New Mars Forums

Rf drops with distance squared fact so size does not matter as the greater the distance the higher the power will be required to compensate for the under charging that distance will cause.

The retro rocket plume from running the engines come at a loss of payload to orbit.. The exhaust pushes the friction causing atoms away from the ship....

Panels and systems are not cheaper as manufacturing is playing games with the size, materials and shapes of them to get energy to rise...

louis wrote:

That article ignores the fact that as far as Earth goes we haven't yet found a cheap enough storage solution to enable a 100% green energy system implemented. Somewhat important I think! If you bought out the fossil fuel industry tomorrow and said you were going to convert to green energy within 5 years you'd have economic meltdown and mass starvation.

You have to be able to put in place a reasonable-cost storage solution first. I do believe we are very close to that. But we are not quite there yet.

But for Mars, cost is not a big issue in the early colony. Solar panel and battery costs are trivial compared with getting a rocket to Mars.

SpaceNut wrote:

Here is the answer for solar
Solar Power Got Cheap. So Why Aren’t We Using It More? It turns out there’s a lot of inertia built into the energy system.

Its that embedded energy cost that Calliban reminds us of, to make them which we keep saying for why on mars we will be not looking to making them for quite some time.

Indeed.  A wind or solar powerplant is basically a natural gas powerplant, with the wind / solar contribution cutting the fuel bill by 30%.  If you've got very expensive gas (we have right now) then the combined system might break even against the gas plant alone.  The most promising way forward is to overbuild wind infrastructure for the intended electrical load and use the excess to produce storable heat in grid connected storage heaters.  The gas turbines then fill in much smaller gaps in base load power demand.  But controlling millions of separate storage heaters is no small challenge.

The labour intensity of a power source is a strong function of scale economies.  Build 100 identical powerplants, and labour intensity is lower than it would be for just one.  For highly complex systems with high power density, like nuclear reactors, that effect is powerful.  It is how the French power industry came to dominate European electricity supply.  They produced dozens of identical, 900MWe PWR units.  Labour intensity is low.  And until their recent dip stick president decided to screw things up, their power was the cheapest in Europe.

louis wrote:

Now you're just joking! There will be no need for any of that. You simply have induction charging of your battery as you head allong the motorway!  No need even to stop in at a service station for refuelling. If you want to go from London to Aberdeen without charging you can.

Louis, did you read the paper that SpaceNut linked?  It was all about charging by radio frequency coupling.  Efficiency drops off rapidly as distance between the transmitter and receiver increases.  Both are discs.  That means you will need to follow a line running down the centre of the road very precisely, otherwise you get massive losses.  And a moving vehicle would suffer eddy current losses as the transmitter induces current in the chassis.  It is one thing having an RF power transfer device embedded in a parking space which you can line up with.  Quite another having a continuous line of them running down a road for hundreds of miles, each with their own cable connection.  I don't think you remotely understand the burden that grid powered cars would present to the grid.  At peak traffic, the power requirements would be greater than the entire existing baseload power generation.  Other times, it would be near zero.  So we would need to build dedicated dispatchable power generation equivalent to the entire existing US generating capacity, just to meet the peak demands of these electric roads.  And we would need to embed radio transmitters along thousands of miles of roads.

You really don't seem to know enough about these technologies to discuss them in an intelligent way.  And you appear to suffer terribly from confirmation bias.

The energy payback time of ten years for solar PV, comes from the EROI analysis of Spain's PV industry carried out by Hall and Pietro, which calculated an overall EROI of 2.45.  Assuming a 25 year average system lifetime, that is an EPBT of 10 years.  The Hall and Pietro study included energy costs that are not usually captured in EPBT estimates of PV systems, but are none the less essential.

But even an EPBT of 2.5 or 5 years, would be problematic.  The plant must generate enough power to replace itself in 25 years and enough surplus to provide for growth in power supply, along with the infrastructure investments needed to grow the colony and meet subsistence energy costs of the colony.  An EROI of 10 is weak by those standards.  An EROI of 5 is unworkable.

The EROI of its principal energy sources, reflects the wealth of a society and its ability to support growth.  Between 1930 and 1970, the EROI of oil production was about 30 according to Hall  - much higher than today.  During that narrow 40 year window, the world that we know today was made.  Practically all of the infrastructure of OECD countries was built in that period.  We went from using biplanes and steam ships and horse and cart, to crossing the Atlantic on 747s, driving privately owned cars and flying to the moon.  Living standards grew far beyond the expectations of previous generations.  The middle class came into existence, private car ownership became the norm, foreign holidays available, food scarcity disappeared, free higher education became mainstream for the middle classes and large fractions of the working class.

All of this growth in living standards and the supporting infrastructure, required huge amounts of additional energy.  Between 1930 and 1970, global oil production doubled every decade.  In the 50 years since 1970, we have failed even one doubling.  This is a direct result of collapsing EROI and falling surplus energy.  Less surplus energy means less spare energy to invest in new things and a higher cost even when we do.  It is why in the years since 1970, we have been coasting compared to the dramatic improvements that came during that narrow window of supercharged growth in wealth, infrastructure and new technology. 

That is the sort of power that high EROI energy affords a society.  It determines whether or not our children will be jetting off to other planets and doing fantastic new things, or shivering with cold in crumbling victoriana houses and shovelling dirt in subsistence agriculture.  It was the incredible bounty of stored liquid fuel that could be sucked out of the ground almost for free, that allowed the complete transformation of Western societies in just a few decades.  It is because of this inconvenient fact of life that I keep pushing the case for nuclear power as an almost moral imperative.  What we do in terms energy really will effect our future prospects.  It is about as far from being an abstract consideration as it is possible to get.  It is the single most important thing that stands between where we are and Medieval levels of hardship.

We need something even better on Mars, because of all the extra energy costs we need to cover.  This is why PV will be no more than a niche solution, something that is used in marginal situations, like powering small pieces of remote equipment.  That plays to its strengths.  Trying to power steel works and synthetic fuel factories using PV on Mars is a fool's errand.  And you are correct that it will rely upon the energy source being imported from Earth.  The problem here is the sheer amount of mass required, as the number of MW needed by the colony stacks up over time.  You are basically relying upon Musk and others having infinitely deep pockets that they generously empty to keep the colony subsidised.  Sooner or later, probably sooner, this will stop working.

It's all coming out now.

The Steele Dossier was a complete fabrication of the 2016 Clinton Presidential Election Campaign.

IN  THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF  VIRGINIA - Alexandria Division - UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. IGOR DANCHENKO

The Clinton Campaign colluded with Russian Federation citizen Igor Danchenko to overturn the results of the 2016 Presidential Election of President Donald J. Trump.  Everyone indicted was a member or former member of The Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank that apparently doesn't do much in the way of thinking.

From the indictment:

The Grand Jury Charges that:
I. Introduction and Overview

1. On or about July 31, 2016, the  Federal  Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") opened  an investigation known as "Crossfire Hurricane" into whether individuals associated with the Donald J.  Trump  presidential  campaign  (the  "Trump  Campaign")  were  coordinating  activities  with  the Russian government.

2. Beginning in  or about July 2016  and  continuing through  December 2016,  the  FBI began receiving a series of reports from a former British government employee ("U.K. Person-I") that contained derogatory information on then-candidate Donald J.  Trump ("Trump") concerning Trump's purported ties to Russia (the "Company Reports").

3. Earlier  that  year,  a  U.S.-based  international  law  firm  ("Law  Firm-I"),  acting  as counsel  to  the  Hillary  Clinton  Presidential  campaign  (the  "Clinton  Campaign"),  had  retained  a U.S.-based investigative firm  ("U.S.  Investigative Firm-I") to conduct research on Trump and his associates. In  or about  June 2016,  U.S.  Investigative Firm-1,  in  tum,  retained  U.K.  Person-I, a former officer in a friendly foreign intelligence service ("Foreign Intelligence Service-I"), and his U.K.-based firm  ("U.K Investigative Firm-I"), to investigate Trump's purported ties to  Russia.

4. During  the  U.S.  presidential  election  season  and  afterwards,  U .K.  Person- I  and employees of U.S.  Investigative Firm- I  provided the  Company Reports to  multiple media outlets and to  U.S.  government personnel.

5. The Company Reports played an important role  in  applications that FBI personnel prepared and  submitted  to  obtain  warrants  pursuant to  the  Foreign  Intelligence  Surveillance  Act ("FISA")  targeting  a  United  States  citizen  who  had  been  an  advisor  to  then-candidate  Trump ("Advisor-I"). In  connection  with  the  FBI's  Crossfire  Hurricane  investigation  and  the  later investigation  by  Special  Counsel  Robert  S. Mueller  III,  the FBI relied  substantially  on  the Company Reports in these FISA applications to  assert probable cause that Advisor- I was a witting agent of the Russian Federation.

6. The  FBI obtained  a  total  of four  court-approved  FISA  applications  targeting Advisor- I,  which  authorized  intrusive  electronic  surveillance  of Advisor- I  from in  or  about October 2016  through in  or about September 2017. Each of the  FISA applications set forth  the
FBI' s assessment that Advisor- I was a knowing agent of Russia and further alleged - based on the Company Reports - that Advisor- I  was  part of a "well-coordinated conspiracy of co-operation" between Trump's campaign and  the Russian government.

7. Over time, the FBI  attempted to  investigate, vet,  and analyze the Company Reports but ultimately was not able to  confirm or corroborate most of their substantive allegations.

8. In  the context of these efforts, the  FBI  learned that U.K.  Person-I  relied primarily on  a  U .S.-based  Russian  national,  IGOR  DANCHENKO  ("DANCHENKO"),  the  defendant herein,  to  collect the  information  that  ultimately  formed  the  core  of the  allegations  found  in  the Company Reports. From in  or about January 2017 through  in  or about November 2017,  and  as part of its efforts to determine the truth or falsity of specific information in  the Company Reports, the  FBI  conducted  several  interviews  of DANCHENKO  regarding,  among  other  things,  the information that DANCHENKO had provided to  U.K.  Person-I  (collectively, the "Interviews").

9. As alleged in further detail below, DANCHENKO lied to  FBI agents during these Interviews.

10. First,  DANCHENKO  stated  falsely  that  he  had  never  communicated  with  a particular U.S.-based  individual  - who  was  a  long-time  participant  in  Democratic  Party politics and  was  then  an  executive  at  a  U.S. public  relations  firm  ("PR  Executive-I")  - about  any
allegations contained in the Company Reports. In  truth and in  fact,  and as  DANCHENKO well knew, DANCHENKO sourced one  or  more specific allegations in the Company  Reports anonymously to  PR Executive- I.

11. PR Executive-1 's role as a contributor of information to  the Company Reports was highly relevant and material to the  FBI's evaluation of those  reports  because (a)  PR Executive-I maintained pre-existing and ongoing relationships with numerous persons named or described in
the Company Reports,  including one of DANCHENKO's Russian sub-sources ( detailed below), (b) PR Executive- I  maintained historical and ongoing involvement in  Democratic politics, which bore upon PR Executive- I's reliability, motivations, and  potential bias as a source of information for the Company Reports, and (c)  DANCHENKO gathered some of the information contained in the  Company  Reports  at  events  in Moscow  organized  by PR  Executive-I and others  that DANCHENKO  attended  at PR Executive-1 's invitation. Indeed,  and as  alleged  below,  certain allegations that DANCHENKO provided to  U.K.  Person-I, and which appeared in  the Company Reports,  mirrored  and/or  reflected  information  that  PR  Executive- I  himself also  had  received through his  own interactions with Russian nationals.

12. Second, DANCHENKO stated falsely during the  Interviews, that,  in or about late July 2016, he received an anonymous phone call from an individual who DANCHENKO believed to  be  a particular U.S.  citizen and  who  was  then president of the  Russian-American Chamber of
Commerce ("Chamber President-I"). DANCHENKO also falsely  stated that,  during this phone call, (i) the person he believed to  be Chamber President- I informed him, in part, about information that  the  Company  Reports  later  described  as  demonstrating  a  well-developed  "conspiracy  of cooperation"  between the  Trump  Campaign  and  Russian  officials,  and  (ii)  DANCHENKO and the aforementioned person agreed to meet in New York. In truth and fact,  and as DANCHENKO well knew, DANCHENKO never received such a phone call or such information from  any person he believed to be Chamber President- I, and DANCEHNKO never made any arrangements to meet Chamber  President- I  in  New  York. Rather,  DANCHENKO  fabricated  these  facts  regarding Chamber President-I.

13. As alleged in further detail below, all of DANCHENKO's lies were material to  the FBI  because,  among other reasons,  (I) the  FBI' s  investigation of the Trump Campaign relied  in large part on the Company Reports to  obtain FISA warrants on Advisor- I, (2) the FBI  ultimately devoted substantial resources attempting to  investigate and corroborate the  allegations contained in  the  Company  Reports,  including the  reliability  of DANCHENKO's sub-sources;  and  (3)  the Company Reports, as  well as  information collected for the Reports by DANCHENKO, played a role  in  the  FBI's investigative  decisions  and  in  sworn  representations  that  the  FBI  made  to  the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court throughout the relevant time period.

A. The Defendant

14. At  all  times  relevant  to  this  Indictment,  DANCHENKO  was  a  citizen  of the Russian Federation and was lawfully in the United States.  DANCHENKO resided in Washington, D.C. and Virginia.

The full indictment spans 39 pages, which details Igor Danchenko's criminal activities in collaboration with Fusion GPS, The Brookings Institute, Charles H Dolan Jr, and the lawyers working for the 2016 Clinton Presidential Election Campaign.

There it is, in black-and-white, for all the world to see.

The Clinton Crime Family and their Democrat Party enablers finally hit a snag in their seemingly endless crime spree.

louis wrote:

While resource utilisation is always a valid area of concern and discussion I have grown weary over the years of being told we were nearing the end of reserves of x,y, z.  I remember news stories from the early 70s about oil running out within a decade. Still plenty of the stuff around.

Mineral resource depletion doesn't really work in that way.  Production grows to reach a peak, followed by a gradual decline.  The question is how close we are to peak, given the limitations we face.  The dynamics of depletion are a tug of war between several competing factors.  The same is true of oil.  We start off producing from the easiest deposits possible- near surface, highly concentrated, close to target markets, in politically stable areas with good transportation infrastructure, etc - basically technically easy and not too energy intensive to produce.

Over the past fifty years, mining has fought depletion and kept production volumes of most elements rising through a combination of greater economies of scale, greater geographical reach, greater use of energy to mine weaker ores, and new technologies assisting discovery, mining, transportation and processing.  The problem is that we are hitting diminishing returns in all of these areas.  Mining is now a global industry and the planet is only so big.  Economies of scale are subject to diminishing returns.  Most critically, the EROI of oil and gas, which power the entire global economy, are falling, reducing the surplus energy available to support all other activities.  It will be difficult to support much greater rates of resource extraction on a shrinking energy base.

And this is the problem that we face.  Our energy base is gradually weakening and yet the solutions that people want to adopt appear to require far more minerals and processed materials than we are producing right now.  Low power density ambient energy, instead of high power density fuels.  Transport solutions requiring dramatic production increases in rare elements.  Something has to give.

The wireless charging system that SpaceNut has described looks very promising.  Something like this would appear to be a necessarily innovation.  You drive for 50 miles and then park, allowing the vehicle to recharge for an hour while you get coffee and stretch your legs.  With a system like that, EVs could use inexpensive NiMH batteries.  Maybe sodium-ion batteries?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery

I think that would work for most people, provided the recharging facilities are reliably available 24/7 wherever they go.  That sort of innovation allows far more flexibility in battery technology.  But can we afford it?

Tea would need to be grown in pressurised, heated greenhouses on Mars.  It isn't just a case of overcoming transport costs.  Even if transport costs from Earth to Mars, were zero and vice versa, the difficulties imposed by the Martian environment would make it more expensive to carry out any activity there compared to any location on Earth.

One advantage Mars does have that is tangible: A much shallower gravity well.  The propulsive effort required to reach Earth orbit from Mars surface, is lower than it is from Earth surface.  And a large fraction of the propulsion can be low-thrust.  Mars has a definite gravitational competitive advantage in producing finished goods and commodities that are intended for use in any location outside of Earth's atmosphere.  Ultimately, even Mars grown food may be cheaper in Earth orbit, than Earth food that must be lifted through a 10+km/s delta-V at high thrust.  That is the singular advantage that a Mars colony can exploit in terms of producing exports for profit.  And aside from novelty value, it is the only advantage that a Mars colony has over an analogous colony built in Earth's polar regions.  If you are looking for export opportunities, this is predominantly where they are to be found.

There may be a few other niches, where direct export to Earth surface may be competitive.  Deuterium, for example.  Mars also contains meteorite materials in a geologically unaltered state.  These contain platinum group metals in higher abundance than terrestrial ores.  But by and large, there are few export opportunities to Earth surface.  I'm not convinced that Mars will become a prime filming location.  CGI can replicate the surface quite convincingly.

Amidst the euphoria and hype surrounding the much promised transition of transportation to an all-electric future, this article highlights what would appear to be a difficult problem with this idea: metal resource limitations.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2021 … alse-deal/

Providing sufficient BEVs to meet the transportation needs of UK (under present usage patterns) would severely strain the entire Earth's known resources of several metals.  And the UK has <1% of Earth's population and represents a similar proportion of vehicle sales.  Long-range BEVs are also energy intensive to produce, largely because of the mining requirements of the metals needed and the energy needed to manufacture the batteries.  We are therefore attempting this transition, at a time when fossil fuel surplus energy is shrinking (oil production peaked in 2018) and disposable prosperity is shrinking.  The EROI of new oil production appears to have declined gradually until 2000, but has experienced steeper declines since then.  This is making oil production more expensive.  But the use of oil as the master energy resource for global transportation, places a ceiling on the price that consumers can afford to pay.  So higher costs can only partially be compensated by higher prices.  This growing mismatch between production cost and sustainable prices, is gradually tightening the screws on the economics oil producing companies.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/ … .2013.0126

These factors suggest that unless there is a dramatic change in the technology, BEVs will never achieve the sort of mass ownership that we see with ICE vehicles.  The need exists for an examination of what options are available and affordable, for maintaining sufficient mobility of people, materials and goods in an era where fossil fuel surplus energy is shrinking, the environmental consequences of their use imposes limitations and the wealth of the average person is shrinking.

One option is the continued development of more fuel efficient vehicles, including hybrids.  In a hybrid, a much smaller energy store (maybe a battery, maybe something else) reduces fuel consumption by either capturing braking energy and using it for launch assist, or in some cases, provides enough stored energy to cover the propulsive needs of short trips, which often dominate the milage of a vehicle.  As the energy store can be much smaller, a hybrid provides a good way of improving mpg (allowing higher cost oil to stay profitable) without the enormous resource requirements of a full BEV revolution at today's levels of car ownership.

Another interesting point to consider - The world has already had an electric transportation revolution.  Electric vehicles have actually been the workhorses of human and goods mass transportation in many countries for a century, with large growth since WW2.  But these vehicles draw power directly from the grid and run on rails.  They do not generally attempt to store electrical energy in heavy and resource intensive batteries.  They are mass transport systems, that achieve efficiency largely through the size of the vehicles.  They are suitable for mass transit between predefined nodes.  Is there a salient lesson here for the sort of EV revolution that we should be planning for, heading into the future?

What does a Mars colony offer that a similar colony in Antarctica, Greenland or Northern Canada does not?

Getting there and getting any equipment you need to the surface, is going to be far more expensive.  Energy production will indeed be much higher per capita on Mars because it will have to be for people to survive.  Food will need to be grown in heated, pressurised greenhouses.  Kaching!

Those greenhouses will be made from steel, glass and plastics that have to be chemically reduced and manufactured from basic, oxidised compounds, like CO2 and metal oxides, using an electricity source that is shipped from another planet.  Kaching!  Air and water are mostly free on Earth.  On Mars, O2 will need to be created from CO2 or through electrolysis of water.  That's about 15MJ per person per day.  Kaching!  Water is frozen as hard as stone and mixed in with dirt underground.  You will need to mine it from the ground mechanically and melt it or pump enough heat into the ground to melt it insitu.  Either way, you are looking at an energy cost of at least 1MJ/litre for water on Mars, about the same as concrete on Earth.  Kaching!  Going outside for work or leasure, requires warm clothing in polar regions on Earth.  On Mars, it requires a pressure suit with a breathing system.  Kaching!  Buildings on Earth are either gravity stabilised masonry structures or portal framed structures.  On Mars, all habitable structures must be pressure vessels, with either tensile skins or massive gravity stabilised berms to provide enough backpressure to prevent a masonry structure from exploding.  Kaching!  If you want plastics for any purpose, you need to manufacture it from CO2 using electrolysis derived hydrogen, rather than simply mining hydrocarbons from the ground.  Kaching!  Metal ores can be mined using electrically powered mining equipment.  For a long time to come, that mining equipment will need to be shipped from Earth at a cost of at least hundreds of dollars per kg.  Kaching!

On the population front, you are probably right.  Old people and people with health problems won't be coming to Mars in huge numbers.  With continuous high rates of migration from Earth, demographics will skewed away from the young and the old for a long while to come.  Investment per capita will be high, but the cost of keeping people alive in such an environment and delivering and setting up any kind of capability, will be extremely high.  It is not obvious to me why you would expect a huge number of people with very deep pockets to empty those pockets into any kind of Mars based infrastructure.  Elon Musk is prepared to do so because he sees himself as a pioneer and architect of the future.  But once the excitement wears off, Mars is a cold and barren planet.  Staying alive there is difficult.  Sending things there is an expensive hobby.

It's time to bring this important topic back into view ...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/robotics-ceo … 18130.html

Tesla CEO Elon Musk also noted this growing trend during a presentation in August, when he said he was working on creating a "Tesla Bot," or a robot that would do "dangerous, repetitive, and boring tasks" so humans don't have to.

"Essentially, in the future, physical work will be a choice," Musk said during the presentation. "This is why I think long term there will need to be a universal basic income," he added.

It is ** entirely ** possible for the population of Earth to provide ample and even abundant supplies of every material resource that might be needed.

It is ** not ** necessary for more than a tiny fraction of the population to be engaged in production of whatever is needed.

The challenge is NOT a technical one (although there ** are ** opportunities to demonstrate problem solving skills).

The challenge is ENTIRELY a social one.  The human population has (so far at least) shown itself incapable of self-organizing so that everyone is provided whatever may be needed for a productive life that includes dignity and personal satisfaction.

(th)

To open this new topic with a concrete example, I would like to offer a vision of an alternative to the (somewhat desperate) vision of trying to deflect asteroids or comets that might be on a collision course with Earth.

As a perfectly viable alternative, I am proposing to follow the tried and true Army Ant procedure.

A large problem is divided into small work pieces that can be managed by individual workers.

In this case, the "individual workers" would be "Unmanned probes" that would arrive at the object, collect one metric ton of material, and head "home" with that payload, using solar wind as the primary driver and occasional mass ejection when necessary.  The small worker devices need not be in a hurry, and they may take years or even many years to deliver their cargo to the desired destination.

An "army" of such workers would make short work of any object that is a threat to Earth, and collect all that might be valuable as a reward.

(th)

Louis,

The transit to Mars should be a period of intense training for both surviving the journey and surviving the early colonization period.  There should also be a practical element to all schooling and training.  Learning about theory is good, but putting theory into practice is golden.  Every book test should be accompanied by an oral board and practical exam where students demonstrate what they've learned.