Posts by louis

louis · Civilization and Culture

I don't really see isolated homesteads being particularly dangerous environments.

They'll have a lot of medical equipment in situ e.g. oxygen, defibrillators and so on.

If someone is in need of medical attention, unless they need very specialist attention, you'll probably just get in your pressurised transport rover and head to the big city.

I doubt there will be charges for health care on Mars. People will be just too precious for them to be left to be sick or die.

I see no reason why people will have to live in row homes on Mars. Sounds like that old Mars One mission.

Pressurised units can simply be imported from Earth with built-in air locks for pressurised vehicles. The only requirement of a homesteader is that you have enough money to pay for the structure, the life support and the maintenance. Either you come with the money or you earn it through doing something like growing food or maybe making furniture. I doubt in the early missions there will be any rent charged for using land.

Once Space X or a Mars Consortium are producing accommodation on a production line, the costs will fall dramatically. I suspect the (spacious) living space for a 4 person family with built in life support might be only something like $200,000. Then if you were a farmer you'd have to add on cost for agri-habs. Those would be a lot cheaper per sq metre.

Food will be very expensive on Mars, compared with Earth, so a farmer will be able to make a good living from a relatively small amount of produce. I think homesteaders will basically supplying market niches - vegetables and fruits that have a strong demand within a section of the population.

I think it's too early to say how colonisation will go. Probably most people - 90% will be in cities and sizeable settlements but 10% maybe will be living a very free existence as family units. There will be no problem getting your children to school as long as you are say within 20 kms of a school. Robot vehicles will transport them to and back from school.

I don't think you've made the case for saying homesteading will be difficult. You seem to be referencing an age before we had robot vehicles. Now the farmer doesn't need to take their produce to market. They don't need to drive their kids to school. They don't need to head into town personally to purchase some propane or whatever. Well they don't need propane as they have a load of PV panels providing all the energy they require.

Homesteading seems to me a perfectly viable option but of course I would agree the vast majority of people will want to access the amenities of a large settlement.

Terraformer wrote:

Where is a young child safer - on a small fishing vessel, or on a cruise ship?
If something goes wrong in a single family homestead, the adults are going to have their hands full fixing the problem. Meanwhile little Jimmy is wandering off to play with the airlock, because no-one can keep an eye on him.
If something goes wrong in a Martian village, the people who's designate job it is to fix the problem will be fixing the problem. If things go really wrong, the village can spare a few adults to watch the children in the emergency shelters whilst the others go and patch up the hole in the habitat, or whatever the issue is. If Jimmy wanders off, he's going to be spotted by someone else long before he can do any damage. A village of say 500 can also afford a doctor - not just seeing one via satellite, but an actual in person doctor.
My point being, the Martian environment is not friendly to tiny groups that want to spread out and build homesteads and hamlets. The near vacuum means that people will be living close together, in rowhomes and apartments to maximise the use of the costly pressurised space. The difficulty travelling means that you want to be near other people, because you can't easily drive over to see them when you need to. The harsh environment means that you need a broad set of skills to stay alive, skills which even if you have in a tiny group will see survival sometimes be a full time job that takes away from important things like stopping little children from accidentally killing themselves.
All this to say, Martian colonisation is going to be a lot more like Classical Greece than the American West, with cities establishing new cities rather than settlers spreading out and finding somewhere to stop and farm. It will select for being able to live together in a dense settlement, not sprawling across the landscape. Because it's harsh, and lethal, and you can't afford to only rely on yourself.

louis · Science, Technology, and Astronomy

Well I think you should rediscover your optimism.

Battery charge electricity is not 40 times more expensive than hydrocarbon fuels even if it's 40 times less dense. It's probably something like twice as expensive. But when you have, in some parts of the world, electricity produced from solar power coming in at 50% or less of the cost of hydrocarbon fuels like gas and coal, then you can link them to batteries and still produce cheap electricity.

Cost, not energy density, in my view is nearly always the real arbiter.

I think we are seeing lots of game-changing moments coming along. A few years back no one thought that lithium batteries had a role to play in smoothing electricity generation against demand. Now pretty much everyone accepts it does.

Using green hydrogen to generate electricity is in reality not much different from using methane to do the same. The issue is: can we drive down the price substantially in terms of producing hydrogen from electrolysis and storing it? I really can't see anything standing in the way of huge cost reductions in production and use of green hydrogen, using green energy. There are plenty of issues with using green hydrogen in the home or in vehicles. But at grid scale, the issues are really those of cost.

The fact the Danes are backing green hydrogen is for me a strong influencing factor as they have tended to back the right horses all along.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
I thought the same thing 20 years ago. Over time, my excitement has been tempered by historical reality. Historical reality says there are vanishingly few "game changing" technologies. 20 years later, batteries are still 40 times less energy-dense than hydrocarbon fuels. I know I sound like a broken record, but orders of magnitude have meaning. You can't power a heavy duty truck or a ship or an aircraft in a practical way, using an energy storage medium that's 10 times less energy dense than liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The universe is trying to tell us something, but some people refuse to accept the message because they don't like what it means.
The message thus far, is as follows:
Oxidation chemical reactions involving Hydrogen produce at least 1 order of magnitude more energy output per unit weight of fuel than any electrochemical reaction that we have successfully tested in a lab to date.
We've been doing chemistry and electrochemistry experiments for a lot longer than I've been alive. We have allocated supercomputers and AI programs capable of computational chemistry, to solving the battery problem. Thus far, we have very little to show for all of the effort. We have lots of interesting results, but no dramatic technological improvements. Sooner or later, we need to accept that gasoline is useful due to it's dramatic energy density improvement over batteries.
13,000Wh/kg (gasoline) vs 300Wh/kg (best commercial Lithium-ion batteries)
33,600Wh/kg (gasoline) vs 600Wh/kg (projected solid state Lithium-ion batteries- "next 5 years")
Even if we actually double that figure for batteries in the next 5 years, batteries can't hold a candle to gasoline, never mind Hydrogen, in the volumetric and gravimetric energy density departments. We have a slightly less utterly impractical battery at that point.
I'm a lot less skeptical of Hydrogen energy storage than batteries for grid scale operations and heavy vehicles.
Current batteries are 1/2 of a heavy duty truck cargo load for equivalent range.
Projected batteries are 1/4 of a heavy duty truck cargo load for equivalent range.
There's an upper weight limit on all existing roads. We're not about to re-surface every road in America because battery trucks weigh more than the road can support, especially when Hydrogen trucks and trains can weigh LESS than existing machines.
Nobody will buy more trucks that are double the cost and there aren't enough truck drivers, as-is.
All I want is a practical solution for similar cost to what we have now. If it's a little more or a little less, no big deal. A 10% cost increase is not the end of the world. Double the price or more is a serious problem.
You keep telling me about how costs are being reduced, but none of that is reflected in the prices consumers pay. In short, something doesn't add up here. Technologies that actually cost less don't wind up more expensive for the consumer. If they do, then no matter how theoretically cheap they are or should be, they're actually more expensive for the person footing the bill. The working class and the poor can't afford yet another considerably more expensive solution to their existing transportation and basic necessity problems.
I don't care what word games you try to play with the fact that a Tesla Model 3 is more than double the cost of a Mazda 3. It's a more expensive car with less range and adding up all the gasoline and engine maintenance, the Tesla Model 3 is still no less expensive to operate over time, as compared to the Mazda 3. Since most Americans never keep a car for more than 3 years, let alone longer, whatever perceived economic benefits having lower cost fuel bills brings with it will never be seen by the original owner. That assumes they don't raise the price of electricity sky-high to cover revenues not generated from gasoline taxes.
Will Chinese battery electronic cars change that paradigm? Perhaps, but that remains to be seen.

louis · Martian Politics and Economy

Your definition of regolith is not the generally accepted definition which is along the lines of this from the Collins dictionary: "the layer of loose material covering the bedrock of the earth and moon, etc, comprising soil, sand, rock fragments, volcanic ash, glacial drift, etc "

I agree that using the word soil for regolith with no organic material is unscientific. Soil by definition must mean stuff with organic material in it - both live and dead.

RobertDyck wrote:

Soil samples. Yea, technically the surface of Mars is not regolith, because that term means pulverized igneous rock. The surface of Mars has sedimentary minerals as well as hydrated material such as clay. Geologists have taken to calling the loose non-aggregated surface material "soil". However, according to agricultural science it must have organic material to be called soil. There is a technical term for loose material that does not have organic material: dirt. Yup, dirt is a technical term. Mars has dirt.
I have results of 6 "soil" samples from Sojourner, and 8 "soil" samples from Opportunity/Spirit. They've taken a lot more, but finding access to data is getting harder all the time. News releases tends to get dummied down. None of the samples were near a glacier.
NASA: Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS)
The APXS instrument has 3 modes: Alpha, Proton, X-ray Spectrometer. Unfortunately the Proton mode didn't work, so they don't have a measure of hydrogen. It would definitely be useful to discern the difference between feldspar rock vs clay. X-ray fluorescence is used for heavier elements, from sodium on up. Here's the website:
X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF)
X-Ray fluorescence is particularly well-suited for investigations that involve
bulk chemical analyses of major elements (Si, Ti, Al, Fe, Mn, Mg, Ca, Na, K, P) in rock and sediment
bulk chemical analyses of trace elements (in abundances >1 ppm; Ba, Ce, Co, Cr, Cu, Ga, La, Nb, Ni, Rb, Sc, Sr, Rh, U, V, Y, Zr, Zn) in rock and sediment - detection limits for trace elements are typically on the order of a few parts per million
A more serious consideration was early results from Mars Global Surveyor. The Thermal Emission Spectrometer detected spectra and thermal momentum consistent with serpentine and actinolite. When crushed they form asbestos. However, none of the rovers detected these minerals on the ground. So perhaps interpretation of the data from orbit was incorrect.

louis · Human missions

It's not that the Mosquitoes were falling apart.They would have been out in all weathers. The adhesives were used throughout the structure (which was basically as I understand it plywood) so you couldn't disassemble them in the way you can a Spitfire.

But they were basically for several years the best aircraft operating in WW2 - able to bomb accurately, take on fighters and fly long distances (very long with drop tanks).

BTW I am firmly of the view that if the RAF has switched production to the Mosquitoes for bombing and moved away from long range high altitude bombing, we could have taken out just about every factory, coal reserve, oil tank, railway and road in German-controlled Western and Central Europe. We could also have destroyed the gun emplacements along the French coast. Sadly the vast majority of investment went into inaccurate bombers.

And here for SpaceNut is a reference to external use of adhesives eg on roofs.

https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Adhesives

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
There are more P-40s, P-47s, P-51s, and Spitfires at any given airshow, anywhere in the world, than there are airworthy examples of the Mosquitos in the entire world. I can count all the airworthy Mosquitos on one hand. Those other American and British fighters were made with Aluminum. Since the Mosquito was made from wood and adhesives, the only airworthy Mosquitos had the majority of their airframes completely rebuilt from scratch after WWII. Any wood and adhesive airframe left out in the elements for a single year is typically completely destroyed and will never be airworthy again. We have examples of Aluminum WWII airframes that were restored more than half a century later merely by stripping the old paint off the parts, repainting, and reassembling them. No such restoration is possible with wood and glue.
Similarly the Allison V-1710, with a bit over 7,000 total parts, had fewer total parts than the Merlin had total fasteners. In testing with a 2-stage supercharger, the V-1710 made more horsepower than the Merlin at lower RPM (it's a very similar but larger displacement engine, so no real surprise there). The Ford GG Aero V-12 had drastically fewer parts than the V-1710, at fewer than 1,000 total parts including the turbocharger system, and was drastically cheaper to produce than either of its competitors (far fewer total parts, far fewer machining operations, far fewer assembly steps, large but simple components). The Ford engine also produced more horsepower with far fewer maintenance hours expended than either the Allison or Rolls-Royce engines.
We produced Allison and Rolls-Royce V-12 aircraft engines because we already had production lines established to make them, not because they were better engines than other competing designs. Maintenance-wise, the Merlin's 14,000 parts were an absolute nightmare during repairs, as compared to the Allison. The Allison was still a nightmare compared to the Ford. Ford stubbornly refused to play ball with our military, so they cut Ford out of the aircraft engine business, despite the fact that the Army Air Corps knew unequivocally from actual testing that the Ford GG was a more reliable, durable, and powerful engine design than either the Allison V-1710 or Rolls-Royce Merlin engines.
The US Army had serious problems with the reliability and maintenance schedules dictated by their use of aviation-derived Wright R-975 radial engines in their M4 tanks, so the moment the Tank Corps was able to replace the Wright engines and that multi-bank abortion that Chrysler came up with, using reliable Ford GAA series engines (a 60-degree V-8 variant of the GG Aero with 4 cylinders removed), they did so and never looked back.
We can say that the V-1710 and the Merlin both produced enough power with acceptable reliability for service in the then-modern fighter aircraft, but only if we totally ignore every other aspect of what makes a good liquid-cooled V-12 fighter aircraft engine design. In those days, it was rare for an airframe to last more than 25 hours before it was destroyed. The moment airframe lifespans exceeded 25 hours, the numerous maintenance issues with the Merlin engine became painfully apparent, which is what prompted studies for further V-1710 development. That ultimately went nowhere because by that time there was simply too much time and money invested in the Merlin.
In war, a mediocre design that is available right now is always better than a dramatically better design the might become available in the future. As is so often the case in aerospace engineering, what was demonstrably better than what we had, never came to be, due to the "Sunk Cost" fallacy.
The sunk cost fallacy is now killing general aviation. We're still using engines from the 1950s because we put so much time and effort into those specific designs that nobody wants to take a chance on development of modern automotive engines. The end result is that stupidly simple engines cost as much as a house, due to lack of production volume. Expansion of general aviation is now functionally impossible, due to lack of investment into less costly and more modern automotive engine designs that would enable greater participation in general aviation. It's a vicious circle. Thankfully, experimental aviation is exempt from the insanity of what we're presently doing. As a result, there are now greater numbers of experimental aircraft turned out of garages every year, than all the professional aircraft manufacturers combined. All of the battery electronic aircraft cost dramatically more than the existing engines and aircraft, for dramatically less range and payload carrying capability.
To that end, if someone can make the combination of solar panels and storage, whatever form that takes, cheap enough to replace fossil fuels, then stop talking about it and start doing it. A solar panel will only ever be 1/2 or 1/3 of any 24/7/365 power provisioning system. If it merely costs as much as natural gas or coal or slightly less in some specific part of the world, then that's a long way from a complete solution that actually replaces coal and gas. Ultimately, I fail to see the point in continually trying things that can't work using existing technology.

louis · Not So Free Chat

Better than that, it is claimed he converted to Islam in Saudi Arabia when he married a Muslim woman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stakFxEoyWw

As far as I know, Brennan has never directly denied this claim. He didn't swear into office on the Bible - as is normal - he swore on the American constitution which is a joke given his subsequent attempts to unconstitutionally removed the duly elected President of the USA.

kbd512 wrote:

Mars_B4_Moon,
Brennan is a self-avowed communist. That's all you need to know about him. He will tell any lie and do any deed, in support of the communist party. Whatever distinguishing characteristics that best describe him and his malfeasance against the American people, he imputes to better men who have brushed him aside, namely President Trump.
Democrats never could achieve the "real change" that they said they wanted, whatever that was, since none of them could agree upon their definition of "real change", so they defaulted back to behaving like insurgents (Brennan), terrorists (blm and antifa), or actual communists (also Brennan, the founders of blm, and most members of antifa). That's what they did in the 1970s, and why the FBI and CIA of that era were actively fighting against the communists, rather than joining them. As the boomer kids aged out and became the establishment, they thought they were going to implement "real change", which never happened.
The fall of the Soviet Union was a crushing blow to the limitless egos of our home-grown communists, so then they glommed on to the global terrorism idiocy started by former President Bush, except that the muslims are totally disinterested in communism, because it subverts the supremacy of their religion. Now that these radicals are ideologically homeless, since the Democrat Party has gone full corporatist (what they thought their parents' generation represented when they became teenagers), they're struggling to try to remain relevant. All of them still have the reasoning capabilities of your average teenager, which is to say very little, except now they're capable of hurting more than just themselves and the people who love them.
In short, they're nothing but a loosely associated collection of anti-American radicals who can't organize their way out of a wet paper bag, even when they have absolute control over the US government. That's where all the new age / nihilist / post-modern dead-head BS movements from the 1960s and 1970s went to die. The leadership is old enough to know how the first movement ended, and now they're even more bitter because all of their nonsense ended up in the exact same place two generations later.
I'm fighting against "The Man", says the childish clown (Brennan) who is now the very embodiment of "The Man". Brennan is a Derpistani tribesman, same as the rest of the Derps in Hollyweird.
Basically, they were in charge of government under former President Obama and now President Biden, but never could manage to do anything useful with our government, so now they're trying to tear it all down in childish fit of rage over their own ineptitude. China is supposed to take over and do something useful since none of these goofballs can figure out what to do. They always were goofballs, but now the entire world knows it, and China is not amused, because their existence as a first-world nation is pinned to the global economy that the post-WWII US system was intended to create, until Bush / Obama / Trump / Biden tore it down because it did nothing for America.
The people who still vote for Democrats, still think they're voting for the party of Kennedy, but the communists murdered Kennedy and we, as a nation, never recovered from that. Afterwards the Democrats lost all moral and ideological grounding, basically their connection back to being Americans, even if they held whatever would be considered radical viewpoints at the time. Now it's just anti-Americanism masquerading as social justice or caring about the environment or any other nonsense cause, because if they're not "fighting for something", then they lack a purpose in life. Democrats were great back in the 1960s when Kennedy moved them away from racism and Jim Crow, but some habits die hard and the old guard never gave up on their racist ideas.
Somewhere along the way, they lost their humanity and became the very thing they claimed to detest so much, namely corporatist oligarchs who don't care at all about the plight of the people under their capricious dictatorial rule. All we get now is excuses for failures or blaming "the other guy", empty platitudes, and total non-arguments for why they behave the way they do. They've lost the plot, even if they don't see it.
Think about this. President Trump was a Democrat his entire life, before 2016. He switched parties, proved how stupid and useless to the American people that both parties had become, and they lost their ever-loving minds over the fact that President Trump exposed what both parties had truly become.
If Kennedy was alive today, they'd be calling him a nazi in the media, they'd prattle on about how he was destroying democracy in their little sewing circles, and that America was racist- all because Kennedy would have commanded them to do right by your country and your people, and Martin Luther King would be telling people to judge others by the content of their character, rather than their skin color.
How much further "full circle" do we need to come, before we recognize where we are?

louis · Human missions

The Mosquito bomber was put together with adhesives back in WW2. Let's assume they know what they're doing!

SpaceNut wrote:

Adhesives would breakdown in the summer heat and winter cold, not to mention the panel would produce less power being hotter due to a roof under them.
Also the maker of the panels selling price does not matter to the installer for what they charge the consumer...

louis · Science, Technology, and Astronomy

You're asking for things I haven't said we have yet!

What I have said is that we certainly have ways of increasing the green energy perecentage of energy usage in various ways.

The next five years are going to be crucial and I think we will see huge changes in storage technology.

While I was initially sceptical about hydrogen storage, I am coming round to thinking that might well provide the fastest route to a reliable green energy system. The basic technology of electrolysis is very simple and reading various analysts, it appears like the scope for cost reduction is huge.

We shall see but currently my money is on hydrogen storage being the game changer.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
louis wrote:
I think you are redefining "grid scale" to mean "total grid scale". Grid scale as I understand it has always meant operating at an energy level that is relevant to keep a grid going rather than an individual household, factory or even local community. There's no doubt in my mind that lithium batteries are being deployed at a grid scale in South Australia for instance, to keep the whole grid going at crucial points. Even if the power output is only 1% say, that's still a very large power output in relation to households, factories and communities.
Provide a link to a battery electrical energy storage system that provides sunset-to-sunrise electrical power for a city of a million people. That's your baseline. America has 400 million people. Whatever the battery solution for 1 million people looks like, we have to scale that up by at least a factor of 400. That assumes we don't go whole-hog on these battery electronic vehicles. If we do that, then we will need more than two orders of magnitude more electric generating and/or storage capacity to prevent a mere 5% of the nation's motor vehicle owners from collapsing the entire grid, from coast-to-coast, when a mere 5% decided to "fast charge" their battery electronic vehicles.
If 5% of motor vehicle owners are BEV owners, and all 5% of them decide to fast charge their passenger vehicles, that is more than the sum total electric generating capacity of the entire US electrical grid (all of them) at any given moment, which includes coal / gas / geothermal / hydroelectric / nuclear / solar / wind / everything else.
Simply find a battery of any description that provides sunset-to-sunrise residential electrical power for at least a million people. If you can't find a city, then find a computer data center that consumes a similar amount of electrical power, or an industrial manufacturing plant. I will accept any of the above as proof that a battery is providing grid scale electrical power. A power curve smoothing battery that provides 30 minutes to 2 hours of power while a gas turbine fires up, is not a grid scale battery electrical energy storage system.
louis wrote:
Saying that batteries that help keep a grid going in the evening are not "grid scale" is like saying gas generators are not grid scale. It's meaningless. Of course they are grid scale, because they are operating at a scale designed to maintain the grid.
The only reason the batteries are required to help keep the grid going is that we now have so much unreliable wind and solar power that the grid would collapse at least once per day without power curve smoothing or massive over-capacity provided by gas turbines, in order to deal with the enormous power fluctuations produced by wind and solar power. We didn't need any batteries when the grid was powered by coal / gas / nuclear.
louis wrote:
I'm happy to discuss "Reverse Combustion" only here. It is annoying when threads go off-topic. Always happens to mine!
We always go off-topic. I was only looking for something that relates back to reverse combustion. Provide a link to a battery that's doing what we need it to do at the required scale, and then we can talk about batteries instead of hydrocarbon fuels. I don't care where the conversation ends up. There's nothing wrong with discussing batteries in a thread about combustion engines. It's when someone starts asserting that a battery is equivalent to a combustion engine that I take issue with that. Both technologies are objectively not like-kind replacements.
If you or anyone else asserts that we can run a diesel fueled forklift inside a sealed indoor factory warehouse with a bunch of people working in there as well, then I would take equal issue with that, because it's an absurdity.
louis wrote:
I have already welcomed this technology as a positive development. If it is low pollution as well, as you have pointed out, then it's really a very beneficial form of storage.
I do feel ultimately very positive about other storage technologies like iron-air, green hydrogen, pumped storage and so on but they can be discussed elsewhere.
I'm looking for a single data point that demonstrates grid scale power. If the Iron-air battery works at scale, then great, that's money, let's use it. Show me a working implementation somewhere. That's all I'm asking for. 30 minutes of power isn't proving that a battery can power a grid over 12 hours of darkness. If someone is doing that, then great, but show me the money.

louis · Martian Politics and Economy

Well this is a very important debate. We should have this debate.

You are saying "What if?" Well I am saying apply the cultural test.

You are saying: "I don't want a cultural test. I want a money test."

But what does that mean? Clearly it means whoever has the billions wins. And when we look around the world today, who is it who can supply the billions (apart from Musk himself): corrupt Russian oligarchs, Saudi billionaires, Gulf billionaires, Iran, the CCP regime in China etc etc...these are not the people I want to lead Mars colonisation.

I personally think Musk is way more intelligent, foresightful and devious than people realise. I think he may well have gamed this already. Just because he said it was his plan doesn't mean it is his plan.

For one thing when he was giving the impression Californians were going emigrate to Mars en masse, he was a lot poorer. He now has billions more to pour into Mars colonisation. I think he will come to see the error of his ways and modify the plan by, in effect applying a cultural test that he can actually subsidise from his personal wealth.

This cultural test can be based on the UN Charter of Human Rights essentially - properly interpreted, not in the way the CCP or Putin or the Saudis interpret it.

If you want to export religious lunatics, communist fanatics, cultists and assorted maniacs to Mars then stick with your "money to Mars" approach.

RobertDyck wrote:

louis wrote:
I strongly oppose Musk's loopy plan and would prefer to see a strong cultural test applied to all potential migrants ensuing their respect for free speech, free thought, gender equality, old democratic norms and so on. We should be exporting the best from Earth to Mars, not the worst.
What if a group of Mormons want to establish New Salt Lake, complete with mandatory membership in the Mormon church, and polygamy? I have suggested such a group could establish a municipality on Mars. With enough people living there, they could become a city. A city-state.
What if a group of fundamentalist Christians want to establish a municipality with traditional gender roles?
What if a group from United Arab Emirates want to establish a municipality with Sharia law and Sharia courts, following UAE culture and legal structure? I mention them because UAE has already sent a mission to Mars.
I'm suggesting each municipality could be a social experiment. One reason for restricting sub-sovereign entities to a single municipality is to prevent the surface of Mars from being claimed. Mars is a planet, with as much surface area as all the dry land of Earth combined. If we start claiming vast tracts, that will be taken very quickly. But restricting sub-sovereign entities to a single municipality, the surface is vast, allowing many such city-states.
Any "test" is biased toward a certain society structure. I'm saying no such test. The only test is if you can afford a ticket.
By the way, all new settlers will arrive at the city established by the corporation that owns the interplanetary transport ships. Arrival on Mars will be greeted by advertising: Come work for The Company! Free Apartment! (in a company dormitory) Free utilities! Free healthcare! Free meals in the company cafeteria! (only Company employees allowed) Free transportation to work! (corridor to walk down for office workers, pressurized bus for miners) And when (if) you save enough money, you can build your own homestead in the outback to become completely independent! (Equipment, tools and supplies at the company store. At company prices.)

louis · Civilization and Culture

Watched something on the very woke BBC last night. The belief that women are unlucky on a boat is alive and well among Cornish fishermen in the UK. I don't think we have to worry about that for Mars. I think the early missions will be nearly 50-50 on gender and have a wide ethnic background.

I would agree that "living off the land" - what I would call "homesteading" - requires the establishment of a secure base settlement first. That would be at least 10 years down the line I think - probably more. But I think homesteading might be useful...letting people go off to create farms in good craters some miles off from the main settlement. The point is it doesn't require planning - you just let individuals make the decisions based on whether they can create viable businesses. I am sure there will be mega farms close to the base but these individual homestead farms could add up to a major resources. They would be good in a biosecurity way as well. If you had some sudden deadly plant disease circulating at the base settlement, these isolated farms could still be producing healthy food and reliably so.

SpaceNut wrote:

Reposting
Ships carrying woman were considered bad luck early on in ocean voyages. I have seen girls that would wreck me so its not a question of what sex to send but fitness to perform tasks into space.
Just because you send the " top 10% (120+ IQ)." does not mean they can think there way out of a box. You need a combination of skills to go with that brain that can reason through a problem as there is nothing but what you have to solve it with you at any point in time when you are on mars.
The talk of living off the land only happens once you have structures to support the activity unlike earth we are going to need energy to be able to leverage to all things that we need beyond the ship and stuff that we bring. Which makes the research islands perfect for the learning of how to do with less.

louis · Human missions

Nope you're wrong. They estimate a 45% overall reduction in cost. That makes sense because (a) the cost of per sq metre production is much cheaper and (b) the panels are quickly applied to surfaces with adhesives, not bolted on to expensive steel frames which themselves have to be bolted on to roofs. Probably an ideal location would be a large flat or sloping roof on a factory. It would be a quick job to lay the roll with adhesive. You can then pretty much forget about it for the next 10 years.

(a) and (b) more than make up for the lower efficiency and shorter life span.

SpaceNut wrote:

Redirecting:
louis wrote:
That's not how I read it and installation costs are a large part of the cost of solar.
SpaceNut wrote:
Louis, I take it that you are willing to pay twice as much for the thin roll out PV since that's what its going to take.
The cost takes both the panels and the installation requirements into total cost to the customer. That said since you are placing twice the panel count its going to double that section of the cost and double the labor as well. Sure if they are the good guy's they might discount their install but do not count on it.

louis · Martian Politics and Economy

Interesting discussion!

I think for the first 3 or so decades the Mars population is going to be "of a type" ie fit, healthy, intelligent and probably well educated in STEM subjects. Whatever they may say, pregnancy, significant disability and depressive traits will be discouraged to the max. There will however be a good gender/race balance because Space X/Musk will be able to pick and choose from the brightest and best all around Planet Earth.

But once human settlement on the planet has established its foothold then what? Musk makes it sound like anyone will be able to buy a ticket to Mars and settle there. Have no illusions, as I have pointed out before, the nature of settlers will change dramatically as a result should he follow through on that. Should Musk be true to his word (I obviously have some doubts) we'll find a very large number of (ex PLA) Chinese "students" suddenly finding the wherewithal to pay for the ticket. Pakistani and Saudi billionaires will stump up many millions to send their co-religionsts there and no doubt Scientologists and others will want to get on board. I am sure Mr Putin could spare some Roubles to make sure there is a strong Russian presence on Mars as well. Even DPRK might want to get in on the act.

Essentially the Musk plan guarantees exporting hell to Mars.

I strongly oppose Musk's loopy plan and would prefer to see a strong cultural test applied to all potential migrants ensuing their respect for free speech, free thought, gender equality, old democratic norms and so on. We should be exporting the best from Earth to Mars, not the worst.

louis · Martian Politics and Economy

I read an interesting article in the (UK) Spectator recently about how this town has grown up on the African Savannah in Kenya. 30 years ago there was nothing there. There were a couple of brick pillars, built by an old colonial farmer as the entrance point to his farm - and the locals likened them to Bull's Horns. That's now the name of the settlement. The Bull's Horns became a place lorries stopped off and picked up people wanting to travel some distance. Then shops grew up around the stopping point. Soon the shopkeepers were building homes for their families to live in. Next the politicians got involved building schools and the like...Now it is a settlement of some 30,000 people, all within three decades.

Obviously on Mars, development will take place in a different way but science research, universities, media companies and so on will be performing the equivalent of selling potatoes by the roadside...

RobertDyck wrote:

St. John's Newfoundland also had whalers from Basque. This was a time before invention of plastics or petroleum products. Whale oil was used for lamps, whale bone was carved to make products, etc. There was a need for support so eventually carpenters and blacksmiths set up shop. Bakers made bread. The fishing camp grew to become a village, then a town, then a city. With all the support services of a city.
France established a colonies in Quebec, Acadia, and Louisiana. They trapped animals for fur, and harvested tree sap to make maple syrup that they called "sugar". Certain types of tree were harvested for timber, white oak and "live oak", because that special type of wood was very strong, required for military combat ships. "Live oak" only grows in southern North America: along the Atlantic coast from southeast Virginia to Florida, west along the Gulf Coast to Louisiana and Mexico, and across the southwest to California. The name "live oak" is from the fact the tree grows year round, it doesn't become dormant in winter. It only grows in warmer climates. Fur trade became big business. Quebec doesn't have live oak, but does have white oak, and did have fur and maple syrup. Quebec colonies were required to provide food locally, including wheat fields using seed grain brought from Europe, and meat from the animals trapped for fur. Most of the colonists were men, Quebec had to periodically send more colonists. Eventually the king of France was tired of having to send more colonists to Quebec, so he sent a shipment of women, young prostitutes from the streets of France. His orders were to get married and have children so Quebec will raise their own men, so he doesn't have to spend money to send more men. The men were quite pleased at a shipment of young single women looking for husbands.

louis · Science, Technology, and Astronomy

I think you are redefining "grid scale" to mean "total grid scale". Grid scale as I understand it has always meant operating at an energy level that is relevant to keep a grid going rather than an individual household, factory or even local community. There's no doubt in my mind that lithium batteries are being deployed at a grid scale in South Australia for instance, to keep the whole grid going at crucial points. Even if the power output is only 1% say, that's still a very large power output in relation to households, factories and communities.

Saying that batteries that help keep a grid going in the evening are not "grid scale" is like saying gas generators are not grid scale. It's meaningless. Of course they are grid scale, because they are operating at a scale designed to maintain the grid.

I'm happy to discuss "Reverse Combustion" only here. It is annoying when threads go off-topic. Always happens to mine!

I have already welcomed this technology as a positive development. If it is low pollution as well, as you have pointed out, then it's really a very beneficial form of storage.

I do feel ultimately very positive about other storage technologies like iron-air, green hydrogen, pumped storage and so on but they can be discussed elsewhere.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
This is the "Prometheus Fuels" thread, not the "Going Solar" thread. I don't care if we discuss your favorite energy generation technology here, because solar power can certainly be used to produce liquid hydrocarbon fuels, but let's try to relate your power generation tech of choice to how we can create a practical energy production and storage solution. We can use more and more unreliable wind and solar energy, so long as it's backed by a reliable and energy-dense energy storage solution, but we can't have unreliable energy backed by nothing.
At the present time, batteries for grid scale energy storage are non-existent. There are no grid scale batteries of any kind, whether Lead-acid, Lithium-ion, or Iron-air. Lead-acid batteries were vastly cheaper than Lithium-ion for many decades, but nobody ever thought they were practical for storing electrical power at a grid scale. Batteries that supply power for a few hours at most are not grid scale batteries, either. When the sun stops shining, it stops shining for 12+ hours. When the wind stops blowing, it can stop blowing for days. Therefore, there are no grid scale batteries that can cover that kind of power generation outage. The literal handful of grid-connected batteries that smooth over power generation drops from wind and solar are power curve smoothing devices, not grid scale storage. If you want to further discuss batteries or non-existent grid scale storage batteries, then we'll move those posts to the numerous threads about batteries.
If we are seeing significant cost reductions in solar and batteries, then we wouldn't see the prices paid by consumers continuing to go up. The prices keep going up because everything (photovoltaic panels and batteries are included in "everything", just as natural gas and gasoline and Uranium and steel and Aluminum and food are included in "everything") is getting more expensive as the supply of cheap energy from fossil fuels dwindles. When you pay more for energy, the way you "know that you're paying more", is that the price keeps going up, because that's how simple math, also known as "counting", works.
None of the experts who have actually done real testing think the nuclear containment buildings are at risk. I'm taking the word of people with real data, who have run real airplanes into real steel-reinforced concrete, over the word of someone asserting without evidence that he thinks arches are weaker than columns.
Steel reinforced-concrete is nothing at all like a bunch of stones stacked on top of each other. If you bothered to learn something about engineering, then you would know that. The only person stopping you from learning is you. The only thing stopping you from learning is your ideology. The only person who can fix that is you. It's not my problem that you think something without evidence or knowledge of the subject matter. If you wish to post whatever it is that you read, regarding what "some experts think", using a link to their research, then we can discuss this further.
1. I never asserted or claimed that Thermite brought down the WTC towers or Building #7. You can't find that anywhere in what I've written, because I never wrote such an absurd thing.
2. What I said was, "when you wrap steel with pure Aluminum, and it inevitably cracks from external forces applied to it (as in, when it's holding up a building), exposing the interior to greatly accelerated corrosion from contact between dissimilar metals, the chemical products produced from Aluminum touching steel touching water, is better known as Thermite. Thermite is Iron Oxide plus Aluminum Oxide. Those are the corrosion products of Iron and Aluminum alloys. When you attack the grain structure of steel girders holding up the weight of a building, and progressively weaken it over many decades of accelerated corrosion, it's a hell of a lot easier to knock it down with an impact from something massive and moving at great speed, like a commercial airliner.
3. The overriding point is that the combination of the interior columns cracking due to an improper concrete set, which caused excessive corrosion to the steel reinforcement there, and the electrochemical attack on the structural integrity of the outer steel girders that was greatly accelerated by cladding it in Aluminum (the Aluminum cladding was done for sake of vanity- "to make it shimmer like gold in the rising and setting sun"), is what caused the WTC towers and Building #7 to fail.
4. My comment about Thermite was written ONLY to head off the other equally ignorant comments made by people who know nothing of engineering or chemistry, with respect to the assertions that Thermite or explosives somehow brought down the buildings.
5. The WTC towers and Building #7 were brought down by inexcusably poor design combined with lack of proper maintenance, plain and simple. The building owners were told that both WTC towers, Building #7, and some other buildings at that site were within a few years of being condemned by the City of New York, due to their severe structural integrity issues and improper or non-existent fire suppression systems.
Regarding my dismissal of the threat of radiation to public health, that must be your position, not mine. The power generation technologies you like so much, are the very same ones that release the most radioactive materials into the environment. All nuclear power operations and accidents have not released as much radiation into the environment as burning coal to make wind turbines and solar panels, or mining the materials used in solar panels and wind turbines and batteries.
It's also very telling that you have no answer to the threat posed by hackers or AI, but take no issue with making everyone 100% dependent upon electronics technologies that can easily be taken over and/or totally destroyed by hackers or governments weaponizing AI.

louis · Civilization and Culture

True, as far as it goes, but if you are making a point about colonisation why was it that most early attempts to establish colonies in what is now the USA completely failed despite it being a fertile and verdant land? Two answers in brief: absence of high technology and absence of a detailed understanding of the land and its potential. These days a 100 colonists on a GPS navigating ship would have no problem setting up a successful colony in such lands.

I agree that geography does to a large (not complete) extent govern culture. And Aresians will be governed by the challenges of living on Mars. But we know already that humans were able to live for a week on the Moon and have lived for years in the same habitat in outer space where there is not even regolith to sustain you.

So let us not underestimate our technological prowess.

We know how to harness energy on Mars - whether it's solar, nuclear or possibly heat differential energy systems.

We know there are copious amounts of water on Mars - the most essential commodity for human life. And we know how to extract it.

We have already grown food in outer space and we grow it indoors on Earth.

Although I am not a member of the "romantic homesteaders" here, I can't see why an individual or small family couldn't live in their own habitat away from the main settlement, growing food for themselves and maybe for sale. There's no reason why not. They could periodically take their produce to market in the main settlements and purchase things they need for their farm while there eg solar panels, electric cable, lights, batteries, seed and so on.

Terraformer wrote:

Mars is not America. There are no fertile soils ready for planting. There is no large river system splitting the planet in half and making navigation easy. No herds of animals that can be hunted for sustenance. The very air you breathe has to be manufactured from gases extracted out of a soft vacuum.
My point is, it's not comparable to the settlement and expansion of the US of A. Maybe, at a stretch, one could compare it to the Norse settlement of Greenland. Consequently, the culture that was formed by the American expansion will not be replicated on Mars, where pressurised space costs time and resources and soil has to be built out of toxic dirt. It will be something different, something that can survive such a harsh environment.
Rugged individualism won't cut it. Martians will not spread out across an icy desert - they can't afford to be so far from help. With all the various specialities needed to build and maintain habitable environments, from air filtration to soil making to greenhouse manufacture to chemical industry etcetera etcetera, those looking to live on Mars will have to learn to live in compact villages surrounded by a tight ring of intensively farmed land. They are not exempt from the same rule that holds on Terra - geography shapes culture.

louis · Science, Technology, and Astronomy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGQAOeSnErs

See at 10:15.

The claim is 45% lower cost of electricity generation compared with rigid solar panels. Given rigid panels can come in at under 2 cents per KwH that is phenomenally low. I think the video implicitly accepts the PV roll might not be suitable for grid scale installations (presumably because of demanding weather conditions, at least on Earth) but it could be a game changer on private houses, industrial buildings and in poorer parts of the world, given you can just, in effect, glue it to a building or other structure. Probably good for EVs as well.

louis wrote:

That's not how I read it and installation costs are a large part of the cost of solar.
SpaceNut wrote:
Louis, I take it that you are willing to pay twice as much for the thin roll out PV since that's what its going to take.

louis · Terraformation

Yes I recall you posting about this before. It does sound a very promising technology. Thanks for the reminder about it. Definitely one to watch.

Void wrote:

I believe that I posted this on the forum some other place but could not find it.
NovaSolix
http://www.novasolix.com/
Quote:
NovaSolix is developing the technology that will generate the cleanest and cheapest form of energy on Earth: rectifying antennas that convert light to electricity from the entire solar spectrum.
NANOSCALE ANTENNAS
NovaSolix’s carbon nanotube (CNT) antennas are small enough to match the nano-scale wavelengths of sunlight. Antennas can convert electromagnetic spectrum much more efficiently than photovoltaic (PV) cells. When perfected, NovaSolix antennas will capture far more energy from the sun, and far more efficiently, achieving near 90% efficiency (versus ~20% for PV).
NANOSCALE DIODES
NovaSolix has successfully manufactured the world's fastest diode – a critical component for energy conversion.
NANOSCALE MANUFACTURING
From the beginning, NovaSolix engineers have developed our products so that they can be manufactured using roll-to-roll advanced manufacturing techniques. At scale, these techniques ensure that NovaSolix’s products will be the cheapest form of energy on Earth.
WORLD'S MOST EFFICIENT SOLAR ENERGY
Our solution, manufactured at scale, will enable solar energy to be produced at a cost per kWh less than fossil fuels.
What I have read and listened to indicates that their devices will be non-toxic,
will cost 10% of what existing solar panels cost, and will be 45% efficient, and
then later 90% efficient.
Of course they will need to actually do it.
So, if they achieve the 90% efficiency goal, is my mind correct to think that
some of the 10% will be reflected off, and some converted to heat?
If this topic has been followed by the reader, you know that I am interested in
shading soils, and also cooling the sky.
Solar panels are inclined to heat up, I presume, because they are so inefficient.
A Heliostat mirror should not heat up too much, if it is of high quality.
So, on small installations, it does seem to me that these new devices could be
good in gardens.
Might large installations create country "Cold Islands", and city "Heat Islands"?
Well my computer is bogging down.
Done

louis · Science, Technology, and Astronomy

That's not how I read it and installation costs are a large part of the cost of solar.

SpaceNut wrote:

Louis, I take it that you are willing to pay twice as much for the thin roll out PV since that's what its going to take.

louis · Interplanetary transportation

But is he going to build Star City at Boca Chica? I doubt it.

RobertDyck wrote:

That's why I suggested replacing houses with buried houses. Buried house designs I read about have concrete walls and roof, buried beneath dirt. The reason was inexpensive heat control. But for Boca Chica, I'm suggesting each house is effectively a block house. With windows facing away from the launch site.

louis · Science, Technology, and Astronomy

You'll see on the Going Solar thread a reference to Power Roll's new thin film PV technology. Everywhere we are seeing significant cost reductions.

The UK's energy price problems large relate to fossil fuels and our stupid policy of only having a tiny amount of storage of gas (compared with our sensible European neighbours who stores months'-worth of gas.

I haven't got much to add re concrete protection for nuclear facilities, except to say that clearly some experts do feel they are vulnerable. And also to add that arches, become fragile when one stone is removed or damaged. The WTC building No 7 was built some 20 years after the main WTC towers. It seems it was thermal expansion (caused by uncontrolled fires) that caused a support to move out of alignment that in turn caused the colllapse. Thermite was not involved it seems.

I don't think you can point to Covid Year as a regular year for battery prices and in any case iron-air batteries don't use lithium. Likewise lithium is not necessary for green hydrogen storage.

Solar plus storage is certainly already winning contracts, but the storage element might only provide a couple of hours' power to augment the direct solar contribution at the moment.

https://renewablesnow.com/news/edfr-sec … ia-752877/

I think you are far too dismissive of the threat of radiation to public health.

As for CCP China, well yes I wouldn't be pursuing this suicidal policy of free trade with them while they steal our technology, corrupt our institutions and plot our demise.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
Public health officials are well known for overreacting, no matter the threat. The Soviets were still humans, despite our attempts to de-humanize them, and their public health officials were still medical doctors, which means they were prone to overreacting. We were supposed to have tens of thousands of excess cancer deaths from Chernobyl. That never happened. It never happened because it was a hysteria-based assertion from people who obviously had very little understanding of radiation casualties.
Flight 11 hit the second World Trade Center tower at 466mph. Building 7 collapsed because it was built the same way as the twin towers. It was also set on fire by flaming debris that fell on top of it, which also cut through the fire main system. All buildings that collapsed used the same construction methods. That's why they fell at near freefall speed. The exact same thing happened to that the hi-rise condo building in Brazil that was never hit by an airplane, it was also set ablaze via the central elevator shaft, and also collapsed at near freefall speed. It was a fundamentally horrible design, heavily questioned at the time it was designed (in the words of an architect who resigned over what he saw as the WTC's fatal design flaw- "the WTC tower design flew in the face of everything I was taught about architectural engineering in college"), those doing the questioning resigned or were fired, and they proceeded to build the WTC towers with those flaws anyway, because they were going to "save a lot of money". That was the 1970s. Famously flammable and toxic curtains and upholstery, asbestos insulation, Ford Pinto fuel tanks, Aluminum wiring without proper wiring gauge or insulation, etc. Basically, the commercial world did lots of stupid stuff to save money, and pretty much all of it backfired spectacularly.
A nuclear reactor's containment dome, on the other hand... These structures range in thickness from 2.5 feet to 12 feet thick. The concrete is typically double the density of ordinary concrete in order to stop radiation. They're designed to survive blast overpressures of 50psi or more. No skyscraper in the world can survive that.
An Integral Numerical Analysis of Impact of a Commercial Aircraft on Nuclear Containment
Simulated Aircraft Impact Analysis on Nuclear Power Plants to Global Body of Research
From the article:
Testing containment buildings is nothing new. In 1988, Sandia National Laboratories conducted a strength test on a large concrete block by slamming a fully loaded F-4 Phantom jet directly at it to investigate the survivability of a nuclear power plant in the event of an attack. The jet disintegrated upon impact while the concrete block remained relatively unscathed. The 482mph impact left only a 64mm deep gouge in the 3.66m wide block from an impact force of over 700 G. Subsequent studies concluded that commercial airliners did not pose a danger.
Compared to previous studies in this field, this work goes a step further by analyzing the effect of aging on the impact response of an APR1400 RCB,” said Almuhairi. “With aging, the RCB’s materials degrade, and as a result, the load-bearing capacity could be compromised. In the event of an aircraft impact on an aged RCB, the structural integrity might be lost.”
Three degradation mechanisms were considered in modeling the aging of the containment: liner corrosion, rebar corrosion, and pre-stress loss of tendons.
“The impact an Airbus A320 would have on the RCB for the APR1400 was investigated using finite element analysis,” said Almuhairi. “A new modeling approach was developed to determine the impact pressure of the aircraft, taking into account the change of the aircraft’s cross section during crushing and dividing the impact into three stages.
“We found that the unaged RCB is able to withstand the impact load of an Airbus A320 aircraft without liner or rebar failure for impact velocities as great as 300 m/s,” explained Almuhairi. “While aging the RCB caused the plastic liner and rebar strains to increase, the structural integrity of the RCB was maintained for most cases. Full penetration of the RCB was reported only for the unlikely event of an A320 impacting a highly degraded RCB (where all degradation mechanisms were applied simultaneously) at a velocity of 300m/s, a scenario that is judged very unlikely to occur during the design life of 60 years.”
Results from studies by the Electric Power Research Institute support Almuhairi’s findings: penetrating even weak reinforced concrete requires multiple hits by high speed artillery shells or specially-designed ‘bunker busting’ artillery—both of which are well beyond what intentional human damage methods are likely to cause. Nuclear reactors are more resistant to attacks from large aircraft than virtually any other civil installations, according to the World Nuclear Association, and Almuhairi’s research contributes to this growing body of evidence while providing peace of mind in case of nefarious intent.
300m/s is 671mph
The Russians seem pretty confident that the reactor would not only survive but the containment would still be capable of maintaining its ability to withstand its pressure load limit after such an attack:
CONTAINMENT ULTIMATE PRESSURE CAPACITY WITH CONSIDERATION OF AIRCRAFT IMPACT
We don't make any rocket propellant tanks with squared off end plates, do we?
No, of course we don't.
And why don't we do that, since it would be a lot cheaper and easier to do?
It couldn't be because arches are much stronger, could it?
We have also seen over the last 50 years that increased energy costs lead to increased energy efficiency so that overall cost rise does not reflect unit cost rise. Just about everything is now way more energy efficient than a few decades ago.
Total energy consumption has only ever gone up! Way, way up!
Increased energy efficiency has done zero / zip / zilch / nada / nothing for total energy consumption, period and end of story. That statement is unequivocally true, in absolute terms.
We've continually seen what mass manufacturing can do to reduce costs of products that were previously not mass manufactured, but that's not your claim here.
LED lightbulbs cost more than incandescent lightbulbs, even with mass manufacturing of LEDs. LEDs will always cost more, because the embodied energy is much higher. I would argue, as I'm sure you would, that LEDs are demonstrably "better" at producing light than Tungsten filaments, but no matter what you or I or anyone else asserts, the embodied energy in the materials that go into making LED lightbulbs is much higher than it is for incandescent bulbs.
That is why LEDs cost more than incandescent bulbs. It's not magic. It's not rocket science. It's basic economics. It's the economics of energy expenditure. If the manufacturer is obliged to use more expensive materials to make any product, then you, as the consumer, are also obliged to pay more per unit of product, or else the business goes out of business, and then you no longer have any lightbulbs.
Up to a point, I'm perfectly willing to pay more money for LEDs to save money (energy expenditure, ultimately) on electricity, because over their lifetime, I pay less money and receive more photons, but this paradigm has limitations. A battery that costs as much as a car is not a good deal, though. It's not less expensive than gasoline, unless I deliberately manipulate the price of gasoline to make gasoline more expensive than the battery. If the battery was a good deal, then the government wouldn't subsidize electric vehicles. Consumers would do simple math and determine that they all wanted electric cars, without any government intervention.
That said, I really do believe we are about to win big on green energy. It could be in fact the biggest ever economic gain experienced on the planet as real energy costs decline rapidly over a couple of decades. These aren't just my thoughts, they are the conclusions of a lot of energy analysts who ponder these things in more detail than I ever can.
FACTBOX: UK electricity prices now most expensive in Europe
You guys are now paying twice as much as we do on electricity.
What happens after you can no longer ship your electronic waste to some impoverished African or Middle Eastern country, to poison their people?
What do you win after your ground water becomes irreversibly contaminated with the Arsenic / Lead / Cadmium / Mercury leached from the panels?
When the Chinese run out of coal and gas, and are no longer able to produce your "green energy", then what?
Similar to the US, the UK doesn't produce bean dip in the way of solar panels, does it?
EV Battery Prices Risk Reversing Downward Trend as Metals Surge
From the article:
Here’s what the early research this year is showing: For the first time since BloombergNEF started its battery price survey back in 2012 — when Toyota was still confident fuel cell vehicles were the future and Elon Musk was yet to be well-acquainted with the Securities and Exchange Commission — battery prices might break away from the year-over-year declines that we’ve become used to. Over the past decade, prices have fallen from almost $1,200 per kilowatt-hour to just $137/kWh in 2020. For an EV with a 50 kWh battery pack, that’s a savings of more than $43,000 in real terms.
If 2021 were to follow the trend, average pack prices this year should be $125/kWh. But over the past 12 months, the price of the key metals used in lithium-ion batteries have risen relentlessly, putting pressure on battery prices.
All in, around 40% of a cell’s cost is tied to commodities that have risen over the past year. Does this rise really matter? Probably not, but there is a chance battery price declines will stall for an extended period of time or could even rise for a few years. If so, then automakers won’t be able to make the same margin on EVs as they do on gas vehicles, and this could lead to a slowdown in EV sales. In regions like Europe, where automakers have to sell EVs or face big fines, this could hit the top line. For the power industry, this will damage the economics of renewables and storage versus coal or gas, which could mean a delay in decarbonizing grids.
24% of the total Lithium-ion cell cost is labor and manufacturing. Set that cost to zero. If the commodity prices go up, then the battery prices follow. The commodity prices are your floor. It doesn't matter what manufacturing or labor costs, or even if that cost is zero, and it can never be less than zero. That's why Tesla has raised the price of its vehicles. They're getting more expensive to manufacture, not less. $102.75/kWh is your floor price for the technology if manufacturing and labor costs are 0, which is twice as expensive is Lead-acid.
95% of all Lead-acid batteries are recycled. Nearly 100% of the Lead recovered is used to make new car batteries.
5% of all Lithium-ion batteries are recycled.
Force the manufacturers to recycle Lithium-ion batteries at the same rate as Lead-acid batteries, instead of dumping them in landfills, watch as the costs instantly triple, and that'll kill off all price decreases in Lithium-ion batteries. You're going to run out of Lithium rather quickly if you don't recycle it, especially if ALL cars sold by 2030 are mandated to use Lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion is cheap because it's dumped in landfills and the consumer bears the full cost of the technology through direct purchase and government subsidies, which the consumer foots the bill for, whether they want to or not.
Electric cars: What will happen to all the dead batteries?
Overall, given current battery technology, the entire concept of using massive quantities of batteries to power things that move is just so insufferably stupid that it's hard to know where to begin. The only reason they're able to sell it to anyone is that virtually none of the people buying the technology know the first thing about batteries or electric motors, except for the ideologically-driven marketing hype, which they can regurgitate upon command, and none of them have any slight clue about engineering in general. To top it off, none of the software and electrical engineers designing these things will ever work on them.
We take a complex and energy-intensive device that stores 40 times less energy than gasoline per unit weight, and then expect it to move a very heavy vehicle great distances. That goes about as well as you'd expect. Then we load it up with a bunch of software that any skilled hacker with more spare time than compassion for humanity can completely wreck at the speed of light. What could possibly go wrong? Besides a simple software glitch turning every network-enabled electronic vehicle on the planet into a puddle of molten metal in mere seconds.
The Big Tesla Hack: A hacker gained control over the entire fleet, but fortunately he’s a good guy
Look, mom, it's electric! And now it's been hacked! And now it's a brick! Isn't it great?
They can all become beautiful, shiny, absurdly expensive paperweights, in the literal blink of an eye, all of them at the same time, by design.
For someone so overly-concerned with a silly little vaccine, yet so overly-enamored with these rolling computers, your inability to use your imagination over how this will go wrong is a bit perplexing. As the Chinese government start experimenting with AI, much like novel corona viruses, it's going to be pretty interesting to see where this technology ends up the moment someone in their government wants something from our technology enthusiasts- kinda like their firmware implants into the new 5G technology.
The bottom line is that driving isn't supposed to be a computer game, Louis.

louis · Human missions

I think the age of thin film PV really is upon us now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGQAOeSnErs

Power Roll looks like a really promising technology and one that might be applied on Mars. Low efficiency (11%) but ultra low mass. Very cheap as well, but that's not a big issue on Mars for the early missions.

Scheduled to reach mass production by 2023.

Will have a big impact on Earth of course.

If you could use drones and robots to fix these to roofs on industrial buildings, you could maybe be slashing overall costs of purchase and installation by 50%.

louis · Interplanetary transportation

Yeah - I really can't see that being the main issue for Star City. Surely Musk must be thinking of locating it a good (safe) distance from the launch site. He wouldn't want to double the cost of it by building it all beneath the surface. Anyway, I am not convinced Starbase will be the main launch area. Surely it's going to be the Caribbean on one or more of the rigs where most launches will take place. Star City is going to be more about technical development of (a) rockets (pretty minor in the scheme of things) and (b) extra terrestial technologies (huge! - everything from asteroid mining, to terraforming to making it safe for humans to live on Mars, to Mars economic development etc).

I think Musk sees Star City as the portal to off world living and making us a multi-plantary species.

RobertDyck wrote:

There are ways to make it feel open. For example, a central courtyard open to the sky. But my proposal is for houses to survive an on-pad explosion of a fully fuelled Starship / Super Heavy.

louis · Science, Technology, and Astronomy

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
Your inability to eat lamb was a function of media-induced hysteria over Chernobyl, not an actual threat of radiation poisoning. None of the absurd predictions about Chernobyl came to pass. Your anecdote proves nothing, except that far too many people are terrified of things they can't see, kinda like the media-induced mass hysteria over the COVID virus.

Well in both cases you are disputing the view of public health officials. I am not saying public health officials are always right - in fact on Covid they have been demonstrably wrong. But back in the day even Soviet public health officials - not known for their huge concern regarding the citizenry appeared to take Chernobyl pretty seriously. The point about sheep as I understand it is that their bodies can concentrate the perhaps fairly low level radiation as they chomp their way through thousands of kilograms of grass.

A jumbo jet flying into a steel-reinforced concrete dome four feet thick would not damage the reactor core. The twin towers were paper-thin structures by design, in order to save money, which is why the jets penetrated so deeply. The steel structural columns in the building chopped up the airliners into small pieces. The exterior support columns were Aluminum-clad and severely corrosion damaged as a result (why no other buildings use Aluminum-clad steel- because cracking of the coating combined with salty water vapor turns the cladding into Thermite). The much more substantially built Pentagon building stopped the other jumbo jet cold, upon impact with the outer ring, despite being nowhere near as thick as a reactor containment dome.
It's physically impossible for a jumbo jet to attain 600mph at sea level in level flight due to aerodynamic drag and available engine power, but maybe you could put one in a near-vertical dive and maybe you could sustain the dive long enough to strike the containment building before excessive aero loads ripped the wings off. Still possible? Sure, anything's possible.

Government and MIT put the closing speed of the second WTC jets at between about 530 and 590 MPH. My 600 MPH is not far off. You may be right about the Pentagon being a better analogy but nobody really knows what would happen if you flew a Jumbo Jet into a reactor building. We saw at WTC that another building never hit by the aeroplanes collapsed because of associated damage - so even if a plane did not break the barrier, there is as yet no knowing what damage might occur inside and the reactor core is not the only potential source of a radiation leak.

There was destruction and collapse at the Pentagon:

"even though 26 first-floor cement columns were completely destroyed and 15 others severely damaged by the fiery crash"

https://www.history.com/news/pentagon-d … 11-attacks

(It's an interesting read.)

Intuitively I feel a dome is a more fragile structure than pillars, walls and ramps. I may be wrong but doesn't each part of a dome support the other part (similar to how an arch works) so damage to one part of a dome could be catastrophic to the whole structure?

I agree consumers (or taxpayers or both) pay for the total cost. However, we can also see how technology has already and will continue to transform the cost profile of green energy. Once technology delivers on storage, we will see the total green energy system cost start to get much closer to the cost of green energy at source. There are so many promising technologies available for storage now, that I feel confident the storage solution is going to be resolved.
Yeah, well some of us are tired of paying for things that don't provide practical function, that we then have to pay for all over again, every 10 to 25 years. Replacing 100% of your power generation and storage infrastructure that frequently is not economical, let alone practical, even if economics is entirely ignored. Technology has already delivered on energy storage. It's called gasoline or kerosene or diesel fuel. There's no battery technology I've seen that's the least bit "promising" when compared to liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Orders of magnitude have meaning in the realm of mechanical engineering, even if you don't understand or accept or willfully ignore them for ideological reasons.

Well it depends on how you view practical function. For me energy independence and domestic economic stimulus are two very positive aspects of green energy. We have also seen over the last 50 years that increased energy costs lead to increased energy efficiency so that overall cost rise does not reflect unit cost rise. Just about everything is now way more energy efficient than a few decades ago.

That said, I really do believe we are about to win big on green energy. It could be in fact the biggest ever economic gain experienced on the planet as real energy costs decline rapidly over a couple of decades. These aren't just my thoughts, they are the conclusions of a lot of energy analysts who ponder these things in more detail than I ever can.

If battery costs continue to fall and storage density continues to improve (to say 0.3 KwH per Kg), it becomes economical eventually for countries in more northerly latitudes to send 500,000 ton battery tankers to be charged in desert areas further south or even to go "sun fishing" themselves on the oceans. One 500,000 ton tanker might have a total charge of 150 GwHes - probably something like 18% of UK current electricity usage on one day. So a fleet of maybe 20 such vessels travelling between Morocco or the South Atlantic and the UK could probably provide all our current electricity needs (but of course wind energy and other green energy sources can supply a large proportion as well).
Battery costs haven't fallen, though. We have improved batteries that cost more money. The problem is that the improvement, relative to the money spent, is not proportional. A 500,000t "battery tanker" won't weigh 500,000t. Batteries are not liquids that distribute weight evenly across the entire hull structure, either.
At current prices of $50/kWh, each 150GWh battery would cost $7.5 billion dollars, which is 1.5 times the entire construction cost of the 1GWe class Watts-Bar #2 nuclear reactor, which produces as much energy as this battery would store, in just 6.25 days. Your government balked at paying for a single Ford class nuclear powered aircraft carrier, but you're somehow going to pay for a fleet of 20 of these ships. Sure, that seems probable. This "battery ship" concept is starting to look a lot like your fanciful solar-powered airliner concept. It looks great on paper, apart from the fact that it could never generate enough power to remain above stall speed at high noon over a desert.
So, how much energy does 500,000t / 500,000,000kg of crude oil provide?
crude oil is around 44MJ/kg, 1MJ = 0.2777kWh, or 12,222Wh per kilogram
500,000,000 * 12,222 = 6,111,000,000,000 = 6,111GWh per load
6111 / 150 = 40.74
A single impractically-large crude oil carrier has delivered twice as much energy per load as your entire proposed fleet of ships could possibly deliver. We go through this increasingly pointless basic math exercise every time you assert your ideology and it's contradicted by the physical world. Gravity doesn't care about your "green ideology" and it never will. None of us get to negotiate terms with gravity. Your ideology is a belief about the physical world that will only ever be applicable to what you think. Gravity, on the other hand, is a tangible manifestation of the physical world, i.e. "gravity is real". No belief, lack of belief, or acceptance is required. If you jump off a bridge, you can profess total devotion to your "green energy god" all you want, but there's only one direction you're headed, because gravity is real and religious beliefs about gravity are not. My contention is that more than enough people have died over religious beliefs not grounded in plainly observable evidence. We don't need to conduct any further "science experiments" with humanity's energy supply to determine that orders of magnitude have meaning.
Moving on from that simple math problem, everyone else besides you (because every bit of engineering knowledge Calliban or I impart to you goes in one ear and out the other) knows why we use crude oil or natural gas for energy storage, rather than batteries. Concentrated energy is more practical than dilute energy for powering machines that must move to do useful work, every day of the week. Despite the fact that it's merely possible to use dilute energy to power said machinery, doesn't make dilute energy more suitable for the intended purpose, never mind practical.
Anyway...
We built a grand total of 1 Seawise Giant (same weight class as the type of ship you're proposing), and then decommissioned it because it was so difficult to hazard that it wasn't a practical ship. Seawise Giant couldn't safely navigate the English Channel due to its draft (part of the hull below the waterline), for example. The turning circle was 2 miles at very low speed and it took 5.5 miles to stop from full speed of 16.5 knots.
Regarding terrorism, have you so much as thought about where your power will be coming from if you send ships of that size to an Islamic country, when the muslims living there decide to seize those ships or sink them because they don't want westerners in their countries?
Let me guess, terrorism won't be a problem, because "green energy" is involved.
But what if no terrorism was ever required?
What if one of the millions of batteries catches fire and turns the entire ship into the world's largest arc welding experiment?
The $150 billion dollars spent on the batteries alone is not chump change, even for the UK's government. The actual battery packs and the vessels to hold them will add many more billions to the total price tag. You'll be replacing those batteries every 10 years or so, or whenever the slightest manufacturing defect in a single battery cell incinerates the entire ship.
Over 10 years, that's only about 1% of your government's annual budget, so it's certainly doable in terms of dollars or pounds sterling, but the same amount of money would purchase 30 Watts-Bar #2 1GWe PWRs, which would supply over 91% of the UK's total electricity usage during 2020. The reactors will continue to operate safely over 75 years, rather than 10 years. Precisely 0 Lithium-ion batteries made this year will still be operational 75 years from now.
That type of insanity is why I continually point out how wretched this "green ideology" nonsense truly is. Someone with your ideology would force your fellow countrymen to spend enough money over the next 75 years to pay for re-powering the entire UK with nuclear power, 7 TIMES OVER, then whine about how expensive nuclear power is. If you had your way, you'd force everyone else to spend enough money on batteries alone to pay for 7 TIMES the total electrical power that the UK actually consumes, all to prop up your ideology, or maybe to pad your pocket book if you hold stock in these "green energy" companies.
I think you are probably stuck in the past on recycling. Huge strides have been taken in dealing with the recycling challenges of green energy. Cheaper green energy allows for more sophisticated (and costly) recycling techniques.
I think I'm probably stuck on current reality, and you're probably stuck in fantasy land. Your "green energy" isn't cheaper when recycling is required, as it eventually will be, which is why so many toxic solar panels and batteries end up in landfills where they contaminate the ground water with Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury.
The people who actually make the solar panels, not people like you who are blindly making assertions without evidence, say it'll never be cost-effective to recycle them in terms of labor and energy, so more government mandates, which I know you love so much, will be required to force the solar panel and battery farm operators to pay for the costs associated with recycling of their toxic products.
Who has time to worry about terrorism when your purported "solutions" are deliberately making entire areas of land uninhabitable, all to support these "green fantasies"?
Much like the coal industry, the wind turbine and electric motor industry is responsible for a greater total radiation release than the entirety of the nuclear power industry, even when you include all nuclear accidents. All of that Thorium that the miners dig up with the rare Earth metals, they simply spread it over vast areas of land, until the EPA or some other governmental agency shuts them down or bankrupts them by forcing them to clean it up.
All these new technologies are opening up lots of opportunities for more efficient ways of operating.
If only that was true. Some solutions are clearly better than others. We don't need to take every unworkable idea to its logical maxim in order to determine that it's not practical.

The price of batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

So battery price has declined hugely while oil price in real terms has remained pretty steady over the same period.

Most analysts think these cost falls are going to continue into the future and I would agree entirely as we see work on much cheaper battery technologies come to fruition. I think the cost reduction is going to accelerate because we are moving from expensive materials to cheap ones. Simples, really.

You don't have to go up the Channel with a tanker that size. You could dock at Milford Haven in Wales for instance.

I only mentioned the battery tanker idea as something that becomes possibly economical as battery price reduces. I think it's an intriguing approach and not one I've ever seen put forward elsewhere - so I am claiming credit for it here.

Of course, yes plugging into a grid in a foreign state doesn't deliver energy independence. But it it is more flexible - you can plug in anywhere that has the top rate insolation. And as I mentioned, there is also the possiblity of developing your own oceanic solar power operation (trailing solar panels on the surface of the sea and through large solar "sails") in the South Atlantic, always tracking the areas of highest insolation.

louis · Interplanetary transportation

In-regolith homes make a lot of sense from some aspects but the main issues are light and build cost. You tend to end up with wide and not very deep housing units, in order to get enough light in. Bit like a glorified corridor.

Of course for Mars itself, this would make quite a lot of sense and you could probably arrange to have solar reflectors directing more light in.

Re Star City I think Musk knows if he's going to create a spaceport or centre of space engineering, he needs to make it an attractive place to live so you need the arts, the schools, the retail and the leisure.

louis · Human missions

Quite!

The answer is yes - Musk could colonise Mars off the back of his own wealth, no problem as far as money goes. But there are some problems no money can solve. There are only a limited number of people on the planet who have the skill and ingenuity to deal with all the problems of rocketry and settlement that stand in the way of Mars colonisation and similar for a wide range of engineers and technicians needed for the prokect. Paying all these people twice the going rate for the skills won't mend the skills shortage. I feel confident Musk has got as much talent concentrated at Boca Chica as it is feasible to do.

kbd512 wrote:

Holy cow. I thought this thread was going to be about Musk's ability to use his personal wealth to colonize Mars. Wrong.

louis · Human missions

It's not a lie he's the richest person on the planet - though no doubt there are various ways of measuring these things:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl … urges.html

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