[ExI] Oil will never run out
Kevin Freels
kevinfreels at insightbb.com
Tue Jul 1 02:56:21 UTC 2008
> so
> >many time I wonder why people continue to use that phrase.
>
> Unfortunately history has examples, Greenland Norse, Easter
> Island,
> and Mayans where things fairly well went down the drain. I
> happen to
> be an engineer who is used to being given a problem and marching
> orders to solve it. But there are problems, backwards time
> travel
> and FTL travel that are probably in the "can't be done"
> category. Others such as diverting an asteroid collision
> on short
> notice can't be done if we don't have enough time.
>
OK. Granted I was getting a bit over the edge. I'm glad you saw my point through the rhetoric.
> There may well be other ways, a vast scale up
> of nuclear
> power of a new design, the pebble bed reactors, might to it for
> long
> enough to reach some kind of singularity where we or our machine
> offspring or some combination get smart enough to get more power
> or
> run on less.
>
I'm very impressed with the pebble bed reactors by the way. I wish I could build my own. :-) These reactors look to be an excellent way to go for the short term.
>
> It's impossible to get as much performance out of batteries as
> you
> can get out of hydrocarbons. If you think of them in
> battery terms,
> 65% of the battery come out of the air and you don't have to
> carry
> it. Trucks on batteries? Not likely. Trains
> can be
> electrified. Aircraft are being taken out of service by
> the
> thousands because of high fuel cost.
Which was my point. Thanks.
>> I put my money on the
> >ability
> >to find solutions to scaling up.
>
> A lot of them don't scale up. That was the point of the
> exposition
> on converting trash to oil, there just isn't enough trash.
> There
> isn't enough land do grow bio fuels.
No. And it wasn't my intention to put trash generation or grass clipping up as the sole method of making fuels. I probably should have more correctly said gasoline produced from "some oilless method as yet to be determined". The picture I had in my head was of various methods being around all producing the same product. One way may produce a bit and get rid of a lot of garbage at the same time with the mass production still being carried out by specialized facilities. The "open source" part was a beautiful mental picture that would probably never happen and I should have left it out. The overall point was producing regular gasoline, diesel and jet fuel out of raw materials cheaper than the cost of drilling and refining oil. I really don't care if it's little machines, or gen en bacteria (is there a difference?). If it can be made by nature, it can be made by us more efficiently.
>
More information about the extropy-chat
mailing list