I don't know why this failed to post the first time, try again. At 12:00 PM 7/23/2008, Bruce Bostwick wrote:
>Pretty sure we're headed for a population crash at least that drastic >regardless. it's obvious to me that the earth cannot support 6-7 >billion sustainably no matter what we do. With a lot of low cost, low environmental damage energy the earth could support somewhat more than the current population--in style. >And there are certain parts >of the population doing their best to outbreed everyone else just to >skew future demographics. So it's likely to be a hard crash, and not >a very well controlled one at that. This would worry me more except I think the age of genes is about over. Ronn! Blankenship wrote: snip >No. I was just thinking that in the current situation, there would >probably be investors who would be very interested in getting in on >something which looked like it really would provide even a partial solution. So far, have not found any interest. But on the other hand, I don't know a lot of VC. (keith wrote) >>The only drawback is the size, it's on a par with the cost of a few >>years of the Iraq War. > >I was thinking that what you would want to do would be to find >investors willing to fund a pilot facility and show that it worked >locally (city? county? state? whatever . . . ). If it did work >as predicted, it would be an easy matter to sell it to those willing >to expand it to larger areas. That's one problem with some of the >suggestions out there: they talk about savings (resource or >financial) to be realized only after the whole energy infrastructure >(at least of the entire US if not the world) has been converted from >what it is at present to the proposed new version. The problem is one of optics that has been understood for more than 200 years. "The Airy disk (or Airy disc) is a phenomenon in <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optics>optics. Owing to the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#Wave_theory>wave nature of light, light passing through an <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture>aperture is <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction>diffracted and forms a pattern of light and dark regions on a screen some distance away from the aperture (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference>interference)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk For microwaves that get through the atmosphere that we can make and turn back into electricity, the antennas on both ends are huge, a km in space and 10 km on the ground. For economic power levels that's in the 5-10 GW. A power sat that large weighs something like 10,000 tons. You could build one that delivered a few watts to the ground, but it would cost almost as much as a multi GW unit. >Few people seem to be talking with any specificity about how to >accomplish the individual intermediate steps to get from here to >there and what the incremental savings or other advantages to be >gained from those intermediate steps will be. And the proposals >which require the whole system to be replaced before any advantages >might be realized Advantages or not, we will be exiting the oil era over the next decade or so. Oil is huge. The solution has to be the same. >are so costly that the only way they could be funded is by the >government with taxpayer money, and we have seen for the past 40 >years how well that works. With a good proposal, hopefully private >industry would be interested in funding the initial local facility >and then expanding from there when it shows results. I agree with how you feel about governments and taxpayer money. I don't know how a project of this scale can be funded on private money or taxpayer money either. Pat Mathews wrote: > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > Showing again that the underlying problem is that people must > > renounce greed and selfishness and replace them with cooperation > and altruism. > >"Great idea. Wrong species." E.O. Wilson To the point. :-) Keith _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
