!למה צריך לסגור את תעשיית הנפט? כי לייזרים
כולם אוהבים לייזרים, נכון? זה מגניב, זה זוהר. Shiny! למען האמת, כל נשקי האנרגיה. רובי פלזמה ותותחי טאכיונים. בכל המשחקים ובכל הסרטים. הרבה יותר מגניב מעוד מתקן עם המון חלקים נעים שמשליך גושי מתכת מצד אחד, נכון? כולם אוהבים את זה. כל שחקן שתתנו לי לבחור בין עוד M משהו כזה או אחר לבין רובה לייזר או מקרן פלזמה… אני יודע מה הם יבחרו.
אז מה באמת מגניב בלייזרים וחבריהם? אין להם תחמושת. כל עוד אפשר לייצר אנרגיה, אפשר להשתמש בהם. אולי צריך לדאוג שלא יתחממו. ויש מכשירים שמייצרים אנרגיה מלהסתכל על השמש(!) ומלשהות בים(!) — זאת כמות פחות או יותר בלתי מוגבלת של אנרגיה(!).
אותו דבר עם מכוניות — ולמען האמת, כל תעשיית האנרגיה. כל עוד אפשר להמשיך לייצר אנרגיה (ראו את השיטות המוזכרות מעל), מכוניות חשמליות יכולות להמשיך לנוע. נפט הוא חומר פיזי. באיזה שהוא שלב, הוא ייגמר. ולפני שזה יגיע גם נרגיש שיהוקים באספקה כאשר הנפט הקיים יהפוך ללא נגיש — או ליקר בצורה לא הגיונית — ואז אולי יפתחו שיטות חדשות להגיע לנפט ושוב וחוזר חלילה. אבל מה תמיד יש? שמש וגלים ורוח והפרש פוטנציאלים הנגרם על ידי נפילת מים ממקום גבוה.
אז תנועו לכיוון התנתקות מתעשיית הנפט. כי לייזרים זה מגניב.
Posted in Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with 9 comments.
I am not against this as an idea but I recall having an argument with someone online about renewable energy sources and can we or can’t we and should we or shouldn’t we and then came someone with a degree and pointed out something simple:
Regardless how you get energy, you still need to move it from where you have it to where you need it
There is always resistance on the way so the amount you have at the end will be less then what you started with
So even if it would be really cool to turn the sahara desert into the energy supplier of the world… it can’t work because of cost of moving the energy around
But there is hope, the space elevators might yet save us as they can be set up pretty much anywhere, are above the atmosphere and thus have enough(too much) radiation to use to make power, and they can also supply us with raw materials
Of course they will probably hyper heat the atmosphere from all that lost energy and fuck with the Ozone… you know what, maybe there is a reason we don’t see any aliens, we all reach a sort of equilibrium as a terrestrial race and don’t manage to find the energy to become continuously space faring
Of course there’s resistance and energy loss. There’s always energy loss. And internal combustion engines also carry this fault. And like everything you produce, it’s better to produce locally than import. But you know what’s the fun part about that? Yes, there are places with advantages but you can have sun, wind and waves anywhere. You can’t have coal and oil and gas anywhere.
And space elevators can’t be put up anywhere. They have to be tethered to the equator or the tether will twist and snap. And I have yet to see a proposal for power generation using a space elevator. And even if that was done, space elevators are still prohibitively expensive and we haven’t perfected the technology for them yet. which is why we don’t have them yet even though the concept has been around for more than a hundred years or, at least, since it was popularised by Arthur C. Clarke in 1979.
A. The only truly abundant source of alternative energy is Solar. Wind and waves are cute and all, ad do contribute some to the total, but to replace the world’s reliance on nonrenewable fuel, only solar power can be sufficient.
B. Moving energy is not a problem. The hole process of using solar energy as a fuel source is a complex, multi-staged issues, with several problems to solve. Moving it was one of them, but we pretty much know how to do that – using hydrogen cells and hydrogen containment materials (basically, boxes filled with things that trap hydrogen efficiently). In brief, the solution is using solar energy to break apart water molecules at the source of the energy (say the Sahara Desert), and store the hydrogen and oxygen in easily transportable, easily useable, hydrogen cells.
C. we’re not really close to building space elevators. our most advanced materials don’t have the load bearing to weight ratio needed for such an endeavor. Without that, nothing else can be done with this truly cool idea.
There are other ways to store power. I was thinking of mentioning it. You don’t have to transmit it. Like, sometimes, loading a truck with hard drives is a faster way to transport data than streaming it online. But I think batteries are better than fuel cells in this regard because of their stability. There’s a reason fuel cells are not that prevalent. They are also not very user-friendly. And battery technology is also advancing quite a bit. Like, there’s an idea to build a battery based on iron and salt which is much better than current technologies but their still perfecting it.
A. Atomic power (fusion, not fission) is also renewable and much more feasible, I would claim, than solar in a power density per investment. Also wind power, in certain areas (especially at sea), is much better value for money than solar. The main problem with solar is that low cost photo-voltaic cells are really inefficient and there aren’t any viable plans atm to massively increase their efficiency. High-efficiency solar plants are very expensive (CSP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashalim_Power_Station , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility ).
But it’s a work in progress. There are many ways to generate renewable power from abundant, non contaminating sources. But, as Michio Kaku put it, a level 1 civilisation uses all the energy available on its home planet. This means capturing all, or most, of the solar energy bombarding Earn. We are a level 0 civilisation now. But we can get there.
I think this scale is very naive and works under the assumption that people (sophonts) exhaust all available resources before moving to the next big thing, which – if Earth history is to teach us anything – is far from a common practice.
I would hazard a guess that we will see vacuum energy (or another high density extra terrestrial energy source) being used successfully before earthlings manage to use a significant (better then 5%) portion of solar energy reaching Earth in the form of light. Then we can skip level 1 and go directly to level 3.
I simplified it. The book is great, though.
The point of the Karadeshev Scale is that at Level 1, we use all energy available at the planet level. Level 2 is all energy available at the star system level. At level 3, civilisation harnesses all energy at the galaxy level. I think we’re far from that.
Obviously, but my problem is the “all” specification. Taken strictly IMO no civilization will ever rank as anything but 0, except the most pedantic.
There’s no reason to collect even a large portion from energy available on your planet once you have access to a more abundant energy source on a galactic level (i.e. non solar specific).