It might be real, but the Left’s “solutions” to it are a fantasy.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Jetsons
Will they go to church?
Of course, for some, science is a religion.
A Modest Thought Experiment
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.
The Delay In Spaceport Brownsville
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.
The High Cost Of Space Access
Roger Launius has a brief history of the Shuttle, but this number is outdated: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.
Feline Behavior
Immortality
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.”
Living Among Giants
on the prospects for settling the outer solar system.Emulsifiers
More evidence that the crap we’ve been putting in processed food (in part) to avoid fat is what’s making us fat. What a disaster.
Star Trek Heresy
Matthew Continetti does not love Spock.
Last week, I tweeted that I was going to write a post about how Obama is not Spock like, but to the degrees that he is, I agree that it’s Spock’s most annoying traits.
[Afternoon update]
The gauntlet has been thrown:
Continetti just glosses over the sacrifice at the Battle of the Mutara Nebula, I assume because he knows it demolishes his case. What about the personal loss at the betrayal of Valeris? What about the hurtful but necessary decision — directly enforced by Spock — to let Edith Keeler die? How I hated him for that! But look, who among us wouldn’t let Hitler dominate the world in exchange for a lifetime of sweet sweet loving from young Joan Collins? Anyone? No one? Just me?
Heh.