Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2011 11:16 pm
Exactly and there are many ways to do that.Was about to say what 93143 says above. Cheap enough energy should mean we can synthesize these hydrocarbon products.
a discussion forum for Polywell fusion
https://talk-polywell.org/bb/
Exactly and there are many ways to do that.Was about to say what 93143 says above. Cheap enough energy should mean we can synthesize these hydrocarbon products.
chrismb wrote:Raw materials just aren't there any more like they were. And if you have no industrial infrastructure, then you can't extract and make use of these deep, very lean deposits. Which means if we loose our industrial infrastructure we just won't have the raw materials available to access those remote deposits and recover again to a technological species. We'll be locked into the stone age until the earth's plates refresh the whole of the earth's crust, and more fossilised biomass hydrocarbon deposits reform.
Cassini's radar data has shown that prominent features on Titan's surface have shifted as much as 30km. The most likely explanation proposed is that Titan has a subsurface liquid ocean. Models estimate the volume of this liquid to be 12 to 40 times the volume of all of Earth's oceans. The hydrocarbons on Titan may not be a renewable resource, but they might buy humanity enough time to figure out something better.Wikipedia wrote:According to Cassini data, scientists announced on February 13, 2008, that Titan hosts within its polar lakes "hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth." The desert sand dunes along the equator, while devoid of open liquid, nonetheless hold more organics than all of Earth's coal reserves.
Unfortunately.Whereas the original images (except for a few pairs obtained at similar orbital phase, some of which we have mapped previously) were offset by as much as 30 km, the new versions align much better. The remaining misalignments, typically <1 km, can be removed by a least-squares adjustment of the spacecraft trajectories before mapping, which also ensures that the stereo digital topographic models (DTMs) are made consistent with altimetry and SAR topography profiles.
Quantities required?What motivation would mining have to carry on doing so whilst it is easier to extract these materials from old products?
Ice age?chrismb wrote:You are thinking hundreds to thousands of years, whereas I am thinking that techno-man will be all but wiped out at the next ice age in a few 10,000's years. Will your iron ore stocks be enough to last Austria for 10,000 years?
Did I say problems? (I'm not criticizing your interpretation). I'm not sure what I meant back then, but I don't see fusion causing identifiable problems. It will cause unforeseeable problems (everything does):chrismb wrote:Charles, I am right there with you on the question and worries of sourcing raw materials.
But I don't understand the connection with your commentWhat is the problem fusion energy would create, with respect to raw material supplies?Cheap electricity from fusion = a dream to be devoutly wished. But like all great things, it will create problems as well as solve them, and it may not stop the end of industrial civilization.
Care to explain that?kurt9 wrote:Cheap energy allows for two things:
1) Synthesis of hydrocarbons by thermal process
Now you're literally off the planet.kurt9 wrote: 2) Extraterrestrial resource utilization
The resources of the solar system are millions of times greater than those of the Earth. In short, cheap energy will eliminate the currently foreseen limits on economic growth.
Good gawd.Betruger wrote:If you have cheap electricity and space propulsion, you shouldn't need to return things to Earth. Just stay in space.
What I'd say will limit freedom of space bound expansion are trouble makers and government. Trouble makers will make it hard to argue that men can be free -unless governments manage to correspondingly ramp up their means of war-making/defense of their constituents- and governments, out of habit, will probably do their best to keep people under their control.