Transmat World

Climate Change Should Make Planned Obsolescence Obsolete

Would-Be Asteroid Miners Should Consider What’s in Orbit Around the Earth First

Can Rideshare Change the Real Estate Market and the Economy?

What Will Happen When Genetic Manipulation of Human DNA Becomes the Norm?

Outfitting a Mined Asteroid Into a Luxury Solar System Shuttle

I Am a Witness to Climate Change—You Should Be, Too

The Environmental Advantage of a Space Elevator

The U.S. Must Recycle Recycling

Climate Change Will Herald the Age of Island Cities

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

Nations at Risk of Becoming Psychological Echo Chambers: China Sets Worrisome Precedent

Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy

What Do We Do Now That We Know Climate Change is Inevitable?

Are You Susceptible to Digitally Induced Cognitive Karma

Why the Oceans Will Be Humanity’s Life Raft

There May Be a Quadrillion Dollars Lying About on the Moon

Mining That First Asteroid - Manned Mission or AI?

A Convergence of Technologies Will Create a New Age of Space Exploration

Steampunk Meets Star Wars: A Harrowing Micro-Tale of Future Spacefarers

The Space Habitat Revisited and Revised

Thruster On a Chip: An Alternative Rocket Science That Could Revolutionize Space Travel

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Lag in Sociological Evolution Has Become an Existential Problem

A Timeline for Climate Change

2019-07-28T20:52:00.001-07:00

Photo by Marcelo Novais on Unsplash

Climate change does not seem apocalyptic to the people currently living through it. Although it is happening much faster than other climate changes in Earth’s history, our lives are too short to appreciate the extreme differences that will occur. For instance, a person in their 60s now is not experiencing weather all that different from when they were growing up. Yes, it may be hotter in the summer time, but there were hot days when they were kids. More storms and stronger storms occur but not so different that you could call it apocalyptic. Those really bad weather events from our past become inflated by our imagination over time and thus ameliorate our perception of how bad current events are.

What we currently call climate change will happen over several centuries; seas rising a hundred feet, the increase of temperatures on average by 9 degrees Fahrenheit, increasing numbers of Category Four and Five hurricanes, and tropical diseases in Nebraska and Illinois. And, if we don't fix it, it could last for thousands of years. I’m sure eventually it will be called something a bit more dire than climate change—something more on the order of “The Great Reckoning”, "The Big Meltdown" or some such thing taken from the headlines of an article about a particularly nasty weather event.

We should keep in mind that the last time atmospheric CO2 was this high was about 15 million years ago during the Miocene. Estimates are CO2 was between 475 and 665 ppm. Before that it was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 56 million years ago. Average temperatures during that time period were about 13 degrees Fahrenheit above today’s average. The rate at which we are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is 9-10 times the rate during the PETM. Whereas the injection of CO2 during PETM was spread over 20,000 years and the warm period lasted 200,000 years; human civilization is on track to do the same thing in only three or four hundred years.

And that is the problem for setting a timeline. We don't really have any historical comparisons. We are in uncharted waters at the edge of the map where it says "Here Be Dragons." We are pouring CO2 into the atmosphere much faster than nature has been able to for at least the past 50 million years. Ultimately, equatorial regions may become nearly uninhabitable. At just a 2 degree Celsius increase in temperature, the oceans will rise 5 to 10 meters. According to predictions from the IPCC, a 1.5 degree C. rise will occur by 2035 if nothing is done to curtail emissions.

Although migration due to climate change has already begun, most people will not be affected for another generation. Here is a link to determine your city’s average temperature in 2050. After 2050, though, it is very speculative with one side promising annihilation and the other shrugging their shoulders and saying “Hey, it won’t be that bad.” Never in the history of mankind has an event of this magnitude been met with so little information about what will really happen.

Humans will adapt. We’ve already begun. As mentioned, some are already moving. Some are changing political affiliations to more climate conscious candidates. Some are changing what they study in school so they can help with the technical stuff. Governments will adapt as well. As it gets worse they will investigate terraforming as an alternative. Giant orbiting shields or massive injections of reflective aerosols into the atmosphere will block the Sun’s rays, bringing temperatures back down. Then it will get too cold and, just like at the office, people will start complaining about the temperature. The next world war may well be over control of the Earth’s thermostat.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Your Property Value Is Dependent on Climate Change Whether You Believe in it or Not

Climate Change Should Make Planned Obsolescence Obsolete

Would-Be Asteroid Miners Should Consider What’s in Orbit Around the Earth First

Can Rideshare Change the Real Estate Market and the Economy?

What Will Happen When Genetic Manipulation of Human DNA Becomes the Norm?

Outfitting a Mined Asteroid Into a Luxury Solar System Shuttle

I Am a Witness to Climate Change—You Should Be, Too

The Environmental Advantage of a Space Elevator

The U.S. Must Recycle Recycling

Climate Change Will Herald the Age of Island Cities

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

Nations at Risk of Becoming Psychological Echo Chambers: China Sets Worrisome Precedent

Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy

What Do We Do Now That We Know Climate Change is Inevitable?

Are You Susceptible to Digitally Induced Cognitive Karma

Why the Oceans Will Be Humanity’s Life Raft

There May Be a Quadrillion Dollars Lying About on the Moon

Mining That First Asteroid - Manned Mission or AI?

A Convergence of Technologies Will Create a New Age of Space Exploration

Steampunk Meets Star Wars: A Harrowing Micro-Tale of Future Spacefarers

The Space Habitat Revisited and Revised

Thruster On a Chip: An Alternative Rocket Science That Could Revolutionize Space Travel

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Lag in Sociological Evolution Has Become an Existential Problem

Climate Change Is Terrible, But Don’t Take it Personally

2019-07-22T13:37:00.000-07:00

Photo by Elijah O'Donnell on Unsplash

Unless, of course, you are the CEO of Exxon-Mobil or the climate deniers in the U.S. Senate, Congress, and current administration of the United States government. They and their ilk should take it personally. You, on the other hand, should take a vacation from angst. The guilt and anxiety you feel about climate change is natural because you’re a participant in this drama as is everybody. Those that don’t have such emotions should be suspect as liars or sociopaths. A normal person should feel, at the least, some unease about the future of humankind because of climate change.

One summer morning at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950, Enrico Fermi, a physicist, and several buddies were discussing the probability of intelligent life in the universe. Everybody was coming up with extraordinary numbers of how many other intelligent beings there had to be because of the number of stars and planets involved.

The subject was dropped. They went to lunch. In the middle of the meal Enrico says, “Where are they?” Several lunch mates knew exactly what he was talking about. Aliens. If the math says they should be there, where is the evidence? They could have crisscrossed the entire galaxy by now even at the slow crawl of our current technology. But there was no evidence of other civilizations that ever made the leap to technology. The question with no answer was named “Fermi’s Paradox.” That was 70 years ago and there is still no evidence, even with our sophisticated orbital instrumentation.

Perhaps climate change is the “Great Filter.” Once the discovery of how to make and control fire is made by an intelligent life form, it is that species death warrant. It may be inevitable that further investigation reveals how this primal element can be harnessed to produce powerful rotating engines. It seems logical, also, that useful technology will blossom and be used planet wide before the technology develops to figure out what it does to the climate. By the time that happens, it is too late.

It may be little solace to think we’ve been had by one of the most sophisticated and dangerous “gotcha’s” in the universe, one that every other race out there fell for. But there it is.

We’re not done for yet. The human race is as resilient and smart as it is greedy and petulant. There are technologies that will help. Some are in their infancy and may become cheap and practical. The political will may yet come around to do something in spite of special interests. This, by the way, is the only power you have over this situation. Your vote for candidates that understand and are concerned about climate change may well determine the future of humankind.

What you shouldn’t do is feel guilty for your lifestyle. It is shaped by your government and society. Who knew there would be a situation where our nationalistic forms of government would be inadequate? Perhaps somebody smart somewhere, but he or she wasn’t loud enough or rich enough to convince anybody.

If you drive an electric car, recycle everything, and compost then God bless you! You’re doing a heck of a job. If you’re doing it to assuage guilt about climate change, take a break. What you are doing has little relevance to the current situation. It will take fifty to a hundred years to stop and reverse the enormous economic, political, and psychological inertia generated by climate deniers and fossil fuel interests. By that time it will be quite obvious to all what is going on, and what will happen to the planet if we continue burning stuff for money. Perhaps we can proceed on a more rational path from then on and survive the Great Filter.

Thousands of years from now perhaps we can make that trek across the galaxy and find what few other races have survived this harrowing trick of nature. At a meeting of such entities we can swap stories of how we made it and how close we came to not being there. I would be willing to bet on one thing. It won’t be around a campfire.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Your Property Value Is Dependent on Climate Change Whether You Believe in it or Not

Climate Change Should Make Planned Obsolescence Obsolete

Would-Be Asteroid Miners Should Consider What’s in Orbit Around the Earth First

Can Rideshare Change the Real Estate Market and the Economy?

What Will Happen When Genetic Manipulation of Human DNA Becomes the Norm?

Outfitting a Mined Asteroid Into a Luxury Solar System Shuttle

I Am a Witness to Climate Change—You Should Be, Too

The Environmental Advantage of a Space Elevator

The U.S. Must Recycle Recycling

Climate Change Will Herald the Age of Island Cities

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

Nations at Risk of Becoming Psychological Echo Chambers: China Sets Worrisome Precedent

Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy

What Do We Do Now That We Know Climate Change is Inevitable?

Are You Susceptible to Digitally Induced Cognitive Karma

Why the Oceans Will Be Humanity’s Life Raft

There May Be a Quadrillion Dollars Lying About on the Moon

Mining That First Asteroid - Manned Mission or AI?

A Convergence of Technologies Will Create a New Age of Space Exploration

Steampunk Meets Star Wars: A Harrowing Micro-Tale of Future Spacefarers

The Space Habitat Revisited and Revised

Thruster On a Chip: An Alternative Rocket Science That Could Revolutionize Space Travel

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Lag in Sociological Evolution Has Become an Existential Problem

Human Climate Change Migration Has Already Begun

2019-07-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

You may not personally believe that over 97% of climate scientists are in agreement on climate change being real, bad, and caused by humans, but after watching this video of Australian climate scientists planning moves to cooler climes you may want to reconsider. They are reluctant to discuss on camera how bad it is going to get because they don’t want to scare anyone but not in the least reluctant to let their feet do the talking. That seems out of character for supposed money-grubbing, spotlight hugging, government leeches; but what the hell do I know.

Australia is being affected more so than most places by climate change. Heat and drought are continual threats. These climate scientists are planning on moving south into a more temperate zone. That would be Tasmania and New Zealand for Australians. One of them is moving to England. With the temperature reaching 113 degrees F. (historic all-time high) in France on June 29, 2019, he may be reconsidering that decision.

It’s happening all over, not just Australians. It’s New Yorkers buying in the Catskills, and Houstonians buying in Oregon. It’s questions whispered to real estate gurus by bankers and doctors, “Where can I buy a safe piece of property for my son’s/daughter’s future?” It’s Elizabeth Boineaux moving from Charleston, South Carolina because her house had flooded for the third year in a row. It’s Chase Twichell and her husband moving from their retirement apartment in Miami back to New York because the rising water and threat of flooding was getting too scary. It’s Dave Anderson of Houston buying a 70 acre spread in Oregon because of hurricane Harvey. It’s the whole community of Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana picking up and moving 30 miles inland because their island is being quickly eroded by the rising ocean. A dozen communities in Alaska must move or perish. Properties in such disparate places as Houston and Staten Island are being bought by the government to be razed because they are too risky to live in because of storms and floods.

This migration is already being compared in scale to the Great Migration, the movement of 6 million black Americans from Jim Crow south to northern cities; but climate migration is expected to reach 13 million by the end of the century, 6 million from Florida alone. And that is just based on people fleeing shore-based population centers. It does not include those that seek relief from the heat waves, tornadoes, wildfires, flooding, and tropical disease predicted to affect the rest of the country as a result of climate change.

My wife and I were among the lucky ones during Harvey. We were on an island surrounded by devastation watching friends and family be inundated. It was a feeling of helplessness and insight. These were forces beyond our control, but I could see a way out for the future. As a result of that experience, we will be at the forefront of this “Greatest Migration” that has already begun at the dawn of the Anthropocene.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Your Property Value Is Dependent on Climate Change Whether You Believe in it or Not

Climate Change Should Make Planned Obsolescence Obsolete

Would-Be Asteroid Miners Should Consider What’s in Orbit Around the Earth First

Can Rideshare Change the Real Estate Market and the Economy?

What Will Happen When Genetic Manipulation of Human DNA Becomes the Norm?

Outfitting a Mined Asteroid Into a Luxury Solar System Shuttle

I Am a Witness to Climate Change—You Should Be, Too

The Environmental Advantage of a Space Elevator

The U.S. Must Recycle Recycling

Climate Change Will Herald the Age of Island Cities

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

Nations at Risk of Becoming Psychological Echo Chambers: China Sets Worrisome Precedent

Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy

What Do We Do Now That We Know Climate Change is Inevitable?

Are You Susceptible to Digitally Induced Cognitive Karma

Why the Oceans Will Be Humanity’s Life Raft

There May Be a Quadrillion Dollars Lying About on the Moon

Mining That First Asteroid - Manned Mission or AI?

A Convergence of Technologies Will Create a New Age of Space Exploration

Steampunk Meets Star Wars: A Harrowing Micro-Tale of Future Spacefarers

The Space Habitat Revisited and Revised

Thruster On a Chip: An Alternative Rocket Science That Could Revolutionize Space Travel

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Climate Change Should Make Planned Obsolescence Obsolete

Lag in Sociological Evolution Has Become an Existential Problem

2019-07-04T09:37:00.001-07:00

Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash

Technology has evolved from the invention of the tool to the machine to the automated machine. From stone spearheads to autonomous cars in 5,000 years. The evolution of our society has not been able to keep pace.

Sociological studies of primates show that their societal structures are very stable. For instance, the gorilla formed the societal artifice of a single male with a harem about 16 million years ago and it has evolved little, if any, since. Humans are primates but are not as socially rigid as the gorilla. At some point we went from individual mating couples to banding together in mixed sex groups in a short period of time, apparently to take advantage of strength in numbers. Out of tribes came the ancient civilizations.

The ancient world was a very fluid and free time for humanity. One could travel unfettered all over the world if you had the means and sufficient bodyguards. There was very little restriction. Restrictions on travel did not occur until the third and fourth centuries of the Roman Empire when serfdom came into being. Serfs were not allowed to travel and had to accept their lord’s conditions of existence. The Romans even invented the “passport” to control travel. Shortly afterward, during the Renaissance, the idea of nation states took hold, allowing rulers to control valuable labor and get rid of unwanted ethnic and religious minorities simply be importing or exporting them across borders.

This is pretty much where we are stuck now. The nation state system has been in effect since the Renaissance 700 years ago, although superficially changed by colonialism and two world wars. Our society has gone from mating pairs to tribalism to nation states over the past 800,000 years. Our technological advances make our sociological advances look quaint. Technologically, we have gone from fire to nuclear fusion. Sociologically, we have gone from mating pairs to large, combative groups of mating pairs—not that great of an advancement. One could argue it is a regression.

Societies were originally invented to protect all the members of that society. The accumulation of wealth, power, and technology by a few in these societies has allowed the original intent of protection for all members to be perverted into protection of those members with wealth and power. The extent of this varies a lot from country to country. For a dichotomy look at Scandinavian countries with their social democracy versus the U.S. with its blatant plutocracy. Quality of life in America is plunging. Lifespans are shortening. Infant and maternal death rates are rising. Four in ten people in the U.S. would not be able to come up with a $400 emergency expense. People die without healthcare. Two-thirds of bankruptcies are for medical reasons. Scandinavians, on the other hand, regularly survey as being some of the happiest people on Earth. They have little inequality of income and universal single payer healthcare.

This article is not about the vagaries of American society. America is just an example of what can go wrong in the current sociological setting. There are other countries just as bad or worse than the United States, and that is the point.

No country on Earth takes the stand that the world’s resources are for everybody, not just those that figure out how to wheedle them out of everybody else. And that is the end game of capitalism. One person ends up with everything. The only game worse is communism where everybody ends up with nothing. Capitalism being the economic mechanism du jour for the world does not mean that, as a species, we are well and totally fucked. It seems to be working in countries where money is not allowed to buy votes or legislation. It is not working in America. American needs to come up with a way to control capitalism so that it reflects a benefit for all parties involved instead of only a few. We still all collectively need clean air and water, food, health care, shelter, and education. We need a climate that is not going to morph into a man killer or destroyer of homes.

The Scandinavian countries have managed a balancing act of free market capitalism and a comprehensive welfare state using a parliamentary democracy. We would do well to look at and, perhaps borrow, some of their methods.

Climate change has added an urgency to the mix. What we need now is a world organization that has the power to control nations similar to what nations now have in controlling their individual states or prefectures—a United Nations on steroids or everything Lance Armstrong took to win Tour de France seven times.

We cannot keep letting our sociological evolution slip backwards while our technical evolution soars. Technology is giving tools to individuals that allow them to take advantage of others to an extent that was never possible in pre-technology. And the rate at which that is happening is increasing geometrically. We have become thinly veneered reptilian brains with nukes and lasers and military grade psychological warfare techniques.

Is it hopeless? Are we doomed? Will we succumb, as a species, to the baser instincts DNA has provided to survive a landscape of dire wolves, cave lions, and giant bears? I think it depends on those other facilities nature gave us. Our capacity for empathy and love and understanding must be developed on an individual basis to be able, as a group, to decide how to go forward into a better future. It is dependent on us … no, it is dependent on you to love your neighbor as yourself. It is dependent on you to understand we are all human beings with the same wants and desires for well-being and happiness no matter which side of whatever border we come from. Once that happens on an individual basis then no, we are not doomed. It is not hopeless. We can then decide through the mechanism of our democratic society the correct path forward. And when that happens we will know that our social evolution is back on track to catch up with our technological evolution after seven hundred years of stagnation.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Would-Be Asteroid Miners Should Consider What’s in Orbit Around the Earth First

Can Rideshare Change the Real Estate Market and the Economy?

What Will Happen When Genetic Manipulation of Human DNA Becomes the Norm?

Outfitting a Mined Asteroid Into a Luxury Solar System Shuttle

I Am a Witness to Climate Change—You Should Be, Too

The Environmental Advantage of a Space Elevator

The U.S. Must Recycle Recycling

Climate Change Will Herald the Age of Island Cities

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

Nations at Risk of Becoming Psychological Echo Chambers: China Sets Worrisome Precedent

Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy

What Do We Do Now That We Know Climate Change is Inevitable?

Are You Susceptible to Digitally Induced Cognitive Karma

Why the Oceans Will Be Humanity’s Life Raft

There May Be a Quadrillion Dollars Lying About on the Moon

Mining That First Asteroid - Manned Mission or AI?

A Convergence of Technologies Will Create a New Age of Space Exploration

Steampunk Meets Star Wars: A Harrowing Micro-Tale of Future Spacefarers

The Space Habitat Revisited and Revised

Thruster On a Chip: An Alternative Rocket Science That Could Revolutionize Space Travel

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Climate Change Should Make Planned Obsolescence Obsolete

Your Property Value Is Dependent on Climate Change Whether You Believe in it or Not

2019-07-02T21:17:00.001-07:00

Photo by Jesse Brack on Unsplash

People are now buying land they think will be worth three times its value in 100 years because of climate change. Popular Science created this great little video (less than 2 minutes) showing the best places to live by the year 2100 A.D. If you think you’re safe by not living near the ocean think again. Even far from rising seas, there are other things to consider—tornadoes, heat waves, insects hosting tropical diseases, drought, flooding, and wildfires.

Even if you do find a piece of property that experts say is safe for the next 50 years or so, that doesn’t mean you’re going to be safe staying there. Think about all the things you are dependent on in our modern civilization. Sure you can grow your own food and hunt and forage; but what about medical emergencies, connectivity with the outside world, and higher education for your kids or grandkids?

If this is your master plan that means you are, at the least, middle class or upper middle class to have the funds to accomplish this. What about the 200 million Americans that can’t even cover a $500 emergency. Do you really think they are going to just sit where they are and burn up, drown, or get smashed to pieces by a tornado? They are going to be traipsing through your vegetable garden, drinking your well dry, and knocking on your door demanding food and medicine and toilet paper.

All of the above is true, but it doesn’t matter. People with the means are still going to buy property in cooler, safer places. They are still going to sell the property they are moving from. Our DNA is preaching "Survival!" and we are the choir. The pace at which this takes place will accelerate as the media continuously spotlights the newest atrocities perpetrated by climate change. More and more scientific papers and organizations will point out what is going to happen and how soon and, of course, its inevitability. This acceleration will be exacerbated by FOMO, the fear of missing out. In this case, missing out on the major trend of a whole geological age—the Anthropocene. The people buying land now thinking it will be worth three times that in a hundred years are in a self-fulfilling prophetic loop.

What is the alternative to buying climate change-proof land? Buy the means to live wherever you want. Invest in a super-insulated, 4-wheel drive camper van with at least 600 watts of solar panels connected to a lithium ion battery and oversized fuel and water tanks. You can live anywhere off grid for a couple of weeks. Such a vehicle would enable you to dodge the vicissitudes of weather to some extent.

As for all those people that wind up buying land in Minnesota, Montana, or Canada, you’ll probably do okay just living there on your own; but, if you want to make a killing, set up an RV park to take care of those people that buy that camper van. It will give them a break every once in a while from all that living in the wild. Adding a few saunas and high-speed internet wouldn’t hurt. And a bar. And grill. Just saying.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Would-Be Asteroid Miners Should Consider What’s in Orbit Around the Earth First

Can Rideshare Change the Real Estate Market and the Economy?

What Will Happen When Genetic Manipulation of Human DNA Becomes the Norm?

Outfitting a Mined Asteroid Into a Luxury Solar System Shuttle

I Am a Witness to Climate Change—You Should Be, Too

The Environmental Advantage of a Space Elevator

The U.S. Must Recycle Recycling

Climate Change Will Herald the Age of Island Cities

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

Nations at Risk of Becoming Psychological Echo Chambers: China Sets Worrisome Precedent

Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy

What Do We Do Now That We Know Climate Change is Inevitable?

Are You Susceptible to Digitally Induced Cognitive Karma

Why the Oceans Will Be Humanity’s Life Raft

There May Be a Quadrillion Dollars Lying About on the Moon

Mining That First Asteroid - Manned Mission or AI?

A Convergence of Technologies Will Create a New Age of Space Exploration

Steampunk Meets Star Wars: A Harrowing Micro-Tale of Future Spacefarers

The Space Habitat Revisited and Revised

Thruster On a Chip: An Alternative Rocket Science That Could Revolutionize Space Travel

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

There's An Asteroid Out There With All of Our Names On It

What Will Be the Most Common Currency In a Future Space-Based Society?

The Military Values High Ground - Space Is the Highest

Climate Change Should Make Planned Obsolescence Obsolete

Movable Housing Will Increase With Climate Change

2019-06-27T19:55:00.000-07:00

Photo by Josep Castells on Unsplash

The year is 2035. Ralph and Susie go to bed after an impromptu party at their mobile home camping center. At 12:45 AM the weather alarm goes off. The klaxon warning has them up and out of bed. The screen on the pilot console has come on automatically showing a local weather map, their location, and the location of an F3 tornado heading in their direction.

Susie plops down in the captain’s chair, punches the “on” button, and grabs the joystick. Ralph straps into the copilot’s chair while the six props on the flying camper get up to speed. As soon as he clicks in, Susie pulls back on the joystick, and they lift into the air. Quick disconnects on electrical, cable, and plumbing do their job, leaving wires and tubing crisscrossed on the small concrete pad.

Satellite feeds replace cable as Susie watches their craft pull away from the tornado on the screen. She veers out of the vortex’s predicted path, goes three miles further, just to be safe, and sets down on a hillock in a pasture to wait out the storm.

Yes, climate change has given a completely new meaning to the term “mobile home” in the future. Because of the increase in violent weather and rising oceans, mobility may be a favorable asset for your living facilities. Snails will have nothing on humans, carrying all the comforts of home that technology will allow around with us.

As the native Americans turned to the tent and horse-drawn travois to follow their favorite food around so might future Americans turn to camper vans and trailers to avoid recalcitrant weather. As the story above alludes to, maybe even a flying electric camper van (I thought of it first, Elon!) to make it easier to outmaneuver rain storms, wind storms, dust storms, snow storms, floods, heat waves, visiting relatives, or the park ranger.

Seriously, as climate conditions worsen there will be adaptations by insects, wildlife, and humans. Wealthy humans will “hunker down” in expansive, well-supplied bunkers they feel are strong enough to survive any type of weather. Unfortunately for them, those places may not survive other humans looking for food when things get tough. The not-so-wealthy will probably adopt the same strategy as the wildlife and insects. They will simply move somewhere more pleasant and welcoming.

Even now, the gig economy has produced a demand for mobile housing. Migrant Amazon workers, layoffs in manufacturing and retail, contract work here and there—these represent a rising disconnect between stable residency and place of work. The only stabilizing factor is working from home via computer and that trend is reversing.

One of the most popular vehicles in demand right now is the “stealth” camper van and the stealthier the better. These are typically a Mercedes Sprinter, Ford Transit, or a Dodge Ram ProMaster van converted to a camper with beds, kitchen, bath, the works. The biggest tell-tales from the outside are the nacelle hiding the roll-up shade on one side and the AC on top. Typically there are no outside markings or fancy ad paint jobs proclaiming what they are. That’s the way people like it because they can park just about anywhere they want to catch six to eight hours of comfortable z’s without worrying about hassles from law enforcement. Currently, thousands of retirees cycle between Colorado in the summer and New Mexico in the winter in their vans, campers, and motorhomes to enjoy the best weather of each season.

I don’t see a Mad Max world for the future, mainly because most vehicles by then will be electric, not gasoline powered. But I do see a world where people will adapt to worsening climate conditions. The costliest year for weather in the U.S. was 2017. Last year, 2018, was considered a “raging, howling signal of climate change.” Week after week 2019 brings more tornadoes and so much rain the U.S. corn crop is pretty much destroyed by the historic flooding. These recent years of intensifying bad weather across the U.S. should give us pause to reflect on what might be in store for the future. How many times will people rebuild their homes from floods and tornadoes before they turn to another solution?

I see a trend of mobility as the economy becomes more friable and the weather becomes more unpredictably treacherous. Maybe the U.S. will not become a nation of RV camping sites. Maybe we will get serious about controlling climate change and addressing inequality of wealth. Maybe we will not have to migrate to Alaska every summer in the future to catch a cool breeze. As for me, I’m working on the patent for that flying electric camper van. Don't tell Elon.

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Climate Change Should Make Planned Obsolescence Obsolete

2019-06-27T09:04:00.000-07:00

Photo by Alessandro Bianchi on Unsplash

Once upon a time, things were made to last. Then corporations had a light bulb moment - literally. The companies that made light bulbs back in the 1920s got together and artificially limited the lifespan of the incandescent bulb to 1000 hours. Although it wasn’t known at the time, the records of such a collusion (the Phoebus Cartel) were discovered decades after Osram, General Electric, and Associated Electrical Industries did the deal.

The genie was out of the bottle. This was such a successful strategy, planned obsolescence is now the go-to business plan for phones, ink cartridges, college textbooks, cars, software, office equipment, light bulbs (Still for incandescent! Buy LEDs.), clothes … the list goes on and on.

We must figure out how to rectify this insidious practice. Not only does this border on fraud and immorality, it is a contributor to global warming and a general inefficiency in the use of energy and natural resources.

It can be controlled by regulation. Corporations will not willingly change practices that make them so much money. To enact such regulation will require electing politicians that recognize the dangers of climate change, how planned obsolescence adds to the problem, and are willing to change how business is done. As it stands, the majority of the U.S. Congress, House and Senate, Republican and Democrat, takes too much money from corporations to impartially decide how to regulate this wasteful practice. Corporations purchasing laws is a bigger problem I won’t go into here. As a voter, it is up to you to bring this problem of planned obsolescence up to politicians and ask for solutions.

The practice is not just inefficient and wasteful, producing much more pollution than necessary, it costs you money: Having to go out and buy more light bulbs. Replacing that perfectly good laptop because it won’t support the latest and greatest software. Buying new software because it is the latest and greatest only to find out it is just more complicated, slower, and buggier.

We must learn to vote with our pocketbooks. We want products that are good and good for a very long time. We should not shy from giving praise to products that are sturdy, vital, and long lasting. Take time to give reviews for such products. Shakespeare said this about clothing four hundred years ago and it is just as true today. "Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not expressed in fancy--rich, not gaudy." It means buy the best quality clothes you can afford and avoid fads which quickly fade. Your clothes will last longer, remain fashionable, and save you money.

With all the big problems such as the continued use of fossil fuels and lack of cooperation between governments on climate change, we sometimes forget about some of the other problems that have crept into our society. Planned obsolescence has had its moment in the sun, or shadows, and should now be considered obsolete. It is time for transparency in quality to be the norm, informing us what is best for individuals and our planet.

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Would-Be Asteroid Miners Should Consider What’s in Orbit Around the Earth First

2019-06-25T14:41:00.000-07:00

Courtesy NASA

Five thousand satellites pass over your head every day. Only about two thousand are working. The rest are “junk” … inoperative … kaput. They represent approximately $20 billion worth of material floating around in space. The average weight of the currently active 2,064 satellites is 3,212 pounds. If defunct satellites follow that average it means there is 9,936,000 pounds of inoperable satellite in orbit worth $2,075 per pound. Since getting something into orbit costs about $10,000 per pound the actual value of that unused material in space is worth 120 billion dollars. That is more than is expected to be made from mining many asteroids. This is material that it is known exactly what it is, where it is, it’s already manufactured into useful components specifically for use in space, and it's already in space. Plus, it is much more accessible than even the closest near Earth asteroid. One of the asteroids we have actually been to is Ryugu. It’s estimated mineral value is just 83 billion dollars, and that is before costs to extract it are factored in.

The satellite situation has not gone unnoticed by some. Tom Markusic, founder of Firefly Space Systems, wants to tow these objects to an orbit around Mars where the salvaged components can help out with missions to Mars and the outer planets. Keith Volkert, CEO of Satellite Consulting, Inc., wants to use space tugs to tow these objects to an orbit around the Moon where they can be salvaged at leisure from a small space station orbiting there. The parts would then be catalogued and warehoused for future projects on the Moon or heading outward to Mars or beyond. NASA’s proposed Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway might fill the bill for this purpose, providing an attachment for a combination disassembly dock, warehouse, and habitat.

Besides making money, the removal of dead satellites from Earth orbit is a very good thing. There are too many of them, and the problem is getting worse. See this great time lapse video to see how big the problem is and how fast it is getting worse. There is the very real possibility of the Kessler Syndrome occurring. A cinematic portrayal of this event was well done in the movie Gravity. This is where a collision between objects in Earth orbit creates more objects in a cascading effect that eventually ruins the possibility of getting anything into orbit without being struck. Mankind could be stuck on Earth for a while.

Use those plastic grocery bags again. Save money. Save the world. Here’s how.

New technology in thrusters may enable these salvage plans to take shape. Accion Systems has developed an ion thruster on a chip. It does away with a lot of complicated plumbing, bringing the concept down to a chip that accelerates ions and a reservoir of fluid for ion creation. The thruster chip is called TILE — Tiled Ionic Liquid Electrospray. The size of a deck of cards, a TILE has been operated continuously for 42 days straight. The goal is 417 days. That is a lot of time thrusting and one of the things making this technology so promising.

As far as satellite removal goes, think of a selfie stick with some TILEs and electronics on one end and an attachment mechanism on the other. A swivel to allow directional changes gives us the first space tug chugging its way to the Moon and back, gradually whittling away at all those space debris objects representing orbital Armageddon.

Phase Four is another company making tiny, efficient thrusters applicable for this situation. Large, high voltage electronics typically produce and accelerate ions in Hall thrusters to move things around in space. Phase Four has reduced these components down to a size you might expect in a cellphone. These components generate radio waves accelerating plasma produced from xenon gas. These efficient little engines could be used to nudge old satellites outward to the Moon, maybe Mars.

Going beyond the simple salvage, many of these satellites have simply run out of fuel. If they were to be refueled, they would be perfectly good satellites again. A salvage operation could also become a service operation, boosting the value of this material many times over its salvage value. But there is a legal hurdle that must be jumped before salvaging or servicing occurs. By Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty countries are recognized to have jurisdiction and control over their space objects. Can this be valid after the origin country deliberately abandons the satellite in space? It can’t be a forever situation.

Once some company goes after an abandoned satellite and the country of origin protests, the U.N. must decide how to handle it. The U.N. should tell that nation that if they still want responsibility for their satellite, they will have to pay for it to stay in orbit. A yearly orbital fee based on the weight of the satellite should be levied by the U.N. on the country in question. I believe a nascent satellite salvage company should press the issue to get things done. The world’s governments and the U.N. are unlikely to spontaneously get around to solving this problem.

I think we will be hearing more about companies with schemes to remove dead satellites and simultaneously mine them for their valuable components. It is certainly a better plan than destroying these valuable objects and may even eclipse news and plans for asteroid mining for the near future.

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Can Rideshare Change the Real Estate Market and the Economy?

2019-06-23T08:17:00.000-07:00

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

There’s about 200 million cars in America. That’s a lot, but consider this. There are an estimated two billion parking spaces. In Los Angeles County, 14% of the land area is parking spots for automobiles. This is in a county that is hurting for lack of housing. For almost any city 50-60% of downtown real estate is parking. Here's some quantitative examples. Philadelphia has 2.2 million parking spaces. New York has 1.85 million. Seattle and Des Moines each have 1.6 million. Jackson, Wyoming has just over 100,000 parking places to accommodate its 10,000 residents. My question is this. What happens when those parking spots are no longer needed?

What if rideshare companies become more and more popular to the point that they are the major means of transportation? It’s a myth that Millennials don’t want cars, but it is not a myth that they are penny pinchers. If Lyft and Uber represent a better deal for transportation, Millennials are going to follow the path of least remittance. The retired crowd will be jumping on the rideshare bandwagon as well. Age related physical constraints and the hassle of car upkeep will herd a lot of oldsters into the rideshare camp. If rideshare is pervasive, convenient, and economic, it will appeal to anyone wanting to go from point A to point B. And you don't need a parking spot just to pick someone up or drop them off.

It may be a stretch to visualize rideshare dominating individual transport, but a recent claim by Tesla may light up your occipital lobe. Elon Musk claims to be able to put an autonomous vehicle on the road by 2020. If they are truly autonomous, it may mean thousands of people buying vehicles that can go out and make them money. If the autonomous software is truly back compatible, there will be a potential quarter million autonomous taxis on the road ready to go for the price of the chip. That's how many Teslas have been sold. The only parking space these vehicles will need is the owner’s driveway.

Then there are flying taxis. My bet is on Blackfly. It is coming out in 2020 and will cost about the same as an SUV. It will be more likely for companies rather than individuals to own Blackflies because they will be more likely to afford the insurance premiums. Once Uber and Lyft are entrenched and flying taxis are ubiquitous, parking spaces will be like appendixes, a useless thing from a bygone era.

What will cities do with all that land? The utopian answer would be small parks, pedestrian amenities, and low cost housing. Or they could sell or lease the land. You can’t blame them. They are going to be missing out on vehicle registration and licensing, gas tax, parking citations, traffic citations, ownership taxes, and parking fees. These are major sources of revenue for municipalities, particularly small ones. Utopia quickly turns dystopian as police and city employees are cut back along with city services. I can see a future in which cities have auctions for unused parking space land going to high bidders with prequalified, city-approved land use plans. That way, the city can have somewhat of a guarantee on future property taxes.

It is not just parking spots downtown that we are talking about. It will affect both urban and suburban housing markets. Construction of new single family dwellings may include the option of no driveway or garage. This should make housing more affordable. Real estate developers will be able to put the same living area in a smaller foundation footprint. With no driveway, they can reduce the size of the yard. Smaller lots, smaller price but more houses. A boon to the purchaser and the developer.

This brings us to another major economic sea change as a result of rideshare—the ownership of cars by individuals. Cars sit idle and unused 95% of the time. That is an amazing statistic. You know it’s true unless, of course, you’re a Lyft or Uber driver. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average yearly cost to drive a vehicle is $9,576 per year. The car loan debt in the U.S. is 1.14 trillion dollars and rising. There are 276 million registered vehicles in America. Since the average car weighs 4,000 pounds there are 552 million tons of iron, steel, glass, aluminum, rubber, and plastic sitting in American driveways doing nothing but taking up space 95% of the time.

Imagine this. Imagine the 1.14 trillion dollars back in the pockets of American consumers. Imagine, going forward, they will not be on the hook for $9,576 per year on a vehicle. Imagine all the energy saved, pollution not created, and carbon dioxide not spewed into the atmosphere by manufacturing and driving all those cars. Imagine all that material available for other products. That will be the power of rideshare when it becomes the ubiquitous form of everyday travel. Rideshare will do the same thing with thousands of cars that used to be done with millions of cars.

Society as a whole will certainly reap benefits from this but what about the individual? At the current Uber and Lyft rates, no. If you take that 5% of the time (1.2 hours per day) a vehicle is used and assume rideshare is used instead, it will cost about $56 per day which is $20,440 per year, twice as much as owning a vehicle. Don’t forget, however, the convenience of letting someone else drive while you check your phone or write articles for Medium. Rideshare has the potential of making our economy more efficient and more egalitarian, but it's not there yet.

There are two things that could change the equation in the near
future—Elon coming out with his autonomous, robotic Tesla slave cars and Blackfly making a big splash with companies wanting to do with flying what Uber and Lyft have done with ground transportation. And don’t be surprised if it’s Uber and Lyft taking wing.

There is a general trend away from personal use of automobiles. Scooters and bikes are a thing in some inner cities. More people are getting their groceries and prepared food delivered, and there is a general tendency toward renting things rather than owning them so maybe there is hope for the continued growth of rideshare. The automobile industry may have something to say about all this since it will take away their customers. That may be why Ford and GM are cranking up their own autonomous car divisions. They figure a portion of a smaller market is better than nothing at all.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my car, but I love money more than my car. Once the economics are there, I will switch to a rideshare service. The garage will be converted to a man cave or a spare guest bedroom, depending on how the discussion goes with the wife. And that is a choice that will be made over and over across this great land.

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What Will Happen When Genetic Manipulation of Human DNA Becomes the Norm?

2019-06-18T21:37:00.000-07:00

Photo by Valeria Zoncoll on Unsplash

We do have a fixation on superheroes. A goodly portion of screen time has been devoted to such. Before screen, comics. It is a profitable genre. It doesn’t matter that many of the powers defy the laws of physics or logic. They tap into a human desire to see evil be given a swift kick in the pants and sent on its way.

Some of the heroes and heroines are more believable than others. Jessica Jones, for instance, has super strength but it’s not that incredible sounding. The reason chimpanzees are 2-4 times stronger than humans is attributable to the muscle fiber being longer and denser, a higher ratio of fast twitch to slow twitch fibers, and the chimps lack of fine motor control. In humans, this limits our muscle strength except in extraordinary circumstances where chemistry overrides motor control circuitry. This is when adrenaline-suffused people lift cars off someone trapped underneath. Also, tonic clonic seizures can remove the strictures on muscle strength, breaking bones and endangering those trying to restrain limb movement.

We already know that there are real live humans with superhuman traits—people with photographic memory, that can do complicated math in their head, get by on four hours sleep every night, quick healers, slow to age, see a hundred million colors instead of just one million, super strong bones, resistant to poisoning, possess large and powerful muscles without working out, super tasting abilities, super endurance, vision of 20/2 that enables identification of a person's face a mile away, disease resistance, getting by with less oxygen, super good looks. Those traits and capabilities are in all of us somewhere in our genes.

Amazon Prime recently came out with “HANNA”, a TV series about a genetics experiment with baby girls to turn them into super soldiers. Hanna gets rescued from the experiment and raised in the wild. She is strong with fast reflexes, super hearing, and very smart. With CRISPR technology so easily and widely available, this is now a possible reality.

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRSPR) is a genomic editing tool derived from archaea (similar to bacteria) which uses it to defend against bacteriophages. It is now used in the laboratory to edit genes in living organisms. Variations of CRSPR can be used in epigenetics to simply tweak the expression of a gene without changing the gene itself. It has already been used on humans in China. CRISPR technology has been used there to produce two HIV resistant babies. The scientist involved was arrested by the Chinese government and has not been heard from since. The experiment was roundly condemned by other geneticists around the world. This is not the end. It is the beginning. As these genetic tools become ever more sophisticated and miracles with animals in labs become commonplace, the rules about using it on humans will inevitably be relaxed.

The first use will, and rightfully so, be curing diseases and genetic defects. Next, it will be used by wealthy parents wanting the “best” for their baby. Good looks, athleticism, intelligence, well-balanced emotional system—you name it, and it will be requested. Unfortunately, this will be another force driving inequality in society.

As the use of genetic tools on human DNA becomes commonplace, governments may easily start programs that take orphan babies and give them better genetics like an IQ boost, quicker reflexes, better eye sight, and stronger muscles as a “public service”. When these children become old enough to join the military, they will be given sign-up bonuses for their abilities. And that’s only in the free societies. An authoritarian regime or country that has no rule of law may not give a thought to such niceties as allowing the option of a nonmilitary career.

Just like governments currently don’t account for taking care of damaged humanity for the rest of their lives as a cost of war, future governments will not take into consideration the problems of reintegrating super soldiers with military training back into society. If and when such a group is let loose into general society, it will make for very interesting times. You will have government modified super humans competing against the offspring of the elite wealthy for money and power. The middle class will continue its shrinkage, and the poor won’t stand a chance in the current environment of uber capitalism.

More importantly this acclimation could begin, as it has with many technologies, a trend of pushing the limits of genetic technology. Eventually, there could arise an arms race to determine who can create the ultimate super human. And isn’t that a more defining characteristic for humanity than how we look and what we can do? Humans take things to the maximum.

In those future days, our great, great, great grandchildren will look back on such shows as Jessica Jones or Alphas as fondly quaint in their lack of imagination as to how far the human mind and body can be tweaked. And, in turn, their descendants will look back on them the same way. That is what we do and who we are.

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2019-06-16T21:04:00.000-07:00

Katigori on flickr

We are very close to waking up one day and finding ourselves in Fringe’s Alternative Universe. You can always tell by the airships’ sedate glide above the skyscrapers. Appropriately, it is on the fringe of engineering that the hybrid airship has quietly come about.

The first powered flight was an airship 51 years before the Wright brothers. A Frenchman by the name of Jules Henri Giffard attached a 3 horsepower steam engine to a cigar-shaped lifting bag and piloted it 17 miles in Paris at 6 miles per hour.

The Zeppelin airship, a rigid frame with cloth cover and internal lifting bags, was built by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in 1895. The luxury class flying industry it brought about died along with 36 passengers in the flames of the Hindenburg crash in May of 1937.

The airship had a lot going for it. It could carry a large payload faster than a passenger liner. There was very little turbulence and it had an impressive range. They can hover or turn in place. Flying low, they don’t typically require pressurization.

And it had some serious drawbacks. It required attentive ground crews to keep it near the ground when loading and unloading. It was vulnerable to wind gusts on the ground and in the air, where it avoided bad weather at all costs. Hangar space had to be huge and, therefore, expensive. They were so huge, an old German airship hangar was converted into a large, covered waterpark. Using hydrogen in conjunction with flammable construction material was bad, bad, bad.

Because a lot of these bad things are surmountable, a company has decided to bring back the airship. It is a hybrid airship called Airlander. It is hybrid because it gets its lift from three sources; helium-filled bag, wing-shaped lifting body, and thrusters. Using these in combination allows the ship to land like a plane but with a much shorter runway. It can also hover and come straight down. It carries its own anchor mast and can withstand 80 kilometer winds without a hangar. Which is the point. It doesn’t need a hangar and requires only a two-person ground crew for the Airlander 10 with a 10 metric ton capacity and none for the Airlander 50 with a 50 ton capacity. Production models are expected to be in the air by 2020.

While there is a lot of hoopla about commercial passenger flying, heavy cargo transport is a given with the airship. Especially since it can go anywhere and land on any flat surface, including water without the need of a runway or hangar.

Africa is an undeveloped continent just waiting for the Airlander to open it up. There are many places in Africa that don’t have access by paved road or the existing roads are unpaved and in poor condition. This is a severe restraint to travel and trade. With a hybrid airship, one could access the farthest reaches of a country with heavy equipment, prefab buildings, or hundreds of people at a time without roads. There are many parts of Asia on a par with Africa as far as undeveloped infrastructure.

And who is at the forefront of acquiring and utilizing this technology? The Chinese. They are in line to receive three of the first ten manufactured Airlanders, which begins manufacturing in 2020. Just like they envisioned the importance of rare earth minerals 20 years ago and set out to dominate that market, the Chinese have realized the importance of roadless transportation, especially with regards to Africa and undeveloped parts of Asia.

The Airlander is not the only airship China has in mind. Soon there will be an airship assembly line in Jingmen, China. With designs from French company Flying Whales, a Chinese company, China Aviation Industry General Aircraft Co., Ltd. (CAIGA), will soon be pumping out airships to use for logging in Asia beginning in 2022. These ships are twice as long as a Boeing 747 and will lift 60 tons of cargo.

Electric propulsion is already being studied for the Airlander and there seems to be no roadblocks to the airship becoming fully electric or a hybrid electric. In the latter case, the Airlander will become a hybrid hybrid airship. Sounds silly, but imagine a swath of flexible solar cells blanketing the enormous surface of an airship feeding several lithium ion batteries that would feel comfortable aboard a Tesla. If it works on the Airlander, it will work on any airship.

Back to the 60 metric ton behemoths being built in China. That’s 132,277 pounds of payload. If it were passengers instead of logs, and we say the average weight of a human is 150 pounds then these ships could carry 882 passengers. That’s not true because there must be seats and luggage compartments and other stuff. It would only carry about 500 passengers. Now make the airship electric, and you have the cheapest airline in the world. No fuel costs. Not the fastest, but a lot of people would forego speed for thrift in the third world economies.

Okay, so we won’t be in Fringe’s Alternate Universe, but it will look damn close except for those Chines symbols on the sides of the airships floating by. The rest of the world needs to realize the potential of this industry. Expensive infrastructure for travel and freight can be eliminated. Roads, airports, fuel stations will be much less important going forward once these airships are put in production and utilized to their maximum potential. The Hindenburg is dead! Long live the Hindenburg!

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Outfitting a Mined Asteroid Into a Luxury Solar System Shuttle

2019-06-08T10:12:00.000-07:00

The early explorers set out on the high seas in wooden boats with cloth sails. They were brave people facing difficult conditions. The next century will see a similar wave of brave people willing to face difficulties to go see in space what no other human has seen or experienced. With proper planning, adequate funding, and modern technology, however, the conditions may not be all that difficult. In fact, they would definitely be considered luxurious by the crews of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria. And it all has to do with an industry that doesn’t even exist yet—asteroid mining.

Near Earth objects or NEOs are usually asteroids, sometimes comets, that come close to Earth at some point in their orbits around the Sun. These are some of the most likely candidates for extraterrestrial mining. There is no gravity penalty with asteroids like there is for Mars and the Moon so design, equipment, and fuel costs are much lower. Although the technology is almost up for it, there are a couple of things to be resolved before mining the asteroids becomes a real thing.

A power source is required that won’t fizzle out towards the asteroid’s farthest point from Earth, which may be even further out than the asteroid belt. NASA could have a solution with technology called KRUSTY (Kilopower Reactor Using Sterling Technology) that puts out between 1 and 10 Kilowatts. I doubt that NASA is tired of the Simpsons jokes yet, so keep 'em coming. While most of the power needs of mining drones would be satisfied by a field of solar panels installed on the surface of the asteroid or hanging in orbit, it would not hurt to have a back-up generator should something go wrong. The drones will be powered by large lithium ion batteries like those in a Tesla and automatically seek a recharge near depletion like a Roomba.

KRUSTY nuclear power plant - courtesy NASA

Also, someone needs to come up with an AI capable of running a space mission on its own. Once that's done and likely asteroid choices vetted, it won’t be long before AI driven, solar powered mining drones with a nuclear backup touch down on an asteroid as it makes a flyby of Earth and start mining it for water, metals, silicon, or whatever substance of value that can be hauled back to Earth orbit on the next closest pass.

If the drones are careful about how they excavate this chunk of space rock, the owners will not only be making money from the mine, but by renting out a perfectly safe and comfortable Solar System shuttle as well. It will serve as a scientific expedition base as easily as a planetary system cruise ship or some combo thereof.

What makes this craft so safe and comfortable? Besides the normal stuff like food, water, and air, there are two big current problems for human habitation of space—radiation and the lack of gravity. Radiation is a big bugaboo. Cosmic radiation can throw an iron nuclei at you that packs the power of a baseball thrown at 40 mph. Concentrating that much power in such a small area causes physical damage and ionizing radiation with mutagenic effects on human tissue. It could damage your eyesight and your genes. Also, we are not sure why, the lack of gravity in space is not that great for humans. It makes bones porous and muscles weak. It can also affect vision and balance. An asteroid-based shuttle does away with both of these problems. Here is how it will be done.

We will use asteroid 1996 FG3 as an example for this thought exercise. Asteroid 1996 FG3 has a diameter of 1.7 kilometers or 5,600 feet. It is a chondrite asteroid and rotates once every 3.6 hours and weighs more than a trillion pounds. It crosses Earth's orbit reaching just inside the orbit of Venus on its trip toward the Sun. Outward bound, it comes close to the orbit of Mars without crossing before heading back in. It takes 395 days to complete its journey so your trip will normally take at least a year.

The mining robots will form a cylindrical shape from the interior of the asteroid as they remove material to be processed. The axis of this cylinder will coincide with the rotational axis of the asteroid. But there is a problem. Even if the internal cavity is quite large, say 3,400 feet in diameter, standing on the inside of that big cylindrical cavity the artificial gravity would be a paltry .002 standard Earth gravity at its current rate of rotation. However much it would help your dunk shot, it would not work to keep you healthy.

If artificial gravity were to be created for cavities inside, the asteroid would have to be spun up to about 1.25 rpm or 20 times faster than what it is now. Even using the mass driver propulsion system I’ve proposed in A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic, Asteroid Propulsion System producing 155,000 pounds of thrust, it would take a hundred years to get the asteroid up to speed. How can this be solved?

We build a cylinder inside this cavity that is much lighter. With a cylinder spinning inside the asteroid, the gravity can be controlled by the speed of rotation. Assuming the dimensions already given, a cylinder 3,400 feet in diameter spinning at 1.25 rpm would provide .91 normal gravity. A 200 pound person would weigh 182 pounds if that person was standing on the outside wall of that cylinder.

Such a large cylinder may have many levels from the center to the outer wall. If each level was a hundred feet from floor to ceiling, there would still be 17 levels. Gravity at the innermost level (100 feet from the center) would be .05 Earth normal while level 10 (1,000 feet from the center) would be .53 or half Earth normal.

To save time and resources, the cylinder will be made a lot smaller and the rotation sped up to compensate. For instance, a 2,000 foot diameter cylinder spun at 1.65 rpm to provides .93 Earth gravity at the outermost level. But we’re not talking about enough room for a space colony … yet. We are only planning for a few dozen people. Plus, if the cylinder is over 100 feet long, serious structural issues begin to pop up at the outer level, the same ones that bedevil an engineer on Earth trying to span a 100 feet with proper safety margins. The above design can be pared down to its simplest configuration—a glorified centrifuge.

This centrifuge would consist of two arms of equal length attached to a central hub. The arms would serve as the vertical access tube to the different elevations and as the main structural support countering centrifugal forces.

Drawing by Glen Hendrix. Click to enlarge.

This first illustration shows a minimalist layout for the habitat inside the asteroid. The hub of the habitat contains electromagnetic bearings that provide frictionless rotation of the habitat. The illustration shows six levels but that could vary. Whatever the final configuration, the arms have to be identical and the internal loading must be monitored by AI to prevent unbalanced loads.

The long, curved outer tubes on the arms will be considered the “basements” as they are the farthest thing “down” and they have the highest gravity at .93 g, a little less than Earth normal. The next level “up” would be .79 g and the next, .65 g. The short tubes closest to the center will be the “attics”. They only have an artificial gravity of .23 g, less than 1/4 of Earth’s gravity. The basement and the next level up will be the primary levels for residence since this will convey the greatest protection against the deleterious effects of low gravity. The rest will serve as labs, storage, and special applications.

Drawing by Glen Hendrix. Click to enlarge.

1996 FG3 is a chondrite asteroid made up of anhydrous silicates, hydrated clays, organic polymers, magnetites, sulfides, and maybe some nucleic and amino acids. The Murchison meteorite proved the extent of organic materials in space when 70 different amino acids were found using high resolution spectroscopic tools. There is the possibility of millions of unique organic compounds in that same meteorite. It is possible these will also show up in asteroids like 1996 FG2.

The asteroid has water, which is important. Water will be extracted during the mining process and stored as ice. This water will power the rotation of this habitable centrifuge. Rocket motors burning hydrogen and oxygen will bring the habitat up to speed with occasional boosts to keep it there. The hydrogen and oxygen come from water mined from the asteroid. This will be the only instance where rocket exhaust in space can be reclaimed and reused. The rocket exhaust will turn to water which will turn to ice which will accumulate in the inner cavity housing the habitat. Special drones will vacuum the ice crystals up periodically for recycling.

Drawing by Glen Hendrix. Click to enlarge.

Once the habitat is up to speed, it’s time for the voyagers to move in. A deep space tug has brought them from Earth’s orbit to 1996 FG3 as it makes one of its passes near to Earth. The tug parks in a bay excavated for it by the mining drones. This gives it protection from radiation coming from most directions. The illustration labeled “Detail 3” shows the tug in its protective bay. The space-suited future inhabitants go from the tug to the access tunnel dug into the rock of the asteroid. This leads to the airlock for the habitat. Through this they gain entry to pressurized living space and transition from 3.6 rotations per hour of the asteroid to the 1.65 rotations per minute of the habitat. They shed their suits, and climb “down” one arm or the other to different levels.

Drawing by Glen Hendrix. Click to enlarge.

As illustrated, this habitat has about 320,000 square feet of habitable space. That does not include areas for storage or utilities. If just half is used for 600 to 1200 square feet apartments, a hundred to two hundred people could have their own digs aboard this asteroid shuttle.

Drawing by Glen Hendrix. Click to enlarge.

This design easily lends itself to expansion. From the minimal wedges of the original layout, it goes full circular. Also, the mining drones have excavated four more cavities for additional rotating habitats and added another access tunnel with docking bay at the other end of the asteroid. This space would allow about 26,000 people to inhabit the shuttle.

By this time, and we may be talking about a couple of centuries in the future, there is a mature economic system in space. There will still be a few tourists, but much of the habitat will be devoted to labs and manufacturing facilities making products in low gravity or vacuum that can't be made on Earth. There will be labs studying new organic compounds discovered on asteroids and comets. It could include a new repository of seeds that will replace the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. It will be safer from cosmic radiation and/or conflict and climate change on Earth. Likewise, a repository of the world's animals as embryos will come about and be stored on such an asteroid.

On its approach to Mars, it will become commonplace for one of the deep space tugs to rendezvous with the uppermost station of the Mars Space Elevator, allowing people to go to the surface of Mars to conduct business or science or just sightsee. Likewise, the approach to Venus allows travelers to make a connection with the orbital labs around Venus working to terraform the planet.

Other asteroids will be converted in a similar matter. Some will have orbits taking travelers to the outer edges of the asteroid belt, almost to Jupiter. These shuttles will be excellent for launching expeditions to the outer planets and their moons, the Kuiper Belt, and even the Oort Cloud. Outposts with fuel and supplies for these ventures can be more easily stocked with such a conveyance.

The human race is at this fantastical pivot point in history. At the same instant in time, historically speaking, we are poised to begin an expansion into space and to witness our planet ravaged by unforeseen (or ignored) circumstances involving the very industrial/technology base that allows us to venture into the great unknown. I sincerely hope we are up to the precarious balancing act from here forward that will allow us to keep our home planet livable while exploring others.

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2019-06-07T08:13:00.000-07:00

Photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash

Growing up in Texas, I always looked forward to car trips. Texas is big, but its landscapes and ecoregions are diverse. Plants and animals changed with the mileage. I remember seeing much more wildlife on those trips than I do now.

Scissor tailed flycatchers lined telephone wires by the dozen every few miles. When corn or sorghum fields came close to the road, hundreds of red wing blackbirds swirled in and out of the edges and lounge in the ditches, taking breaks from whatever they were doing inside those rows. Roadrunners unwisely dashed in front of the car—at least several every trip. Which brings up the carnage. There was a lot of road kill. There were foxes, skunks, armadillos, snakes, coyotes, turtles, birds, squirrels, raccoons, foxes, possums, lizards, frogs, you name it. Every half mile or so was a reminder of mortality.

Sometimes we would be lucky enough to spot a turtle before it got too far across the road and pick it up and move it to a safe spot on the other side. When was the last time that happened to you? Not in a long time for me. I don’t remember helping snakes across the road, though. Driver prejudice, I’m fairly certain.

Even living in the city, it would be common to see geese flying south for the winter. I would hear them first. You could tell how high they were by the sound. Now, I hardly ever see that. No more fireflies arising from the ditches or woody copses on spring and summer nights.

I saw rivers of silver in the sky one day. Then it began raining spiders. We ran inside. I remember a biblical invasion of grasshoppers. Huge yellow things that spit brown juice. The power in their legs when they launched from my hand was amazing. Texas horned lizards were an everyday thing for a kid messing around outside. I haven’t seen one in the wild in thirty years.

I still see the occasional victim of vehicular slaughter, but it is more likely to be a dog or cat than a wild animal. The only thing I see more of now than back then is deer. It’s almost as if we care more about them and have carefully cultivated them so that now there is enough to register as a major percentage of road kill. I guess we don’t care about the rest of the lot. Which is too bad. I kind of miss those silly looking scissor tails.

I think it is important we remember these things and compare them to our current reality. It is particularly urgent because of climate change. Things will soon start to change faster and faster. I think it is important to convey this information to others and to our children. Think back to when you were a child. What was around then that is missing now? Write it down. We need to remember lest we forget completely, as a society and a civilization, how things are changing—for better or worse.

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America’s Choices on Climate Change

2019-05-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

On the one hand you have the climate deniers, mainly in the United States, and mostly fossil fuel adherents saying it’s hard to determine the extent of humanity’s involvement, and that to combat climate change will simply cost too much money. It won’t be that bad. It’s God’s will. Basically, they will say anything to protect the interests of fossil fuel. And they have spent a lot of money convincing other people to buy into climate change being fake news. This article does not address those duped into a false assurance by propaganda.

On the other hand you have 97% of the world’s climate scientists in agreement that climate change is real and it is caused by mankind. The rest of the world, every other country, is in agreement with the climate scientists and have shown that agreement by supporting the Paris Agreement. With the current administration vocally opposed to the agreement and swearing to withdraw at first opportunity, the U.S. is now the only holdout.

The last time CO2 was this high, nearly 416 ppm, was 10-15 million years ago during the Miocene. Seas were a hundred feet higher and average surface temps were 11 degrees F. hotter. If climate is so CO2 dependent, why don’t we see that now? Because normally the Earth sees a change from 280 ppm to 413 ppm CO2 over the course of millions of years, not two centuries. There is going to be some lag time. Right now, however, glaciers and polar ice are melting. The sea is rising. Extreme weather events are common. An extinction event is happening before our eyes, and there is a cult of American deniers hindering the ability of the world to do anything about it.

There are many directions it can go, but boiled down to a binary format of the extremes the government’s choices are these:

1. Pay lip service to the climate change believers, fund a few programs, make it look like something is being done while energy companies go about their business as usual.

2. Go to war against climate change. Go solar, wind, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, afforestation and reforestation, soil carbon sequestration. Put major restrictions on carbon and institute a carbon tax.

Here is the best and worst of what would happen.

Pick #1 and the best scenario is that it turns out not to be as bad as they say: only centuries of hardship, famine, pestilence, and floods compared to near extinction as some scientists have predicted.

Pick #1 and the worst scenario happens: The world becomes a hothouse only survivable at the poles, the oceans become acidic vats of dead and dying fish and mammals. Billion of people die from drought, starvation, hyperthermia, and disease. The remnants of the human race are facing hundreds of thousands of years before the climate begins to cool down. Oops.

Pick #2 and the best scenario happens: After a century or two the climate stabilizes, CO2 starts to drop, and the Earth starts to cool again. Some companies’ bottom lines suffered, some treasure was spent, but other companies come into being and all is well.

Pick #2 and the worst scenario happens: Despite best efforts global warming has begun a runaway thawing of all the methane trapped as methane hydrate in the tundra and oceans and releases it to the atmosphere. Civilization is doomed. At least we tried.

From the options above, the obvious choice is to tackle climate change as though we were going to war and hope it is enough to facilitate the best scenario outcome. What the U.S. government has done under Trump is worse than option one. It is completely denying or ignoring human causes of climate change and actively aiding and abetting the fossil fuel industries.

Climate change is like the mafia. It is making us an offer we can’t refuse. It is unconscionable that we ignore it. They won’t admit it, but many of those people waging misinformation campaigns about climate scientists and climate change have this one evil thought at the center of their brains that they won’t even admit to themselves, “I don’t care because I won’t be here.” At best, these people are like children on a raft of chocolate on the ocean, willing to eat the very thing that keeps them alive--little psychopaths taking what they want. At worst, these are traitors to humanity. They have sold out every man, woman, and child of future generations. May there be a special place…. There should be a plaque with their names and what they have done, a permanent record of their treasonous deeds for all of history to look at and revile. If there are any historians left to keep track of it.

America was the savior of the world during WWII, fighting the Nazis to end Hitler’s despicable regime and the slaughter of millions of Jews. How times have changed. As a nation, the U.S. has contributed more to the climate problem than most. Now we are the only nation in the world whose government is saying “no” to the future. These few climate denying Americans will not be responsible for just a few million lives. They may very well be responsible for the deaths of billions of people of every nationality, race, and creed. They should think about that, and it should keep them up at night. I doubt that it does. Very sad.

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The Space Habitat Revisited and Revised

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How a Space Mirror Could Deal With Orbital Debris and the Threat of an Asteroid Strike

2019-05-15T15:47:00.000-07:00

Photo by Renden Yoder on Unsplash

On August 20, 2075, in Kalispell, Wyoming, a young amateur astronomer is drinking ice tea to cool his thoughts about the 103 degrees F. outside his window at 9:30 in the evening. Climate change is relentless. Harold thinks this is fairly normal weather. It’s been nearly this hot most of his adult life.

Checking the laptop hooked to the homemade telescope in the plastic bubble on top of the house, he inputs values into a program and runs it. He runs it again. And again. He shows the results to several astronomer friends by email. They check it and verify the output. Soon thereafter, the world goes crazy.

Something happened to asteroid 2005 YU55. It was supposed to come within 237,000 miles of Earth on November 8, 2075. Now it is on a collision course. Some other asteroid came close to or bumped 2005 YU55 and slightly changed its direction. NASA has known for weeks but not released the information for fear of mass panic. The amateur astronomers have forced the issue, and NASA holds a press conference.

The head of NASA explains the situation is not as dire as it would have been just five years ago because of Project Drogon. Everybody knows about the large, focusing mirror in orbit because it has been efficiently vaporizing space debris cluttering orbital lanes near Earth for several years. Few gave thought to its second purpose until now. It’s shiny discs have been re-focused on 2005 YU55, and it is currently engraving an ablation trench in a spiral pattern as the asteroid sedately rotates every nineteen hours. The mirror is in an orbit that keeps it in sunlight 24 hours a day.

Not meant to cut the asteroid in pieces, the focused power of the mirror explosively evaporates the surface material it comes in contact with. This creates, in effect, a thruster on one side of 2005 YU55, gradually changing its course. The Earth is saved, and the young astronomer is made the new head of NASA. Well … yes, the story does kind of break down there. That would not normally happen in real life, but the description of a focusing mirror is not so hard to believe. We have the technology.

Imagine a mirror array with six circular pads in a circular array and one in the middle. Each pad is about 27 feet in diameter, made up of 120 flat panels per pad. Each panel is 2.25 feet square. Each panel is driven by a precision servomotor. With a total of 4,200 square feet, the mirror could concentrate 530,670 watts of power onto an area 2.25 feet by 2.25 feet. This is enough to vaporize most forms of matter. Note: Sun’s energy in space is 126.35 watts per square foot.

Drawing by Glen Hendrix in AutoCad. Click to enlarge.

The entire mirror is aligned with its target using a system similar to that of the Hubble telescope. Six gyroscopes and four reaction wheels can target the mirror to within .007 arcseconds. Let’s use 2005 YU55 as an example to show what that means. Let’s say we start beaming concentrated sunlight to 2005 YU55 when it is a hundred million miles from Earth, 400 times further than the Moon, about 38 days away. This accuracy guarantees the beam will hit within 40 feet of where it’s pointed. Since 2005 YU55 is about 1300 feet in diameter, it is a pretty sure thing it will be hit. The space mirror’s software will automatically track the asteroid on its path through space.

Drawing by Glen Hendrix in AutoCad. Click to enlarge.

To aim at objects beyond the orbit of Earth will require a reflector mirror about the size of the focusing mirror. It is much simpler, being a large, flat mirror that reflects the sun’s rays back to the focusing mirror when it’s pointed away from the Sun so that it can do its job. It will also need gyroscopes and reaction wheels as well as a suite of thrusters to position it. The whole thing could be lifted into orbit on a couple of Big Falcon Rocket trips with some assembly required, batteries included.

Drawing by Glen Hendrix in AutoCad. Click to enlarge.

The space mirror may be particularly adept at getting rid of that modern day scourge—space debris. The modularity of this design would allow a killing field to be set up for approaching debris, an invisible tunnel of dense solar energy. The idea would be to completely vaporize debris, turning it into a spreading gas cloud without the inertia to be harmful.

Astronauts working on reaction wheels of Hubble. Courtesy NASA.

Another application could be the smelting of ores in space. Nickel and iron from asteroids can be turned to steel. Ore from the Moon can be processed into aluminum. Off-world mining and other heat intense manufacturing processes will not be able to advance without this type of ancillary tool.

Mirrors in space might come in very handy for diverting asteroids, mining asteroids, smelting metals, terraforming Mars, vaporizing space debris, and paving small areas of the Moon with glass. Putting large mirrors in space, however, may have adverse political consequences for whatever nation or corporation that tries it. The main fear will come from those that don’t have a similar device in orbit worried that it could be used as a weapon. It would be possible to burn a hole in some other country’s spy satellite, start multiple fires in forests and brush lands, heat gas and oil lines until they rupture and burn, put a hole in a ship’s hull in the middle of the ocean, and on and on. Concerned parties would be looking at ways to guarantee the safe use of such tools, and they would have a legal basis for protest. One of the guiding principles of the Outer Space Treaty is “States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner; ....”

Perhaps the United Nations will evolve to have its own space force, like Trump has proposed for the United States. Trained members of this elite task force will go into space along with worker astronauts to check out the control software of space-based mirrors, their focusing capabilities, their accuracy in aiming and maintaining that target, and all the other things that could turn such a dangerous machine into a weapon. Space Marshall U.N.! It will make a great TV series. Maybe the fiction has to come before the fact as it has with so many such ideas in the past.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Climate Change Will Herald the Age of Island Cities

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

Nations at Risk of Becoming Psychological Echo Chambers: China Sets Worrisome Precedent

Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy

What Do We Do Now That We Know Climate Change is Inevitable?

Are You Susceptible to Digitally Induced Cognitive Karma

Why the Oceans Will Be Humanity’s Life Raft

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A Convergence of Technologies Will Create a New Age of Space Exploration

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The Space Habitat Revisited and Revised

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The Environmental Advantage of a Space Elevator

2019-05-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

image courtesy Obayashi Corporation

Climate change is big. It’s bad. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s going to be a rough few hundred, maybe few thousand, years for humanity. The short term view is not encouraging. The fossil fuel energy companies are going to fight tooth and claw to keep selling combustibles. The long term view is more optimistic. As the adverse affects of climate change begin to multiply and intensify, naysayers will be silenced, and social pressure will mandate change. Will it be enough soon enough? Hard to say. If mankind ever gets this CO2 problem under control, we will be looking at different ways to do business that protects the Earth in a more proactive manner, keeping the environment as ideal for life, all life, as possible.

A space elevator may be the key technology for mankind to have it’s cake and eat it, too while the Earth’s climate rebalances. With a space elevator, all the nasty industrial processes that require a lot of energy and cause a lot of pollution could take place in orbit around the Earth. The end products of those orbital industries could then be more easily and cheaply transported to Earth via the space elevator.

A space elevator could also preserve planetary resources. The materials needed for these myriad industrial processes may not even need to come from the surface of the planet. Most can be found in the asteroids or on the Moon. Need fuel? Load up an orbital tanker from a methane lake on Titan, one of the moons of Jupiter. Need water. Find an asteroid made of water and mine it. It is estimated half the water in the oceans came from a bombardment of water-bearing asteroids. Need metal? Nickel-iron asteroids are plentiful. Need energy? Build focusing mirrors for heat and solar panels for electricity.

How does a space elevator work? Take a piece of string with a weight on one end. Pick the string up by the weightless end and spin around until the weight is straight out from your body. A ladybug makes an amazing landing on the string and starts walking out the string to the counterweight. You are the Earth, the string is the elevator cable or tether, the weight is the counterweight, and the ladybug is the car that goes up and down the cable. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it gives a good idea of what and where the major parts are. The counterweight would be about 60,000 to 90,000 miles up from the Earth’s surface. The center of mass of the whole thing should be at geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 miles up. Now quit spinning and sit down because you’re gonna be dizzy.

Currently, carbon nanotubes are in the running to be the material that can withstand the tremendous stresses of this application. Someone just has to figure out how to make a 60,000 mile long ribbon of the stuff with no imperfections. Meteoroids and space debris are a major problem. Protective measures must be implemented. A major clean-up of our space debris may be in order before we invest in such a mega-project as the space elevator.

With the polluting industries moved to orbit, imagine the Earth as a giant natural park. Yes, we’ll live here, but not as obtrusively as before. One counterintuitive idea would be a further consolidation of humanity into supercities. Megalithic structures would house humanity. Supercities could eliminate untold millions of miles of transportation because everything and everyone is so close. Walking would be the preferred mode of transportation along with personal electric scooters and elevators.

It would free up a lot of land for planting trees and other plants to sequester CO2. Meat would be grown or fabricated in a lab. Multistory greenhouses would grow our vegetables and grains. Supercities would be connected by high speed underground subways like Hyperloop. Other means of transportation will be electric drones and hybrid airships that can flip between heavier and lighter-than-air modes of flight.

I know what you’re thinking. This is all such pie-in-the-sky fantasy stuff with no connection to reality. Fifty years ago, so was AI, GPS, autonomous vehicles, internet, and personal computers. The future looks bright. If we can just get there. Let us hope our immediate future holds in store political allies to humanity and the planet instead of what we have now.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

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Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy

What Do We Do Now That We Know Climate Change is Inevitable?

Are You Susceptible to Digitally Induced Cognitive Karma

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The U.S. Must Recycle Recycling

2019-05-06T16:01:00.000-07:00

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

Looking in recycling bins around my neighborhood, I see stuff that shouldn’t be there. It’s single stream recycling, everything in one bin. And I mean everything. Cardboard contaminated with grease or lots of plastic tape, plastic that’s not recyclable, general trash, styrofoam, envelopes with the little plastic windows. it’s a mess. This is a nice neighborhood. Houses are going for $650,000 to $1,400,000. No, I am not wealthy. My house is a teardown. It will be the lot for one of these McMansions. I know it’s profiling, but I assumed people here would know how to recycle, but they don’t. They are, apparently, just like the millions of other people in the U.S. that feel good about recycling, but the Chinese think their recycling stinks because … well, it does. Too much of it was garbage and winding up in Chinese landfills and incinerators instead of being recycled, so the Chinese government put a stop to it with the 2017 passage of the National Sword policy.

Now, I know that you do recycling correctly. I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about all those other people out there that put plastic grocery bags, shower curtains, or garden hose in the recycling bin. Also, there should be no shredded paper, clothing, scrap metal, needles or medical waste, bubble wrap, aluminum foil, drinking glasses, non-recyclable plastics, hazardous waste, dirty diapers, liquids, frozen food containers (polymer film on the cardboard), and no caps or lids on glass bottles or jars.

The problem has been going on a long time, and China isn’t the only nation being persnickety about what winds up on their shores, and America isn’t the only perp. Six years ago, Canada sent 103 shipping containers to the Philippines containing recyclable plastic. Inspectors there determined it to be regular household garbage. Philippine President Duterte is livid and threatens to declare war on Canada if they don’t take it back.

There are great benefits to recycling. It reduces the amount of waste going to landfills and incinerators. It conserves natural resources such as water, metals, minerals, and timber. It saves energy. It helps create jobs. Besides, it just feels right, like you’re doing something to save the world. Don’t get carried away. It’s going to take more than recycling to defeat climate change, like voting for someone that gives a shit.

I think recycling went wrong with the advent of single stream recycling. Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) are semi-automatic, sorters using a lot of clever gadgets and software to sort single stream recycling. They are good but not that good. Plus, they cost a lot of money; and they still need people to keep watch and help out when the fans, magnets, eddy currents, and optical sorters miss something. Even with all those gizmos and people to sort trash, what comes out of a MFR is still dirtier than what recycling used to be. Once upon a time, the recycling center could count on the stuff it received to be as advertised. Everything was separated out. A quick glance could determine cleanliness or lack thereof. It was a much cheaper way to recycle but required more thought and time from the recyclables producer.

The first material recovery facility was Resource Recovery Systems in Branford, Connecticut in the 70s. The idea spread, apparently because it was thought to be a positive in selling recycling to the American public. Convenience, convenience, convenience. When China started taking in recyclables thirty years ago, MRFs served us well in getting all that stuff into cargo containers headed somewhere else besides American incinerators and landfills. There were plenty of empty cargo containers from all the consumer goods China was shipping to the U.S. At the same time, however, shipping plastic recycling to China put the quietus on good ole U.S. of A. recycling centers where this stuff could be turned back into usable plastic.

Sounds like a great opportunity for a young, smart startup team. If China won’t do it, by golly, we will. There’s another problem. The price for recycled plastic as a commodity has gone from a peak of about $300 per ton to “… costing more to collect, process, (and) ultimately produce recycled materials today than they’re worth.” That’s from Peter Keller, a vice president of Republic Services.

The Chinese won’t take it, and the price for it is in the crapper. Municipalities with recycling programs are really in a pickle. All over the nation, they are pretending to pick up recycling, but it is being diverted to landfills or incinerators. It’s going on right here in Houston. Home owners all over the city have video footage of trucks picking up both trash and recycling. They are very upset that their recycling is going the same place as the garbage. I don’t blame them. Some people spend a lot of time washing out containers, taking tape off of cardboard, etc. The mayor claims the “sanitation engineer” made an error, but I don’t think he’s telling the whole story. The order to send recyclables to the landfill comes from the top. There’s nothing else they can do with it. The recycling centers were just fronts for shipping this stuff to China. They don’t have the facilities to actually turn it back into useful material that domestic industries will buy.

So, now what do we do? For one thing, we should cut down on the use of throw-away plastic in our lives. It will be difficult. Carry your own utensils? Stainless steel personal straws (telescoping to fit in your pocket)?

If companies are going to ship their products, they should come up with something better than plastic for shipping padding. Take a lightweight metal screen, shape it around a product, leaving screen around the product the size of the shipping box. Swish that screen through a vat of paper fiber in one direction, let it dry, and pop it out—a custom made paper mache packing insert for the product. It’s effective and recyclable. If companies that rely on shipping did this, it would do away with megatons of plastic that is not ordinarily recyclable.

We should also consider taking sorting to the next step for plastics. Separate each plastic by number in its own bin and make sure it’s clean. Also, have municipalities pay the consumer for the recycled material. It doesn’t have to be much. Make it a $5 monthly rebate on the trash pickup or water bill for some minimum of material collected.

With clean, presorted plastic as feedstock, the government could then provide low cost loans as an incentive to restart American recycling centers. If we can get plastic recycling to where it’s not losing that much money, it will be in good shape the next time oil prices head skyward. Then we can bask in the glow of non-stinky recyclables and tell the Chinese “no” you can’t have them, even if they ask nicely.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

Nations at Risk of Becoming Psychological Echo Chambers: China Sets Worrisome Precedent

Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy

What Do We Do Now That We Know Climate Change is Inevitable?

Are You Susceptible to Digitally Induced Cognitive Karma

Why the Oceans Will Be Humanity’s Life Raft

Mining That First Asteroid - Manned Mission or AI?

A Convergence of Technologies Will Create a New Age of Space Exploration

Steampunk Meets Star Wars: A Harrowing Micro-Tale of Future Spacefarers

The Space Habitat Revisited and Revised

Thruster On a Chip: An Alternative Rocket Science That Could Revolutionize Space Travel

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

Going Back To the Moon Is Not Just for Governments Anymore

Why It Is a Certainty We Will Become a Space-Based Civilization

Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

Sticking the Landing On Your Billion Dollar Asteroid

Artificial Intelligence and Asteroid Mining Will Be a (Necessary) Match Made In the Heavens

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Climate Change Will Herald the Age of Island Cities

2019-04-30T16:18:00.000-07:00

Courtesy The Seasteading Institute and Gabriel Scheare, Luke & Lourdes Crowley, and Patrick White (Roark 3D)

Maybe you haven't heard of the Seasteading Institute. Their idea is to create ocean-going island cities with separate laws and governance from the rest of the world; more for sociopolitical reasons than practical. Little do they know they are ahead of the curve on what will be a major trend in the future.

Accurate ice core readings now show the atmosphere has more CO2, way more, than at any time in the past 800,000 years. Less accurate but 95% reliable are studies showing the last time CO2 levels were this high was during the Miocene 15 million years ago.

As our world heats up due to the unrelenting rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, it will begin to resemble the Miocene era.

You will find arguments that since average temperatures were much higher (5-8 degrees Centigrade higher) along with sea levels (130 feet higher) during the Miocene, there is no correlation with our current situation since we are not seeing those conditions. Those CO2 changes in the Miocene took place over a period of thousands of years. Ours has taken place over just the last 250 years.

If climate change were a light bulb, we have flipped the switch and are living in that geological microsecond the bulb filament is glowing a faint red. We are wondering why the light does not come on, but it did. It will get brighter at it's geological pace. Humanity is handicapped by not being able to visualize clearly the scale of really big things, be it time or space or the thermal inertia of a planet. Plus, we want patience and we want it now.

What the hell does this have to do with island cities? As that light bulb gets brighter, the planet’s oceans will become the most pleasant, practical places to live over the next century or so. When they talk about the seas becoming warm and too acidic, they are talking about the uppermost layer of the ocean called the Epipelagic Zone, also known as the Sunlight zone. Towards the lower boundaries of this zone is a thermocline that is a demarcation of warm, mixed upper sea water and frigid, stratified deeper sea water. Ninety percent of the ocean is below the thermocline and is 32-37 degrees F. This means if you lived on the ocean in 2100 A.D. you could be as few as a hundred meters away from a precious commodity in a hot and getting hotter world—the coolest liquid on the planet.

What can you do with it? You can pump it through the water side of a water/air heat exchanger, blow hot moist ambient air (there will be plenty of that) through the air side of the exchanger and collect the condensate off the coil for one of the cheapest ways to produce large quantities of fresh water known to man; cheap enough to use for farming. Use the cool air produced as a byproduct of this process to air condition living quarters and refrigerate food. This would eliminate the hydrofluorocarbons typically used in air conditioning. They are some of the worst greenhouse gasses around as far as potency; 1,430 times worse than CO2 per unit mass.

But wait! There’s more! That cold seawater your pumping can go into a large fish tank as it leaves the heat exchanger. It is full of nutrients and, because of its temperature, can hold a lot of oxygen, unlike the warm acidic water surrounding the island city. Many species of fish and shellfish may be saved from extinction by being raised in such tanks. This will also serve as a major source of food for the island city. The still cool overflow from the fish tanks will be dumped into the warm surrounding water, forming oases for wild organisms following the island around. With enough island cities and given enough time, this cool water from the depths may begin to help cool off the planet, assuming CO2 emissions are under control. It puts a whole new spin on the idea of deep-sea fish farming.

These island cities may be built with modules—habitat, water, plant farming, fish farming, solar power, wind power, manufacturing, harbor, recreation, etc.—linked together to form a large floating mat of functional habitability. Or they could be like huge, sail-driven cruise ships specially built to be self-sustaining. I can also see where they would run the gamut from well-planned and custom engineered to an old freighter with attendant sea barges roped to it a la Waterworld.

The engineered island cities will make excellent platforms for exploring the depths of the oceans for minerals, metals, and scientific studies. They will trade with other cities and whatever ports are still functioning to form a network of civilization the likes of which the world has never seen.

There are other reasons living on a floating island city may become a much better option than living on land in the future. For many, living on land will be a scramble to stay ahead of rising seas and ever hotter middle latitudes. There is evidence that equatorial regions may have been uninhabitable by living creatures during the hottest parts of the Eocene, another time period when temperatures rose along with an increase in CO2 due to major volcanic eruptions. This may cause a migration of humanity and animals on a previously unimagined scale, causing strife and conflict between haves and have nots. Many people will look to the sea for a less stressful life.

One could get a taste of this lifestyle by simply going to work on a cruise ship or going for an extended cruise. It's only about $45,000 for a year’s cruise. That would certainly be cheaper than buying a cabin on The World cruise liner for 13.5 million dollars. Probably would not be the same. They won't put you to work wiping off solar panels, gutting fish, or harvesting crops on a cruise ship. I wouldn’t, however, count on living at sea becoming a necessity in the immediate future. That light bulb filament won’t be orange for a couple of decades yet.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

Nations at Risk of Becoming Psychological Echo Chambers: China Sets Worrisome Precedent

Climate Change Will Alter The Way We Think About Energy

What Do We Do Now That We Know Climate Change is Inevitable?

Are You Susceptible to Digitally Induced Cognitive Karma

Why the Oceans Will Be Humanity’s Life Raft

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Steampunk Meets Star Wars: A Harrowing Micro-Tale of Future Spacefarers

The Space Habitat Revisited and Revised

Thruster On a Chip: An Alternative Rocket Science That Could Revolutionize Space Travel

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Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

A Heavy Metal, Cannibalistic Asteroid Propulsion System

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Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

2019-04-28T05:53:00.000-07:00

Photo by Cata on Unsplash

Our modern lives insulate us from and make us forget a knowledge that came simply and unforgettably to our hunter-gatherer forebears. That is the discrimination between needs and desires. We don’t need smartphones, automobiles, TV, indoor plumbing, granite countertops, Nikes, non-fat lattes with caramel drizzles, YouTube, scented candles, or video games. We do need food, air, water, a modicum of shelter, and a proper temperature range in which our species can exist. The last was a given until recently. That’s why there’s no life on Mars or Venus—too cold, too hot. The fact that temperatures go up in lockstep with CO2 levels now makes CO2 capture and sequestration mandatory to provide us with one of our necessities, a livable temperature range.

If you want to make a lot of money, figure out a cheap way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and stash it somewhere for several hundred years or forever. Everyone will thank you and shower you with cash. Ahahaha! That’s not true, but it should be true. Unfortunately, Trump is gutting U.S. funding for research in this area. That leaves the Chinese as the world leader for this technology. At the rate CO2 levels are increasing, we may end up renting the technology from them. Ironic, since they probably stole the idea from us to begin with.

Since energy companies revealed they are spending 5 trillion dollars over the next decade for fossil fuel exploration, it is a foregone conclusion that CO2 capture and sequestration (CCS) will be a technology of existential necessity. The fossil fuel industry has an enormous cache of wealth acquired at the expense of the Earth’s climate. They are going to use that wealth to continue doing what they do by gaming the legalized bribery system at the heart of many of America’s problems—lobbying. The energy companies plan to sell combustibles until fossil fuels are gone, they are too expensive to extract at a profit, or their client base has plummeted due to “natural causes.”

We are currently at 413 ppm CO2. We are on track to hit 550 ppm by end of century. This will raise average temps 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit. At some point in the next century, if we keep going at our current rate, we could see 700 to 900 ppm CO2, something not seen since the Eocene some 50 million years ago. Temperatures were up to 25 degrees Fahrenheit higher on average. There was no ice at the poles, but probably alligators and palm trees in Antartica.

Looking at past geological records, it appears there is a lag time of one to four centuries for sea levels to catch up to rapid changes in CO2 levels. None have been as rapid as the last 200 years. We know that sea levels were a hundred feet higher during the Miocene, 15 million years ago, when CO2 levels were similar to what we have now. The reason we don’t see that large increase in sea levels or the 11 degrees F. higher temperature yet is because of the buffer provided by our still-cool, deep ocean waters. Ninety percent of the ocean is between 32 and 37.5 degrees Fahrenheit. But over the next couple of centuries we will see increasingly rapid elevations in sea levels and temperature.

If we burn the rest of our fossil fuels scientists estimate atmospheric CO2 levels could rise to 1000–5000 ppm. If it is toward the upper limits of this estimate, it is debatable whether life will continue as we know it on Earth. Before we get there fossil fuel companies will, hopefully, realize they could lose their customers and, therefore, make some changes. These same scientists say just 450 ppm will be disastrous. It is a certainty we will reach that. With uncontrolled fossil fuel use and no capture and sequestration, CO2 levels will easily blow past 500 ppm; and our civilization could collapse under the strain of drought, food chain disruption, defrosted pathogens, resource wars, heat prostration, and tropical diseases.

That is where CCS comes in. Various means of scrubbing CO2 from the air have been developed. It is then used for making lubricating oil and putting the fizz in soda water. Those are pretty small markets for the amount of CO2 we need to eliminate. Plus, who is going to pay for it on the industrial scale that is required. It would be ideal for those responsible for the CO2 in the first place to pay for capture and sequestration by implementing a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme. Otherwise, we are simply paying to clean up the energy companies’ mess which, in the end, may not be out of the realm of possibilities.

In the past it was thought that CO2 capture would have to take place at those industries where it is produced—chemical, power, concrete, steel, and fertilizer plants. Then it would be pumped somewhere to be injected into the ground. This is very expensive and unlikely to be adopted.

A recently developed CCS technology allows carbon to be extracted directly from the air. Not oddly at all, it is called Direct Air Capture (DAC). With current technology it may be possible to get this down to about $100 dollars per ton. It needs to be ten times less expensive ($10 to $20 per ton) not to be a drag on the economy. This is the only technology that can realize a carbon negative offset. In other words, it could remove more carbon than is produced by mankind and nature to reduce overall levels in the atmosphere. The only alternative coming close is massive reforestation and afforestation. These have their own sets of problems and need funding to iron out the bugs.

The problem is money. No one except a few universities and Bill Gates are spending money in the U.S. to develop this technology. It is not enough that we strip carbon out of the atmosphere. It must be put in a stable environment or condition and left there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Turn it back into limestone? Make CO2-foamed concrete? Make plastic to feed our 3D printers? Plant all available land with trees? I don’t know. That is why we need some smart people working on this right away.

Environmentalists are in a moral tug of war about CO2 capture and sequestration. Some believe it will give the fossil fuel companies an incentive to keep on doing what they are doing. That ship has sailed. We cannot be picky now about how carbon is removed from the atmosphere. It is all good, but CCS offers at least the possibility to reverse the levels of carbon in the atmosphere, staving off the worst of global warning until the climate stabilizes at a reasonable temperature—one of the basic needs that will allow us to keep on drinking non-fat lattes with caramel drizzles.

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There May Be a Quadrillion Dollars Lying About on the Moon

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A Convergence of Technologies Will Create a New Age of Space Exploration

The Space Habitat Revisited and Revised

Thruster On a Chip: An Alternative Rocket Science That Could Revolutionize Space Travel

Oumuamua: Alien Probe or Asteroid? It Could Be Both

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Taking the 06-03-25 Asteroid Shuttle to Mars - An Alternative to Planned Mars Missions

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