The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

We all know that oil wont last us forever. Nuclear power wont either. We'll even run out of coal in a couple of hundred years unless something changes.

So , what alternative power source do you think will be oils replacement, and how do you see it affecting society at large? When should this transistion take place? Or should it? If not, why not?

Also, how can we save energy? Even if we find a new power source, it might not be suitable for the consumption lifestyle we have today. What energy draining equipment do you think we can live without? what is unnecessary? And of course, what can we not live without, what is absolutely vital to you?

I'd say nuclear, but I see you don't see it as a solution.

I think our best bet is using solar/wind/hydro/geo-thermal energy where you can get it efficiently enough, but if we want to maintain our present energy consumption (which will probably double in years to come) we have to come up with something better.
Nuclear fusion sounds promising. If we can get it to work properly, that is give more energy then it drains, then we'll have enough fuel on earth itself to last for a couple thousand years.
This should be enough to find us a nice source of anti-matter ;)

As for what devices I can and cannot do without.
I'd say the most important things are transportation, heavy industrial equipment, computers, lights and refridgerators.

You explained the need for transportation in THE FUTURE thread.
Without Indistrial equipment we'll pretty much stagnate, it'll be hard to build anything without it.
Our society has become very dependant on computers, and we will be even more dependant around the time oil runs out.
Lights may be something many people think they would do without, but imagine how your life would look if any light-source you'd have after sunset was a candle or a torch. That would take us back a hundred years or so.
Refridgerators maybe aren't so important, but they help everone store food for a much longer time. May come in handy if there'll be supply shortages due to transportation problems.

It should be quite easy to save on transportation and lights. If you put everything on trains, instead of trucks, you can use any source of energy that can be turned to electricity.
The costs may rise, like time of transportation, but hey, it's better then nothing.

Energy that goes on lights can be saved by bulding more efficient light-bulbs and ordering a black-out at certain hours.

Computers may cause some problems. As they get more powerful they also eat more energy. Currently I'm observing how my home PC is slowly catching up my electric oven when it comes to power usage. Maybe changing thr processor technology will help a bit. Biological processors for instance shouldn't eat that much electricty, and might settle for a banana ;).

I think this is promising:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER)

Here in Canada, wind power is becoming a big thing.

Also, there are ways to make oil. Since the late 80s or
early 90s scientists in the US have been producing
crude oil from the results of human waste + a special
kind of bacteria. Considering the amount of human
waste on the planet, I'd say oil is here to stay for
a very long time.

Also, diseal cars can run very well on vegetable oil. Lots
of plants around, right?

As for conserving. Well, there is a move toward smart cars,
electric cars and such. I would like to see the military/government
cut back on their oil purchases.

My point from all this is that between the move to conserve and
the many alternitives to drilling for oil, there will be
no energy crisis.

You can't produce 4 billion (!) tonnes of oil annually through alternative sources. Take Brazil for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil#Effect_on_oil_consumption (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil#Effect_on_oil_consumption)
Production in a year: ethanol: 14 million m³
Land use: 45,000 km² 
It takes a large area to produce about 10 million tonnes of fuel.

You require about 16 million square km, in order to satisfy current world demand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth#Geography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth#Geography)

Earth has about 150 million square km of land, most of which is useless for growing crops (antarcitc, deserts, siberia, northern canada).

Thus, oil from crops will have to compete with food for people, and with an ever increasing population, that is simply not an option, especialy on the long term.

Well, that's my view on it, anyway.

Lunar helium-3.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3)

Zero Point Energy!



Fossil Fuels, Methane Ice, Nuclear Fission, Wind, and Bio-fuels. In other words, I don't see a big replacement, I see a few of them. I see energy staying expensive even after the infrastructure is built to harness these things, emissions dropping for a little while before increased demand for energy brings them up again (china and india,) and farm fields of grains and sugar below, and giant pinwheels spinning above them. I also see myself becoming emperor of the world, but I don't think that this is relevant.



Then perhaps the problem is not as much supply as demand. If our population continues to increase, regardless of our power sources, we will not be able to produce enough food for ourselves eventually, especially if there is any kind of hiccup in production brought about by relatively mild natural disaster(s).

There's 2 major powersources I think. The Sun (nuclear) produces wind and water power here on earth... except tidal which is taking energy from the moon. Then there's geothermal (earth magma). Pick anyone of those and you're set for quite a while.

Nuclear is sort of like "all the eggs in one basket"... atleast you're not dropping eggs all over the place like with fossil fuel.

Helium-3 is interesting, apparently it would be so valuable that it's actually worth going to the moon and extract it from the moon dust. Something for GWB to think about... or maybe he have.

Set fire to street-bums. They're all over the place.

Street-bum power is the way of the future. I'm sure of it.


Also, I'd stop get arrested for it, and I see that as a bonus.

That is just barbaric. Think of all the people who'd starve to death if you didn't use them for soylent green.

Well, I'm sure we wouldn't have to use all of them.

And what about old people? Aren't there enough to keep up SG production?

No, they are needed for methane production.

I would say nuclear fusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy) is the best bet. It’s safe and easy to do. The hard part is getting more energy out of fusion then you put into it.

Aren't you supposed to be studying?

well we have alot of dead people, can't we convert corpses into oil for a little while?

there are few mass graves in the middle east plus think of all the land we'll gain by cutting out the cemetaries  ;D

plus we can nerf golf courses and turn them into valuble homes for all the old people who are about to croak and prep them for the conversion  :D

Or quite a few people will switch to that 'E85 Ethanol' (i think) shit that i've been seein' on that Tee Vee.  :)

People feel like Nuclear Fission (or fusion, hell i dont know) but i just have a bad feeling about that.

Without linking to any source (if someone doubts it, I'll try to dig it up), I'm fairly sure that with our current rate of consumption, we have enough fiffiosn fuel for another 100-200 years tops. If we run out of oil, and have to replace that with nuclear fission, then it wont last near as long. Of course, this is discounting any technical innovations that could be made.

In my eyes nuclear power has to problems. Mining the stuff isn't exactly enviromental friendly (and you need diggers trucks and other things currently dependent on oil to do so), and you have to store the end product for a really long time. As rapidly as our way of life has changed i nthe last 200 years, it's hard to say where we will be in 20000 years,, yet we assume we'll be perfectly cabable of running a secure storage facility for that long.


Yes, but until we find some nice way of storing the energy they produce, it'll be impossible to dpeend solely on these.


Indeed. But that's a big "If", seeing as we not only need to get it working, but fairly quickly. And again, we need to find a decent way of storing that energy for mobile units such as cars, or just get rif of them altogether.


No argument there. But I was looking mroe specifically to "What could you live without", rather than "What is essential". What equipment would you be ready to give up today, if you were told you need to start conserving energy?


If they get it working, then yes.


Do you have any link to these experiments (out of interest). From what I know, man produced oil is entieryl possible, but I was udner the impression that it wont be possible/economical to replace oil with that, and that the end product quality would vary.


And yet, they do not regrow quick enough to keep all our cars going. Even if they did, there would be some unexpected eniromental issues steming form cutting down animal habittats every so often.


Doubtful. In order to use this energy source,  we need to be able to construct some rather large transportation spaceships, and use less energy driving them to the moon and back than the energy of their payload. We also need to have them land without incident every time, and constructy mining bases all over the moon. This is not impossible, but seeing as our crowning prestation so far has been to land and come back in a tiny craft, I'd say tis still a far way off.


This is probably the best way to go, not keeping all your eggs in the same basket.  Fell free to answer the other questions posed.


I've been taught to distinguis between renewable and non-renewable sources of energy, but it basically works out the same. However, assuming that we will be able to utilize just any one of those to the same extent that we are using oil seems a tad unrealistic. For one, wind and water power cannot power your car ;)

Well, mining anything isn't too environemtly friendly.
We just have to decide if the benefits outweigh the costs.


Yes but when oil becomes a scarce resource you me want to consider withdrawing it from public use. If only certain industries will be allowed to buy oil, you want use nearly as much of it.
Tough I must admit I don't like this solution, too much government interference.

Also it probably wouldn't be too hard to design trucks, diggers, etc that run on electricty.


20 000 years? I think you underestimate the power of radioactive decay. By that time a significant part of the waste would have already turned into iron, or something.

Here, have a FAQ (http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html).
And here is the part related to what we're talking about right now.




It's not the storing that is the problem, but making them meet the demand for energy.
I'm not sure if they can ever be anything more then an auxilary source.


Not a that big "if".
There are working fusion reactors, the problem is they are too small and worked for a too short amount of time to give more energy then they needed to start the reaction.

I'm not sure what's this about cars. There are  few nice models of electric cars. All you have to do is perfect the technology.
And I'm not sure 50-100 years is fairly quickly. Look at the past 50-100 year's progress to see what I mean.


I could easily do without cars, as long there was some fairly efficient public transportation.
I could throw out the TV out the window any day.
Dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, microwave and electric ovens, I could live without them tough some things would suddenly become a pain in the ass.

I guess what I'd get rid of depends on how much energy I was allowed to use.

I'm not saying what's best, just what I think will happen. With today's technology, I don't think there is anyone thing that has enough output to hold off our monstrous demand. However, as time goes on and infrastructure is built, one source might become dominant, like methane ice.



Alright.



I think it should take place a few millenia after WWIII. It probably will take place when the economics have forced the majority of people to look beyond oil.



Are you asking what the downsides to the replacements would be? Fossil Fuels of all types pollute unless you are very careful and efficient, Methane Ice could be accidentally broken free from the ocean floor in fast quantities thus kill the miners and ending the ice age environment that created our species, Wind puts giant spinning blades over the landscape that require maintainence, and Bio-Fuels compete with food production as GeomanNL said.



Same as before, don't let the 3rd world have it, muhahaha. Seriously though, I'd say long distance travel should go. Use your computer to stay in touch, and vacation in your backyard- much cheaper as energy gets pricier. Shut down Los Vegas. Actually, shut down night time light pollution, period. It sucked from the beginning.



"It is my industrial strength hair dryer, and I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT IT!"

Computer, Cat, Food Coolers, Clothes Washer, Tesla Gun, and sadly, Toilets (see "the FUTURE" thread for details.)



I don't think you realize that you're not just going to wake up some day and say "OMG, the OIL. . .it is ALL Gone!" When it is very scarce, if civilians stop using it, there will still be plenty to run your equipment (and if not, society collapses anyway.)



Nature stored it for quite some time. Put it back where and how you found it.

Yes there's doubts about it, but apparently it's worth considering despite being on the moon (and other places).
You're incorrect in some of your statements, did you do any research (aka. internet research aka. checking first link on google)? Getting off earth probably cost the most energy, landing and taking off from the moon is cheaper, and entering the earth atmoshere must be relatively cheap too.  If you're patient you can just glide to the moon with a robotic shuttle without wasting much energy. If the moon-men were handling out 1t blocks of helium-3, we'd be able to fit 25 of them in our shuttle. Those 25t could power the US for a year, so the transportation cost would be insignificant. The problematic part (that you hinted at) is more about how to harvest it, as it's very dilluted in the lunar dust. I'll link to this article: The article I link to. (http://"http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_000630.html")

Teacher may I be excused? My brain is full. It ended up that no amount of studying would have prepared me for that test. Everyone I know in the class thinks he or she failed it.

Lukipela you seem to be underestimating the POWER of the dark side....  err fusion reactions.

You know the whole E = MC^2 thing?

True, even though mining of Uranium often brings the bonus of Radon gas. I'm not saying it's impossible to mine and not cause enviromental problems, but it is a large challenge.


Unless you privatize the oil companies, or pass a political suicide law making it illegal to posess gasoline, I think this is going to be hard to achieve. Also, as most oil comes from a very unstable region, it's not entirely impossible that when it gets more expensive, they'll start making exclusive deals with those who pay the most, or who aren't their traditional enemies. At some point, there is a risk that they just turn off the tap.


DURRR I'M A RETARD! You are of course correct. I meant to say, "As far as we've come in the last 200 years, how will we look in another 200 years. Not 20 000. Boy is my face red now.


Actually it's both. It doesn't matter how great your windmill is if the wind isn't blowing. Wind and sun power cannot provide a dependable energy source (in most places) because they have far to many peaks and valleys. If a windmill could somehow store the energy it's producing when it's producing more than is needed, and then use that energy for when the wind isn't strong enough, it'd be much more dependable than it is now.


Yes. But unless we can manage to run them for long enough to produce energy, they aren't that much good to us. Once again, I'm not saying this is impossible in any way, but it isn't that simple either. Hopefully, we'll get it working before oil prices make it impossible to even start with current machinery, ratehr than converting everything to electricity first.


I'm not sure what you're referring to either. The biodiesel? I'm sure it can be made to work a lot better, but as was brought up earlier, you need a lot of biomatter to convert, and there are a lot of unknown factors still present.


I wonder how well our society could live without these. I mean, without them someone in the family will have to stay at home and take care of things, while the other works.. It'd be an interesting restructure of our society.


Nor was I implying that. I was simply pointing out that all other forms of energy production is somewhat dependent on oil. So even if you use nuclear power, that too ill become more expensive along with oil, as you are still using oil to produce the fuel for your nuclear reaction. Also, if you look at the top of this post, you'll find there is a slight risk at the oil will be ZOMG gone at some point. Not large, but existant. Your oil at least, while the Chinese will be fine.


And once it is as safe as it was while nature was storing it (in 1000 years or so) I will.  Before that, it's hard to put it back the way you found it. Much like unscrambling an egg.


Mining it is the big problem though. I don't care if this stuff is pure Energon, in order to get it here we would have to send up a lot of mining equipment, a lot of suppplies, and quite a few people. These people would then have to establish a moon base, assemble a working mine in a enviroment we have no experience of mining in, dig out and enrich Helium-3. Lifting all this stuff off-planet, and keeping the people up there supplied would be a pain. Especially since we can't exactly glide down either. Unless all the Space Shuttles get some serious overhaul that is. At the moment we can barely manage to keep the ISS supplied as it is, so visions of a moonbase seem a tad unrealistic. I',m not syaing it can't be done. Just that it will be quite hard.

So yes, you would need a lot of energy to get there. The gains could potentially be astronomic, but at the moment we simply don't have the resources or tech to pull this off without a lot of luck.


Why yes I do. Feel free to read through the posts higher up if you like. You'll find that I don't think fusion wont give us an awesome amount of power. I wondering if we can get it to work properly, and within a limited timeframe. Out of interest, what is it you are studying for?

Recently, the Russians announced plans to build a moonbase for the purpose of mining helium-3. Whether this happens in the proposed time frame is up to debate...
http://www.space.com/news/ap_060126_russia_moon.html (http://www.space.com/news/ap_060126_russia_moon.html)

In the last few years, the US and China have announced that they will build their own moonbases (though they did not list helium-3 mining as a reason). Coincidence?

My input is that we should remove cars.

I know it sounds very... radical, but it wouldn't be so difficult. If we made an efficient public transport system (let's say, 50 times more vehicles than now), cars would no more be necessary. We would reduce contamination, and in addition remove traffic jams.

The biggest problem is that there are some morons that love showing off their cars, and would do anything to stop a measure like this one. Anyway...

Maybe it'll happen. Let's work for it.

Moon Base- What happens to the inhabitants when there is some solar activity? Won't protecting them from the radiation be a problem?


Mass Transport- This idea only works sort of okay for people in population centers. It doesn't explain what you do for people living in rural or semi rural areas.

Well, even if it is impossible, it's more a benefits vs costs thing.
If uranium is the only cheap and efficient enough source of energy you might be willing to sacrifice the eco-system of a few mining sites.



As far as I can tell most oil companies already are private... didn't you mean nationalize?

Yeah making gasoline illegal would be suicide, but I think at the point in time we're discussing oil would be to expensive for most people. And if it was too expansive for many companies the government could decide to fund, atleast partially, the oil or gasoline for them. This way you wouldn;t interfere with the market, and I think most people would understand that keeping the industry alive is more important then their private needs.


Don't sweat it , mistakes happen.
But either way I don't see the problem. You seal the stuff in lead containers and dig it under the ground. Just make sure no one will dig it out to soon and you're set.


Well there different kinds of batteries.
I belive there is one on top of my faculty's bulding, it's connected to a solar collector.
The problem with them is that they are quite expensive, not too environmentally friendly either, and you'd need a lot of them to make use of them even in a small town.


No I meant something more like this little guy (http://takeoka-m.web.infoseek.co.jp/reva.JPG). And here are its tech specs (http://www.revaindia.com/revastd.htm). A purely electric car, I know it's nothing special but it sure would be enough for me.

There are also hybrid cars that use gasoline to generate electricity. They are quite neat  because they can reacharge while breaking for example, so they use much less fuel.
Some run on hydrogen instead of gasoline.

Most of these cars are either too expensive, or not as good as the ones we have right now, but hey, in 50 years things may change.


Just take a look behind you. We've been through this already. Tough I doubt we'd suddenly go back to a patriarchal system.
There are loads of ways to resolve this problem.
It could be like you said, that one member of family is doing the housework, the other earing money.
Another way is to divide the housework, for example one cooks the other cleans.
Or you could make the kids do all the housework, once they're big enough.

EDIT:

Actually it works fine, but you bourgeois capitalist pigs are too lazy to make it work in your country ;)
But seriously, it's again a matter of necessity. It may not work too well in the US becuase most people there can afford cars and fuel.
In my country this is not the case and mass transportation thrives, even in rural areas, and by rural I mean populated by 6 humans, 4 sheep and 2 cows.

I'm trying to convince you otherwise.
So you think the process that makes it possible to destroy a city with a weapon the size of a duffle bag won’t be able to produce an awesome amount of power?

Fusion does not require Uranium it only requires hydrogen, and we have oceans full of that stuff (H2O). So any claim that the fuel source for fusion won’t last very long is rather ridiculous.

We will. Time is not as limited as you seem to believe, people have been saying for decades that the oil will run dry. They even had experts that have given multiple dates, which have come and gone, of when all the oil wells would be dry. I take the news of oil wells dying up as a grain of salt. Also oil companies are always finding newer ways to extract more oil out of the same well.

I was studying for tests in computer graphics and spanish.

Come to the great plains of the USA to see why mass transportation is not practical here.
I’ve been to Europe and was amazed at how compressed everything is. The impression I got was you could not go 5 miles after leaving a town without entering another. I don’t know if this true of all of Europe. In America you can cross an entire state without entering a town that is little more then a gas station.


As for things I could do without?
Um… lava lamps, plasma spheres, my broken X-box, and the city of Las Vegas.

Read what he said again.
He doesn't think that fusion wont give an awesome amount of power.
A double negation.
He's not disagreeing with you.


Oh I've been to the States, tough I didn't see too much of them.
Interestingly enough, the place were I was at was even more compresses then you say.
It was a town next to a town, without anything outside of "Welcome to..." signs telling you that you just went from one town to another.

As for wheter whole of Europe is compressed, well it's not.
Especially northern and eastern Europe, (however eastern countries, tough not too populated, aren't as big as northern ones).

But I see the problem even the biggest European countries are roughly the size of an avarage state (I think). And I guess that in many cases the general population density is much lower then that of European countries, so mass transportation would be a hard thing to accomplish.

However, even in the more compressed areas I haven't seen anything that could rival the transportation system I'm used to, and I do think it's because in the US cars and gasoline is cheao (yes, cheap. No matter what you are lead to belive by people consantly whining about gas prices, trust me, it's cheap).

In some rural areas there are decent public transit systems. However,
it's rare. Sadly rare. I think owning cars is fine...but one can have
a car that runs on electricity and used vegetable oil. That wouldn't
be so bad. Fill it up twice a year and you're good to go.

Ah… That crazy leprechaun is always trying to trick me!

Why do I get the impression we are all going to die very very soon... :-X *gulp* like as in someone screws up in a nucler plant and destroys 25% of america then we get piss say its Europe's then world war 3 begins we kill all the Europens then everyone else trys to kill us we kill them... then i dunno what happens after that  ;)

...
huh?
You overstate what a meltdown in a nuclear reactor would do. The worst thing a reactor can do is spew out radiation. When Chernobyl melted down the only structural damage to the building was a hole in the roof of the reactor chamber, and what resulted of the building lighting on fire. (http://www.ourtimelines.com/hist/chernobyl.jpg)

Nor could a single nuclear bomb destroy that much of America. Also Nuclear reactors have the best safety track record of any major energy plants. No one has died in running a civilian nuclear reactor in America.

In here, http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=248 (http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=248) it says: "Had the melted reactor core collapsed into the small lake of water underneath it, it would have been the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb."

Anyway, that didn't happen :) But at long range, the effects of a nuclear meltdown are much more significant than that of a single bomb, because a reactor can release much more radiation. Perhaps I'm slightly more serious about this, cause there was a temporary ban on certain vegetables in the Netherlands, following that disaster. And that is about 1,000 miles away.

See i was right  ;) remember the bomb at japans capital durring WW2? *i think* similar effect execpt without the huge awsome nucler explosion

The effect of radiation and how much effect it has (at non lethal levels) is an issue of great debate, but people tend to exaggerate a great deal. The lack of accurate data makes this worse. So anything that can be said to be caused by radiation will suddenly have that as the cause. I’m not saying radiation can’t cause all those things, but people have a tendency to rush to conclusions.

You should at least try to get some facts right. When you constantly get your facts wrong it makes you lose a lot of credibility. Tokyo has never been nuked.

There are fail safes you can build into reactors to keep them from having problems. From what I understand, the problems errupt when you don't use these fail safes, something mechanical obstructs them, or the reactor system gets damaged somehow.

You should at least try to get some facts right. When you constantly get your facts wrong it makes you lose a lot of credibility. Tokyo has never been nuked.
[/quote]

Tokyo is also not the capital of Japan, just the largest and most populous city. Kyoto is the capital, though that was also never nuked.

Kyoto was Japan's capital and the emperor's residence from 794 until 1868. In 1868 the emperor moved to Edo which was renamed to Tokyo making it the capital city.

Huh. I thought it still was the seat of government (what with the Emperor being a ceremonial position now) even today, though. Very well, I stand corrected.

Slow-neutron reactors are incapable of using U-238 or Pu-239, and therefore cannot draw energy from dividing these energy-rich atoms. This is very inefficient. Almost all of our reactors are slow-neutron reactors.
Since they only run on U-235, they require highly-enriched U-235 fuel, which is also suitable for making nuclear weapons.
They leave very long-lived nuclear waste, with half-lives of tens of thousands years.

Fast-neutron reactors use all of the above-mentioned isotopes -- U-235, U-238, and Pu-239. This requires decent purification only, no enrichment. It can make nuclear fuel out of sufficiently heavy elements.
The nuclear waste left by fast-neutron reactors is very short-lived, 1000 years max and mostly much shorter.

So far, sounds like Fast-neutron reactors (FNR) are just the bees knees, right?
Well, there are down-sides.

1) FNR can be used to generate Plutonium, which can be separated out and used to make nuclear weapons much more easily than Uranium can be separated out and used to make nuclear weapons.
mitigation: Plutonium-based weapons are much harder to make than Uranium weapons, after you get the material
2) FNR use liquid metal coolants, which have a not so hot safety record.
mitigation: there is a lot of room for improvement in the handling of these.
mitigation 2: when the liquid metal spills, it is at least not radioactive.

So, if the question of nuclear power is just radioactive waste and supply problems, FNR is to a great extent an answer. If it is an issue of security, it is partially an answer (you don't need to have enriched Uranium all over the place) but also a problem (each one is potentially a plutonium factory).

In the mid-range run, I think that'll be the answer. After that, we may have affordable fusion.

(edited to correct a typo which changed the nuclear physics)

Nuclear power will last a long time yet especially if proliferation bans are lifted. Some nations are already using things like Ethanol(We could just drain the Orz ;)) and Hydrogen. Solar is good because the sun will last as long as life on earth dose if not longer. My roommate and I are currently working on making Ethanol more efficient.

There are lots of replacement fuels that are available; they are just more expensive to produce right now. If we can build a sufficient info structure now to produce these replacement fuels the expense by the time the oil runs out in about 50 or so years at current rate of uses and growth of uses.

Thankfully we already have the technology to make plastic once we run out of oil.

There is also the idea out to build methane farms, but that seems like it would be a rather smelly operation :). It would be worth it though if it produced a good amount of fuel

Hydrogen is just energy storage... not a source. If you're going off of ethanol farms, remember to compare it with other solar-based energy sources in full-cycle efficiency. How much energy must be spent to keep the farm running?

highly effective source of energy, i think we have a nobel peace prize in order for you...

how are we supposed to fuel cars with flaming street bums? Let them burn into ashs, mix their ashs with rubbing alcohol and tabasco, let it ferment for a year then send it to the pump?

We'll find a way to create, safely harness and extract unlimited power from a contained singularity event. Oh wait, someone mentioned Zero Point Energy, dangit...

What other futuristic method can I think up...antideuteron? If we could smash together an antiproton and an antineutron and make a few molecules of antideuterium, that might have possibilities.
Anyone mentioned harnessing magnetic monopoles? Some sort of superconductive dynamo with multiple monopoles in it to produce vast amounts of energy. Would that even work?

Hmmm...that ITEN thing looks pretty neat. I hope it works out. If it doesn't, I'm going to invest in some solar panels for the roof of my house, wind generators, maybe a geothermal tap if I'm close to a fault line or something and then wire myself up so I never have to pay an electric bill. Shoot, I'll probably -make- money selling power back to the electric company. Ahh, Mother Nature always has a way.

"Oh wait, someone mentioned Zero Point Energy, dangit...What other futuristic method can I think up..."

You could bring up Dark Energy, no one has mentioned that yet. . .oh wait. . .

Containing a molecule of antimatter to generate energy...except if the container gets screwed up, say goodbye to pretty much everything. 1kg of matter colliding with 1kg of antimatter produces 1.8x10^17 joules...nuclear fusion of 1kg of hydrogen only produces 2.6x10^15.

Sheesh.

Iceland I believe burns hydrogen in their cars, and it is or at lest was used in rocket fuel (I think it still is, but I have not read any thing new on the subject for a while). Any how you can get hydrogen out of things from water to ammonia with little effort.

As to the methane farm I don’t think bacteria require too much maintenance, though I have not looked into the idea much, as you can probably tell.

Great. As I said, Hydrogen is energy storage. It is pretty good energy storage.


The energy you get out is less than the energy you put in, because you have to make the H2 molecules out of lower-energy configurations.

An energy source must be high in energy when you get it.

Like, light from the sun, fissionable elements, or oil pumped from the ground. Those things have energy and you didn't need to put the energy there yourself.

National Geographic did an interesting article on this
topic a year or so back, I think. If I remember correctly,
the two energy sources the author favoured were wind
and solar power.

I just wanted to state few interesting facts.

How a majority of the world stores hydrogen is in a mixture of hydrocarbons. These hydrocarbons are naturally occurring and are easily stored. The more common name for them is oil. Pure Hydrogen is colorless, odorless, and tasteless. Also when pure hydrogen burns it has no visible flame. So a Hydrogen station could be on fire and you wouldn’t know it, until something other then hydrogen starts to burn, mainly you.
 

If while approaching the station, a driver is too slow to notice the immense heat distortions, temperature increase, and people running around screaming and turning into ash, he shouldn't be behind a wheel, anyhow.

I think that there would be other things burring in the station before you just pull in.

Hydrogen also makes a rather loud bang when it goes off.
Besides this thread is to discuss what to do when the oil runs out.

I really am not doing well i nthis topic, am I? Yes, I meant nationalize.


Depends on your private needs. If the heating in your house is produced with oil, then you might not be too happy. Alternatively, if the heating in your house is powered by electricity, but thet elecricity becomes to expensive because of the oil price, you have the same problem. Basically, when oil becomes to expensive, it'll create quite a lot of instability.


It's the making sure part that is tricky. There are a lot of things that really cant be predicted which could influence a storage that is supposed to last for this long. Granted, many of them are unlikely, but for example even guarding the stuff might be tough. What if the economy flops after 2060s stock crash? Guards need to be payed, and every facility nmeeds to be maintained.


My point exactly. Unless you find some truly efficient reusable batteries for those mills, they're unreliable.


Yes, but the people making a living driving large trucks from one part of the continent to another might not be staisfied with that.



I see Ivan set you right on most things, but I just wanted to comment on this. That we have loads of food doesn't mean a thing if we don't get it working. Just like all that lunar-3 up there is worthless unless we can bring it down.

Well, yes. But there are more sources of electricity then oil. Let's stay with nuclear power for now as we're sure we can use it. Even tough the prices will generally be higher the change won't be that dramatic.


That goes without saying, the question is wheter we'll be able to survive this instability and how much of an inconvieniance it would be.


You don't really have to guard it. Dig it deep enough so that digging it out would require heavy industrial equipement, and possibly put the containers in another container whose opening would require even more equipment and just leave it there. If you see someone with enough of heavy equipment snooping around the area you just send some people to supervise their work.


That's why sadly they have to find another job.
Possibly driving trains instead of trucks.

Still doesn't help any one with an oil burner. I wasn't trying to make out that all energy come from oil, only that if oil becomes too expensive, electricity isn't always an "easy" alternative.


That remains for the future to tell. Despite the fact that I may come off as negative in this thread, I don't actually think that we are necessarily heading for a huge disaster. It might turn out that Bio is right, and that amazing amounts of oil is found within the next few weeks. Fusion might come through. Hell, Helium-3 might save the day. The reason I'm taking the "What if" side here is because it annoys me when people refuse to acknowledge even the possibility of a problem. A bit like when it comes to faith really :) So I'm not saying everything will end badly.I'm just pointing out that it isn't impossible.


Then, after the avian flu 0f 2036 kills of 75 % of europes population leaving these sites completely unguarded and anarchy reigning , "freedom fighters" simply commandeer heavy machinery and dig them up.

Alright, I'll admit that is unrealistic. ;) The point I'm trying to make is that you simply dont know what will happen in the next 1000 years. The future is hard to predict, and very few man-made things survive for that long, including countries and civilisations. Therefore, you have to build a shelter for waste that is immune against whatever the next millenia brings.


This might slightly miff the people who are used to cheap food in the supermarkets, as well as the people who don't live close to a train route. A large part of our current lifestyle depends on trucks. Cheap tomatoes from spain, cheese from france, tea from england. If most improted produce dissappears or becomes much more expensive, the cost of living will rise dramatically. In a lot of places, current railway arrangments would make it extremely hard to feed a large city if all produce was brought in by train.

Also, assuming that all trains don't become electrified withing the next 10 years or so it might also miff those whose trains are dependent on diesel, and thus too expensive to drive.

Maybe it doesn't help anyone with an oil burner, but it does give him some room to maneuver. Replacing a heater might be a fuzz for some, but it's less trouble then going to the forest every day to cut down some wood to burn.
I think it doesn't matter if something doesn't seem an easy alternative right now, what matters is that it might be the easiest alternative at some point in the future.


A risky debating tactic in my opinion. It has an equal chance of backfiring as it has of succeding. For example I'm somewhere in the middle on this issue, but was compelled to take the opposing side because I saw your arguments as over-dramatic.


Ok, I see the problem but I think you're exagerating it when you talk about 'millenia'.
I admit there is no sure fire way to keep the waste safe, but I've said it before and I'll keep saying it till the end of time, you have to compare the probability and the size of a disaster that might be caused by something going wrong with the waste with the consequences of not having a good energy source.
It's obvious that if there is an alternative to nuclear power then we should use it (well, unless it will have its own drawbacks), but we might not have the luxury of choice.


Well if I were to choose between beeing slightly miffed because I can't afford as much food as I can now, and starving to death or eating my neighbor's cat and possibly my neighbors too, I think I'd choose the former.


Really? I think small towns away from railways will have a bigger problem then large cities.
You could build super large super markets next to train stations and it would probably be enough to feed the city. Probably.


Wha? Come on, Poland is considered to be a few steps behind other countries, and I very rarely see a diesel train here.

I recall that there were also ideas about placing large solar collectors in space, and transmiting the energy to earth through low frequency radiation (micro waves I think) - which is harmless to humans, and is received by very large arrays and then converted into energy - somehow.

You can actually dispose of nuclear waste safely... in the future. You can either send it into space or the sun, or transmutate it into something else.

Solar panels in space could be nice, but remember that some energy will be used to keep them in place, or the solar wind will blow them away. Beaming the energy down here must surely result in loss of energy too.

I really don't get the point of Hydrogen/fuel cell cars. When you create burnable hydrogen via electrolysis, you are never going to get a 100% efficient conversion. The only 100% efficient conversion is the annihilation of matter with antimatter, which I think was mentioned earlier.

So, why not just take the energy that you were going to use to perform electrolysis and pump it straight into the batteries of an electric car? Much more efficient, I would imagine.

Batteries are heavy compared to normal fuels, if you look at the energy they are carrying. On top of that, they don't last long, are expensive, and are heavy polluters.

Energy inefficient in the extreme.


The solar wind blowing away solar panels? You put them in orbit. sometimes it pushes against the wind, sometimes the wind pushes it along. The only net effect ends up being the drag of the panel's motion against the solar wind as if it were sitting still. Note that the solar wind is still higher vacuum than any vacuum achievable on Earth, by several orders of magnitude.
If there is a problem, it isn't that.

As for beaming efficiency, yes, there is loss. After the losses, it's still going to be more efficient than ground-based solar arrays, just based on its being in the sun nearly 100% of the time (how much depends on the orbit you choose).

I saw some thing no dangling cables from satellites into earth’s magnetic field to produce power. The show that I saw it on made it some like they got a lot more power then they could handle in the experiment. I guess that the trouble would be getting to power back to work.

Have you heard the story of they kid who thought he could dry off his 2 pet cats by putting them in a microwave? I won’t go into detail, but he had 2 less cats and one rather nasty microwave to clean up.

EDIT:
just found this:
http://kittenkiller.ytmnd.com/ (http://kittenkiller.ytmnd.com/)

:)

How expensive is energy nowadays, btw ?

In the Netherlands, one liter of gasoline costs about 1.45 euros (3.7 liters go into one american gallon, and 1 euro is about 1.2 dollars ) .

Here in california, gas is around $2.80-$3.00 USD per gallon.

And here in Jersey, where it's pretty cheap compared to most of the rest of the US, it's running ~$2.50 - $2.75 a gallon.

And after a quick calculation, I must say I don't envy the European price at the pump. Small wonder the Smart Cars are so popular.

Microwave ovens use a frequency that is tuned to interact very strongly with water. The microwaves that would be used for this purpose would be tuned to interact very weakly with water.
Just saying that it uses microwaves doesn't mean much -- the term "microwave" covers a factor of 1000 in frequency. Meanwhile, the visible spectrum covers a bit less than a factor of 2, and look how much variation there is in colors!

Canadian gas is, on the east coast, around $1.20 per litre. Which,
I suppose, is around $4.00 per gallon.

I'm with nuclear energy 100%, no carbon emissions and it can be put in place today which is critical as we should have reduced greenhouse gas emmisions about 30 years ago. There is I believe, enough nuclear fuel in the ground and in the bloody weapons we have, to supply more than enough energy until we actually get fusion working as a feasible option.

Current estimates put that at 2030 at the earliest, so until then, nuclear power is the only way to go. (The costs of setting up renewable energy facilities to meet the world energy demand are astronomical)

Additionally, nuclear power efficiency and safety is incredibly advanced compared to the days of Chernobyl. The Chernobyl incident was caused by politics as much as it was by flimsy construction.

One tiny little problem with your wonderful solution.

Widespread nuclear energy also means a whole lot of nuclear waste. Nuclear waste last I checked (and depending on the type of waste produced) takes a few thousand years to decay down to safe levels. Finding a safe disposal site that wont contaminate the surrounding area is difficult in and of itself.

Carbon, though it might trigger more dangerous effects, can be removed from the atmosphere much more quickly then it takes for radioactive waste to decay.

Point in form: Nuclear isnt really an option either. We need to step up to fusion as soon as humanly possible and skip nuclear altogether.

Um, fusion is nuclear.

I think Canada (and the US) would do well to observe countries
like Denmark who are currently moving their systems over
the wind and solar power. Last time I checked, their energy
came from about 30% renewable/green sources. Surely
we could get a similar system in place before 2030?

Fusion isn't worth it. I takes far more power to get the reaction started and then just to contain the reaction then you will ever get out of it.

You can at lest reuse fission reactor cores, I don’t know why recycling radioactive material is illegal in the United States, but it is and I think that its stupid because other countries do it and it works for them.

Also it just so happens that the guy that founded Green Peace had a change of hart as to nuclear power, saying that it was the best way for the USA to go.

One more thing, burning oil and coal puts a tone of radioactive particles in the air.     

I'm well aware that fusion is a form of nuclear energy as is fission.

You're talking about fusion as if it's progressed as far as it will ever go. Improving techniques and research will make fusion energy not only more efficient but eventually more practicable as a true replacement for our current energy generation methods.

Saying we should give up on fusion because it's not an effective power source currently is absurd. Consider the humble car engine as an example. Modern motors are more energy efficient today then they were say, 30 years ago. Those in turn were more efficient then they were 30 years thence, and 30 years before that people scoffed at motorised transport.

Times change, technology moves forwards. Fusion is the future. And I never said that burning coal and oil were clean alternatives. I was stating that it is easier to put up with a somewhat higher proportion of natural radio isotopes in the atmosphere then it was to deal with thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste that has to be stored for more then three times the length of human history, guarded against corrosion, earthquakes and be checked and rechecked constantly to make sure nothing goes missing in addition to the costs of maintaining a storage facility for that period of time.

Not if you use it in a fast reactor. See my posts earlier in this thread.

And XR4-IT wasn't talking about a somewhat higher proportion of natural radioisotopes in the air. He was saying that burning coal releases uranium and other heavy elements into the air, and these elements are, as usual, radioactive... and that, per Joule of energy generated, you get more radiation released by burning coal than you do by running a nuclear power plant. And to boot, this radiation is spread out all over the place rather than kept in an out-of-the-way place.
If you're complaining about the radiation hazard of nuclear waste, where it's unlikely anyone is going to actually go there, you should also complain about the nuclear material that is being sprinkled all over the planet by the coal plants.


Lastly,  to come in on Cronos' side... XR4-IT, the ITER is expected to run a net energy gain from a fusion reaction, and that's going to be finished next year. Of course, it's not very economical at this point, but we're over the hump and into the 'marginal energy production of running the device is positive' range. Just, it takes a lot more energy to build the thing than it's going to, on net, produce over its lifetime.

But we are getting there. Finally.

Fusion will be good when it gets here, but practical fusion power is still some ways off. Right now we can produce plenty of power from fission reactions.

We do not necessarily have to have nuclear “waste” when dealing with fission plants. The “waste” can be put through a proliferation process that will make useable power cores. Nuclear proliferation has been band in the United States and therefore we have to go about storing old fission rods with less then safe methods.    

  Sorry wrong waist - waste

Nuclear waste can be harmlessly stored in many places. Under the circumstances, we really have no alternative. None.

Nuclear fusion won't mature for quiet some time. Either we can store nuclear waste, or watch our children starve and die of disease as the worlds farmland becomes unuseable.

Nuclear fusion though, contrary to what was earlier said, will most likely become viable eventually. It will be worth it one day.

I don’t understand your no alternatives to storing nuclear waste. It is possible to lift the proliferation ban. We in the United States and any other nations that are under such a ban need to petition our governments for a change in law.

The Citizens of the United States need to writ their senators and representatives, and tell them that they want the proliferation ban lifted so that we can recycle all that nuclear waste.   

I think you have your terms mixed up.

Nuclear proliferation is when everyone has nuclear weapons.

A breeder reactor is where you make your neutron absorbers out of U-238 so it turns into Pu-239 and becomes fissionable. Then you fission it, and get energy. This releases neutrons, which turns more U-238 into Pu-239, and there you go.

There is no ban on breeder reactors, so far as I know. The problem is, no one has yet figured out how to build one which passes adequate safety requirements.

D999, I've read somewhere that  the waste is processed and some of it can be used as fuel again, and I doubt it had anything to do with breader reactors.
....I'm not really sure about what I'm saying as I've read this quite some time ago, and can't even remember where, but are *you* sure no such process exists/is used?

I was confused.

Breeder reactors do exist. They are distinct, so far as I know, from fast reactors. I do not know why they are not used widely, unless it is that they make plutonium, which scares people.

 :D 8) ;)
I've read through most of your post and I have seen that there is one mention of ZPE
believe it or not zero point energy is a theoretical energy source that high-energy physicist are studying and trying to isolate. Its likely that for the technology to be able to harness and stabalise ZPE will take several decades but its a fesable and expected energy source.
If you find that that is too far feched then you could still with nuclear fusion not fussion, with is similar to the reaction that is presently occuring in the sun.
If you need anymore information about this or just want to controdict me or for any reason whatsoever contact me just just post again I'll come check bi-weekly.

ZPE is not an energy source.

I wrote the following article, which explains what it is and why it isn't an energy source.

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1717978

(Incidentally, there is no disclaimer here -- I am a physicist)

Ah, the link is working now, thanks.

So what you are saying is there is no known way to tranfer zero point into a lower frequency, useable form, right? It is just a carrot on a stick? (Forgive me if I'm completely off, I'm out of my league here.)

Basically, with one exception:

It's not that there there is no KNOWN way of getting this energy, but that there really is no way of getting this energy.

Okay, so then it is not like cold fusion, where you end up getting less energy than you put in, but there is simply no way of transfering it to a useable form. This raises some questions in my mind:

1) Why is it absolutely certain that it cannot be converted, when science still doesn't have a full grasp of physics (there is still so much that is theory, and that is debated back and forth, like the accuracy of string theory?) For instance, zero point might have a different frequency in a higher dimension, or something crazy like that.

2) Is it also impossible to convert lower frequency energies into ZPE? Send them on a one-way trip, basically? Could this be what happens to matter and energy when it reaches the singularity of a black hole (if such a thing is possible?)

3) Could ZPE be some sort of property of matter (IOW, it cannot be extracted, and matter cannot exist without it as a component, perhaps?)

I thought cold fusion was you get more energy than you put in to it, thus completely smashing a law of physics.

That's the comparison I was trying to make, that both cold fusion and zero point energy resources are supposed to be impossible to get anything useful out of, but because of different reasons.

My understanding of cold fusion is that, thus far, we have gotten less
energy from the result than was put in. Ideally, as the technology develops,
it might be possible to set off fusion reactions using relatively less
energy. Thus providing a relatively safe, efficient energy source.

The proof is in the atom.

My understanding of cold fusion is that people can't reproduce the initial reaction and nobody is sure whether it actually exists or not. A few years ago my class interviewed a scientist at SRI lab, and the impression I got from him was that they really believed it existed, they just couldn't make it work.

Anyway, some humor:
Cold Fusion: The Musical (http://www.deadtroll.com/text/ColdFusion.2003.rtf)

I, personally, don't see that there's a huge energy problem anytime in the near future.  Will fossil fuels last forever?  No.  But they will last a long, long time.  Much longer, I think, than any of us suspect.  Utah alone has over 300 billion barrels of oil in the oil shale (not including the stuff we haven't even discovered)... it just isn't economically feasible to get it out yet.  If the price of oil goes too high, we'll start mining that oil shale, and it will be a long time before even the U.S. runs out of that.

If the price continues to soar, then we can look forward to hydrogen fuel cells.  Once cars get running on hydrogen fuel cells, the demand for oil will drop significantly (that'll be a great day), and those 300 billion barrels will last a long time.  The problem there is jump-starting the hydrogen fuel cell technology through that stage where it really isn't profitable to do research yet, although we know it will be in the future.

Biodiesel isn't really viable for most instances because it pollutes as much as diesel (which discourages people from researching it) and it's really, really rough on a car.  Hybrids aren't going to pull their weight (they have LOTS of moving parts, and will be expensive to maintain).  Liquid Natural Gas isn't going to take off if oil dies for the same reasons that oil will die.  LNG might be a good "transition fuel" for cars, but it won't be permanent.

Here's what will happen.  Gasoline will get more and more expensive, and alternative fuel sources will get more and more researched until someone makes hydrogen fuel cells that are really practical.  Then, everything will slowly evolve to use those.  We're talking decades into the future, though, so don't mind if it's a little hazy around the edges.

As for electrical power, I have no idea what will happen.  I just hope we discover a profitable cold fusion, or a good way to contain hot fusion.

I guess this could be relevant to this discussion. Brittish actor/comedian talking about Blair, Iraq and oil.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7374585792978336967

A: ZPE is, by definition, the energy that can't be extracted. So, if you can extract the energy, it sure isn't ZPE.

B: just because we don't know everything doesn't mean we don't know anything.

C: I can see one way around the restriction in A, but in order to get the energy out of empty space, you would, at a very minimum, have to break the ability of free space to carry a certain wavevector of electromagnetic radiation, across the entire universe. Assuming you could conquer the causality problems that entails, it is a really bad idea for reasons which should be obvious.
Extracting the energy of a local oscillator can be done, but it just involves lowering the resonant frequency... and we already know how to do that, it's nothing astonishing. And the amounts of energy you get out of it are craptacularly small.


I don't know what you're talking about, and I suspect you don't either.


You could say that; but instead of just matter, it would be more general.

This is right, pretty much.

There are several methods claimed to produce cold fusion.

One definitely works in principle, but is technically unachievable. That is, use a particle accelerator to produce muons, have those muons displace electrons in hydrogen. The muons settle closer to the nucleus than electrons, because they are heavier. This lowers the barrier to fusion greatly.
Problem: muons decay slowly for rare particles, but fast on the time scale of fusion, and anyway, they're hard to make. You'd have to make an incredibly precise muon factory and bury it in a vat of hydrogen.

Another uses a sound wave to make only very small regions of the hydrogen hot. This is the one that is controversial. It's controversial because it hasn't been reproduced and there were some bad experimental techniques used in the original work, and they over-hyped it.

There are some reasons that it might not have been reproducible elsewhere (necessary elements to the setup that they did not identify, and so were not reproduced), but at this point, it seems a dubious claim. Other groups are moving forward with this method; however, they are not trying to reproduce, but simply to produce in the first place, by methods they think are better.

Yes, but sometimes what you think you know turns out to be more complex (and other times simpler) than originally believed.



If I knew what I was talking about, why would I be asking all these questions? :P

I'll restate, if ZPE is a reservoir of energy that cannot be extracted, can energy be put into it (the resevoir.) Can, say, visible light energy be converted into zero point energy?



Do you mean a fundamental element of energy and matter, (and any other forms of anything that are discovered, like dark matter/energy?)

If ZPE is infinite, physics aside, what would be the point of trying to *add* to it?

There is no such thing as "infinity plus one".

No, you can't get anything into or out of it. You can sometimes arrange matters so its existence makes a difference, but you have to bring the energy to do so yourself.



Noo... I mean that if something has a wavefunction (i.e. if it exists), and it is subject to some potential (i.e. it interacts with other things), then there will necessarily be some energy in that interaction which cannot be removed. This is ZPE. If you find a way to remove it, then the energy of the new lowest state you found is the real ZPE.

Now, if our theories are even vaguely right, the kind of ZPE we're talking about here is totally inaccessible. We'd have to be about as off as nonrelativistic newtonian mechanics was from a quantum field theory, in order for this to be extracted.

Let's see how off it would have to be.... hmm... I think I found an analogy. It would be about the same as if someone managed to dig a hole in the Earth, kept going down... for 200,000 miles.

Or, it's as if "The Core" represented a valid scientific viewpoint.

Is it infinite? I thought it was just unextract-able and in vast quantities. Anyway, I never said I had plans to convert visible light into ZPE, I was just asking if it was possible.



No, there is no "infinity divided by zero," infinity plus one just equals infinity. . .at least, I think it does. . .



Ah damn, I had forgotten about that movie, now you've reminded my of its existence. . .

An example of infinite, unextract-able stupidness.

This link gives a fairly recent overview of global energy (oil, gas and coal) reserves and production, it's pretty interesting (note the position of countries like Iran and Iraq). Of course the reserves are economically viable reserves, if energy prices go up, it'll increase a bit.

http://www.geohive.com/charts/charts.php?xml=en_oilprod&xsl=en_res (http://www.geohive.com/charts/charts.php?xml=en_oilprod&xsl=en_res)

Okay.  I can understand that.  Wow.  That would take an alternate universe of some sort, or perhaps an alternate multiverse, assuming the existence of one multiverse in the first place.  I mean, I took and passed high school and college physics.  And I can point out a thousand wrong-headed ideas in that awful excuse of a movie.  More, if I'm given some time to think.  Half of the dramatic deaths were made comedic by just stupid, botched and backwards "science."

I think I now see why ZPE talk gets you riled up a bit.

Is that list really a global energy overview... or a who's who of Bush's "axis of evil" ? ;)

Ummm...  Yeah.

You know those filthy American dogs at number three.  Bush wants to take over the U.S....

Oh, wait, he's the President already.

I don't even see North Korea on here.  Now, if he had named Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and Mexico as the axis of evil, then I could understand your comment.  As it is... you don't make sense, or at least not to me.  Maybe I'm just stupid.

More like the "Axis of countries we need to bring the gift of American-style-guns-blazing-democracy," really. True, he's working out of order what with the US and Iraq checked off the list before Saudi Arabia, but take the targets of opportunity as they come, right? ::)

^ ^ ^ delete me, I'm a spam post ^ ^ ^

ZPE is still too theoretical and/or fantastic to be used in any assumptions and "serious" theories.

Fossil fuels are obsolete, or rather are supposed to be. DESERVE to be.

Nuclear fission is a clean source of energy that will last us a long time if managed properly (the way fossil fuels weren't). Also, all the paranoia, controversy and sensationalism surrounding nuclear fission can be blamed only on human error, human deliberate and the manhattan project. Incidentally, I consider the manhattan project viable reason to eradicate the US off the globe - or rather, let's be fair: humanity in its entirety, seeing as the majority of the world's governments (including my own before the 1994 bullcrap) went 'Nuclear bombs! Yeah, we gotta get in on that!'

Assholes.

Nuclear fusion is a viable alternative, but is still in development.

Antimatter still has a loooooong way to go.

Ethanol/methanol is also very viable, particularly in the automotive industry.

So: Fission/fusion power for industrial/commercial use, alcohol for transport. Could work quite well, and is much cleaner than our present system of making the planet uninhabitable.

Geothermal power: Good concept, very viable. Clean.

Hydroelectric power: Yes, good idea, but dams cause far too much ecological impact to be viable. Remember the Yangtse river dolphin?

Solar power: Very good idea. Use an abundant natural resource that isn't going to turn the planet into a barren wasteland over time. Underused.

Discuss. (please note that my hatred for humanity is preferred not to be an item for discussion).

All the alternatives are good ideas, but sadly they are all, except for nuclear power plants, still not efficient enough.
Chances are that even if we forced ourselves to use these alternatives now, we'd cause more damage to the environment then we would have, if we just stayed with fossil fuels for a while, until we developed some of the alternatives better.

The way I see it, as fossil fuels become more expensive, there will be more incentive to find a viable alternative, and sooner or later someone will come up with it.

Retooling to run vehicles on methanol actually requires very little modification to the vehicles themselves, and the price per litre of methanol is far lower. In addition, engines running methanol instead of petrol run cleaner and colder. The drawback here is that methanol without additives delivers lower performance than ordinary petrol (octane of 70-odd instead of 90-odd).

The only issue with conversion to methanol is retooling to produce the quantities required i.t.o. cost and environment impact. Sugar cane is a very good raw material to extract methanol from, and if I have to give up sugar in my coffee for a cleaner environment, I'm prepared to do so.
Reduce the number of cars and increase the number of scooters and bikes, and the amounts required go down even further. I travel to work every day. Most families around here have a car per license - one per kid and one for each parent AND the minibus/4x4 for weekend use. Excessive?

This just in - Popular Mechanics just ran an article about a (production) car with a 400KM range and a 0-100 of 4s, running ELECTRICITY! This is a technology worthy of mass production, IMO.

If that is really the case, expect some car mechanic with a nose for buisness to offer car modifications, and a guy with good contacts with another guy from Brasil to start some gas stations.
The reason you don't see this in America is because for all the complaining gas over there is still very cheap. But where I'm from some people (specifically the ones who's buisness is greatly dependant on gas prices like taxi drivers or truckers) would kill for a cheap alternative.
To give you an example, taxi drivers mix gasoline with oil (the kind you use for frying), so they can save a few cents on a litre.


That's very nice of you, but also very naive.
How much sugar do you use daily?
How much alcohol could you get out of it?
Not much, huh? Now even if everyone decided to save sugar, also pretty much everyone has a car, so the amount of sugar saved per capita would be pretty much the same as you'd get for yourself if only you decided to save sugar.


The problem is neither you or any other single person or a cometee get to decide what is worthy of mass production and what is not. If there is a mass demand, there will be mass production, any attempt to force producers to make something that no one really wants will end with a disaster.
This Divine Intervention tactic that you seem to suggest will cause more harm then good. If you really must play with market forces, be more subtle - tax the hell out of something you want to discourage and and lower the taxes on the stuff you want to encourage, but even then it can backfire.

Begin eruption...

Actually, what IS going to happen is this: First - we are going to continue with our stupid lifestyle and stupid values and stupid morals and stupid greed, thus using up what few resources we have. Because we insisted on continuing with methods which are inherently self-destructive, and showing little to no interest in alternatives "because it costs too much to implement the change/the change is too inconveniently large-scale/the change requires too much behaviour modification", our resources are going to dry up - disappear. By that stage it will be too late to switch to alternatives.

Second, everyone is going to kill everyone else for possession of the last remainder of bugger-all and the human race will be extinct. Wonderful. At least then our embarrassment of a species won't be able to spread to space and wreck more of the universe, considering how we've wrecked this insignificant little ball of rock which we all live on and WILL become extinct on.

Humanity DESERVES itself.

End eruption.

What you speak of is impossible for a very simple reason.
As Deus said in this very thread: I don't think you realize that you're not just going to wake up some day and say "OMG, the OIL (or whatever resource). . .it is ALL Gone!".
As the resources run out their price will grow, as they keep growing the prices of alternatives won't look as discouraging and we will switch to them.
Even now there is big incentive to develop alternative energy sources, and with time this incentive will only grow.

At least the Amish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish) in the U.S. wouldn't be killing people if "bugger-all" suddenly disappeared.  Not that they even kill someone in self-defense... so they might end up being victims of people raiding Amish farms for food.

Very true. As the price of dealing with ouil becomes higher, all sorts of alternative solutions will become more and more attractive. At some point, they will become more profitable than oil, or we will switch over. this is one of the core tenets upon which the world is run. Always use the cheapest option in order to maximize profit.

The problem that I think Mugz is alluding to, is that it might not be as easy as all that to switch over to alternative fuels after the oil becomes to expensive.  In theory, sure, when plastic bags become to expensive it is more profitable to make paper bags, when gasoline cars become to expensive it is more advantegous to own ethanol fueled cars.

But research into these things isn't easy. It takes a lot of time, money, and energy. If all goes well, we will at some point spend a few years/decades/centuries more with energy prices that rise higher and higher before we come up with something that replaces oil. But what if we don't find it? What if no new energy source we find is capable of providing us with the same amount of energy for the same low price? What if nothing we come up with allows the infrastructure we've built upon cheap energy to continue functioning even in the least? It's hard to research alternate ways of producing power if you can't fire up your lab because of the high cost. It's hard to convert your factories to run on methane if you can't transport the new macinery there due to high energy prices.

Of course, as I've stated earlier, this is gloomy to the extreme. More probable than not, we're not going to fall back into some sort of Steampunk fantasy where "He who controls the oil, controls the universe". I just feel slightly worried that so many people just go "Crisis, nevermind, we'll have fusion in a few years!"

That's understandable, but I on the other hand don't like it when people scream "THE SKY IS FALLING! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!". I don't like it even more when people who claim that the sky is falling advocate heavy government (or whatever) intervention.
In a situation where people will run around screaming about the end of the world, and generally having an 'give us anything but oil, or we'll cut your heads off' attitude, they might get... anything that isn't oil - regardless of it's efficiency, costs, and impact on the evironment.

Ah, well.

Which is why we complement eachother so beautifully in threads such as these. I prefer to err on the safe side, and point out problems. This pessimism annoys you and you rebutt with positive projections. So I crank the old gloom-o-meter up a bit, and you counter with some Optimist Rays^TM. At some point, we should just duke it out until we end up in position not quite unlike "APOCALYPSE WTF OIL BLOOD STONE AGE!!" and "HIPPY HIPPY FREE ENERGY MAN UTOPIA SHINY GRACE!". That could be quite interesting.


Still, not all things can be solved without intervention. Granted, it's very seldom effective, but it can be a first step on the road. Look at endeangered animals. Without protection many of them would have vbeen wiped out already. But even with some heavy-handed intervention they are still getting there. The solution can be to buy some time through interventions, and use that time to fix the problem. Of course, it doesn't always work.


Did I hear someone say bioethanol?

The one gets lighter and the other gets darker. Hmmm. Maybe we should keep pushing this one until we manage to obtain a sustainable matter-antimatter reaction right here on the forum.

It's funny you mention endangered species protection.
I just got around watching an episode of Bullshit about this very subject.
It was about how it was handled in the States, so I understand it's different in other countries, but I wanted to discuss the mechanism itself.

One of the problems with the endangered speices legislation there, is that determining which species are endangered and which aren't is left to local authorities.
So if you have two adjectant areas, one has lots of animals of species X in one area, but only a few in the other, in one place they are considered endangered and protected, and in the other they're not.
The consequence of this is that in one place you are allowed to completely mow down the habitat that animals prefer (since most of them are living there, it follows that they prefer to live there), while you're not allowed to touch the place that they don't really like.

I know this can't be used as an argument agianst intervention in and of itself, but it describes the mechanism I was talking about perfectly.
If there's an angry mob screaming "Save the endangered species!", the focus is not on doing the job right, but on making the mob calm down. As a result, it is likely that the actions taken will do more harm then good.

If anyone's interested in the mentioned Bullshit episode, I think you can catch it on Google Video
here (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5112907900249637625&q=penn+%26+teller)


Heh, I didn't really research ethanol, but there are quite a few things that come to mind, like the way recycling was implemented in my country - they set up a few containers so people would sort their trash, only to have it all dumped into the same truck's cargo hold.
Not to mention that recycling some stuff is more harmful to the environment then just producing more of it.

The drawback to government intervention specifically is that governments have to kowtow to public opinion. The public very seldom agrees on what exactly it wants, yet knows precisely what it doesn't want. The government usually only finds out what the public doesn't want the hard way. (less frequent)

Alternately, the government doesn't give a damn about the majority of the public, choosing instead to cater to an unrepresentative minority of their supporters - NOT voters! - and generally being more interested in making themselves and their buddies rich(er) than in anything else.

Intervention to buy time to implement a solution is pretty much the only thing interventions are good for, although usually then it's too late anyway.

But then, cynicism compels me to remark that the time is always 'too late.'

I don't mean to derail anything or sound unhip, but I'm afraid this whole topic is not really looking at the problem, just a side effect. The real issue is actually gloomier than even luki's take on the situation. ;)

The good news is there is no need for a search for alternative energy because there is plenty of energy sources.

But the problem is that there is just too damn many of us, and we are growing, growing, growing. In europe and america, we can cut back and live like hippies, but we are what? 500-600 million people? China and India are both becoming very modern, with a combined population of about 2,500 million. That's about 3 billion combined heavy consumers/polluters. So we all have to use something like 1/6 of the energy and create 1/6 the pollution of what we use/create today, just to keep things going as badly as they are now, in just these two respects (will get to the others later.) And that is not counting continued population growth in these nations (China revoked its one child per couple law in 2002, India still has a very high birth rate, US is growing heavily do to extreme immigration, EU is probably the slowest of the four.)

And for greens (such as myself,) I have more bad news, as the US and China have hordes of coal resources that will undoubtedly by used once the relatively "clean" petrol fossil fuels become way too expensive, and should be much cheaper than alternative energies outside of damns (ecologically destructive as well, but will also continue to be built.)

But fuel is also highly less noteworthy because we have so little essential things like water and especially food, whose shortages are increasingly aided by climactic instability.

So to create that ethanol (which has relatively very little energy per gallon when compared to standard gas) Mugz ain't going to be giving up the sugar in his morning coffee, he's going to be deciding whether to run his car and heat his house, or eat that day.

The US/EU liberal/progressive belief that utopia can be accomplished using alternative energy and careful resource usage, while turning a blind eye to the real problems of population growth and the resulting food/water shortage disasters, is about the same as believing everything is about to be taken care of by armageddon, as long as you follow strict religious law. It's just that to try and deal with the real problem takes so much away from our emotions and modern morals that it is too upleasant and hard to deal with for most people, so they simply don't, imo.

So to finish off my perfectly depressing rant, the only solutions you would find from biological and nuclear energies, would be from plagues and mushroom clouds. ;)

(Deus sweeps into first place for gloomiest human on the planet, leaving luki to have to settle for second.)

'Too many humans, not enough space and resources to go around'.
(5 points to whoever can give me the source of that quote, +5 for the context)

What we need is a negative population growth for about, ohh, a millennium. How to achieve this?

The quickest way to halt and reverse population growth will be to do nothing. The resources will run out one day. It might be tomorrow, for all I know. We have now established this beyond any possible doubt. Loss of fossil fuels and other energy sources is admittedly minor. Food and water, now, that's a biggie. Global drought and famine, probably with a few plagues thrown in for good measure. It is going to be very biblical.

I don't think we'll have too many survivors. If there are survivors, well, good luck to them. They're going to NEED it.

It is going to be very interesting. Unpleasant, but interesting.