Transmat World: Tesla

Showing posts with label Tesla. Show all posts

Sunday, December 5, 2021

Quit Obsessing About Climate Change. What You Do or Don’t Do No Longer Matters.

by Glen Hendrix

Quit worrying about going vegan, or recycling, or riding a bicycle to work, or buying a Tesla instead of that Ford F-650 pickup you’ve always wanted in order to save the planet. You’re off the hook. It’s out of your hands. You can do these things if it makes you feel better, but they are not going to change the big picture. Whatever you do does not matter. Unless you are a head of state, king, president, prime minister, or other grand poobah, it is above your pay grade. If you are able to vote for people of power, that is what is left for you to do. Other than that …. nothing.

According to scientists, the only way to keep the planet’s temperature from increasing 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit is to immediately phase out all fossil fuel infrastructure and devices. As soon as existing coal, oil, or gas plants reach their engineered lifespans, instead of refurbishing we must shut them down. If we don’t, the estimates for increasing temperatures start going up. At 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, positive feedback loops of evaporating Arctic methane could kick in. Methane is 21 times better at warming the atmosphere than CO2. The warmer temps evaporate the methane. The methane makes the atmosphere warmer. It evaporates more methane …. you get the picture.

I don’t want to be a Donny Downer or a Cassandra but how likely do you think shutting down the fossil fuel industry is? The industry has just invested billions upon billions on natural gas liquefaction plants to easily transport this fuel around the world. They are not giving that up without a tooth and nail, knock down drag out; and they have the money to do it. There are 25 countries whose oil percentage of exports range from Malaysia’s 22.3% to Iraq’s 99.8%. The trucking, railways, shipping, and airline industries would have to be completely transformed to electric or hydrogen propulsion. They will be as reluctant as oil and gas to give it up. All 195 countries would require state-ordained laws banning the use of fossil fuels entirely. There are still vast numbers of people in Africa that gather around campfires and stoves burning wood or coal just like they did thousands of years ago. What are they going to use?

This is the most pivotal point in the history of man. We only get one shot at this. If we blow it, we won’t get a comparable situation for millions of years, if ever. If mankind does have a world-wide civilization by then, we will have forgotten all of this — this choice we had. Save the planet or just get along and ignore it until it is too late. Scientists are saying our planet is doomed and all I hear on the news is everything but that. We are a society in denial, trying to collectively whistle past the graveyard. Our weather men won’t even talk about it on the local news. It might be construed as political. It might upset people. We are so polite and civilized in our denouement.

Since it is off our individual shoulders now, maybe we should give more thought about how we tell our children what’s happening and what to expect in the future. Hopefully, they won’t kick you in the shins when they finally understand what you are talking about. How do we look someone like Greta Thunberg in the face and tell her we screwed up in the worst possible way. This Swedish teen will probably spit in your eye and tell you to fuck off and keep riding that bike to work. She is up for a Nobel Prize for her admonitions to do something about climate change. In reality, she should be voted Queen of the World, because that is exactly what is needed right now; some central, charismatic figure with smarts and determination to do what is right, what is required.

It is not really our fault. Besides being stupid and greedy, we are genetically handicapped to deal with this situation. We simply don’t live long enough to plan ahead. By “planning ahead” I don’t mean decades. I mean centuries. The reason is that people with money and power, the people with the means to do something, just don’t care. They would have to give up some of that money and power to change things. They figure they won’t be around to suffer the consequences of climate change anyway, so they just don’t give a damn. It would require Biblically long lifetimes to plan ahead for the human race. For now and the near future we can, at most, hope to live to a hundred, not the 969 years of Methuselah. If you were going to be around for the consequence of your actions or inaction for as long as he was, you would care.

Our one ray of hope is artificial intelligence. Pundits say a generalized AI, the singularity, will be here within 20 years. It will have the lifetime and the smarts to rationally plan ahead for a viable future for the Earth. Maybe, by the grace of God, it will take over and guide the human race rationally into the future instead of selling us as cheap, world-wrecking slaves to the first aliens that drop by.

So tell your children you are sorry for what is going on with the climate, but it’s not their fault or yours. Tell them some bad people made it too hard to do anything until it was too late. Tell them you will vote for people that might help with the problem. Maybe if we elect the right leaders, and they do the right things there is still time. Tell them to study science and engineering so that someday they might help with a solution or figure out adaptations to deal with it. Or you can put that whole talk off for later. I won’t blame you. You are only human.

Read more great articles on this blog and on Medium.

Monday, August 6, 2018

How We Will Get Asteroid Material Back To Earth

Tesla Roadster in space - courtesy wikipedia

We won't be hauling it down with a Tesla Roadster.

An asteroid one kilometer in diameter is parked at the Lagrange point L5 of the Earth/Moon gravitational system. The asteroid orbits the Earth at the same distance as the Moon - 238,900 miles. If a line were drawing through the center of the Earth to the Moon and the center of Earth to the asteroid there would be about a 45 degree angle between those lines. It is in a safe, stable orbit that does not require regular expenditures of fuel to keep it there. This safe, stable location was the deal between the United Nations and the company retrieving the giant space rock; actually more metal than rock. 16217 Ryugu contains iron, nickel, cobalt, water, nitrogen, hydrogen, and ammonia.

Plastic bags are made from ethane, a part of natural gas burned as waste before they started making plastic bags.

Outer space construction has not yet hit its stride so some cheap way is needed to get these metals to the surface of Earth where they can be sold. Here is how it could be done.

If chunks of metal were cut off of Ryugu and simply dropped to Earth, it would be a mess. Chunks big enough not to vaporize completely upon reentry could do major damage. The velocity when it reached Earth would be nearly 200,000 miles per hour and create an explosion equivalent to 100,000 tons of TNT. So, for practicality, we need to get this stuff closer to Earth and reduce that velocity.

Flaming mass making reentry - courtesy Neil Bleving

A deal is brokered between the powers that be on Earth and the asteroid mining company so that a million ton chunk of iron can be brought into a medium Earth orbit about 2,000 miles up with careful planning and monitoring. Along with it comes several space tugs and lots of water (from the asteroid) as fuel (electrolysis - oxygen, hydrogen) to keep it in orbit. Engines are anchored to the big asteroid chunk and will automatically kick in to prevent a deterioration in orbit.

Any amount of heat one requires in outer space is available. One simply needs the right size mirror configured to apply that heat to an appropriately sized area on command. With this heat the stoney portions of an asteroid and, perhaps, lunar regolith can be melted and turned into ceramic. Metals can be melted down by these same mirrors.

Concentrating mirrors cut off a 300 ton chunk of iron and begin to melt it down.

Concurrently, stoney portions of the asteroid are melted to form ceramic. While the ceramic is molten, pre-heated (to prevent explosive expansion) nitrogen is introduced into the ceramic melt to produce a foamed ceramic material. This material will be formed into the shape of a lifting body similar to that of the Space Shuttle but about half the size. As the hot nitrogen entrained in the ceramic cools it forms a partial vacuum, making the material much less conductive to heat.

It takes 7 trucks to move the same number of paper bags as one truck moving plastic bags.

The blob of iron melt is rammed into the ceramic mold. High temperature spargers inserted through the wall of the mold inject the iron with nitrogen as well, making a foamed metal having one tenth the weight of iron while still retaining much of its strength.

Once out of the mold, a foamed-ceramic mat is attached to the bottom of the foamed metal lifting body. and a steering module is inserted into the cavity molded in the rear to accept it. This is a heat-resistant rudder and elevators on vertical and horizontal stabilizers controlled by an onboard GPS and autopilot. Built in space with only the electronics and motor coming from Earth, those parts are used again while the rest is recycled.

A railgun is built on the mass of the asteroid chunk and points at a tangent point to Earth about 100 miles above the surface. The lifting body is attached through grooves molded into it and launched towards Earth at 20,000 miles per hour retrograde to orbital velocity. When the lifting body reaches the upper atmosphere, it is going much slower in relation to the Earth, allowing a safe, guided landing on a shallow lake where it is recovered.

The bubbled metal might be worth many times its solid value, making the whole operation profitable. Many types of metallurgy may be possible in a vacuum and weightlessness that aren’t feasible on Earth. We could be talking about metals such as high temperature inconels that are very expensive. I designed a coil in a furnace, the prototype for making BPA free plastic bottles, where a 6 inch schedule 40 (1/4” thick wall) piece of pipe cost $1200 per linear foot.

For smaller packages of very valuable metals like platinum or palladium, NASA may have just the thing. They have developed a folding heat shield. A small reentry vessel with a hundred pounds of palladium has a heat shield that folds out to a much larger size than the vessel itself, creating a shield off of which most of the frictional heat is sloughed away around the side of the vessel on its reentry path to an elevation and speed at which it can deploy a parachute. Be there to pick it up before someone else gets it because that's 1.6 million dollars we're talking about.

courtesy NASA

These are the possibilities once we start thinking about how to maximize the payback for such a massive undertaking as capturing an asteroid. Of course, the real payoff for the asteroid miner will be when construction off world begins, increasing the value of their asteroid many times. Unexpected returns will be the technological advances necessary to get this done that will eventually work their way into our everyday lives.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Cryptocurrency Is Going Into Space

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Asteroid Mining - How to Pick the Right Asteroid

Recycling Asteroids For Fun and Profit

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

How We Can Diminish the Possibility of Water Wars

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

Workers In Space Will Live In Igloos

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Very Large Scale 3D Printing In Space

Energy and Space; Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum

China’s Strategy for the Future Is Scary Smart

We Will Live on the Moon: the How and Why

Thursday, January 31, 2013

The Zombification of Innovation?

by Glen Hendrix

We are clever. I'll grant us that. If you don't' think so, look at this coverage of technical exploits from 2012.

Yet some people complain about the pace of innovation, saying we've reached a plateau and there's not much new under the sun. They are wrong, but it's not their fault. They just can't help themselves. Don't blame lead in the water or genetically modified food or too much television.

True, it's not a target-rich environment for innovation anymore. The days of Marconi, Edison and Tesla are gone. We know about the electromagnetic spectrum and we've seen the light on nuclear forces. We get telephony morphed into cellular communications. We're nano knowledgeable now. We can turn explosions into torque, grow babies from scratch and see the far reaches of the universe.

One could argue that now it is simply a matter of finesse. Cell phones were a done deal. It took someone like Steve Jobs to do it with such verve and panache that it transformed society. Rockets? Hahahaha! So old school. So why did it take Elon Musk to teach NASA how to get into space for less than $500 per pound.

Electric cars were the future until Ford came along. Once again, kudos to Mr. Musk for taking a mundane form of transportation that's been around over a century and turning it into Motor Trend's 2013 Car of the Year. He's just biding his time with steam cars.

We've mastered the production and distribution of electricity. We posses the miracle of antibiotics, have indoor plumbing, enjoy the magic carpets of airplanes and cars, can talk to anyone on the planet or instantly access the knowledge of the world: What is there left to do? Our productivity per person over the past 200 years has climbed from nearly zero to peak at 3% in the middle of the last century. It has now fallen to 1.33% despite now having a car that drives itself and computers that we can have conversations with. Why can't we invent something to get things going again instead of just tweaking what we've got? It's an illusion.

Kroger has agreed to give you free trash bags for life if you buy this.

The reason it seems innovation has stagnated is because the torrid pace of innovation for the last 150 years has set a standard that will never be seen again. It is simply by comparison that we think innovation has flatlined. Mankind has come from animal-fat torches to electric lights in the blink of an eye, historically speaking. We are immersed in it. We can't step outside and look back in objectively at the timeline and say, "My that WAS quick." We have been inoculated against perceiving innovation. That's why when I tell you there is a now a company that can do 3D printing of solid stainless steel, you go "meh."

We are only being less innovative compared to a blistering pace that can never be matched again unless there occurs some sort of singularity moment. Yes, there are exciting advances being made in 3D printing, driverless vehicles, and gesture-based computing; but we are losing sight of what is really important. Despite the fact that innovation is alive and well, there is a void that has left us lacking. There are three critical technology goals that need to be addressed to get past this period of "stagnation" and provide mankind a comfortable, safe, productive future: vast amounts of cheap energy, inexpensive access to space, and lengthening the human lifespan. One of these three turns out to be yet another reason we think our collective cogency has been compromised.

ENERGY:

It's energy. Energy is the choke point, the stricture, the bottle ne...you get the idea. Except for steampunk, energy technology and its implementation has been woefully inadequate to keep up with current and future demands. Quoting from the bigthink article Bits Versus Stuff: Peter Thiel Asks Why Has Innovation Stalled "'we're no longer moving faster,' literally. And part of the reason we don't have things like supersonic commercial jet planes, he says, 'is due to the failure of energy innovation.'" He made this remark at a festival of ideas, The Nantucket Project held in October of 2012, after stating that pessimism has "started to seep into our system." Peter hasn't snapped to the "pessimism" actually being a society-wide perceptual problem but, hopefully, people will listen to him because energy is a problem that needs to be addressed. Remember the Concorde!

Courtesy: Udvar-Hazy Center National Air & Space Museum

All of our technologies depend on energy. Transportation, data processing, manufacturing, heating and cooling; you would be hard-pressed to come up with something that doesn't use energy. Even pressing the button on that remote takes energy. Our lifestyles are a reflection of that energy availability and cost. We can look at the gas pump and see that things aren't like they used to be. Three dollar gas in the U.S. is a symptom of the beginning of, dare I say it, peak oil. Calm down. It's here. Gotta deal with it. Even with less driving and more efficient cars, we will soon max out on what can be economically extracted. This will become a serious buzzkill for the global economy.

Convenience and low cost of fossil fuels have driven our economy up to now. They are so part and parcel that talk of cutting back or replacing them is an invitation for rabid and irrational response. This is despite the increasing awareness that they are intrinsically connected to climate change. We don't just need research here. We need the fossil fuel industry to get on board with going renewable.

The first solar cell was made in 1883. There's enough U-238 for breeder reactors to last 5 billion years. Solar energy hitting the Earth is 20,000 times what humanity currently uses. But we are still building coal plants and still don't have nuclear fusion! The largest solar energy projects in the world are being built in Saudi Arabia. What does that tell you, Exxon? We need cheap, pollution-free energy and lots of it. I hear thinking caps being drug out of cardboard boxes in the attic and dusted off…aaaahchooo. It's a good thing. I'll take some Benadryl. Another recent miracle? 1943.

SPACE:

Yes, there may be 20,000 times the energy currently needed hitting the Earth in the form of sunshine but, believe it or not, we'll outgrow that, as well we should. Are you going to put some limit on our future growth? I thought not. It's all out there. A whole star's worth of sunshine for energy, hydrocarbons for plastic, and water for…well, it's pretty handy. Space = future.

But there is a darker reason we need to get into space.

The first human broadcasts that made it into space were Hitler's broadcast of the 1936 Olympics 77 years ago. We are at the center of a 144 light year diameter bubble filled with our electromagnetic babble. There are less than 500 "G" type stars, those similar to our sun, within this sphere. Chances are slim for E.T. to be on one of them. But as time goes on, that boundary expands. The reason we should be concerned about "others" is what we are capable of doing ourselves, and most of us have never thought of it.

If this had been around 15 years ago, the “paper or plastic” question would be pretty moot.

We now have the capability, with off-the-shelf technology, to destroy a planet in another planetary system light years away with relativistic missiles. No, I am not writing this from a padded cell. Combine several NASA HiPEP ion thrusters with a TOPAZ style nuclear reactor, a computer, and a few tons of xenon (all properly armored against cosmic radiation); and you have a weapon that travels for light years and arrives at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. The Death Star would be envious of this weapon's kinetic punch. What it doesn't destroy, it buries in meters of ash. I've done the math. Hint: force = acceleration x mass; velocity = acceleration x time.

Image of Defense Department employee's id.

Image courtesy of DannoGerbil @ deviantArt.com

What does that have to do with humans in space? Well, let me ask another question. How paranoid do you think our defense department really is? Yeah, me too. Maybe I'm projecting, but it wouldn't be a stretch to think some Romulan/Borg type race might come up with this type of weapon as well. The question of whether or not we push into space permanently is like the climate change question. Maybe it is a coincidence that carbon dioxide levels started to spike with the advent of the industrial age and maybe not. If we ignore it and it was a coincidence, we continue our merry existence. If we ignore it and it wasn't a coincidence, we've made a grave error - perhaps fatal. Hopefully, you won't have to make excuses to your grandchildren about your F-650 pickup truck.

Use those plastic grocery bags again. Save money. Save the world. Here’s how.

The human race, as we physically look now, has been around about 100,000 years. In another 100,000 years "I Love Lucy" will be galaxy-wide. The cat's out of the bag. The can of worm's has been opened. There's cat fur covered worms crawling everywhere and we cannot clean that mess up. If we are going to last another 100,000 years, I suggest we get into space. We will develop new technologies and will not have all our eggs in one basket. Am I preaching to the choir? Sheesh, I'm all out of cliches. Alien kinetic bomb sound far-fetched? Then substitute your favorite disaster: asteroid strike, super volcano, antibiotic-resistant plague, resource wars, kudzu, irradiation by cosmic rays, or settling philosophical differences with nuclear weapons.

Obviously, I'm not talking about a trip to Mars and back. I'm talking about permanent digs. That means an even cheaper means of space travel than what Elon has in mind. Something on the order of a space elevator. Not only would that make space inexpensive, it would provide a stable focus point (the counterbalance in geostationary orbit) and conduit to move power from collectors in orbit down to Earth. Mass goes up, power comes down. More how-to about living in space in a later post.

HUMAN LIFESPAN:

Come on, admit it. If you thought you'd be around for another few hundred years, you'd pay a little more focused attention to what's happening to the environment and your 401k, wouldn't you? Not to mention take a little better care of yourself. That is exactly why research into extending human life is so important. This quarter by quarter planning has to change. Three months does not a future make. If it's not abstract, if we have a physical stake in the future, we will make sure the future is a better place. If you live to 300, who are you shortchanging if you harm the environment or waste precious resources? Uh huh.

Paper or plastic? … If you said “paper”, read this.

Average life expectancy in the U.S. has gone from 47 in 1900 to 78 today. Dramatic, but it is not enough. Science needs to find out why Methuselah could live 969 years and most of us now barely make it to 80. Of course it could be just a Biblical accounting error, but it is still a worthy goal. Long-term planning would become a necessity, a living art form. Profligation would be an aberration rather than a norm. People could have true multiple careers, becoming masters of many areas of expertise - Da Vincis by design rather than accident. Our descendants will ignore prescribed boundaries of erudition, cross-pollinating knowledge bases and multiplying our wisdom in ways we've never dreamed of.

They will do it after they are retired from their 9th career at 637 while jetting around the Solar System planning an "intervention" of the aliens that tried to exterminate us in the year 2432 A.D. with a relativistic kinetic missile.

Other articles you may enjoy: