Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Iowa And Ethanol

3 Comments

Straight talk from Ted Cruz.

To me, ethanol epitomizes the dysfunction of our national politics. It’s an awful policy, raising the price of both fuel and food, which hits the poor hardest, while damaging engines and stealing from the taxpayer. Everyone knows it but, because, by historical circumstance, Iowa is so politically prominent in presidential politics, too few are willing to say it (I’ll grant that Huckabee and Santorum may actually be economically ignorant enough to think it’s a good idea). So good for Cruz.

I wonder if there’s any possibility of a class-action suit against it, from both fuel consumers and food consumers? If not, there should be. It could fix a lot of awful welth-transfer laws.

Science And Society, Technology and Society

A Modest Thought Experiment

22 Comments

Imagine the maximum discharge of the Mississippi (~20,000 m^3/s) being issued in Green River, Wyoming.

What would be the environmental impact?

I’m thinking it would green up the west pretty nicely.

[Saturday update]

I put this in comments, but decided to update the post:

Someone can check my math, but ignoring wall friction in the pipeline, raising a gallon of water 6000 feet takes a head of about 0.02 kW-hrs (a little over 7 kJ). So a tiny fraction of a penny. At a speed of half a meter, for 2000 km, I get about 0.02 watts to move it up the hill (again, ignoring wall friction), over a period of six weeks or so. Seems affordable to me from an energy standpoint. Rather than pipelines, actually, it would make more sense to have a series of aquaducts with pumping stations, for less friction, and probably lower construction cost. At that velocity, 200 meters deep and 200 meters wide would do the job. I’m sure it could be optimized for speed and dimensions.

Of course, max outflow of the Mississippi might be overkill, so a useful system might be quite a bit smaller.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Delay In Spaceport Brownsville

5 Comments

Joe Pappalardo has the story. I wonder how much of it is due to environmental impact assessment, and if so, if it would be as hard if they were doing an airport instead? Back in 2004, we tried to extend the categorical exception that the aviation industry gets from the National Environmental Protection Act to space transportation, but the result was weak tea, leaving waivers up the discretion of the head of the EPA. Something I’d like to see in an amended version of the Commercial Space Launch Act would be to make it a clean extension, with no discretion from Gina (or any future administrator). It would be interesting to see if that made it veto bait for Obama, though.

Business, Economics, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

The High Cost Of Space Access

9 Comments

Roger Launius has a brief history of the Shuttle, but this number is outdated:

The best expendable launch vehicles (ELV) still cost about $10,000 per pound from Earth to orbit.

As I commented over there (it’s awaiting moderation), Falcon 9 delivers ~30,000 lbs to LEO for ~$60M. That’s $2000/lb. Price, not cost. Falcon Heavy will roughly halve that. If they can reuse cores, they’ll drop the price further.

Business, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Immortality

2 Comments

No, Newsweek, that’s not what Silicon Valley billionaires are seeking. They’re seeking indefinite lifespan. Immortality, if achievable, could/would be a curse. People just want to live as long as they want to live.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, read it all the way through. The last graf shows a huge failure of imagination:

Perhaps the most worrying question that arises with the prospect of having millions (and even billions) of multi-centenarians running around on Earth is whether the planet can support this kind of growth. Current projections suggest that the world’s population will rise from 7 billion today to about 9 billion in 2050—at which point it will more or less level out. And abundant concerns have already been raised about what all these billions of people will do for work, not to mention where they will get safe drinking water and the food necessary to live healthily. But those forecasts don’t consider the possibility that we’ll stop dying. If we do, the next generation of innovative health-tech entrepreneurs will face perhaps an even greater challenge: redesigning the planet to accommodate its massive population of Humans 2.0.

Planet? Where we’re going, we don’t need “planets.”