[extropy-chat] Nuke 'em

[Damien Broderick]

At 10:22 AM 10/23/2005 -0700, Damien Sullivan wrote:

>I also don't know if we even have industrial tech
>for CO2->fuel, and am struck that no one ever talks about it even as a
>research possibility.  It's oil from coal, or hydrogen from water, never oil
>from air.

New biotechnology will grow liquid fuel for the poor, according to Freeman 
Dyson, seeding the tropics with plants that convert sunlight into the 
machineries of appropriate technology.

In THE SPIKE (2201), I cited this:

<`How can a godforsaken Mexican village become a source of wealth?' Freeman 
Dyson asks. Sunlight, he notes, is not restricted to the rich countries - 
quite the reverse. Genetic engineering of new kinds of crops will make 
solar energy available even to the poor. `An energy crop could be a 
permanent forest of trees that convert sunlight to liquid fuel and deliver 
the fuel directly through their roots to a network of underground 
pipelines.' (Freeman J. Dyson, The Sun, the Genome, & the Internet (1999), 
p. 69). >

Not sure of the details, but this sounds like oil from air and sunlight to me.

[The subject line of this thread is weirdly dysfunctional and unpleasant, 
BTW, Greg, rather as if we were discussing ways to encourage people to love 
each other better under the heading `Rape 'em'.]

Damien Broderick