Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 DarkLink wrote:
Biofuels work out to be a crazy-inefficient way of powering vehicles. It's simply not even remotely close to being viable.

Define "viable". Is it a good option for powering your everyday commute? Probably not, because that's a short enough trip with enough charging time between trips for an electric car to be viable. But where biofuels are incredibly useful is in situations where size and/or weight are important. For example, we aren't going to have electric airplanes in the foreseeable future (other than as toys or research projects) because batteries are way too heavy for the amount of power they can store. But biofuels allow you to use existing engines with their high power-to-weight ratios without worrying about running out of a limited resource. And I suspect a similar case might exist with long-distance trucks, where you can't carry huge amounts of batteries and you really don't want to stop and wait to recharge every few miles.

BeAfraid wrote:
Think about what will happen in the USA when every taxi, bus, and train operator is put out of work by a nearly flawless AI self-driving vehicle.

That is coming by 2020.

No it isn't. It will probably happen eventually, but not for a long time. We'll still have human drivers for the same reason that we have human pilots flying planes equipped with autopilots that are perfectly capable of handling the trip without any human intervention. Even if most of the work is done by the computer we're still going to have a human sitting there watching it just in case they need to take over and avoid a disaster. Five years isn't even close to long enough to turn research projects (the state self-driving vehicles are currently in) into a viable product and establish a record of safe operation that justifies giving them full control.

And... Even professionals such as Doctors and Lawyers are not immune from Tech Unemployment.

Look at IBM's Watson.

Do you know what its FIRST application is?

Paralegal and Diagnostician, which it does better than a human, millions of times faster.

It will not be very long before it can produce a fully argued legal case (including being able to field objections to points) in a full court.

Oh, and the Judge will have been replaced by another version of Watson.

This is never going to happen for the same reason that self-driving cars are going to take a lot longer than you think. Humans are not going to surrender control over the legal system to a computer anytime in the foreseeable future. Paralegals and diagnosticians are only at risk because they're low-level jobs that require human supervision anyway. There's a huge difference between replacing a paralegal whose job primarily consists of "drive over to the courthouse and fetch this document for me" and letting a computer be a judge or lawyer.

I, and others, are working on ways to cybernetically optimize human biology by simply getting rid of most of it

No you aren't. It's very obvious that you're making up most of your supposed credentials. And your "project" to replace human organs with self-repairing plastic is just a cliche scifi story.

I am sure that we can divvy that area up into regions that have at least one region that is sunny or windy when peak power is needed.

It's not even close to that simple because of transmission losses. You really want to generate your electricity fairly close to where you're going to use it, otherwise you end up wasting huge percentages of it and eventually reach a point where it's just not viable to send it that far. A region with consistent sun and/or wind can generate its own electricity and supply nearby areas, but proposals like "power New York with solar panels in the deserts of the southwest" are purely wishful thinking.

 DarkLink wrote:
Biofuels are simply not feasible.

Only with current ways of making them with corn and crap like that, which also increases food prices to boot.

On the other hand, if we use genetic engineering to alter Algae like is currently being done by some companies we could have an efficient way of making fuel that way. Its just a matter of time as technology isn't quite there yet.

Of course, we are likely to have a breakthrough in battery technology before that happens. So its really a question of what happens first and how quickly could we transition to electric vehicles.

 Grey Templar wrote:

On the other hand, if we use genetic engineering to alter Algae like is currently being done by some companies we could have an efficient way of making fuel that way. Its just a matter of time as technology isn't quite there yet.

Ohh, that reminds me of a video I had to watch about "Green buildings". Apparently in Germany some of the new office buildings going in have these multi-layer plate glass windows where the middle portion has water/algae growing. The algae reacts to sunlight, becoming more green, which shades/cools the building, while at the same time providing some power to a reserve generator/battery setup that supplements the existing power grid. Then, when the sun goes away, its cloudy, or just plain dark, the algae goes back to it's "clear" state and what natural light there is still gets through.

 Breotan wrote:
I have never subscribed to any of the alarmist theories and I'm glad to see the data backs up what I've always known intuitively.

I too like it when someone tells me that my hunches are right and that I'm smarter than the average person.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Only with current ways of making them with corn and crap like that, which also increases food prices to boot.

Yeah. Ethanol is actually feasible if you're making it out of something feasible like sugarcane. Corn is literally the worst source of the stuff you can find, but we gotta prop up those multimillion dollar mega farms with massive subsidizes, otherwise they might actually have to compete

Imma watch this tonight...

Few things...

1) The reason why Emeralds aren't mined anymore is not because it's scarce... it's because it can be lab grown cheaply.

2) Never discount human ingenuity. We'll be fine. Case in point, we can extract oil from Poultry packaging wastes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

Efficiency & Economy of Scale are the barriers that can be surpassed.

 Elemental wrote:

 Breotan wrote:
I have never subscribed to any of the alarmist theories and I'm glad to see the data backs up what I've always known intuitively.

I too like it when someone tells me that my hunches are right and that I'm smarter than the average person.

I know, right?

 whembly wrote:
2) Never discount human ingenuity. We'll be fine. Case in point, we can extract oil from Poultry packaging wastes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

There are two problems with this kind of thing:

1) Oil isn't just useful because you can burn it in your car, it's useful because it provides a huge net energy gain. As long as you can find a good place to drill it's easy to get and easy to process, which makes it cheap. If you have to spend a lot of energy to make oil then the cost inevitably goes up, and that puts a limit on where you can use it profitably. This is the real problem with peak oil, we'll probably never literally run out of oil but the cost of exploiting the last remaining sources will increase until oil is no longer a viable energy source.

2) Scale is a huge problem. How much poultry waste is available compared to current oil consumption? Processing waste into oil is great as long as it's waste you're already generating and paying to dispose of, it's not so great if you have to figure out ways to produce extra waste just to turn it into oil. That makes cost go up significantly and you're back to the problem of running out of cheap oil. Alternative sources like this have a lot of potential for cases where you need oil because of its specific properties (aircraft fuel, plastic manufacturing, etc), but they can only supplement larger-scale energy sources.

 Breotan wrote:
I have never subscribed to any of the alarmist theories and I'm glad to see the data backs up what I've always known intuitively.

Actually it is just a matter of which data you choose to go by. There exists scientific research to support pretty much any viewpoint you could have.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Only with current ways of making them with corn and crap like that, which also increases food prices to boot.

Yeah. Ethanol is actually feasible if you're making it out of something feasible like sugarcane. Corn is literally the worst source of the stuff you can find, but we gotta prop up those multimillion dollar mega farms with massive subsidizes, otherwise they might actually have to compete

Not really. Ethanol subsidies are a big problem, but they don't exist because farmers are demanding them. They exist because of a misguided push to encourage local biofuel production. Farmers are just taking advantage of an opportunity the government has given.

Not worried.

I just watched the whole video and I'm glad I did. It could have said what it did in far less time but it was well presented.

The most interesting thing for me was the last 6 minutes, which discusses carbon emissions. 50% of the World's carbon emissions are generated by the 1 billion richest people. Our challenge going forward is to cut the emissions of the most guilty, which will have a much greater impact than the extra emissions that 4 billion more poor people will generate.

Where I disagree with the video is that I still think that population growth is a concern. We may "only" grow to 11 billion people by 2100, which in percentage terms is a far slower growth than we have seen in the last 100 years. Even so it has massive implications, sociologically and environmentally. Africa quadrupling its population in the next 85 years is a challenge the whole World faces, not specific to that continent.

Sure, a lot is being done to cut the birth rate. Momentum needs to be built on though and the whole World needs to play its part. Getting more and more people out of poverty is ultimately a good thing but we need to be sure that our planet can handle our expectations for what kind of lifestyle we wish to lead.

 Grey Templar wrote:


Not really. Ethanol subsidies are a big problem, but they don't exist because farmers are demanding them. They exist because of a misguided push to encourage local biofuel production. Farmers are just taking advantage of an opportunity the government has given.

I'm more pointing out the silliness, because at this point Farm subsidies are becoming corporate handouts as larger conglomerates take over the agriculture industry

I've always felt that we should get the best fusion scientists in the world, lock them in a bond villains secret lab and throw money at them until they manage to accomplish a self-sustaining Fusion reaction and then construct a functional fusion reactor.

Once we've got fusion then all our energy worries are basically over.

Okay, I'm still trying to sit down and watch this in its entirety. I got through a little bit before my kid woke up on Saturday - I really liked the stat about Bangladesh, with birth rates scaling that far back in a single generation.

Maybe tonight I might see the rest…

 Peregrine wrote:
This is the real problem with peak oil, we'll probably never literally run out of oil but the cost of exploiting the last remaining sources will increase until oil is no longer a viable energy source.

It is both the problem and the solution - oil is going to become more expensive to access, which makes alternatives more viable. That doesn’t mean everything is going to fine of course, that mechanism does mean we’re looking at a future of more expensive energy, which is a major threat to expected economic growth. Expensive energy and flat populations is something our economies and cultural understanding of economies just isn’t ready to deal with.

Alternative sources like this have a lot of potential for cases where you need oil because of its specific properties (aircraft fuel, plastic manufacturing, etc), but they can only supplement larger-scale energy sources.

Yeah, and I think that's where a lot of energy sources will find a place - as a supplement to existing resources. I think part of the new future of energy will be in figuring out how to use the strengths of each new energy tech to offset its weaknesses. It is the kind of thing that you’d think would be simple, but it took decades for us to realise that while solar is more expense per kw compared to coal, it has a unique advantage in scaling. This means that efforts to build big solar farms and run power to homes and factories like it was coal was a terrible idea, but unlike coal solar could actually be set up at the point of use, with even just a single panel, massively changing the cost structure.

Here I thought this was going to be about the 6th mass extinction.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33209548

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
I've always felt that we should get the best fusion scientists in the world, lock them in a bond villains secret lab and throw money at them until they manage to accomplish a self-sustaining Fusion reaction and then construct a functional fusion reactor.

Once we've got fusion then all our energy worries are basically over.

Meh, Fusion would be nice, but Fission would last us a dozen millennia just fine.

If you want to power the world, you need to face facts about Renewables, namely that they cannot and will never be able to do enough. The future, and a future that China and India are quickly embracing, is in MSR/LFTRs and in Gen IV nuclear reactors, with the former being the more promising of the two in my opinion because it's not like thorium is rare. The tech is well known. We just have to put the time and money into it. Same deal for the Gen IV fission reactors. Our aging nuclear power infrastructure is not a benefit, we are actively harming ourselves with our childish fear of nuclear energy.

As far as the video goes I don't think it was Malthusian at all, if anything it was a refutation of Malthusian doctrine on just about every front.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
I've always felt that we should get the best fusion scientists in the world, lock them in a bond villains secret lab and throw money at them until they manage to accomplish a self-sustaining Fusion reaction and then construct a functional fusion reactor.

Once we've got fusion then all our energy worries are basically over.

Meh, Fusion would be nice, but Fission would last us a dozen millennia just fine.

Right, if you don't mind having a load of radioactive waste at the end and it requiring expensive and hazardous fuel

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
I've always felt that we should get the best fusion scientists in the world, lock them in a bond villains secret lab and throw money at them until they manage to accomplish a self-sustaining Fusion reaction and then construct a functional fusion reactor.

Once we've got fusion then all our energy worries are basically over.

Meh, Fusion would be nice, but Fission would last us a dozen millennia just fine.

Right, if you don't mind having a load of radioactive waste at the end and it requiring expensive and hazardous fuel

I have a simple answer: New Mexico. Its already a rad filled postapacalyptic mutant death world, and that was in the 1850s. Its gone downhill since.

 Frazzled wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
I've always felt that we should get the best fusion scientists in the world, lock them in a bond villains secret lab and throw money at them until they manage to accomplish a self-sustaining Fusion reaction and then construct a functional fusion reactor.

Once we've got fusion then all our energy worries are basically over.

Meh, Fusion would be nice, but Fission would last us a dozen millennia just fine.

Right, if you don't mind having a load of radioactive waste at the end and it requiring expensive and hazardous fuel

I have a simple answer: New Mexico. Its already a rad filled postapacalyptic mutant death world, and that was in the 1850s. Its gone downhill since.

But do we want to increase it's radioactive properties? Could be bad...

Yes, yes we do. Further, all prospective presidential candidates should be dropped off in the middle of it. The ones that survive can run.

Survivor: New Mexico

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
If you want to power the world, you need to face facts about Renewables, namely that they cannot and will never be able to do enough.

Never is too strong a word, IMO. The technology isn't there, yet. It isn't all that efficient, yet. However, I should point out that many scientists consider hydro-electric power to be "renewable" because it depends on the water... you really think that's going to run out anytime soon?


Personally, I think the "best" situation, would be to run on nuclear power as a primary, with the renewable sources acting as a supplement. This should, in my mind, allow the reactors to run at a near-constantly "lower" power setting or whatever they use (the reactors will be well away from maximum reactor capacity, basically what I'm getting at)

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
I've always felt that we should get the best fusion scientists in the world, lock them in a bond villains secret lab and throw money at them until they manage to accomplish a self-sustaining Fusion reaction and then construct a functional fusion reactor.

Once we've got fusion then all our energy worries are basically over.

Meh, Fusion would be nice, but Fission would last us a dozen millennia just fine.

Right, if you don't mind having a load of radioactive waste at the end and it requiring expensive and hazardous fuel

The danger and amount of waste generated by Fission is way overstated. And we have very very safe ways of transporting and storing it. The containers could get hit by a full speed freight train and not crack.

And the rods only need to be replaced very infrequently. Then they get taken and buried beneath miles and miles of earth out in the middle of nowhere.

Again, just drop it between Hobbs and Artesia. no living thing will notice, or more precisely no creature with two eyes and only two arms will notice.

but whatever they do, don't let those trucks stop. They have to just push the barrels out the back and keep going full speed. In fact its best to air drop it from C-17s. 'Cause the muties are out there, and they are watching.

 Grey Templar wrote:

And the rods only need to be replaced very infrequently. Then they get taken and buried beneath miles and miles of earth out in the middle of nowhere.

And even then, we do have ways of reusing those spent rods for even more fuel (as I alluded to earlier ITT) I've heard, that if we completely used our nuclear "fuel" as far as it could sustain energy, we would be producing one 55 gallon drum of waste, per year. When you consider that many people have garbage cans around 55 gallons, or larger and they are full every week, and THAT garbage can directly impact the quality of life for the very person throwing it away, should make people more concerned about that stuff.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
If you want to power the world, you need to face facts about Renewables, namely that they cannot and will never be able to do enough.

Sort of – we also have to face facts about a whole lot of energy sources. Because there’s a big one the proponents of nuclear keep ignoring – it requires massive up front investment. This is probably a bigger killer of nuclear projects than the public’s fear of radiation. Simply put, it’s a really tough to get investors to put up hundreds of millions of dollars for a new nuclear plant when there is so much uncertainty about what the energy sector will look like in a couple of decades time.

Now, I’m not anti-nuclear in any way – the sooner our base load power is shifted from coal to nuclear the better as far as I’m concerned. But it isn’t as simple as just getting the public to calm down about radiation, new nuclear investment is tough at the best of times, and really tough given the current environment.

 sebster wrote:

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
If you want to power the world, you need to face facts about Renewables, namely that they cannot and will never be able to do enough.

Sort of – we also have to face facts about a whole lot of energy sources. Because there’s a big one the proponents of nuclear keep ignoring – it requires massive up front investment. This is probably a bigger killer of nuclear projects than the public’s fear of radiation. Simply put, it’s a really tough to get investors to put up hundreds of millions of dollars for a new nuclear plant when there is so much uncertainty about what the energy sector will look like in a couple of decades time.

Now, I’m not anti-nuclear in any way – the sooner our base load power is shifted from coal to nuclear the better as far as I’m concerned. But it isn’t as simple as just getting the public to calm down about radiation, new nuclear investment is tough at the best of times, and really tough given the current environment.

This is true, however If you were to look at it in purely "energy output per dollar" then nuclear is the much better investment when compared to say... solar, or wind. Probably the only things cheaper would be coal/gas fired and hydro. The problem with hydro now being, much of the dammable rivers in the US have been dammed. So that leaves people looking at subsurface tidal plants, damming bays and inlets to use tidal pressures to generate power, or affixing large underwater turbines to things like bridges in fairly quickly moving rivers/waterways. There are a whole host of environmental issues with all of them and that drives up the cost of producing those methods of power generation.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
This is true, however If you were to look at it in purely "energy output per dollar" then nuclear is the much better investment when compared to say... solar, or wind.

Yeah, it is, but the point is that energy output by dollar isn't the whole picture, even from a pure return on investment POV. Really big upfront investment is scary at the best of times, while small scale generation like solar and wind is much safer, even if the overall return is less impressive.

And yeah, hydro is awesome but it isn't just the US where it's peaked, even in the developing world much of the hydro has already been tapped.

 Peregrine wrote:

BeAfraid wrote:
Think about what will happen in the USA when every taxi, bus, and train operator is put out of work by a nearly flawless AI self-driving vehicle.

That is coming by 2020.

No it isn't. It will probably happen eventually, but not for a long time. We'll still have human drivers for the same reason that we have human pilots flying planes equipped with autopilots that are perfectly capable of handling the trip without any human intervention. Even if most of the work is done by the computer we're still going to have a human sitting there watching it just in case they need to take over and avoid a disaster. Five years isn't even close to long enough to turn research projects (the state self-driving vehicles are currently in) into a viable product and establish a record of safe operation that justifies giving them full control.

And... Even professionals such as Doctors and Lawyers are not immune from Tech Unemployment.

Look at IBM's Watson.

Do you know what its FIRST application is?

Paralegal and Diagnostician, which it does better than a human, millions of times faster.

It will not be very long before it can produce a fully argued legal case (including being able to field objections to points) in a full court.

Oh, and the Judge will have been replaced by another version of Watson.

This is never going to happen for the same reason that self-driving cars are going to take a lot longer than you think. Humans are not going to surrender control over the legal system to a computer anytime in the foreseeable future. Paralegals and diagnosticians are only at risk because they're low-level jobs that require human supervision anyway. There's a huge difference between replacing a paralegal whose job primarily consists of "drive over to the courthouse and fetch this document for me" and letting a computer be a judge or lawyer.

I, and others, are working on ways to cybernetically optimize human biology by simply getting rid of most of it

No you aren't. It's very obvious that you're making up most of your supposed credentials. And your "project" to replace human organs with self-repairing plastic is just a cliche scifi story.

I am sure that we can divvy that area up into regions that have at least one region that is sunny or windy when peak power is needed.

It's not even close to that simple because of transmission losses. You really want to generate your electricity fairly close to where you're going to use it, otherwise you end up wasting huge percentages of it and eventually reach a point where it's just not viable to send it that far. A region with consistent sun and/or wind can generate its own electricity and supply nearby areas, but proposals like "power New York with solar panels in the deserts of the southwest" are purely wishful thinking.

I see this is an area in which you have no expertise (yet it is the area central to my studies, and my eventual PhD).

Airplanes tend to have pilots still because catastrophic failure of the autopilot is a catastrophic failure and death for every individual on the aircraft.

Catastrophic failure of autopilots on trains happens all the time, and on trains in many urban centers, which have no drivers, the train just stops until someone reboots it.

Also, the possible causes for catastrophic failure of an autopilot is negligible for a car compared to an aircraft (my brother has designed autopilot systems for Boeing).

If an autopilot on a car were to fail as often as an autopilot in an aircraft (for the same reasons) it would be around ten thousand years (given statistical averages) before we saw the first failure for cause.

As for the legal and medical applications.

Too late. THAT has already begun to happen.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:
P.S. As for your inability to understand current work and projected extrapolation of application:

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Min_Rong/publication/231704637_Self-Healing_Polymeric_Materials_Using_EpoxyMercaptan_as_the_Healant/links/0c96051f3226aca446000000.pdf


Automatically Appended Next Post:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/artl.2009.16.1.16103

http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/02/27/rsif.2008.0521.focus.short

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 DarkLink wrote:
Biofuels are simply not feasible.

Only with current ways of making them with corn and crap like that, which also increases food prices to boot.

On the other hand, if we use genetic engineering to alter Algae like is currently being done by some companies we could have an efficient way of making fuel that way. Its just a matter of time as technology isn't quite there yet.

Of course, we are likely to have a breakthrough in battery technology before that happens. So its really a question of what happens first and how quickly could we transition to electric vehicles.

Craig Venter's company has found a way to create Biofuels from Algae that literally gak the fuel.

They can also be made from E. coli bacteria that do the exact same thing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
https://gigaom.com/2011/10/23/craig-venter-algae-fuel-that-can-replace-oil-will-not-be-from-nature/

This is Old News in the Cybernetics and Synthetic Biology fields.

But it is not exactly odd that the news has not made it into the public domain as of yet.

Craig's company has made bitter enemies of the Oil Companies (and especially the Kochs), who have been piling on legal challenge after legal challenge, which have each been eventually overcome.

His company now puts out hundreds of thousands of barrels of biodiesel a year, and is scaling up to eventually make it so that no Oil is needed (from the ground) ever again to produce Deisel.

Eventually, because he can get the bacteria or algae of his choice to produce WHATEVER HE WISHES (he has one that poops gold) in terms of chemicals (the Gold One works by filtering it from seawater, not by atomic assembly), and especially of hydrocarbons (which are what out cells naturally deal with for energy), he can eventually get a bacteria or algae to produce ANY hydrocarbon.

Even raw oil.

This means that EVENTUALLY, we will never need to drill for oil again.

HOWEVER. . . Oil is still a CO2 producer, and we need to switch to a hydrocarbon that does not produce CO2, but rather one that breaks down cleanly into basic carbon and water (this locks the carbon out of the atmosphere, but then creates problems in sequestering the carbon in a way that allows for its easy removal from our technologies.

Ultimately, synthetic biology offers better solutions.

Cells can also produce electricity itself.

Our cells work by feeding them a hydrocarbon, and they break this down into ATP via an Electron Trasport Chain (ETC) in our mitochondria (I.e. Electrocity produces the cellular currency for energy: Adenosine Tri-Phosphate)

We can reverse that process so that rather than producing ATP by consuming Electrocity, we can produce electricity by consuming ATP.

Craig is currently working on that as well, to produce bio-batteries.

Elon Musk (Space X, Tesla) is one of the investors.

MB