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#1 Re: Not So Free Chat » Putin's Russian expanding to be the old USSR » 2022-04-09 15:23:13
You seem very angry about corruption in Ukraine which has been invaded but not about the far worse corruption in Russia that has done the invading.
Zelensky is in power thanks to a coup funded by George Soros and the CIA and ably assisted by none other than Hunter Biden. Trump was naive enough to ask the Ukrainian gangsters for evidence that Hunter Biden and the other crooks in Washington had illegally put them in power! Basically, asking the Ukrainian crooks to incriminate themselves and their buddies in the US. Trump was dangerously naive in so many ways. Thanks to the Russians, Zelensky, the new world order Zionist Jewish stooge has been made to look a hero, rather than the gangster that he actually is.
#2 Pictures of Mars » Inhabit Mars » 2022-04-05 16:42:59
- louis
- Replies: 1
The YT Vid creator "Inhabit Mars" is very inventive and doesn't fake stuff - just deploys his imagination.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nHuoQzuiSZc
Seeing a human in the landscape helps us understand what we are looking at I think.
#3 Re: Meta New Mars » John Creighton Postings » 2022-04-05 12:59:34
Well I recall we couldn't eat Welsh lamb for several years after Chernobyl - maybe 2000 miles away.
louis wrote:For a relatively small island like the UK, it is madness to rely on nuclear power when a serious accident could cause a major catastrophe with millions losing their homes and agricultural production being reduced by as much as 50%. It's an even greater madness to let the Chinese Communist Party control the plants.
Louis, this whole thing about 'a nuclear accident leaving us without a country' is nonsense. A serious nuclear accident would indeed be a colossal pain in the arse. But let's put the real risks into perspective. Here are the contamination maps for Fukushima immediately after and one year after the accident.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_R … 03131.htmlIf you lived in one of those red areas and didn't move, you would have taken about 200mSv gamma dose in the first year. That is about the same dose as we will be taking living on Mars surface or serving on the ISS. There are places on Earth where natural background is as high as that. It will expose you to the same level of risk (for one year) as air pollution in one of those big Japanese cities. Doesn't sound so scary when you put it like that does it? After 1 year, the red area had shrunk by about 90%.
Some five years after the accident, only a few areas remained heavily contaminated.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/informati … ident.aspxThis is the result of no fewer than three core melt accidents and an open air fuel pond accident. And if no one moved or took any counter measures, people living in the red areas would have taken the same pollution risk as people in Tokyo for a year or two, in most cases. It would be difficult to measure any decrease in average life expectancy.
These accidents look scary because they are sensationalised by the media. The reality on the ground is a pollution hazard, no more dangerous than the air pollution that billions of people live with every day in the world's cities. It isn't an ideal situation, but you won't see people dropping like flies or growing extra heads. And most of the hazard is gone within a few years as the most radioactive fission products decay.
The calculated risk from the various means of power generation always ends up showing nuclear power as the safest. That's because the probability of a major accident is very small. If it does happen and you happen to be living nearby, you might end up having to live with same pollution risk, for a year or two, as someone living in a city. That's a drag I admit. It is one of several reasons that I don't like going to London, or Manchester or Glasgow. But I live within 10 miles of a nuclear power plant. The danger I face from a nuclear meltdown does not make it into the top 100 concerns I have in life. There are plenty of things that do scare me. I fear car accidents. Having stuff dropped on me when I carry out site inspections. I have a fear of heights. I don't particularly like spiders or snakes. Lately, my power bill scares the heck out of me. This year, it will cost me around £3000. That is the hazard of living in a big house and having three kids that are glued to computer games. I fear losing my job above all other things, because it pays for everything.
If the UK suffers some sort of great depression event because we fail to provide an adequate energy supply, it will do a lot of damage to a lot of people. They will lose their income, their homes and many of them will die. I fear that and so should you. It is a much bigger concern for me than having to live with some radioactive pollution for a few years. The depression is something that is very likely to happen. The radioactive pollution is not.
#4 Re: Not So Free Chat » 99% of COVID deaths in the U.S. are now of unvaccinated people » 2022-04-04 18:00:34
#5 Re: Meta New Mars » John Creighton Postings » 2022-04-04 14:58:30
Well it seems to me we are now looking to the future, not in the rear view mirror.
The record-low prices will see projects due to start operating in 2023/24 coming in at £39.65/MWh (in 2012 prices, £44/MWh adjusted for inflation) and those for 2024/25 at £41.61/MWh. These are some £8-9/MWh below the government’s “reference price”, the level it expects to see for electricity on the open market in each year.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-re … ts-by-2023
I accept that wind energy in the past, especially offshore wind energy, was a much more expensive proposition and if we look only at total costs now, the comparisons might not seem very positive but now we are assessing what is best for the future.
Of course you are quite right that at present you have to make allowance for other energy input to account for days of low wind input. Not all of that means gas subsitution. You can also use hydro, pumped hydro, waste to energy, geothermal and biofuels.You also of course ensure you are plugged into a continental wide grid so you can call in power as necessary from other areas e.g. from Scandinavia, Iceland, Ireland, Denmark and mainland Europe.
But I think we are also moving to a scenario where green hydrogen will fill much of the gap. This is important because even if that is more expensive than LNG, if it forms part of your domestic economy it represents a huge wealth creator.
Currently I estimate that Green Hydrogen might cost around 27 cents per KwH. If that cost can be reduced to something under 7 cents per KwHe as seems feasible if the price of hydrogen reduces to $1-$2 per Kg, then coupled with a price of 2-3 cents per KwH for green energy - solar and wind, that will deliver cheap and secure energy at around 3-4 cents per KwH (noting we will only require the green hydrogen for perhaps 10% of production, max).
For a relatively small island like the UK, it is madness to rely on nuclear power when a serious accident could cause a major catastrophe with millions losing their homes and agricultural production being reduced by as much as 50%. It's an even greater madness to let the Chinese Communist Party control the plants.
Louis, you don't like £0.09/kWh for a first of class NPP? How about £0.152/kWh? That is the actual average breakeven price for offshore wind in the North Sea and Irish Sea. But that's for wind energy, so I guess you would say that's cheap.
For onshore wind things look a little better. But that is for the UK, which is just about the windiest place on Earth. Believe it or not, the cost per installed MW of wind power has been trending up for a while. But capacity factors have increased as turbines have gotten larger and have moved into deeper water.
https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/365-win … nd-realityThe actual day ahead wholesale price of electricity in the UK as of March 2022 is running at £0.302/kWh. Retail prices were capped until 1st April something that resulted in numerous retailers declaring bankruptcy. They now exceed wholesale prices by a comfortable margin. They will rise again in October.
The UK electricity supply is now dominated by three energy sources. Natural gas, mostly burned in CCGTs, wind power (a roughly even mix of onshore and offshore) and nuclear power.
https://gridwatch.co.uk/Why is electricity costing so much? When you buy a unit of electricity, you are paying the capital and operating costs of all of the systems needed to deliver it to you. In the case of wind power, you are essentially paying the capital and operating costs of both the natural gas CCGT power plant and the wind farm. You need both of them to produce electricity reliably. Essentially, wind power reduces the amount of natural gas burned in the CCGT. So your renewable energy is actually 30% wind and 70% natural gas. Saving the gas is worth about £14/MWh. But it costs £152/MWh. So the real cost of a MWh of combined wind and natural gas power is something like £200/MWh. That's because you still have to pay all of the capex and operating costs of the CCGT even if it sits there doing nothing. And you pay for the wind power as well. And then there is the cost of transmission, carbon taxes and profit margins. Which takes it up to £300/MWh. That represents a 20x increase in the wholesale cost of power over the past 20 years. That is equivalent to a compounding 16% increase per year for 20 years. Now millions of people get to feel real righteous as they freeze in the dark.
With nuclear power, you pay for the cost of nuclear generation and that's it. Just one power plant. Refuelling and planned maintenance takes place in summer when power demand is lower. This is why £100/MWh, though expensive compared to legacy nuclear power, is actually a bargain compared to what we are paying right now for the UKs renewable energy folly. And nuclear power allows the UK to reduce its dependence on natural gas. Renewable energy increases that dependence. Since 2008, the UK electricity usage has declined by around 20%. This is what happens when a country's manufacturing industries die. Those industries have gone to India and China and other places where energy is cheaper. The price we pay for ideological stupidity will be poverty and a sliding position in the world economic order.
The breakeven cost of wind power is about to go up some more, as Chinese steel exports are constrained by that coal crisis that they are having. Both wind and solar power infrastructure are made using liw-cost Chinese coal based energy.
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch. … n-percent/
https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/ho … 009-U1.pdfHow much would wind and solar power cost if those turbines had to be made using wind and solar power?
#6 Re: Meta New Mars » John Creighton Postings » 2022-04-03 18:20:51
I don't think it's for me to give you chapter and verse on the nuclear power industry which historically has been incredibly secret about its costs. All I have to do is link to this:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/d … ower-plant
The price of new nuclear power electricity in the UK, supplied to the grid, cannot fall below 9 pence per KwH! That's incredibly expensive.
As for the energy return on PV panels, I think you are living in the past. Even if Hall was right in 2016, that's 8 years ago and that's a long ago in the development of PV panels:
https://www.bnl.gov/pv/files/pdf/pe_mag … _10_12.pdf
This seems like a good debunking of Hall's analysis, laying stress on his error in including waste heat as part of the useful energy provided by fossil fuels:
http://bountifulenergy.blogspot.com/201 … -than.html
That said, EROI analysis often descends into angels-dancing-on-a-pin territory. It is far more useful to uncover the unsubsidised price of an useful energy unit in my view. The market does all the calculations for you.
Over 500 people employed in producing just under 1Gw of electricity:
https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power- … ey-point-b
Do you need 500 people to maintain 800 wind turbines which might provide on average simple power levels? I doubt it.
Power density is very important. It is the difference between a system that is sustainable without fossil fuels and one that is not. We cannot build solar power plants on Earth or Mars using the energy produced by solar power. The EROEI of solar power in Spain is 2.45. That is the value calculated by Charles Hall back in 2016, including all of the inputs to the power plants- roads, labour input, everything. I'm not sure if he even included storage or back up. But either way, there isn't enough net energy to allow solar to build new solar over their producing lifetime. These things are fossil fuel extenders. That is why they are produced in China using otherwise stranded coal reserves. Here on Earth, it is a way of accessing coal reserves that would otherwise be inaccessible. So we can think of solar power as being stored coal energy from Xinxiang.
A solar panel is rather like a non-rechargeable battery, that charges up will coal energy in China and discharges in California. If you build it in Germany or England, you will actually get less energy back than it took to build the power plant. Those levels of insolation are comparable to what we will encounter on Mars surface. If EROEI drops beneath about 11, economic growth becomes impossible here on Earth. That is because economic growth means investing in new infrastructure at the same time as paying operating and maintenance costs of existing infrastructure. On Mars, the EROEI threshold will be higher, because usable land must sit in a pressure vessel, heating will be needed everywhere all of the time, and even air is something that must be manufactured.
So the reality is that if nuclear power can produce enough net energy to allow us to expand civilisation on Mars, then a Martian civilisation is a realistic prospect. If it cannot, then there will not be a civilisation on Mars. End of. There is no coal or natural gas on Mars and no air to burn it in. The air is too thin for wind power. Solar power is a niche power supply. It cannot power heavy industry. It will be useful in some small, dislocated applications, just as it is on Earth. And nuclear power will be needed to produce solar power.
The capacity factor for light water reactors is 90%+. Most of the down time they do have is scheduled refuelling outages. For a PWR, fuel shuffling needs to take place once every year. A 1GWe PWR will replace some 30 tonnes of fuel (out of a total of 90 tonnes) every year. That is where most of the down time comes from.
If so many people are employed at a nuclear power plant, then I have to question what they are really doing. A NPP is a steam plant, with a nuclear pile replacing the boiler. There are no mills, no blowers, no fuel delivery systems, no ash handling equipment, no coal heaps, no tanker jetties and no ash lagoons. This is what has made nuclear operating costs so low. Fuel is cheap. Maintenance is light. The main costs come from building. So if nuclear workforce is really that high, what are they actually doing?
#7 Re: Meta New Mars » John Creighton Postings » 2022-04-02 19:38:02
You do know nuclear power facilities on Earth have maintenance downtime, experience emergency shutdowns and occasionally suffer catastrophic failures, don't you? You're making it sound like nuclear facilities operate 24/7 for the whole of their lives.
I note you haven't even bothered to address the issue of how nuclear power facilities might operate in dust storms on Mars.
I don't accept the starting assumptions about solar power - mass and so on.
Louis,
No it can't. You need power to make back-up energy, and when that backup is gone it has to be replaced or it's not there for next time. You wouldn't use stored energy in the event of any failure, because with nuclear you get 3X more power for the same energy input it took to move all those solar panels and batteries to Mars to begin with.
Energy production is the name of the game. Always.
Nuclear does that for less mass and less total cost when all factors are taken into consideration.
#8 Re: Human missions » Starship is Go... » 2022-04-02 17:41:28
Thanks for the update Void! Encouraging - if only a little.
#9 Re: Meta New Mars » John Creighton Postings » 2022-04-02 17:28:35
Emergency and balancing dirunal energy storage can easily take the form of methane and oxygen which can be used to power methox electricity generators. We have to make methane and oxygen in large quantities for rocket fuel in any case so using part of the production for energy storage is a sensible and straightforward solution.
What would you use for energy storage in the event of a nuclear power failure? Or would you just assume your nuclear power facilities are going to work perfectly, including in a dust storm? How will nuclear power facilities operate during long lasting dust storms on Mars? We know it is an issue on Earth for much shorter duration storms:
"The main negative effects of dust/sandstorms could be corrosion, abrasion, plugging, and clogging of filters, electric/electronic circuits and rotating parts of the systems, structures and components (SSCs) of the NPP"
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCol … 093696.pdf
My calculations suggest that on Mission One you could easily have a long period of emergency power from Starship batteries and other imported battery stacks (maybe up to 30 tonnes out of your 500 tonne allowance). IIRC more than an Earth month.
That's probably necessary on Mission One as we will want a belt and braces approach.
Longer term we need to look at sublimation heat engines.
http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8251
Mars seems like the perfect location for developing these. I think they can operate a night as well, which is an added advantage.
Calliban,
Speaking of reality checks, you'd need at least 2 reactors to provide 100% "up-time", and 3 would be highly preferable.
Each square meter of the Mars Insight lander's solar panels produced about 333Wh/day on its best day. Since they are nearly identical to the arrays used on the Phoenix lander, I estimate the panels are 4kg (according to NASA, this is what they are) and all deployment and single-axis tracking hardware probably bumps that up to 8kg without invoking expensive specialty materials. Even so, let's only consider the mass of the panels themselves.
2,000,000,000Watts * 24hrs per day = 48,000,000,000Watt-hours per day (yes, I know a "sol" on Mars is a tad longer, which means nothing in the grand scheme of things)
48,000,000,000Watt-hours per day / 333Watt-hours per square meter of panel area = 144,144,144m^2 of panel area.
144,144,144m^2 of panel area * 0.289372784489619kg/m^2 of panel area = 41,711,392kg
NASA says Insight's panels will produce about half that during a major dust storm, so double that if you still want to live when it's dustier than usual. If the power ever runs out, reason unimportant, there is only one possible outcome and it's not good for anyone living there. We haven't considered the mass of the energy storage system for solar, but rest assured it will be considerably greater if any significant quantity of power is stored.
For the Sodium-cooled reactor, we need 1,200,000kg / 1,200t of steel.
We could ship every piece of that reactor from Earth and still come out ahead. Heck, we could ship 3 of them and come out ahead. Maybe then we'd actually have enough power to grow the colony and assure the survival of the colonists. There's nothing good that comes from being energy-poor. All the mass we saved could then be devoted to sending other useful things like machine tools for factories, life support equipment, food, teachers who can teach their students how to count, etc. The batteries make a lot more sense than nuclear reactors for vehicles, but they don't make any sense for trying to store 1 month of emergency power, which would never have been an emergency if you were producing the same amount of power the entire time, without regard to solar insolation levels.
#10 Re: Meta New Mars » John Creighton Postings » 2022-04-02 17:15:25
You're cheating by ignoring the human input into a nuclear power station which means you have to have car parks, canteens, transport links, food, housing and all the rest dedicated solely to nuclear power workers. These are all real world costs of your energy systems which can be seen because if these costs were not part of the nuclear power system, those workers would be free to undertake other useful work for society, whatever that might be. Having them (and their resource use) tied up in nuclear power is a drain on society.
This is one of the reasons why levelised cost is a much better comparator because it necessarily has to account for human input.
Price also exposes how unimportant energy density is in the overall scheme of things. Nuclear power has the best energy density and just about the highest price of any of the standard energy systems.
A few reality checks. Nuclear systems become more mass efficient as they scale up. If we could scale boiling water reactors to 2000MWe, they would require about 20 tonne of steel per average MWe. Or 6 tonne per MWth. If per capita power requirements are 0.1MW, and much of that can be heat, that works out at 600kg steel per capita.
https://fhr.nuc.berkeley.edu/wp-content … _input.pdfSodium cooled reactors with S-CO2 power generation loops would be around an order of magnitude more power dense. So that's 60kg steel per 100kW. We could ship that to Mars.
How much would a competing solar power system weigh? How about a Fusion fission hybrid reactor, or an aqueous homogeneous reactor? Living well on Mars would appear to be very energy intensive. And the cost on an imported energy system is a function of weight and power density. If we are serious about colonising Mars, then we need to plan for high power density energy sources, exploited with large economy of scale. Our ability to expand industrial civilisation on Mars, is really all about our ability to harness high power density energy sources.
#11 Re: Meta New Mars » John Creighton Postings » 2022-04-01 16:43:14
Louis,
Let's say that over the 168.5PWh of energy consumed, 1/3rd was consumed during the night, or about 56PWh (5.6^16 Watt-hours). The average nightly requirement (56PWh / 365) is then 153,424,657,534,246Wh/night, and 12,785,388,127,854Watts per hour if night is defined as 12 hours of the day. If each thermo-radiative panel provides 50W/m^2, then 255,707,762,557m^2 of panel area are required, or 255,708km^2 or 505.7km per side. That's a total panel area slightly larger than the State of Oregon. Oregon is #9 in total land area, of all 50 US states. The electrical resistance losses from such low power output devices will ensure that a significantly larger panel area is actually required.
Are you talking about the US energy requirement? You don't make that clear...
Of course when you say land area you make it sound like an additional land area requirement, but presumably such devices could in theory be sited on rooftops which means there is no additional land requirement.
I don't think infrared panels are very practical but I think we should encourage innovation. Spending maybe 1% of your GDP on this sort of thing is a good idea in my view even if 99.9% of projects come to nothing.
#12 Re: Meta New Mars » John Creighton Postings » 2022-04-01 13:50:22
Does this relate to infrared PV panels?
https://www.sustainability-times.com/lo … -it-comes/
These panels could potentially produce useful radiation around the clock.
Whether that would be needed on Mars is an open question, given a large part of economic activity is going to be devoted to manufacturing methane and oxygen for rocket fuel (so a part of that output, maybe 10%, could easily be diverted to energy storage and use in methox generators to produce electricity).
#13 Re: Not So Free Chat » Putin's Russian expanding to be the old USSR » 2022-03-31 18:35:45
Would they have a role to play in taking agricultural production north in Canada? Another few degrees north in heated polytunnels could be v significant given the size of the country.
Canada has attempted to develop a new nuclear reactor to replace the aging NRU reactor. Maple reactors would be two identical reactors so if one is down for maintenance the other would still work. These reactors were used to produce medical isotopes. I mention them because they were intended to use HEU. This was a government facility but non-military. The project was cancelled in 2008 due to design problems. It was to use very small reactor cores which produced temperature control problems.
#14 Re: Not So Free Chat » Putin's Russian expanding to be the old USSR » 2022-03-31 18:16:12
If the war seriously depletes agricultural production in the region we need to look at technological alternatives that could rapidly increase agricultural production in arid areas of the world like Australia, parts of India, Namibia, SW USA and Mexico, Sahara, and Chile.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti … ep-closer/
Use of polytunnels with water recycling must also be something that needs to be explored.
#15 Re: Life on Mars » Covergent evolution Mars-Earth » 2022-03-31 13:51:44
Of course wings are a good example of convergent evolution having been developed by both dinosaurs/birds and bats.
Birds can react to quite complex commands and solve difficult problems for sure. I love watching corvids interact with their environment and each other. There was a dog that could fetch up to 200 separate soft toy from another room on 200 separate names/commands. That was pretty impressive. Most humans could not do that.
But nearly all animals seem to need a food reward to develop these behaviours.
Whether "talking" - use of sound waves - is a general feature of intelligent land creatures across the cosmos is an interesting question. Something like a squid's complex colour changes could be far more expressive than serial words. Imagine an intelligent creature that comunicate simultaneous information about past present and future, about their emotional state and about intellecual ideas. A genius squid mathematician could make equations appear and disppear on their chest in an instant! Maybe smell and taste could be used for complex communication. The problem of course is that smells get carried on the wind, this way and that, so might not be so effective. Whale songs sound like they could carry a lot of information, more than human sentences.
Louis, Per your last post #32:
Consider Birds, which reportedly are Dinasaur's in disguise
Dinosaurs do not like to go to the vet to get their nails trimmed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRnApz3nMts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNrCKaG0MMg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNrCKaG0MMg
There are other Cockatoos, Barney, Gotcha, and others. Vinny.
Gotcha: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Go … 314C283BD7
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Go … EA5E05D079
I am not sure the story telling is not a hoax. It is funny even so: Barney: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Ba … 6BF4E72A11
Buster: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=bu … A8D7A2831A
The animals are extremely high maintenance as far as I can see. They use one foot predominantly as a hand, sort of.
Birds have superior breathing methods.There is a whole lot more to discuss about it but imagine a creature with six limbs. Two wings, two hands, and two feet. It did not happen here, but suppose another world with lower gravity and thicker atmosphere, an unknown level of Oxygen. So, an interesting path.
I think that for efficiency the bird brain has a higher baud rate than that of humans. To them we may seem to be "Slo-Mo". I sort of think that may be true.
I am interested in brain implants for parrots. And computers and robots that could communicate/interact with them at the baud rate that they are comfortable with.
Then we might learn more about potential alien types.
I have sort of been watching Indian Ringnecks, they are likely less capable but they are interesting.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Ch … &FORM=VIRE
Done.
#16 Re: Life on Mars » Interesting images from Mars » 2022-03-30 18:56:06
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmuPim-vxA4&t=911s
More good stuff from Joe but particularly the fortification at 16:00. It reminds me very strongly of the square Roman forts that would occupy commanding views. I once holidayed close to one. It doesn't look like a natural rock formation to me. May be one of Joe's best finds.
#17 Re: Life on Mars » Covergent evolution Mars-Earth » 2022-03-30 13:26:28
I do think about convergent evolution a lot.
It seems to me that for any particular task there are certain potential solutions that life forms might come up with. For dextrous handling of objects, hands with fingers and opposable thumb are very good. But an octopus with eight tentacles can probably be just as dextrous. But I don't think we have any examples of tentacled creatures moving out of the sea and on to land. Is that just chance or is there something more at work there? It might be that on land, where gravity really weighs you down the energy budget for tentacles is not so great. It may be that a couple of arms that hand down at your side as you perambulate are evolution's most effecient solution to the dexterity solution. If so we might see the solution being ubiquitous across not just our solar system but across the cosmos on non-watery surfaces.
For offence and defence, we see similar solutions in different branches of life - horns, antlers, teeth, clawss, spines, spikes, hard armour and so on.There is a limited range of options essentially - you might had things like electric shock, stings, squirting noxious substances or venoms and so on. But I think what we see on Earth probably pretty much exhausts the available possibilities that would apply on any planet. On other planet as on Earth, predators and prey will come into an states of equilibrium when offence only very slightly overcomes defence on average.
Again when you think of reproduction there are a limited range of possibilities. The initiating act of reproduction will have to have some sort of pleasure reward, to stop animals focussing entirely on food. Foetal development will have to be protected somehow - something like eggs or a womb or an exterior pouches are obvious possibilities.
#18 Re: Not So Free Chat » Vaccinate Your Children! » 2022-03-30 06:34:58
Do you know what's the most important thing in that chart? That the data is from Dec 2020 (there's an error - giving the date as 2021 BTW) to June 2021. During that period of course for most of the time most people were unvaccinated, so - especially in the first couple of months (when the Covid winter wave was at its worst) - the vast majority of people getting Covid and dying with it (not necessarily from it) would be unvaccinated, simply as a matter of statistical fact. You need to wait until essentially everyone who is going to get the vaccine has had it before you start your analysis. I also think you need to screen out all the people who were too ill/close to death to receive a vaccine or booster, in order to avoid skewing the figures.
As time has gone on we see diminished vaccine efficacy as that initial statistical quirk has been left behind. Now the picture is as Alex Berenson presented it.
#19 Re: Not So Free Chat » Vaccinate Your Children! » 2022-03-30 06:21:13
Yes and no.
No, in that this was billed as a 95% effective vaccine, not as something that might help a very small minority of old and sick people stagger on in continued ill health for a few more months.
Yes, in that older people (or rather older people with poorly functioning immune systems) are more vulnerable to the illness.
But equally, you can't ignore that people close to death are not vaccinated, it being considered unethical to vaccinate them as it raises their chances of dying in response to the vaccine significantly and it can cause them extreme distress (e.g. the problem of finding a vein in someone who is thin and frail, and maybe confused about what is going on). Anyone can see that that is going to hugely skew the figures, but it is never allowed for.
I totally reject the idea of age-related analysis of vaccines.
louis, this disease has a massive skew in age-related mortality. You *have* to factor in age. It would be like, idk, designing a Mars base and ignoring the very significant difference in atmospheric pressure between Mars and Earth. You can't just ignore something that has such a large impact on results.
#20 Re: Human missions » Could China beat Space X to Mars? » 2022-03-29 17:30:17
World GDP is something like $84,000 billion per annum. Space X's Mars Mission might be something like $20 billion over more than a decade. $20 billion represents something like 0.02% of just one year's World GDP. Or 0.002% over ten years.
It's nothing essentially.
Musk is well on the way to becoming the world's first trillionaire thanks to his amazing ingenuity and business acumen. He will have no problem funding the Mars Mission. The limit here is not funds but people - people with the right knowledge and technical skills plus the right attitude - and then the right set up - getting everything square with the authorities and NASA.
My own estimate for the first human footprints on Mars would be: 2100. No one alive here now will live to see it.
This is roughly how long I think it will take to recover from an imminent great depression stemming from fossil fuel depletion and declining working age population. The question of when humans can first reach Mars, is basically a question of how long it will take to rebuild the energetic basis of our economy. I think it will take many decades to replace the chemical energy base with a nuclear energy base. It will take many decades to reverse demographic decline. So I think 2100 is probably about right. The other answer that I dread to give would be never at all. I would like to think that we can overcome the disaster that is about to hit us, even if we have to rebuild on a resource base that is depleted. I just don't think anyone here will be alive when we finally regain Space faring capabilities. I would be happy to be wrong.
#21 Re: Not So Free Chat » Vaccinate Your Children! » 2022-03-29 17:20:10
I totally reject the idea of age-related analysis of vaccines. Remember, these are deaths associated with Covid. You are admitting the vaccines don't prevent deaths associated with Covid. Vaccines are supposed to prevent disease not to deliver some very marginal and possibly non-existent benefit. Or, to put it another way, if you are going to undertake age-related analysis then why would any healthy person under 50 take the vaccine and risk vaccine injury? They derive only statistical risk from receivin the vaccine.
Anyway you're just retailing the same old biased stats. Your Covid stats for older people are completely unreliable because (a) doctors don't vaccinate very weak and elderly people - it's unethical because it will cause them extreme distress and likely kill then and (b) when the Covid vaccination kills someone or causes them to be infected with Covid that isn't counted because you have the completely bogus two week grace period following injection when "supposedly" the vaccinated are still unvaccinated!
louis,
We've had a very, very high takeup of the vaccines amongst the elderly, who are the people who are actually vulnerable to it. 95-100% depending on cohort. And even with vaccination, their risk is still far higher than an unvaccinated young person (vaxxed 80 y/o = unvaxxed 50 y/o in risk terms). So it's no surprising that they're dying at a far higher rate than the unvaxxed, who are for the most part young people at very low risk.
In America, the vaccine hesitancy cuts right up the age pyramid, so consequently they have far more hospitalisations and deaths at the same fraction of people vaccinated. A country could have not vaccinated anyone under 40 and the still wouldn't have many deaths as a result, because the age specific mortality rates for people under 40 are very very low. Which is why rare adverse effects can tip the benefit:cost balance away from vaccination for young people -- it cuts a very low risk of death or injury from the virus, but introduces a very low risk of death or injury from the vaccine. If you're elderly, the risk from the virus is so high it's a no brainer to get it. If you're a child, it's probably lower risk to be infected.
#22 Re: Not So Free Chat » Chat » 2022-03-29 17:11:59
We have a forecast of snow on higher ground in the UK...
Forget Climate Change, this is the IPMAB effect.
It's Pretty Much As Before.
There's white stuff falling from the sky! It's March 29, we're supposed to be done with snow. Ack! I said the 'S' word! But to be philosophical, there's often one last snowfall the first weekend of April, then it quickly melts in less than a week. So far it's melting as soon as it hits the ground, and it's light, but if it keeps up it'll cool the ground enough to allow snow to build up. But but but but... I want spring! We all do.
#23 Re: Not So Free Chat » Vaccinate Your Children! » 2022-03-29 06:37:43
Nearly all these deaths - over 90 percent, closer to 95 percent under a more expansive definition of Covid deaths - now occur in people who have taken Covid shots.
Latest data from UK shows that the unvaccinated are faring better than the vaccinated when it comes to Covid deaths.
#24 Re: Not So Free Chat » Putin's Russian expanding to be the old USSR » 2022-03-29 06:15:17
Louis,
NATO kept poking Russia, from Putin's perspective, until he threw a massive temper tantrum that resulted in mass murder of people who would otherwise have had more in common with Russia than the rest of Europe. In reality, NATO was never going to attack Russia and they were never going to admit Ukraine to NATO, but after a month of watching the Ukrainians lay waste to the Russian military with comparative pea shooters, now the entire world knows that Russia's military has a glass jaw when it comes to a real slugfest, and their leadership is so paranoid about being attacked, because that's what they want to do and are actually doing to their neighbors, that they can think rationally (from anyone else's perspective). Putin's merely another third-world tin pot dictator, no different from Castro or any of the other little phony street toughs who think they know something about fighting until they mess with someone who actually knows how to fight.
It's true that NATO could be said to have poked Putin. But history is complex. To begin with, as the Berlin Wall fell, the pro-globalist West thought it was a slam-dunk and they could change Russia, make it an ally of the EU, perhaps even bring it into the EU and NATO over time. The arrival of Putin on the scene gradually changed everything, but he was clever and moved slowly, exploiting Western differences. The rush to expand NATO was as much a product of fear in recently "liberated" Eastern Europe as any drive to expand from NATO. However I would agree NATO acted hubristically in trying to expand its role.
Regarding GDP, in a sense you're right if we're talking about services, and if you read what she wrote instead of simply calling her names, then you'd see she stated that sometimes new services are not very energy-intensive while being very valuable, boosting GDP out of proportion to the energy invested into the economic activity. We see how services like Uber use owner-operator ride-sharing with cellular technologies to reduce the number of cars required. Seemingly unimportant little innovations like that can have profound impacts without going gonzo on energy consumption. We had taxi cabs since we had cars, but Uber figured out how to use mobile devices to more efficiently utilize the fleet of vehicles while not paying the owner-operator for maintenance, likely another unsustainable scheme in the long-term, but it works until those owner-operators can't pay their bills. However, you still subscribe to the "metaphysical woo woo" nonsense that these "economists who never left the classroom" do. There is no human activity that doesn't use energy. If you're alive, you're using energy. Period.
Wasn't me who denied energy usage for all activity but I think we agree there are ways that low energy use can improve GDP output. The classic one was probably in 18th century England when "husbandry" knowledge about all aspects of agriculture e.g. crop rotation spread among farmers so that agricultural output increased hugely, allowing expansion of population, urbanisation and industrialisation. Knowledge is the classic low energy user!
I'm also counting on recycling improving because otherwise this "electronic-everything" futurism, however cool-looking, is pure fantasy. In the same way that it took about 90 years for Lead-acid battery recycling to reach 95%, it's probable that recycling any other type of battery will take at least that long to become at least that pervasive, and then the energy cost will still exceed that of sourcing virgin materials. The government could incentivize programs for recycling, but they believe the same thing you do- that resources are infinite. If we're talking about the entire solar system, then compared to Earth the resources are infinite, but someone has to have "been there, done that" first, and thus far there are no takers despite the fact that they could be wealthy beyond anyone's dreams. The sea bed mining looks interesting and I read about that, too, but again, let's see how closely reality matches up with "the dream".
Recycling is one of those areas where government intervention can make a huge difference. If it becomes a legal requirement, the sector will put in the investment to make it happen. Obviously you can't do it overnight but once the legal requirement is there and everyone knows the rules of the game, the recycling capacity expands.
I've already stated what the present issue with photovoltaics, wind turbines, and batteries is. The sunk cost over time is exponentially more than competing solutions. It starts out that way and gets worse over time. When fossil fuels were more plentiful, it didn't matter much, but they can't keep the lights on in China where they make all these things. That's why the marginal monetary cost of making the next copy of these whiz-bang gadgets, which reflects embodied energy costs, has to approach something trivial for it to be viable. We've almost figured out how to do that with microchips, but the energy cost is still staggering. How do you achieve continual growth when energy costs keep going up as the scarcity of the inputs continues to get worse? Beats me, but if you figure that out please let the manufacturers know so we can make this beautiful dream a reality.
In looking at this issue, firstly ignore historic costs as a guide to future costs except to the rate at which costs have fallen. The potential for cost reductions in photovoltaics particularly but also in battery storage, green hydrogen production and wind energy are huge. Secondly, let price be your guide.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/leve … -hydrogen/
Only fully depreciated Gas CC facilities can beat the lowest price points for solar and wind. Of course we have yet to see entries for fully depreciated wind and solar facilities (they too will be extremely cheap). I accept this chart doesn't mean green energy viewed as a total system (generation, distribution and storage) can yet match the price of the cheapest non-green sources but they are getting very close now and the outlook is good. The price of large nuclear power facilities is never going to go down substantially unless perhaps you can safely get AI robots to manage the facilities. Automated small nuclear power facilities might be a lot cheaper but we don't have any in operation in the real market place yet, so we will have to see. I am sceptical about them because of the terrorist threat and public opposition to having them sited on people's doorstep and the lack of any real info on operational costs.
#25 Re: Not So Free Chat » Putin's Russian expanding to be the old USSR » 2022-03-28 19:25:52
She sounds like a complete nutjob - believing NATO wanted the war in order to disguise their resource problems! Total effing BS. NATO are terrified of Putin!! They never wanted the war. Even now they won't send planes or tanks to Ukraine.
On the larger question I don't think resources, in the sense of materials for industrial use, are a brake on increasing GDP. World GDP has increased every year since WW2 bar one year I think it was. That's despite huge population increase and a huge increase in per capita material consumption by humanity. Hardly an indication that resource utilisation is a brake on growth. (The bigger issue is probably food - unless you want to destroy natural habitats and cause huge disruption to ecosystems, we are probably getting close to the limits of food production on Earth.)
What we have experienced over the last couple of years are classic dislocation effects from a pandemic, a flawed pandemic response (test and trace interfering with normal economic activity), and now a big war and sanctions response.
In the longer term I think human ingenuity can address the issue of sourcing materials. Recycling technologies improve every year allowing us to reclaim more and more resources. As raw material prices rise so novel mining solutions e.g. extraction from the sea bed become economical. Ultimately as rocket transport prices drop, we will be able to ship in resources from the asteroid belt. At the same time we can find better way of solving energy problems than for instance using lithium. Iron-air batteries and green hydrogen will likely be better forms of energy storage than lithium in the long run. We can probably reduce the size of lithium batteries used in EVs by bringing in electric roads, allowing vehicles to charge as they travel.
Why no one will win the Ukrainian war.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/03/28/n … -conflict/