You are not logged in.
GW/OF
This isn't just determined by satellite imaging, in fact I think it's the ground penetrating radar that is key because pure ice gives different signals from rock or impure ice. They can tell all sorts of things from the way radar waves come back. There are also chemical signatures being given off.
But the other key fact here is that Space X plan to send cargo ships to the Mars landing site two years before humans land. There is no reason why a robot rover shouldn't be sent with those cargo ships and then be deployed to check whether the water results are reasonably accurate. If they are, then the human mission can go ahead, no problem.
Two points: the iron-air battery won't be used every day. My estimate is they might be used maybe 35 days a year. This is long term storage for when green plus energy fails to deliver sufficient energy. For daily (essentially nightime/early morning) storage it's pretty clear that lithium batteries, green hydrogen, and hydro (pumped or non-pumped) can provide cover when energy production is running at average levels.
There's going to be a lot of trial and error on the road to a fully reliable green energy system but I think now we can see the outlines of a solution: wind, solar, other green energy (tidal, sea current, wave etc), energy from waste, biofuels, green hydrogen, heat storage, lithium batteries and iron-air batteries all working in combination.
kbd512 wrote:That hot rocks technology that Louis brought to our attention had the benefit of using rock to store energy. Nobody had to invent a super secret new technology, nor wave their magic wand over a vat of chemicals to transform it into Unobtanium, and it would have the benefit of being mass manufacturable and scalable to the degree required, right effing now.
We've been making and tinkering with batteries for longer than we've been making and tinkering with internal combustion engines. Thus far, the combustion engines we were using in the 1900s would still be superior to batteries in terms of both cost and weight, which were the two metrics that actually mattered for making a practical internally-powered motor vehicle.
Has anybody ever heard of the pendulum effect?
If the technology becomes so sophisticated that nobody can fix it, let alone truly understand how it works, then it's no longer a viable technology. If Form Energy actually came up with a repairable and maintainable technology, then my hats off to them, they deserve high honors and heaps of praise, and I want their engineers to become rich beyond their wildest dreams. Until we have real world test results, I'll leave it at that.
Agreed. The pendulum effect is exactly the trap that nuclear power has fallen into here on Earth. We have attempted to engineer infinite safety into LWRs using ever more intricate systems and quality control. As a result, the systems are now so complex that they take decades to build, need supply chains that no longer exist and have to be rebuilt from scratch and end up costing a fortune. The SMR concepts are an attempt at a fresh start, relying on assembly line manufacturing and simpler passive systems that are easy to build and maintain. Time will tell how well this will work out. But I digress.
The essential problem with the Form battery is the sluggish reaction rate of iron oxidation. This limits the power density of the battery, by limiting the discharge rate. Form are essentially saying that because the battery is made from cheap materials, this won't be a problem, because the batteries can be scaled to provide long-term storage. The problem is that the marginal cost of storing a MWh in a battery, is inversely proportional to the number of charge-discharge cycles it achieves in a year. Kind of like having a car - the more you drive it, the lower the marginal capital cost per mile driven. So
I think my assertions are with foundation:
These craters expose “excess” ice (Dundas et al., 2015)– which is almost entirely free of dust (>99% water ice).
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/file … tagged.pdf
99% pure ice is what we should be aiming for and I believe it's why JPL has selected sites in that area for the first base and recommended them to Space X.
I really don't think finding water and processing it is going to be that big a problem on Mars.
Getting the carbon is much more problematic.
Louis-
The present project is specifically stated to provide sufficient water to produce enough Oxygen and Hydrogen for the return to Earth and also for all other uses, and extracted from ice that's contaminated by who knows what. Your assertions are also without adequate foundations. Getting water that's chemically and physically contaminated into a condition that it's pure enough for electrolysis and human consumption requires a massive amount of processing--AFTER it's been dug out in chunks from strip mining-type operations.
1. My understanding is Form Energy bought up a proprietary cathode which makes all the difference to being able to make efficient iron-air batteries.
2. Odd then that a utility scale provider has contracted with them, don't you think.
3. This is not a child's toy. Stop being ridiculous.
I've been through this sort of thing before with wind and solar. 20 years back people were pointing out all the drawbacks and the high costs etc without seeing the potential. Now we are well advanced on the road to a reliable and comprehensive green energy solution.
Even if iron-air batteries don't work, green hydrogen is now becoming a viable storage technology.
Battery prices reduced by 90% over the last decade. If you want to bet they won't reduce over the next 10 years feel free to bet but a lot of analysts think major cost reductions will continue because of technological innovation and economies of scale (as more and more batteries are used in electricity production).
tahanson43206,
Apparently, someone does know exactly what this battery technology is. It's hopefully very cheap, hopefully better than existing technologies for the intended purpose, and hopefully scalable to the degree required. All "hope and change", but without any real change, since it's still a normal battery using normal materials that are subject to all of the normal material property constraints dictated by basic physics. There are lots of astonishing advertisement claims backed by precisely zero independent tests to differentiate marketing hype from real world performance.
Form Energy could clear up all of that mystery by providing the results from a single independent test, but has elected not to do so.
I'm guessing there are three most probable explanations for that:
1. Their battery isn't any kind of miraculous new technology, even if it does work at some level (we already knew that it could, because it already did work before I was even born, but not well enough to justify using it for anything)
2. They're still having serious developmental issues and have yet to make their technology run reliably or to scale to the degree required for it to be useful to their target market (this is the most probable explanation, and is the actual explanation for why we're not using batteries for grid scale storage)
3. They simply want more money to tinker endlessly to satisfy their scientists' child-like curiosity (if you can always get someone to provide more funding, then you can make a career out of research projects, even if they never result in usable technology)
Remember what Elon Musk said about fundamentally better battery technology?
There may be some radically better battery technology out there, but I've never seen it. Bring your device in, we'll test it to see if it matches your claims, or simply comes close enough, and Tesla will cut you a check for any reasonable amount of money (aka, "make you rich beyond your wildest dreams"). Thus far, there have been precisely zero people or companies who have come up with something fundamentally better than Lead-acid or Lithium-ion.
You know what people with viable battery technology do?
They sell it to a corporation like Panasonic or DuraCell or Energizer or Tesla, that specializes in making and using batteries, and then spend the rest of their natural life sipping Margaritas on the beach while their wife and kids frolic in the ocean. If that's what they've actually done, then they deserve every dollar we give them to do whatever they think is worth doing. If it was me, I can guarantee you that that's what I'd be doing.
I have a hunch that 50 years from now, we'll still be throwing mad money at batteries, largely without result, commercialized batteries will still be a joke that isn't funny for both grid storage and motor vehicles, and all that time / money / brain power we squandered, could have been funneled into practical solutions, is lost forever. Seriously, though, when is it time to give up on this "electric everything" silliness, in favor of something that could actually work using technology that we humans actually know how to make?
That hot rocks technology that Louis brought to our attention had the benefit of using rock to store energy. Nobody had to invent a super secret new technology, nor wave their magic wand over a vat of chemicals to transform it into Unobtanium, and it would have the benefit of being mass manufacturable and scalable to the degree required, right effing now.
We've been making and tinkering with batteries for longer than we've been making and tinkering with internal combustion engines. Thus far, the combustion engines we were using in the 1900s would still be superior to batteries in terms of both cost and weight, which were the two metrics that actually mattered for making a practical internally-powered motor vehicle.
Has anybody ever heard of the pendulum effect?
If the technology becomes so sophisticated that nobody can fix it, let alone truly understand how it works, then it's no longer a viable technology. If Form Energy actually came up with a repairable and maintainable technology, then my hats off to them, they deserve high honors and heaps of praise, and I want their engineers to become rich beyond their wildest dreams. Until we have real world test results, I'll leave it at that.
If a 90 year old like William Shatner (who has not been a model of healthy lliving over the years) can survive these sorts of G forces then I think we can begin to see space tourism and also Earth to Earth (E2E) transportation as much more accessible than we might have previously considered. Mr Shatner's flight was of some historical importance I would say. We are definitely leaving behind the era of "Right Stuff" astronauts and moving into "space for all".
You're asserting things here without providing evidence.
The only "one time use" for water is rocket fuel manufacture.
For everything else, from agriculture to hygiene to cooking, varying degrees of water recycling are possible - with probably 95% overall an achievable goal. Plants actually transpire etc over 97% of the water they take in.
Louis-The scale of chemical process equipment required to process ice into usable water will astound you, as well as the quantities of starting material needed. GW gave a listing of how much water will be needed and getting a ton a day simply will not suffice. We can get Hydrogen and Oxygen from water by electrolysis, and the efficiencies are not really anywhere near quantitative. Every process has operational losses, and the efficiency is usually described by percent yield at the end. The difficult step will be getting enough CO2 to run through the Sabatier process and having hydrogen from the atmosphere.
This is a massive industrial undertaking at the scale of Starship's requirements. One Starship freighter will probably not be enough to handle a chemical processing facility in total weight and volume. A lot of this processing machinery is bulky.
Designing plants was part of what i did in industry. I designed the chemical process and with engineers, built systems that worked.
There have certainly been plenty of discussions over the years probably under general headings.
Manufacturing airlocks on Mars or importing them from Earth are both big demands on resources.
One proposal I had was using ice as the gas barrier. So when you want to open the airlock you melt the ice and when you want to recreate the barrier, you freeze water to make ice. This approach could be achieved in various ways.
Another proposal I had was to use cut basalt as the air lock door.
For SpaceNut ... there was no topic in Life Support Systems for airlock design
This new topic is offered for those NewMars members who would like to describe existing airlock designs that might work on Mars, or to reveal totally new designs that are (possibly) unique to Mars.
The opening design is from work done by Void in mid-to-late 2021 on Earth ...
His design (as I understand it (which is not necessarily the same as his design)) features a liquid, such as water.
A habitat designed to use this airlock design would NOT have to worry about mechanical seals or double door entry ways.
The principle of operation is that a column of water on Mars of 50 feet or (approximately) 15 meters will balance a habitat pressure of 8 psi / 500 mBar.
This pressure is close to the pressure recommended by RobertDyck at multiple places in the forum archive.
Rule of thumb: 3-5-8 (3 parts Oxygen, 5 parts inert gas, 8 parts total)A person inside the habitat would don an EVA suit, including air supply, and enter the surface of the liquid opening into the habitat.
The person would then swim through a U shaped bend of pipe, and then up 50 feet of liquid to reach the surface.
At the surface, there would be a small cabln to protect the opening to the airlock from Mars dust and whatever else might fall into the opening.
The pressure inside the cabin would be Mars atmosphere, since the cabin would not be sealed except to keep dust out.
The Mars dweller would shake off any liquid remaining after egress from the passage, open a standard door, and proceed to the surface of Mars.
(th)
Robot mining and transport on Earth are well advanced as I've pointed out before now. This has big implications for Mars in as much as you could probably locate your base much further away from a water source than might otherwise be the case. As long as you have a continuous supply chain, it won't matter if it's 100 or a 1000 miles away. Robot rovers could be linked together by Wifi control following a lead navigator. One "train" might carry hundreds of tons of water ice or minerals.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/australia-pl … 14102.html
Wed, October 13, 2021 4:58 AM
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia has agreed to build a 20-kilogram (44-pound) semi-autonomous lunar rover for NASA to take to the moon as early as 2026 in search of oxygen.The rover would collect soil that contains oxides and NASA would use separate equipment to extract oxygen from that soil, a government statement said. Oxygen extracted from the lunar surface would ultimately be used to sustain a human presence on the moon and support future missions to Mars.
Australian Space Agency deputy head Anthony Murfett said NASA had been impressed by technology used to remotely control from 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) huge dump trucks that transport iron ore from mines in northwest Australia.
For SpaceNut .... this initiative looks promising for your regolith harvesting inquiry.
(th)
No need to get too worked up about, let's say, a ton of water ice per sol would be my view. Probably even a single human being with a rock drill could harvest that amount of ice in a 4 hour shift, at 250 kgs per hour. Not that I think we will use human labour directly in that way. Maybe a couple of robotic drill rovers will be breaking up the ice.
Harvesting the CO2 may actually be more problematic. As you say, that would involve some fairly heavy duty machinery. It could well be a very significant proportion of the payload to Mars. Maybe 20-30% of 500 tons delivered to the surface. Pure guess on my part. The only thing I have to go on is that NASA had a plan I think for a machine that could harvest 3 Kgs of water vapour per sol and that weighed in at 800 Kgs IIRC.
Here are the numbers from Spacenut's post 1483. These are the quantities of water and carbon dioxide required to make 1200 tons of propellant to send a Starship from Mars back to Earth. And don't kid yourself, it will take all 1200 of those tons of propellant to get home.
-------------------
Here is the end results of setting up shop to get home for a starshipwater gathered to make methane oxygen with co2 mT from the Atmosphere
540mT 240mT 960mT 660 mt
---------------------Now, let's make some assumptions about the mission and timing of events:
(1) Assume the Starship uses the 6-month trajectory, not the nominal 8.5 Hohmann trajectory.
(2) Assume the usual timing of launch windows -- every 22 months
(3) Assume the crew arrives from one launch window, stays through the second, and goes home during the third.That's a 44-month mission interval, during which two 6-month trips must occur. 44-12 = 32 months = 960 days. Just to make the return propellant (no other life support needs at all!!!) the crew must process water at 540 tons/960 days = 0.56 tons (TONS!!!) per day, regardless of the weather or any other circumstances. They must process carbon dioxide at the rate of 660 tons/960 days = 0.69 tons (TONS!!!) per day. They CANNOT FAIL to meet those daily minimums, or they do not not come home at the prescribed time. Which means they die.
That's a nice long stay on Mars, not quite 3 years. It may not be possible to stay that long, for any of a variety of reasons, especially during the first such missions. So, revise assumption 3 from every other launch opportunity to every opportunity. The stay time on Mars is then 22 months less 12 months of 2-way travel = 10 months = 300 days. They must make the propellant in 10 months, or else they don't come home. In turn, that means a dead crew.
Here's the rates. It's the same 1200 tons of propellant, regardless of stay time! Water 540 tons/300 days = 1.80 tons (TONS!!!) per day. CO2 660 tons/300 days = 2.20 tons (TONS!!!) per day.
Now add life support needs for water and oxygen to that.
This is going to take some big machinery to accomplish that task, regardless of whether you return every opposition or every other opposition. The numbers just DO NOT LIE!
So, somebody tell me just exactly who is building machinery like that? Or where they might be testing it?
Failing any answers, then somebody tell me just how many tons of supplies are we going to have to ship every 22 months to a crew sent one-way to Mars, where they will live out their lives.
GW
True, but a large proportion of the non-fuel water can be recycled to high degree - maybe 90% or more. Water for "drinking, sanitation and bathing, Aquaculture, Hydroponics, growing of crops" can all be recycled. It's just water for fuel that is a one time use.
From the internet: " An acre of corn gives off about 3,000-4,000 gallons (11,400-15,100 liters) of water each day, " I also read that 97% of the water taken up by the plant from the soil is released back to the atmosphere via transpiration and other processes. As long as you aren't releasing water vapour to the Mars atmosphere, the absolute water requirement for all the activities you mention will be low.
Louis, you 're thinking too small. I'm thinking of producing water for an entire colony, all in a big system, and this requires 10 20 tons per day of ice prior to processing. We've been taking about just the return fuel processing, and the scale you are talking about isn't close to what I think is needed.
In the long term, we want adequate water for drinking, sanitation and bathing, Aquaculture, Hydroponics, growing of crops. etc.
The Russians recently pipped the Americans to be the first to shoot a commercial movie in space.
I thought this was interesting in two respects, in terms of what I have said previously about developing the Mars economy.
1. We see the role competition plays. Russia wanted to beat the USA in being the first to make a film in space. On Mars we will see similar competition. Who will get the first TV ad for an automobile shot on Mars? Toyota, Ford, VW, or someone else?
2. People do want to make movies in space...well orbital space is not that exciting compared to all the wonderful vistas and backdrops on Mars! Mars I think is going to be used on a fairly regular basis.
So, I think we can be confident there will be a race to make the first movie "on Mars".
Of course with modern CGI you don't necessarily have to transfer your actors to Mars to make the movie. It may be more a question of filming all the Mars scenery and then slotting in the actors back on Earth.
In any case I think the fact "movies in space" is already a reality is an excellent portent for the viability of a Mars economy.
I agree and NASA has good evidence of where we could easily uncover such ice deposits (in the Erebus Montes locality). There is strong evidence the ice is just a few feet below the surface in many locations. We can use robot earth movers, diggers, drillers and transporters.
How much ice is required to be mined per sol? I'm thinking it can't be more than 4 tons. I think a couple of 500Kg transporters should be able to handle that sort of tonnage with return trips during say a four hour working period.
I think that trying to harvest water from surface regolith is a fool's errand. I discussed my method of obtaining water years ago on this website. GW is absolutely correct. I proposed mining frozen chunks and transporting to an indoor and heated facility in wagons, and allow to simply thaw in a pressurized environment. Will need lotsa wagons per day, but something that's relatively lightweight or the purpose.
Even if there were very similar features I would say it doesn't matter. Certainly iron-air batteries were around in the 1960s when NASA were investigating them. So what? It's all about implementing a technology.
To give an example. FAX technology was invented in about 1910 but it took about 70 years for anyone to implement it properly, in a cost effective way (before it got succeeded by e mail).
For SpaceNut .... in post #9 you've made a claim that I suspect is unsupportable.
I realize you don't have time to show a detailed comparison, but until someone provides support for your claim, I'm going to assume it was tossed off without much thought.
For Comparison:
Edison batteries have features a, b, c and dThis battery by the Form company has features x, y, z and r
Which of these features are the same?
(th)
Not sure this is particularly relevant to initial human settlement of Mars since a pragmatic utilitarian approach is called for and in the context of a mission that will cost tens of billions of dollars, the cost of the solar panels is not a huge component.
But this is an encouraging development and shows that a well thought out path to innovation can pay huge dividends.
Nearly all analysts believe the cost of solar power is going to reduce dramatically in the next couple of decades and I think they are right.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/sola … 51060.html
This report ought to be encouraging to forum members who are advocating for solar cells ...
Solar Startup Born in a Garage Is Beating China to Cheaper Panels
Ashlee Vance
Thu, September 9, 2021, 4:05 AM
(Bloomberg) -- About seven years ago, Vince Allen barged into the garage he shared with some flatmates in a Sydney suburb and set about trying to shake up the solar industry. He was at the time a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, and he had an idea for making solar panels much cheaper: replace the expensive silver typically used to pull electricity out of the devices with plentiful, cheap copper.Shi, the SunDrive investor nicknamed “Sun King,” said it will be hard to find enough affordable silver if the solar business grows as predicted. Over the next decade, he expects to see manufacturers move to a 50-50 split between silver and copper in the solar cells. “The shift to copper is something that we’ve long desired but has been very hard to do,” he said.
He recalled visiting Allen at his homemade lab and being surprised by what the PhD student had accomplished. “He had all these simple tools and things he’d bought off Amazon,” Shi said. “Innovation really is related to the individual and sometimes the right moment, and not to being at a big company with lots of resources.”
(th)
Its the level of confirmed water levels which need to show way more than just a single landing refueling at were we do the testing.
We will need to know over a very large grid as to if the water fades as we go from a high density location.
We are trying to select a sustainable location in which we can do more than a sortie science mission as a crewed follow up.
10 x 10 x 10 metre of ice is 1000 tons of ice.
I don't think you should exaggerate this problem.
All Space X have to do is send a couple of Starships with a couple of robot rovers on them to explore the neighbourhood and check on water deposits.
If there ain't no water you cancel the human mission.
Simple!
Louis-
The present project is specifically stated to provide sufficient water to produce enough Oxygen and Hydrogen for the return to Earth and also for all other uses, and extracted from ice that's contaminated by who knows what. Your assertions are also without adequate foundations. Getting water that's chemically and physically contaminated into a condition that it's pure enough for electrolysis and human consumption requires a massive amount of processing--AFTER it's been dug out in chunks from strip mining-type operations.
If my method of extraction is used to collect ice, it will be relatively clean. I use the word relatively with caution. My system involves allowing the crude mined ice to melt in a heated environment. The water Probably dirty and possibly even a sludge, will be dewatered with a basket centrifuge that separates the solids from free flowing but still chemically impure water. Distillation is the next step in getting water pure enough for electrolysis and drinking.
You don't like inheritance? First you would have to invent a foolproof system for preventing mothers and fathers passing wealth to their children! Not even the most resolute Communist societies have yet found a way of stopping that, though the advent of Digital ID (promoted by the mad WEF-Davos crowd and supported by all the mules around the world saying "Build Back Better") may make it easier.
You can't stop people passing on wealth and opportunity to their children...you can only provide wealth and opportunity for those who don't get it from their parents.
"All of the people who contributed the most to humanity started life with nothing or very little" - that's just pious PC BS. Most inventors. entrepreneurs, scientists, artists and intellectuals were already bourgeois when they got started. There are very few big contributors who started off dirt poor, certainly until before the end of WW2 after which society opened up a lot. But it's still true that the people making this world mostly come from bourgeois backgrounds.
Louis,
I propose an economic system whereby every able bodied person must work for what they have in life, irrespective of what mommy and daddy achieved during their lives, because human civilization is built by laying brick after brick, continuously, not by spending most of our time enjoying what our ancestors endowed us with. You learn to appreciate what you work for, not what you've been given, because no effort is expended to merely receive a gift from your ancestors. We should show gratitude for what our ancestors have endowed us with, but we should never believe that what we have collectively achieved is sufficient.
All of the people who contributed the most to humanity started life with nothing or very little, in comparison to what they achieved. As such, there must be something to "being left wanting for a better tomorrow". In the future, should human children want for food or clean water or medical care or suitable shelter? I think not, but neither should they be permitted to go through life without contributing at least as much as their ancestors did, should they wish to continue to enjoy the lifestyle they've grown accustomed to. That is not the way to assure that humanity continues to grow and improve.
This is one of the reasons why I propose that on Mars we should have a system of universal share ownership to spread the benefits of capitalism, as one of the new features of the Mars economic system.
Under this system each individual from birth would be endowed with a spread of shares across the the economy. Each child born on a particular sol would be given the same share portfolio .They would retain the portfolio for several decades, perhaps age 50 before they could sell the shares. Shares in companies that were liquidated would be replaced by shares in other companies equivalent in real terms to the starting value.
This would allow all people to benefit in rough equality from the capitalist system.
There are many benefits to capitalism, not least where it is able to invest over the long term. Individuals and even co-operatives find that much more difficult as one's tendency is to enjoy the fruits of labour here and now. Capitalists are allowed happy to follow the market, which makes them more responsive to market information, which allows for more efficient investment.
I am personally very much a "Mixed economy" fan. There are things the state can do well, things individuals and partnerships do well, things big capitalist firms do well and things co-operatives do well. We should aim for diversity but ensure all Mars citizens gain from capitalist activity.
For SpaceNut .... while working on the Post Repair initiative, I ran across one of your posts in Chat.
It was a while ago, but you had a full head of steam built up criticizing capitalism.
You appeared to be upset that Capitalists were concentrating on running efficient businesses without regard to the workers and all the protections and benefits they wanted.
Capitalism is ** not ** set up to do any of those things. It is like a wild ox that you've harnessed to till your garden. You need to keep a wary hand on the till, and be ready to run for your life if the ox turns on you.
In return for harnessing such a dangerous beast, you get a garden overflowing with abundance.
If you want to harness Capitalism, what makes sense to do is to accumulate stock.
If you have ** not ** accumulated stock, then you can enjoy the benefits of products and services produced by Capitalism, but you are forever denied the monetary reward for harnessing the ox in the first place.
(th)
This report will surely give you pause if you think that the ultravax ideologues of Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Media and Big Government have your best interests at heart....
Uttar Pradesh in India has virtually eliminated Covid in their state by distributing health kits including as a main element Ivermectin - you know, the "horse dewormer" that hysterical or malevolent pro-vaxxers in the USA and UK don't want anyone to use.
https://www.sott.net/article/459021-Ind … t-revealed
The opposition to Ivermectin has nothing to do with health and everything to do with control, profit and the pursuit of the goal of replacing natural immunity with super-vaccination.
I thought he'd be gone by last month! But I must as that the White House medical staff are pretty good (as we saw with Trump's bout of Covid) - he's certainly more coherent (not saying a lot) than during the campaign. That said, his overall decline is painfully apparent. I saw in The Sunday Times an article suggesting his days are numbered. Apparently the Dems are looking to Jill Biden to deliver the message - you can forget the Constitution, which is of little interest to the Dems these days...apparently Dr Jill will make the dementia assessment.
SpaceNut,
It's time to make Kamala Harris the President, because Joe Biden can't remember enough to be a President. I've said that before, and I'm reiterating it here.
The Arizona election audit found a total of 34,448 duplicate ballots cast by 17,126 unique voters! But Maricopa County reported no duplicate ballots in its canvass report! The invalid duplicate ballot papers were included in the count.
Why the AZ Republicans haven't made more of this, I've no idea - but there is clearly an ongoing battle between RINO-Never Trumpers on the one hand and pro-Trump conservatives on the other in every state. But certainly this aspect of the audit findings has been totally ignored by mainstream media - you may in fact be unaware of it if you confine your viewing to CNN, MSNBC etc.
I think I use the word "totalitarian" advisedly when you have a situation where compulsory medication is being implemented, people are being denied employment for failing to adopt state-approved medicine, academics opposed to Woke ideology cannot operate in most universities, where political violence by Antifa goes unpunished, when you have peaceful protestors arrested for violent insurrection and imprisoned without trial, when the mainstream media operates like a chorus supporting Leftist narratives and ignoring or belittling those narratives that oppose Communism.
Quotes from Louis post 920 above, each analyzed:
"Now the UK media are shadowing the American media's puzzling silence on the Airzona audit," -- I do not see any US media silence, what I saw was VERY widespread reporting that the persons hired to find fraud in Maricopa County Arizona could not find any fraud at all! In point of fact, the totals for Biden went up, and for Trump went down, by trivially small amounts. This was VERY WIDELY reported. Your source is lying to you. (And, it is spelled “Arizona”.)
"aspects of the Afghanistan debacle," -- which would have been a debacle no matter whether Bush, Obama, Trump, or Biden actually pulled out, precisely because none of the war colleges ever learned the lessons of Vietnam, so they don't teach them. Each of those 4 presidents was advised by the same class of top military officials. So very clearly, none of those advisers were ever taught the lessons of Vietnam.
Plus, your diatribe against me, Biden, and Democrats TOTALLY FAILS to acknowledge that the pullout agreement with the Taliban was agreed-to by Trump, not Biden! Your source is lying to you again, and I just gave you the specifics! Biden actually agreed with Trump that the US needed to get out. Biden merely delayed it from Trump's May 1 deadline to his August 31 deadline. BFD, and it didn't help with the inevitable outcome, did it? This was widely reported in the US.
"Millie's traitorous behaviour," -- it is spelled "Milley". General Milley acted to reduce the likelihood of an unjustified and unnecessary nuclear war breaking out between the US and China. What is so traitorous about that? Especially compared to Mr. Trump inciting (over many months, not just that morning !!!) the Jan 6 insurrection. Which is EXACTLY why he was impeached a second time!
"Traitorous" more aptly applies to McConnell's then-GOP-controlled-Senate failing to convict Trump. Some of them said in public that “yeah, he did it, but we still choose not to convict”. I heard them, live!
If the Dept. of Justice were to do it, they could still try Mr. Trump for "sedition" under the US Code. (Myself, I wish they would. We’d have a better choice available in 2024.)
"Biden family crime operations (including payments from CCP front companies)" -- I have seen absolutely ZERO about this Chinese-connection claim, because I do not care to watch or listen to far-right echo chambers and disinformation sites. Believing those sources violates Occam's Razor, as well as providing an object lesson in circular logic. Everyone, including you Louis, should know better than that.
"and the rampant rise of totalitarian thought and practice in the USA." -- those ideas and practices derive from far-right groups that exhibit what we usually term "fascist" characteristics. Trump's advisor Michael Flynn was one of these, being a Q-Anon believer who advocated for a military takeover of the US. Unfortunately, about 40% of Americans seem to fall in this category. I do not know how we are to fix this! If we don’t, our democracy will fail, that is clear.
The actual word you seek is "authoritarian", because "totalitarian" is too-associated with specific governments, whether far-right or far-left. We have associated "fascist" with "authoritarian" since the early 1920's (Hitler and Mussolini, who taught Hitler much of what he knew about power and control). It's not limited to the far-right, because the extreme far-left is also quite "authoritarian" (Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia, from before 1917).
In point of fact, ignoring the expressed ideologies (which are ALWAYS LIES), I see NO PRACTICAL DIFFERENCE between far-right and far-left authoritarians. They both want dictators supported by armies. I do not!
GW
Testing has resumed...the nose cone tiles are an issue.
Mechazilla arms in operation later this month, possibly.
ONS can no longer be relied upon to provide objective data. It used to be well respected but since the Covid debacle began it's become another Big Pharma propaganda outlet. Please note:
1. The ONS data fails to make clear that the "unvaccinated" category is not just those unvaccinated by choice but includes the sickest and frailest people in our society, people literally at death's door. Doctors refuse to vaccinate them because they know to do so would be to kill them. (This would probably be true of most vaccines for such individuals since vaccine response is one that requires a lot of energetics on the part of the recipient. Very weak, often extremely aged people cannot cope with the energy requirements in their body.) This one factor itself could totally distort the analysis - this category may be a small proportion of the total population but it is a very large proportion of the number of people who die each year, So there is no point in comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated. You have to compare healthy unvaccinated people with healthy vaccinated people. What is the difference there? Is there any? In doing so you have to have a reasonable definition of healthy. I don't accept for instance that obese people who are not currently lilsted as having a co-morbidity are in any sense "healthy". We know a very large proportion of cases in non-elderly people are among obese people. Our UK PM who contracted a life-threatening case of Covid was obese (over 17 stone for a man of lower than average stature - he was probably a good 35% overweight ).
2. The chart you've reproduced from the Bill Gates propagandist outfit Statista is meaningless. All it is showing is the proportion of deaths attributed to Covid (correctly or otherwise) for each category. It's no more informative than showing athletes are more likely to die in sports-related accidents than non-athletes. It doesn't mean non-athletes are healthier than athletes.
Here is the ONS page that better shows what you are looking at.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation … d2july2021
However I would suggest there are huge problems with this data. Look at the Fig 1 data. What we see is a huge discrepancy in the early winter period when deaths were very high among the unvaccinated population. But of course in that period the majority were unvaccinated so we aren't get real differentiation. What we see later on is the death rates are converging. Even the ONS has to admit:
Vaccinations were being offered according to priority groups set out by the JCVI, therefore the characteristics of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations are changing over time, which limits the usefulness of comparing counts between the groups.
It sure does but it doesn't stop Gates-funded groups from misrepresenting the data.
Using age-standardised ASMR may "seem" fair but of course it isn't in the sense that everyone has to die and the older you are, the more likely you are to die. Put simply, the more strong healthy people getting vaccinated you can include in your vaccination count, the better for so called "vaccine efficacy" as far as stats go. That's how Big Pharma produces such wonderful results during trials and why the results soon start to decline in the real world. As already indicated unvaccinated people include a significant proportion of those very close to death who will NOT be vaccinated despite being very vulnerable to Covid.
BTW I can't understand why there are gaps in the lines for the vaccinated categories either. It's not clear what is meant by "fully vaccinated" in the green line - is that excluding deaths prior to 14 days after second shot? That was my understanding of full vaccination.
3. Can you point to any other vaccine where so many people have a vaccine and then die - yes die - of the very thing the vaccine is supposed to be protecting yourself against?!
4. By focussing on purely Covid deaths this sort of statistical exercise is by definition misleading. We want to know a vaccine is resulting in people leading longer and healthier lives, not simply that it is proving effective against just one disease ie if it is killing you in some other way then it is not a good vaccine (see 5 below for instance). And there is a further question as to whether the balance of risk and benefit is entirely different between healthy and unhealthy people. It might well be. But there are also far bigger health issues e.g. if you can wipe out flu, Covid and all other respiratory viruses with mRNA vaccines what will happen? Will the Earth's biome totally vacate human lungs for ever after. Does that seem likely? Or does it seem more likely that far more cunning pathogens will evolve and take up residence, possibly with a threat to the lives of billions of healthy and younger people. Old people can be very selfish.
5. The ONS is not going to publish anything that reflects badly on the official response to Covid .You need to open your eyes to what is actually happening:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/10/01/dea … out-began/
6. This analysis also excludes the issue of the efficacy of natural immunity. Just about every scientific study has shown that if you have been infected with Covid then your natural immunity is way more protective against Covid infection than the Covid vaccine. By having only two categories - vaccinated v unvaccinated - a very unreal analysis follows. Really you want to know what happens to (a) healthy vaccinated people who had had Covid prior to vaccination (b) healthy vaccinated people who had not had Covid prior to vaccination (c) unhealthy vaccinated people (d) unhealthy vaccinated people who had not had Covid prior to vaccination (e) healthy unvaccinated people who had had Covid and (f) unhealthy vaccinated people who had not had Covid previously. In terms of "what happens" you need to look at all deaths as well as Covid deaths and you need to look at all illnesses as well. You then need to look at all those categories across age groups and other relevant demographics.
What the ONS are doing here is just pumping out pro-vaccine propaganda.
I can assure you GW that the UK mainstream media, with BBC in the lead, was totally, totally obsessed with Trump - in a bad way of course. They hated him and were as deranged as the Dems in wanting him out. Prior to that they were in love with Obama and, to a lesser extent Hillary. Events peculiar to the USA such as mass shootings, the unlawful killing by Police of petty criminal George Floyd, the Jan 6 "insurrection" (you know, the one in which the Police killed peaceful protestors doing no more than Biden himself did in his youth when he was in the Capitol protesting the Vietnam War in his youth) and American energy policy are all obsessively followed by the UK media.
So even if I wanted to, I can't ignore American politics.
Now the UK media are shadowing the American media's puzzling silence on the Airzona audit, aspects of the Afghanistan debacle, Millie's traitorous behaviour, Biden family crime operations (including payments from CCP front companies) and the rampant rise of totalitarian thought and practice in the USA.
Once you have rain and running water on Mars I think the dust issue should resolve itself - the dust would become silt in rivers, lakes and seas.
In the future creating a magnetosphere might be easier than appears now, using satellites and solar power.
There is the nuclear bomb option for heating up the planet which Elon Musk has mentioned. I can't see that being politically acceptable, myself. But certainly regolith can be converted into gas using a variety of methods. Maybe nuclear power would be used. We might have millions of factories producing strong greenhouse gases and processing regolith into gas.
We don't have to worry about upper atmospheric loss in the "short term" - everything I have read suggests it takes thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands of years for loss to become significant.
One of the best suggestions I've seen for heating up the regolith is simply laying transparent heat trap plastic sheeting on the ground, name of which I forget. Would be a couple of inches thick. If anyone remembers the artist Christo, this would be very much his sort of thing: wrapping a whole planet in plastic! Well in reality maybe you would be looking to cover a third of the planet in this stuff.
The option of crashing small asteroids onto the Mars surface, preferably those with high water content seems feasible to me. We would have to develop a technology that could ensure the asteroid landed where we wanted ie well away from human settlement.
A Mars colony may need to think in terms of devoting 20-25% of its GDP to terraformation. There would need to be a dedicated institution e.g. Mars Terraformation Institute that could study the related issues in depth, develop new techniques and monitor implementation of plans.
Terraformation is going to be incredibly important on Mars in terms of its culture. It will be something that unites people, people who may come from different nations and different cultural traditions. It is something that could be celebrated on a special sol in the calendar each Mars year.
Terraforming Mars, and connecting it functions to the other planemos.
This depends as an offshoot or "Terraforming Earth". At it's post #11.
I have formulated the topics title here so that it is possible to relate an increasingly
Terraformed Mars to other things like the Asteroid Belt and Earth/Moon, without exposing
the materials to the "Off Topic" show stopper.First of all it is currently speculated that 16 Psyche is a rubble pile, and not a whole
planetary core. It is possibly composed of ~10% Carbonacious materials. It is also now
thought to have a great deal of VOID spaces. These things are not yet proven very well.
However, for me if aproximately true, it makes this asteroid quite a prise. If it is as
suggested, then the metallic core of one of the parent asteroids was shattered. To me
this says that study of it is facilitated, and that various metals will be available to
access. Nuclear fuels, and also metals for Heliostats. So much energy. Unlike small
rubble piles, it should have some reasonable amount of gravity. Not a lot, but perhaps
enough to favor working with machinery on and inside of the object.https://astronomynow.com/2021/06/11/16- … y-thought/
https://www.universetoday.com/151531/as … bble-pile/
https://www.firstpost.com/tech/science/ … 16321.htmlSo, what about Mars? Well, it seems that it could be a refueling station for trips to
asteroids, 16 Psyche maybe. Mars may also have two rubble pile moons. We can't be sure,
but they appear to be very porous. So, methods for them may to a degree apply to
16 Psyche.About Martian Dust Storms:
https://www.universetoday.com/14892/mars-dust-storms/
Quote:Surprisingly, many of the dust storms on the planet originate from one impact basin.
Hellas Basin is the deepest impact crater in the Solar System. It was formed more than
three billion years ago during the Late Bombardment Period when a very large asteroid hit
the surface of Mars. The temperatures at the bottom of the crater can be 10 degrees warmer
than on the surface and the crater is deeply filled with dust. The difference in temperature
fuels wind action that picks up the dust, then storm emerge from the basin.The low spots on Mars includes Hellas, and much of the Northern Hemisphere. And the big canyons.
Where some doom sayers claim that there is not enough suitable materials on Mars to Terraform
Mars, I dispute this.
Steps possible include:
1) Vaporize CO2 of the ice caps, pressure in Hellas is now an aproximate maximum of 11.5 mkBar.
adding the polar CO2 to the atmosphere should bring the max pressure in Hellas to >23 mBar.
2) Inject water vapor into the upper atmosphere of Mars. This should split into Oxygen and
Hydrogen, adding a magnetic field to Mars, should help the Oxygen to stick around. I don't know
how high the air pressure could be increased, but probabbly 1/3 Bar is possible. The time for
this to be achieved is unknown.
3) Bake rock to get atmospheric components, and Metals. Planetary magnetic field desired.Notes:
-The use of Methane to warm Mars may not work. It appears that our probes indicate that at night
Methane can appear, but by day it is consumed by some process.
-Hellas has ice in its Southern portions.
-It may be possible that there could be arteasian water under the permafrost of Hellas--
-CO2 condensates in the southern winter could damage equipment.Obviously I am very interested in Heliostats. I think that whole forrests of them should be created
on Mars, and so to collect energy, stiffle dust storms, and create atmospheric gasses from
regolith/dust. And in a hot process perhaps to generate metals and ceramics to build still more
heliostats, and other things.If Hellas were completely filled with Heliostats, it would be an amazing thing, and very good for
terraforming and also having bulk wealth for humans on Mars.We probably have trouble accepting such a prospect, but if Elon Musk is correct, robots will not too
long from now do virtually all the work. If they don't kill us off, then they can make forests
of Heliostats on Mars, and other places.From the topic "Terraforming Earth", materials about storing high temperature energy can be found.
If heat were stored in "Salt Baths", and dust and other regolith disolved into them, the
British/Europeans have macinery that can extract O2 or CO2 from the disolved materials. This can
also produce metals.So first stiffle the dust storms, and then consume the dust If the dust does not have enough materials
for atmosphere, then use rocks.The salt baths obviously will store energy, in case there is a major dust storm.
I think that using a forest of heliostats in Hellas, (And other places), may allow surface water deposits.
If the atmospheric pressure is increased, the heliostats may even become condensers. The floor of the
crater can be cooled, by blocking, reflecting, and capturing solar energy.I agree with some here that there would also need to be fision nuclear power, for a safety measure.
Done.
Re 1, it could certainly be used on Mars to provide hot water for heating. hygiene, or clothes and dish washing as required on a one-sol cycle. That could be useful for a solar power system, since the heat will last till the following morning when a lot of hot water is being used again.
Good find Louis. I found an article on the same technology here.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/02/ho … city-grid/This energy storage technology does hold a great deal of promise in my opinion, probably the most promising that Louis has introduced us to so far. The energy storage medium, crushed rock, could hardly be cheaper. Its cost and embodied energy are close to zero. One cubic metre of rock, heated across a temperature difference of 500K, will store up to 1MWh of heat. That is as good a storage density as most batteries. In something that is almost free, aside from the insulated tank that it is stored in.
The low cost and very low embodied energy, makes this an option that can be scaled up to provide days of energy storage without bankrupting the utility supplier. There is no free lunch of course, you need a reversible heat engine, or a heat pump and heat engine, to charge and discharge the thermal store. But thermodynamic machines like this are made from steel and are much more sustainable than batteries made from exotic chemicals. Grid energy storage based on this technology, is essentially a set of thermal power stations, using hot rock energy stores, instead of boilers. It is not a new idea and there is nothing unprecedented or technically difficult about doing this. I sometimes think that people ignore what should be the most obvious ideas, because they don't find them exciting.
The sixty percent round trip efficiency is actually a technical stretch. Large heat engines based on Brayton cycles get around 70% carnot efficiency, so realistically, storage efficiency will be 50%, unless you can find a use for waste heat. If you can, then exergy efficiency will be better. Round trip efficiency needs to be balanced against capital and operating cost. It is whole system reliability vs whole system cost that matters. The economics of a battery depends heavily on how many charge-discharge cycles it provides per year. This is why Li-ion batteries provide hours worth of storage and are used for grid frequency control. You couldn't afford to scale them to provide weeks of power, they just aren't suited for that. For long term storage, providing days worth of capacity, you might get only a a couple dozen full charge-discharge cycles per year. So the store itself needs to be very cheap, as you are going to be leaving it sitting there doing nothing for a lot of the time. What could be cheaper than a steel tank full of stones? For those very long-term lulls, as we saw this summer, you could charge the thermal store using a furnace burning coal or charcoal. This would be an acceptable situation, because you would only need to use the fuel occasionally and the average amount used is small. But it is cheap to keep coal in a heap, for insurance against the unpredictability of the weather.
There are a lot of other possible applications aside from just grid electric storage.
(1) You could use this technology to absorb excess electric power to store heat for large buildings. When the building needs heat, you run the heat engine, use the waste heat to heat the building and sell power back to the grid. You are getting more than 60% efficiency that way, because the waste heat has local value. In smaller buildings, you could just use the heat pump to charge up the gravel tank for direct heating applications. A house could store a few days worth of heat in an insulated gravel tank.
(2) Industrial activities require a lot of process heat at various temperatures. For low temperature heat, this technology could absorb electricity when it is cheap and run the generator constantly, selling baseload power to the grid and low grade heat to the industrial use. For high temperatures, you would use the heat directly, without the generator.
(3) Large vehicles could make use of stored heat engines for propulsive power. I'm thinking trains and ships. In a ship, the thermal stores provide ballast in the keel. You would run the ship between coastal ports, charging it with electricity at each port. You could also provide offshore mooring points, which are connected to grids by undersea cable, where the ship could dock and plug in for recharging. Trains would use the thermal store to generate electric power to run electric propulsion. A hydraulic cylinder would provide regenerative braking.
(4) Could this work for trucks? I haven't looked into it. It wouldn't have anything like the range of a diesel powered truck. But when oil gets expensive and even unavailable, we may be forced to examine less ideal options. This is something that is at least relatively cheap in terms of capital cost and easy to build.
Thermal energy storage like this would definitely make living on intermittent energy a lot easier.
There are iterations of this thermal energy storage that could work in a lot of niche applications. I am quite fond of the idea of a heat pump that charges an underground ice store in winter and a hot water store in summer. A heat engine would run continuously between them, generating baseload power. The whole system power density would be crap, but its still a cool idea, especially if you can build it once and have the stores last a century or more. Exploiting seasonal temperature differences to generate power, for a large offgrid house, say. On Mars, one could do this far more easily, taking advantage of diurnal temperature differences to generate power.