyone there, but not enough to have adverse effects if the person was not exposed over a long period of time. The edge intensity is negligible. I'm not sure exactly how "dangerous" this would be as the peak power density is not high enough to cause much harm.

There are many technological and economic issues with this power source.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Biomass Future-- Will It Replace Oil in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Wednesday, April 27 2005 14:39 Profile #39
quote:
This prediction is rather late. Have you ever heard of the bomb "Mike", which obliterated an entire island in the Pacific Ocean?
Did you read my initial statement? A steady state DT nuclear fusion device (not a hydrogren bomb which is a fusion device, I am aware) would be perfect for making the material for more hydrogen bombs.

Mike, by comparison, is a rather crude device by today's standards. Modern nuclear weapons use a three stage process of a fast fission of Pu239 with 1-2 MeV neutrons, fission neutrons generate tritium from a Li6 blanket and we get DT fusion from compression of a some sacrificial blanket while the which generates 14 MeV neutrons, these 14 MeV neutrons in turn give good fast fission of U238 shields. This adds up to a massive energy release.

The problems with fusion power are a lot more than just getting the energy out. Doing energy confinement is a big obstacle for the magnetic folks. Doing reliable steady state pulsing of 5 MJ lasers at 5 Hz is the big obstacle for the inertial folks. There are other more exotic proposals, but the two I mentioned are the closest to electricity production. There are, of course, many other technical obstacles to the development of fusion as an electrcity source.

The first wall damage problem is not only a technical obstacle, but an economic one as well. This is what, I feel, will not be resolved to the degree to make the energy source economic.

[ Wednesday, April 27, 2005 14:40: Message edited by: *i ]

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Biomass Future-- Will It Replace Oil in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Tuesday, April 26 2005 09:32 Profile #29
quote:
Originally written by Frozen feet:

Uh, by the way, how long will the oil supplies still last? The last estimation I heard was 40 years, and that was 7 years ago. That would mean we have 33 years left. Is this right?
I think this is where we bring up the concept of Reserve, Reserve Base, and Resource.

Reserves are what are proven supplies of a resource that are currently economically favorable to recover.

Reserve Base is supplies include reserves and those that are not proven, but fairly certain, or are economically questionable at the current time.

Resources encompass everything there is potentially or not economical at all to recover.

What is often quoted are reserves. These change over time because of future exploration or changes in economical situation. New technologies and the lack of economically viable resources push things that were in the Reserve Base into Reserves. This means there is more oil out there than given, whether or not we recover it is an economic and political decision.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Biomass Future-- Will It Replace Oil in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Sunday, April 24 2005 06:51 Profile #22
quote:
Biomass 50% of energy by 2030
Biomass land usage requirements are 5.2 square kilometers per MWe. At a modest 1.5% growth rate in energy, we should be using close to 1230 GW of electricity by 2030. The land usage requirement for 50% biomass would be 3.2 million square kilometers or about a 1800 x 1800 km plot of land or about a 1100 x 1100 miles of land.

Considering this is bigger than most states, I find this estimate of 50% to be rather high. Note this is only electricty I accounted for, not total energy usage which would be much higher still.

Wind producing 20% seems quite high as well. It's often quoted by environmental groups, but most realistic estimates are somewhere between 5-10%.

Currently Solar PV cells create more environmental damage with toxic chemicals produced than we would get equivalent amounts of energy from fossil fuels. While I don't doubt we will be able to solve these issues in the future, it still remains a concern. Solar thermal could provide a lot of needed assistance over winter months, however. Also, the cost of solar PV is quite high and is not economical. I seriously doubt people could afford to pay their electric bills at 10-20% energy production.

Realistically, renewables will probably only account for 20% or so of the energy grid. We cannot go past what people can afford in terms of monetary and land usage requirements. Your projections are quite unreasonable and we will have to use fossil fuels or nuclear fission for some time.

This is not as bad as one would think:

Clean coal technology could reduce the environmental impact from that source making it more attractive.

Current reprocessing technologies for spent nuclear fuel are at hand but not economical at present largely due to the decomissioning of the weapons stockpiles. If the cost can be lowered, the energy content of the fuel can increase from 5% usage to 80-90% usage with a lot less long term (10s-100s thousands of years) waste in the process.

Although these new sources of electricty are exciting and should be developed, it is a lot more economical to look into was of improving existing technologies.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Biomass Future-- Will It Replace Oil in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Saturday, April 23 2005 17:28 Profile #17
Those numbers seem a little high from what I calculated from a chemistry text. I get:

43 MJ/kg (gasoline)
25 MJ/kg (ethonol)

Keep in mind typical efficiencies of thermal to mechanical energy is on the order of 30%, so the actual yield is much lower.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Biomass Future-- Will It Replace Oil in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Saturday, April 23 2005 16:27 Profile #15
English system, yuck. Care to put those in metric kJ/mol or MJ/kg for those of us who use real unit systems?

What is the land usage requirement for a hyptothetical ethonal economy?

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Biomass Future-- Will It Replace Oil in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Saturday, April 23 2005 14:10 Profile #11
quote:
In the ten years after most of the older engines would be replaced by attrition.
I find the ten year statement to be highly dubious. I know a lot of people who have vehicles ten years or older. Mine is personally fifteen years old from the manufacturing date and the engine still works fine. Replacing it would not be economical for me at this time.

I think twenty years would be the absolute soonest for large scale replacement with thirty years a more likely achievable goal if we work on attrition alone.

That said, a more relevant question:

What is the energy density of ethanol versus gasoline? How many square kilometers of land would it take to support one vehicle for one year? Suppose we now multiply that by 300 million. How many square kilometers would such an economy require?

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Biomass Future-- Will It Replace Oil in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Saturday, April 23 2005 09:35 Profile #6
quote:
Instead, we should fund the project Nuclear Fusion.
Well, I hate to break this as a nuclear engineer, but fusion is gonna be a long way away. That doesn't mean we shouldn't fund research, but we need to use what we have today.

Here's the deal with fusion: The easiest fuel cycle, the deuterium-tritium (DT) cycle has some inherent problems even if we get the actual cycle worked out:

1) Produces high-energy neutrons which damages the vessel, which makes it very expensive to replace. I fear this will make it uneconomical.

2) The cycle would be the ideal device for manufacturing thermonuclear weapons. The production of tritium in abundance coupled with removable U238 or Th232 reflector curtains would be perfect for manufacturing weapons grade fissionable material.

Other more advanced cycles such as DD, D-3He, 3He-3He, and p-11B are tens of times harder than the DT cycle, but do not have the same problems as much.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Biomass Future-- Will It Replace Oil in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Saturday, April 23 2005 09:18 Profile #4
There is plenty of land that can be used for this purpose. Wind should be expanded too and if it ever becomes economical and environmentally friendly, solar photovoltaic should be used.

Unfortunately, because they have either low energy density or have reliability issues, they will probably only be intermitant power sources. Affordable baseload power will have to come from high energy density sources of coal combustion, natural gas, or nuclear fission.

We can argue that there will be something better in the future, but there will always be something better in the future. We have to use what we have now and research the things for the future.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Biomass Future-- Will It Replace Oil in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Saturday, April 23 2005 07:29 Profile #2
Biomass has some potential applications depending on which process we refer to. The combustion of organics tend to lead to the release of CO2, CO, and large particulate carbon chains which are not entirely good for the environment and the people in it. However, this does not imply combustion is the only way to produce energy.

The real problem with biomass is the extremely low energy density. In order to produce the amounts of energy that other major suppliers produce, it would require phenomenal amounts of land usage dedicated to just making the biomass.

Also, petroleum products with the very long carbon chains are important to the formation of plastics and other polymers. I doubt shorter carbon chains can make as reliable products.

Biomass has a niche, but it's energy density and other limitations will keep it from becoming a dominant fuel source.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
NEW POPE! in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Tuesday, April 19 2005 08:38 Profile #5
quote:
Originally written by Morgan:

This is very bad news for the Catholic Church (and people in general). He's about as conservative as it's possible to get, so don't expect any nice liberal teachings on abortion, contraception, gay people or women priests.

The only blessing is that hopefully he won't be around for long.
There are no people in the upper echelon really that have liberal views.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Do you think there is a Hell? in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Monday, April 18 2005 17:35 Profile #265
quote:
I disagree. If God didn't want people to be gay, as it says in the Bible, he wouldn't create them to be hetrosexual or homosexual. That's a decision people make by themselves.
There is some evidence to suggest that homosexual males have certain hormone levels of heterosexual females and vice versa. There is a physiological, a chemical or physical difference, in the neurology of homosexuals.

Many behaviors are like this and are pretty much beyond our control. More serious cases, like skitzophrenea or bipolar disorder, require treatment. Homosexuality used to be considered a disease. I'm not saying that it should be classified as one, but it has phisiological causes, which a person cannot control.

How then do you reconcile real scientific results with your statement?

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
litalia ressurection bug in Geneforge Series
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Sunday, April 17 2005 17:52 Profile #2
Send Jeff an e-mail reporting the bug.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Do you think there is a Hell? in General
*i
The Establishment
Member # 6
 written Tuesday, April 12 2005 18:45 Profile #213
quote:
The reforming of Israel was prophcied, as well as many wars and the end times.
I hardly think these count. The reforming of Israel was a forced thing by the powers that be after World War II. It happened not through divine intervention or chance, but because people willed it to happen to confirm the prediction. It's like me making a prophecy that a specific person will get a million dollars and then that person spends his or her whole life making that come true. Would I be considered a great prophet? Well, one at giving out self-fulfilling ones, I suppose...

Many wars, like? Specifics here! What exactly was predicted? That great wars will happen? Well, just about many religious traditions talk about major wars. Major wars have been happening all the time, it's just the scale was different. The war was big relative to the "size" of the world. If there was a prediction saying that in the 20th century there would be a war across the globe, the slaughtering of Jews, ending with weapons of incredible power, that would be a lot nicer.

I got news, the end times haven't happened yet...

The problem with prophecy is that they are really too vague to substantiate anything. I can make prophecies so general that they are bound to happen sometime in the next few thousand years.

Please, tell me specifically what prophecies have been/are being fufilled today.

quote:
I have made a commitment to study all other holy books but with the personal proof I have for myself (which I can only testify to so it doesn't hold much water with you) I expect only to confirm what I already believe. If I find otherwise, I'll be sure to let you know.
Why bother? If you go in with the attitude that you expect to confirm what you already know, I suspect you will never find anything to contradict that. That's true for most things. Right now the burden of proof is on the other books, and I suspect it is just as high as it needs to be such that you never need to challenge your belief systems.

Let me be the last to tell you how to run your life, but I think that examining other holy books (and secular ones too, I should add) with a critical eye, making the burden of proof on your belief system, would be a lot more convincing.

[ Tuesday, April 12, 2005 18:53: Message edited by: *i ]

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00

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