One more rare material looks to be replaced by one of the most common, carbon.
As I've been saying for a while, when our needs can be satisfied with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (the CHON elements), there will be effectively no barrier to indefinite sustainability of technological civilization as long as the sun shines.
.... there will be effectively no barrier to indefinite sustainability of technological civilization as long as the sun shines.
So when is it that all our needs will be satisfied by CHON? Might want to hurry that one a little. Within ten years, if not sooner, climate tipping points may make sustainability a word of the past. That is, if it isn't already. That is, if the combination of technology and sustainability isn't the biggest oxymoron of all times to begin with.
Can we have a guarantee the CHON paradise will be established before 2018? If not, never mind, we've got more important things to do.
The production ramp will be fast. There is a lot of money to be made in converting the lifeblood of our economy from oil to ingenuity.
But, it will take time to ramp production and refine techniques.
The largest delay will come from de-monopolizing power generation and transportation. These are regulated monopolies with monolithic distribution rules. Most innovations profit by preempting waste with distributed collaborative distribution (Internet like). Innovations break the rules.
The technology and manufacturing can be addressed, maybe not without real hardship. Regulatory approval to innovate is a more desperate issue.
Regulatory approval to innovate is a more desperate issue.
Ya know - I used to think that but its a lot more cloudy then just deregulation - powerful groups have a mutual assured destruction pact with each other. The EV1 (flawed example I know but stay with me) altered a market too much for the vested markets (auto parts supply, oil change shops, oil companys ect...) for it to be accepted. The vested market alliance kept with the relationships it knew.
One of the reasons that IBM fell in influence was due to the desire for the mass market to want to have th evil empire to fall - it was a social background that created the realizations that empowered the market to move beyond the mainframe modal.
Even with innovations the ground is littered with the bodies of companys that had the right idea but fell because people did not have a connection that the innovators success was tied to there own destiny.
I guess what I am trying to say is the regulators are simply one part of a puzzle - a social realization that ones own prosperity is connected to the success of a new market configuration and then the new market needs to create products that capture the passion of the consumer in a non rational way - involve yourself in this market and you will prosper, do not and you will personally fall.
All the deregulation in the world cant ignite that passion within a person - and all of the digital theorizing in the universe amounts to a rain dance for a non existent reality.
I am still hopeful - but looks like we do not have too much time.
No, you can't have any guarantees. As they said in my High School Natural History class, 'The only thing constant is change.' But even without a contract written in granite, don't you think we should be looking into the many things we're discovering we can do with carbon? Hydrocarbons, and (CHON) Organic Chemistry in general?
Yes, his statement was also overly broad. 'No Barrier', indeed.
There are MANY important things to do, and MANY people that we have to keep busy if we are to get there. (Since we clearly can't stay here..)
I seem to remember Indium going for something like $100 an ounce and this was several years ago.
It might be now, where gold was a decade ago.
If it could be displaced by carbon, it would be. There must be applications that really call for it.
One I've heard of it, that it's used in low-temperature soldering, like of mil-spec stuff.
I've long said that high-tech stuff would soon devalue to where it's only worth its scrap value, but that it where high-tech equipment stands now. It's not repairable, it's quickly outdated, and its only value is in the gold, palladium, and stuff like indium that may be on the circuit boards and in the chips.
The minute human beings began chipping stone tools we became a technological species. Just prior to the invention of the steam engine, Europe had thousands of water wheels powering manufacturing machinery of various types. A nascent solar power industry also existed but was cut short by the realization stored solar power in the form of coal was more economical to exploit. Assuming that the human race survives the coming energy transition, there is not the remotest possibility that we will become a non-technological species. The key questions are:
1. What level of economic production can be sustained in post fossil fuel world containing 8 or 9 billion people?
2. How long can the world’s net economic productivity continue to increase?
It is not just the sustainability of solar PV that matters, but economic cost of delivering a net unit of energy, including the cost of compensating for the variable nature of the solar resource on both short and long time scales as dispatchable fossil fuel generation declines. Since China is still building coal fired power plants like crazy, it is clear that solar energy has a ways to go yet before it can match the economic quality of fossil fuels.
Furthermore, no matter how much solar energy technology improves in the future, it cannot enable the exponential expansion of our economic productivity forever. When the world’s net economic productivity stops increasing, then new ways of allocating production resources and more equitable means of distributing economic output will have to be developed if we hope to maintain a humane, democratic society. I believe that the dream of purely technological fix which will enable business as usual operation of the current economic system to the end of the century and beyond, will prove delusory.
...if we hope to maintain a humane, democratic society.
I would maintain that we (USA) do not have what qualifies as a humane and democratic society. We may have come close a few decades ago, but things have been decidedly downhill since the 'Reagan Revolution'.
The trends of wealth accumulation, poverty and injustice are plainly negative. At present we likely have available the most energy per-capita that will ever be available (some figure the peak of per-capita energy was passed ~1989). Given this, how are these trends likely to be reversed. How are we going to fix our deteriorating infrastructure, house our homeless, provide health care and education for all in a future with less energy available? Especially considering the extra energy that will be taken to make the post fossil-fuel transitions?
Optimistic back-of-envelope calculations will mean nothing until these negative trends are seen to be clearly on the mend.
when our needs can be satisfied with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (the CHON elements), there will be effectively no barrier to indefinite sustainability..
The fly in the ointment here is the "H" or Hydrogen. There is no free hydrogen anywhere on earth. It takes more energy to extract hydrogen from water than you get when it is re-oxidized and becomes water again.
Just saying that these elements are out there and all our needs can be satisfied from them says nothing. Well, it says nothing to anyone with any knowledge of thermodynamics anyway.
But of course the solar rollers believe we can build thousands of square miles of solar panels and extract all the hydrogen we need from water. But all this is nothing more than a pipe dream. It is a little like fusion energy, fifty years in the future, and always will be.
I like how Ron is so positive about what the future will bring, doesn't think there is absolutely any chance he is wrong. Although I think new science and tech will save the future, even I know there's a chance that is wrong and things will go bad. I think my favorite quote of the year on the forums was "absolute statements amuse absolutly" can't remeber who wrote it, but very telling. There was also someone who had a great prediction from 1880 about NYC, where the guy predicted in 100 years NYC would be overrun by horse manure, pretty amusing. The point of all this? No one not even Ron can predict the future with 100% certainty, only a fool would believe so.
unfortunately other than Bussard (now gone) and those who are continuing his work, nobody who works in fusion seems to think it will work - I've spoken to a few physicists who work in fusion and none of them believe the Bussard type fusors are the way to go...not my area of expertise by a long shot, but doesn't make me hopeful that the (fusion) cavalry is going to ride in at the last minute and save us all...
I agree the future is quite unknowable - but I would argue that some truly awful "nasty, brutish and short" futures are included (and perhaps more likely?)
on the other hand Indium was supposedly as common as silver, so how could we have only 10 years left? (and it has not been a sought-after element for very long, unlike silver) - not sure I'm buying into peak Indium yet...
Which just goes to show how much of the world's resources we must plunder to keep the current population alive and happy for the remainder of our natural lives...
Are you aware that so far only about half of the people who ever reached the age of 1 have died?
Wrong! Not just wrong but terribly wrong. A quick google check of "How many people have ever lived on earth" brings up several estimates.
The total of the entries of the last column is about 2,402 billion person-years (2,402,000,000,000). If one divides by 25 as an estimate of average lifespan, one estimates that 96,100,000,000 people have lived on the earth. http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ramsey/People.html
And:
Number who have ever been born 106,456,367,669 http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx
But of course it does not say how many of those 106 billion lived to reach the age of 1. But you can be sure it was far more than one in 30, the number it must be if half the people who reached the age of 1 are alive today.
So only 1 in 15 to 20 people who ever lived are alive today.
Yeah, estimates since agricultural development, are as high as 100 billion, but with much of the time in that 10,000 year period having infant mortality rates as high as 1 in 2, about 50 billion have reached 1 year old - so today it's about 1 in 8 people alive compared to the total who have reached 1 year...
Now, if you look at resource use, I would suspect that our resource use, for the people alive today, will far outweigh all the rest of human history.
AntiDoomer, your critique of my post can best be described as "whining". I posted my opinion that thousands of square miles of solar panels to generate hydrogen from water and save the world form peak oil was a dream, and like fusion energy, always somewhere in the future.
You replied with a URL that on the Bussard reactor that ended with this statement:
"Someday, they said, if they're right, a machine just 20 times bigger than the one sitting in the corner on Parkway Drive could run the city of Santa Fe."
Someday indeed! And I made no absolute declarations in my post. But I do believe that crude oil will begin its decline in five to ten years, perhaps less. And the fusion reactor that will solve all our problems is coming down the pike someday! We cannot wait for someday AntiDoomer.
If peak oil hits the economy hard, and I believe it will, research money will be the first to go, especially research money that only promises a "perhaps someday" reward.
One Glaring problem with fusion is how to extract energy from it. Half of the energy output of D-D fusion is fast neutrons which are extremely difficult to trap and convert into thermal energy. These fast neutrons also have a nasty habit of embrittling materials as well as transforming them into radioactive isotopes. Fusion has the radioactive madas touch. Everything in reach will become radioactive.
That's exactly the point for why Bussard's polywell fusion is potentially so interesting. He believed the machine would support Boron-proton fusion, which is a much much cleaner process.
One description of this:
Theoretical and experimental results suggest that this "polywell" approach to fusion can not only generate net power, but do it in a clean way, with no radioactive byproducts, using fuels (hydrogen and boron) that are abundant environmentally friendly.
We researchers and engineers who churn out this miraculous stuff for you to brag about are dismayed by your lack of understanding.
Have you any idea what compromises and limitations we have to fight each day just to keep adding tiny refinements to existing technologies? And how long its been since anything 'revolutionary' has been discovered?
We're no longer plunging into the unknowns, full of undiscovered unpredictable new fangled things. That was over hundred years ago. Today we know rather well what might be possible. Rather we are like stuck in a small box of limits of laws of physics, tediously stretching our limbs for better positions, with ever diminishing returns...
But surely more money will create more innovation and release us from our troubles?
What do you mean by more money? Double my budget? Ten times the dimes I have? So a hundred times then. Ok, that'll buy me some latest equipment, hire a couple of research teams on projects I'd been keeping in the closet, and maybe a new building for them. Let's see ... no, you didn't even double my 'innovations'. And by the way, now I'll need that same or increasing amount of money every year from now on just to stay in place.
Money is linear but research subjects are infinitely exponential. Give me any amount of money, and I'll spread it out so thinly on all the possibilities that nobody will notice the difference. So you have to make choices. Not just ball park guesses but actually very specific and highly defined narrow projections on where it's worth placing the buck.
And then you go to work. You spend 5 years collaborating with your international colleagues to experimentally test some of the most likely projections. You end up with a candidate or two and spend your next 5 year's budget to make the experiments that define enough data to see some of the engineering limits of its applications. Then a venture capital firm jumps on some fruitful looking angle of your technology and you spend another 5 years waiting if they can get their shit together and make anything out of it. Oh, too expensive for the current market conditions? - damn, back to the drawing board. And so on and on...
So, you see, I find it hard to share your optimism. Perhaps you'd like to share with us your ideas and experiences on why we should think that after a hundred years, our modern, mature, pumped dry and streched to the limit -technology has the capacity left, or the time to deploy, solutions or even significant mitigations to problems like PO or GW?
Ransu, great post. I read it twice. I could not stop chuckling at your venting of your frustration. Of course I know it was not funny to you but nevertheless I could not stop laughing.
A far better rebuttal to TheAntiDoomer than I could ever give.
ransu, great post - right about dead on what the less technocopian fusion researchers describe...
I know one fusion physicist who (quietly on the side) said to me that he sees societal collapse before we solve the engineering issues of fusion - I'm afraid his view is far closer to mine than the "we can mine helium 3 from the moon and run society forever!" camp....
the test reactor that they just groundbroke in France, I wonder if it will even be finished when budgetary problems hit? and that's a test, not adding anything to the grid at all...
While you're crying in your beer I'd like to hear how the unified theory of physics goes - since you implied it with "Rather we are like stuck in a small box of limits of laws of physics,"
Ah, did I? Well, may I then too assume you imply that the existance of water-proof unified theory is required before one is allowed to critically look at what can be achieved?
As for crying into my beer, may I be excused for doing so when surrounded by antidoomer people spouting silly nonsense without the slighest understanding or experience in experimental physics or real world engineering?
My point was the species is still learning the physics laws, so the box size is unknown ...and then there is that real world engineering ...that costs ...money.
Ok, the box I was talking about is the conceptual frame, which consists of our understanding of physics, a frame you need in order design any kind of experiments in science or applications in engineering. We know this box well, we've been bouncing on its sides for long enough now, and its getting tight for us already. We see clearly all the walls and have measured the angles between them, so it sure looks like a box to us, inside of which we are stuck. Now, we cannot quite see if the seams join in the corners so there is some small uncertainty left, hence we can't make up our minds on the unified box theory yet...
Now, what you mean is well known - the limits have been discussed here on TOD many times. Your box is the reality. Specifically for us, at this time, this globe. With all our physics and chemistry books and datasheets full of statistics on ecology of populations, we just don't seem to 'get it'. As a species we're the kid in the classroom who slept during all the lessons when nature spoke of the rules and limits, which govern everything. Now we're sweating it out at the exam, trying to make up stuff in the answer sheet.
This post explains exactly why I left the field of environmental ecology (entomology) and became a computer analyst for a private company. I decided the effort to succeed in science far outweighed the returns. I am glad that there are some folks left in the world with the stamina to keep up scientific effort, but it becomes more difficult every passing year. My tolerance for it all ran out after ten years.
I salute you and sympathize with your struggle. I decided to try for a more normal life...kids and a salary to support them.
Excellent post. A lot of intelligent folks still don't seem to 'get' either the time constraints this particular civilization is under or the Tainteresque diminishing returns on investment in complexity, which are huge at this point in mature fields.
I spoke with Bussard last year about his approach, not because I thought it would work, but because it was one of the few long-shot approaches which might not prove to be impossible, and if it wasn't impossible, it seemed to possibly have the characteristics which could allow it to be retrofitted into current systems in a reasonable time. (ITER-style tokamaks won't ever be built out significantly even if they work fine). In other words, a hail-mary pass.
In other words, a desperation move. We're down to desperation moves at this point. His work was funded by the Navy instead of by what I had in mind, which was fine by me. I'll be amazed if anything comes of it, but it'd be nice.
Anyone who thinks there are plenty of tech answers out there to human overshoot really, really, doesn't understand the problems.
Disclaimer: I'm not a practicing physicist, or an expert in fusion. If I have any expertise - debatable - it's in visualizing a number of things simultaneously and not shrinking from what I see.
I think ITER-style tokamaks will function as advertised. I see no flaw in the theory; the physics are unremarkable and in many ways elegant. On an artistic level, I support it as an object of complex functional beauty.
My skepticism has everything to do with "receding horizons". Even if the thing cranks ahead on schedule, commercial versions are supposed to be designed by what, 2040? And the first one maybe built out by 2050? And how many of them do we need?
I'm afraid that once we get a couple of decades into the future, fiscal and geopolitical systems will be in a fair deal of chaos, for reasons frequently discussed here. "Just in time" supply chains, won't be. Impoverished and increasingly hungry/disgruntled populations may complicate things significantly.
Beyond that, though, I suspect that the falling EROEI will begin to qualititatively affect the level of complexity which is sustainable by a globe-girdling civilization. A high-tech masterpiece like a functional tokamak will require, by its nature, designing to the limits of alloying and fabrication technologies. Our current reality, in which nearly any element is available in a reasonable time at a reasonable price, is the output of the most complex evolved extractive system ever to exist, operating at its all-time peak efficiency. That evolved infrastructure is an integral part of things from tokamaks to space shuttles, they don't exist independently of it; and that infrastructure is changing in fundamental ways. It will not well tolerate or recover from hiatus.
Building rail is great precisely because it does NOT require the current infrastructural complexity.
Don't misunderstand; I'm not opposed to giant tokamaks. I even think that a few will be built and will function for awhile. I would help if I could. But unless some plague were to wipe out 90% of the human population and buy more time, I don't see it happening. The project isn't being pursued with the necessary desperation and probably isn't scalable.
I was that odd environmentalist who was for O'Neill colonies, superconducting supercolliders, and mankind as the responsible high-tech stewards of a healthy oasis in space. My preferences went unrealized; and continue to be.
I understand your point. One analogy would be German (and Japanese) efforts during WW II, where certain available resources (oil & mercury in Japan, oil & rubber in Germany) were far short of requirements, and bombs kept falling on the infrastructure.
I do prefer robust infrastructure (hydroelectric dams kept producing in North Korea and Albania despite isolation, and PRK RRs as well).
Still, if a workable economic design of a tokamak can be built, I think more will be built at erratic speed and places. Not a smooth curve of worldwide construction but brief clusters here and there.
The Nordic areas might be one center of design and construction post-2050. A disciplined and desperate Japan might be another. Perhaps Russia, the USA (the USA has a large strategic stockpile), EU or even Brazil.
And the remaining islands of high tech metallurgy & electronics (the two most critical basic skills to building tokamaks) could trade with each other.
As a chemical engineer currently debottlenecking a polyimide film production line, I can absolutely understand the intense time, effort, and capital required to make incremental improvements to established processes.
I don't have experience with determining the feasibility of theoretical projects; however, I imagine the same generalities apply as materials, technologies, and markets evolve over time.
Technical improvements are hard won any more, but we don't have much in the way of technical problems. Political and organizational improvements can come in a flash. We desperately need some of those, starting with leadership that is a little less useless than the Bush administration ...
One more rare material looks to be replaced by one of the most common, carbon.
As I've been saying for a while, when our needs can be satisfied with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (the CHON elements), there will be effectively no barrier to indefinite sustainability of technological civilization as long as the sun shines.
So when is it that all our needs will be satisfied by CHON? Might want to hurry that one a little. Within ten years, if not sooner, climate tipping points may make sustainability a word of the past. That is, if it isn't already. That is, if the combination of technology and sustainability isn't the biggest oxymoron of all times to begin with.
Can we have a guarantee the CHON paradise will be established before 2018? If not, never mind, we've got more important things to do.
The production ramp will be fast. There is a lot of money to be made in converting the lifeblood of our economy from oil to ingenuity.
But, it will take time to ramp production and refine techniques.
The largest delay will come from de-monopolizing power generation and transportation. These are regulated monopolies with monolithic distribution rules. Most innovations profit by preempting waste with distributed collaborative distribution (Internet like). Innovations break the rules.
The technology and manufacturing can be addressed, maybe not without real hardship. Regulatory approval to innovate is a more desperate issue.
Regulatory approval to innovate is a more desperate issue.
Ya know - I used to think that but its a lot more cloudy then just deregulation - powerful groups have a mutual assured destruction pact with each other. The EV1 (flawed example I know but stay with me) altered a market too much for the vested markets (auto parts supply, oil change shops, oil companys ect...) for it to be accepted. The vested market alliance kept with the relationships it knew.
One of the reasons that IBM fell in influence was due to the desire for the mass market to want to have th evil empire to fall - it was a social background that created the realizations that empowered the market to move beyond the mainframe modal.
Even with innovations the ground is littered with the bodies of companys that had the right idea but fell because people did not have a connection that the innovators success was tied to there own destiny.
I guess what I am trying to say is the regulators are simply one part of a puzzle - a social realization that ones own prosperity is connected to the success of a new market configuration and then the new market needs to create products that capture the passion of the consumer in a non rational way - involve yourself in this market and you will prosper, do not and you will personally fall.
All the deregulation in the world cant ignite that passion within a person - and all of the digital theorizing in the universe amounts to a rain dance for a non existent reality.
I am still hopeful - but looks like we do not have too much time.
No, you can't have any guarantees. As they said in my High School Natural History class, 'The only thing constant is change.' But even without a contract written in granite, don't you think we should be looking into the many things we're discovering we can do with carbon? Hydrocarbons, and (CHON) Organic Chemistry in general?
Yes, his statement was also overly broad. 'No Barrier', indeed.
There are MANY important things to do, and MANY people that we have to keep busy if we are to get there. (Since we clearly can't stay here..)
Bob
I seem to remember Indium going for something like $100 an ounce and this was several years ago.
It might be now, where gold was a decade ago.
If it could be displaced by carbon, it would be. There must be applications that really call for it.
One I've heard of it, that it's used in low-temperature soldering, like of mil-spec stuff.
I've long said that high-tech stuff would soon devalue to where it's only worth its scrap value, but that it where high-tech equipment stands now. It's not repairable, it's quickly outdated, and its only value is in the gold, palladium, and stuff like indium that may be on the circuit boards and in the chips.
The minute human beings began chipping stone tools we became a technological species. Just prior to the invention of the steam engine, Europe had thousands of water wheels powering manufacturing machinery of various types. A nascent solar power industry also existed but was cut short by the realization stored solar power in the form of coal was more economical to exploit. Assuming that the human race survives the coming energy transition, there is not the remotest possibility that we will become a non-technological species. The key questions are:
1. What level of economic production can be sustained in post fossil fuel world containing 8 or 9 billion people?
2. How long can the world’s net economic productivity continue to increase?
It is not just the sustainability of solar PV that matters, but economic cost of delivering a net unit of energy, including the cost of compensating for the variable nature of the solar resource on both short and long time scales as dispatchable fossil fuel generation declines. Since China is still building coal fired power plants like crazy, it is clear that solar energy has a ways to go yet before it can match the economic quality of fossil fuels.
Furthermore, no matter how much solar energy technology improves in the future, it cannot enable the exponential expansion of our economic productivity forever. When the world’s net economic productivity stops increasing, then new ways of allocating production resources and more equitable means of distributing economic output will have to be developed if we hope to maintain a humane, democratic society. I believe that the dream of purely technological fix which will enable business as usual operation of the current economic system to the end of the century and beyond, will prove delusory.
I would maintain that we (USA) do not have what qualifies as a humane and democratic society. We may have come close a few decades ago, but things have been decidedly downhill since the 'Reagan Revolution'.
The trends of wealth accumulation, poverty and injustice are plainly negative. At present we likely have available the most energy per-capita that will ever be available (some figure the peak of per-capita energy was passed ~1989). Given this, how are these trends likely to be reversed. How are we going to fix our deteriorating infrastructure, house our homeless, provide health care and education for all in a future with less energy available? Especially considering the extra energy that will be taken to make the post fossil-fuel transitions?
Optimistic back-of-envelope calculations will mean nothing until these negative trends are seen to be clearly on the mend.
I would maintain that we (USA) do not have what qualifies as a humane and democratic society.
I agree with the above comment. I should have said: 'If we hope to create and maintain a humane, democractic society'.
The fly in the ointment here is the "H" or Hydrogen. There is no free hydrogen anywhere on earth. It takes more energy to extract hydrogen from water than you get when it is re-oxidized and becomes water again.
Just saying that these elements are out there and all our needs can be satisfied from them says nothing. Well, it says nothing to anyone with any knowledge of thermodynamics anyway.
But of course the solar rollers believe we can build thousands of square miles of solar panels and extract all the hydrogen we need from water. But all this is nothing more than a pipe dream. It is a little like fusion energy, fifty years in the future, and always will be.
Ron Patterson
Or bussard fusion which could be just a few years away:
http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2007/12/bussard-fusion-update.html
I like how Ron is so positive about what the future will bring, doesn't think there is absolutely any chance he is wrong. Although I think new science and tech will save the future, even I know there's a chance that is wrong and things will go bad. I think my favorite quote of the year on the forums was "absolute statements amuse absolutly" can't remeber who wrote it, but very telling. There was also someone who had a great prediction from 1880 about NYC, where the guy predicted in 100 years NYC would be overrun by horse manure, pretty amusing. The point of all this? No one not even Ron can predict the future with 100% certainty, only a fool would believe so.
unfortunately other than Bussard (now gone) and those who are continuing his work, nobody who works in fusion seems to think it will work - I've spoken to a few physicists who work in fusion and none of them believe the Bussard type fusors are the way to go...not my area of expertise by a long shot, but doesn't make me hopeful that the (fusion) cavalry is going to ride in at the last minute and save us all...
I agree the future is quite unknowable - but I would argue that some truly awful "nasty, brutish and short" futures are included (and perhaps more likely?)
on the other hand Indium was supposedly as common as silver, so how could we have only 10 years left? (and it has not been a sought-after element for very long, unlike silver) - not sure I'm buying into peak Indium yet...
I can make an absolute prediction that I am certain is right - everyone of us is going to eventually die.
It's that "eventually" that's the tricky bit. . .
Are you aware that so far only about half of the people who ever reached the age of 1 have died?
Which just goes to show how much of the world's resources we must plunder to keep the current population alive and happy for the remainder of our natural lives...
Not a nice thought.
Wrong! Not just wrong but terribly wrong. A quick google check of "How many people have ever lived on earth" brings up several estimates.
And:
But of course it does not say how many of those 106 billion lived to reach the age of 1. But you can be sure it was far more than one in 30, the number it must be if half the people who reached the age of 1 are alive today.
So only 1 in 15 to 20 people who ever lived are alive today.
Ron Patterson
Yeah, estimates since agricultural development, are as high as 100 billion, but with much of the time in that 10,000 year period having infant mortality rates as high as 1 in 2, about 50 billion have reached 1 year old - so today it's about 1 in 8 people alive compared to the total who have reached 1 year...
Now, if you look at resource use, I would suspect that our resource use, for the people alive today, will far outweigh all the rest of human history.
AntiDoomer, your critique of my post can best be described as "whining". I posted my opinion that thousands of square miles of solar panels to generate hydrogen from water and save the world form peak oil was a dream, and like fusion energy, always somewhere in the future.
You replied with a URL that on the Bussard reactor that ended with this statement:
"Someday, they said, if they're right, a machine just 20 times bigger than the one sitting in the corner on Parkway Drive could run the city of Santa Fe."
Someday indeed! And I made no absolute declarations in my post. But I do believe that crude oil will begin its decline in five to ten years, perhaps less. And the fusion reactor that will solve all our problems is coming down the pike someday! We cannot wait for someday AntiDoomer.
If peak oil hits the economy hard, and I believe it will, research money will be the first to go, especially research money that only promises a "perhaps someday" reward.
Ron Patterson
One Glaring problem with fusion is how to extract energy from it. Half of the energy output of D-D fusion is fast neutrons which are extremely difficult to trap and convert into thermal energy. These fast neutrons also have a nasty habit of embrittling materials as well as transforming them into radioactive isotopes. Fusion has the radioactive madas touch. Everything in reach will become radioactive.
That's exactly the point for why Bussard's polywell fusion is potentially so interesting. He believed the machine would support Boron-proton fusion, which is a much much cleaner process.
One description of this:
For more details: (Should Google Go Nuclear?, Polywell, Aneutronic Fusion).
theantidoomer,
Thanks for posting that link. It's nice to hear that Bussard's polywell work is still progressing.
W.
Please.
We researchers and engineers who churn out this miraculous stuff for you to brag about are dismayed by your lack of understanding.
Have you any idea what compromises and limitations we have to fight each day just to keep adding tiny refinements to existing technologies? And how long its been since anything 'revolutionary' has been discovered?
We're no longer plunging into the unknowns, full of undiscovered unpredictable new fangled things. That was over hundred years ago. Today we know rather well what might be possible. Rather we are like stuck in a small box of limits of laws of physics, tediously stretching our limbs for better positions, with ever diminishing returns...
But surely more money will create more innovation and release us from our troubles?
What do you mean by more money? Double my budget? Ten times the dimes I have? So a hundred times then. Ok, that'll buy me some latest equipment, hire a couple of research teams on projects I'd been keeping in the closet, and maybe a new building for them. Let's see ... no, you didn't even double my 'innovations'. And by the way, now I'll need that same or increasing amount of money every year from now on just to stay in place.
Money is linear but research subjects are infinitely exponential. Give me any amount of money, and I'll spread it out so thinly on all the possibilities that nobody will notice the difference. So you have to make choices. Not just ball park guesses but actually very specific and highly defined narrow projections on where it's worth placing the buck.
And then you go to work. You spend 5 years collaborating with your international colleagues to experimentally test some of the most likely projections. You end up with a candidate or two and spend your next 5 year's budget to make the experiments that define enough data to see some of the engineering limits of its applications. Then a venture capital firm jumps on some fruitful looking angle of your technology and you spend another 5 years waiting if they can get their shit together and make anything out of it. Oh, too expensive for the current market conditions? - damn, back to the drawing board. And so on and on...
So, you see, I find it hard to share your optimism. Perhaps you'd like to share with us your ideas and experiences on why we should think that after a hundred years, our modern, mature, pumped dry and streched to the limit -technology has the capacity left, or the time to deploy, solutions or even significant mitigations to problems like PO or GW?
Ransu, great post. I read it twice. I could not stop chuckling at your venting of your frustration. Of course I know it was not funny to you but nevertheless I could not stop laughing.
A far better rebuttal to TheAntiDoomer than I could ever give.
Thanks again.
Ron Patterson
ransu, great post - right about dead on what the less technocopian fusion researchers describe...
I know one fusion physicist who (quietly on the side) said to me that he sees societal collapse before we solve the engineering issues of fusion - I'm afraid his view is far closer to mine than the "we can mine helium 3 from the moon and run society forever!" camp....
the test reactor that they just groundbroke in France, I wonder if it will even be finished when budgetary problems hit? and that's a test, not adding anything to the grid at all...
ransu,
The frustration is understandable.
While you're crying in your beer I'd like to hear how the unified theory of physics goes - since you implied it with "Rather we are like stuck in a small box of limits of laws of physics,"
Ah, did I? Well, may I then too assume you imply that the existance of water-proof unified theory is required before one is allowed to critically look at what can be achieved?
As for crying into my beer, may I be excused for doing so when surrounded by antidoomer people spouting silly nonsense without the slighest understanding or experience in experimental physics or real world engineering?
My point was the species is still learning the physics laws, so the box size is unknown ...and then there is that real world engineering ...that costs ...money.
Yeah, reality is a hard taskmaster !!
Ok, the box I was talking about is the conceptual frame, which consists of our understanding of physics, a frame you need in order design any kind of experiments in science or applications in engineering. We know this box well, we've been bouncing on its sides for long enough now, and its getting tight for us already. We see clearly all the walls and have measured the angles between them, so it sure looks like a box to us, inside of which we are stuck. Now, we cannot quite see if the seams join in the corners so there is some small uncertainty left, hence we can't make up our minds on the unified box theory yet...
Now, what you mean is well known - the limits have been discussed here on TOD many times. Your box is the reality. Specifically for us, at this time, this globe. With all our physics and chemistry books and datasheets full of statistics on ecology of populations, we just don't seem to 'get it'. As a species we're the kid in the classroom who slept during all the lessons when nature spoke of the rules and limits, which govern everything. Now we're sweating it out at the exam, trying to make up stuff in the answer sheet.
Re: "the conceptual frame,"
Thanks for the clarification.
This post explains exactly why I left the field of environmental ecology (entomology) and became a computer analyst for a private company. I decided the effort to succeed in science far outweighed the returns. I am glad that there are some folks left in the world with the stamina to keep up scientific effort, but it becomes more difficult every passing year. My tolerance for it all ran out after ten years.
I salute you and sympathize with your struggle. I decided to try for a more normal life...kids and a salary to support them.
Ransu,
Excellent post. A lot of intelligent folks still don't seem to 'get' either the time constraints this particular civilization is under or the Tainteresque diminishing returns on investment in complexity, which are huge at this point in mature fields.
I spoke with Bussard last year about his approach, not because I thought it would work, but because it was one of the few long-shot approaches which might not prove to be impossible, and if it wasn't impossible, it seemed to possibly have the characteristics which could allow it to be retrofitted into current systems in a reasonable time. (ITER-style tokamaks won't ever be built out significantly even if they work fine). In other words, a hail-mary pass.
In other words, a desperation move. We're down to desperation moves at this point. His work was funded by the Navy instead of by what I had in mind, which was fine by me. I'll be amazed if anything comes of it, but it'd be nice.
Anyone who thinks there are plenty of tech answers out there to human overshoot really, really, doesn't understand the problems.
Keep posting!
ITER-style tokamaks won't ever be built out significantly even if they work fine
Could you elaborate ?
Tritium can be breed over time.
Even if more costly than fission nukes, anti-nuke nations should be interested in them (Italy, Germany, Denmark, etc.)
Best Hopes for Fusion,
Alan
Disclaimer: I'm not a practicing physicist, or an expert in fusion. If I have any expertise - debatable - it's in visualizing a number of things simultaneously and not shrinking from what I see.
I think ITER-style tokamaks will function as advertised. I see no flaw in the theory; the physics are unremarkable and in many ways elegant. On an artistic level, I support it as an object of complex functional beauty.
My skepticism has everything to do with "receding horizons". Even if the thing cranks ahead on schedule, commercial versions are supposed to be designed by what, 2040? And the first one maybe built out by 2050? And how many of them do we need?
I'm afraid that once we get a couple of decades into the future, fiscal and geopolitical systems will be in a fair deal of chaos, for reasons frequently discussed here. "Just in time" supply chains, won't be. Impoverished and increasingly hungry/disgruntled populations may complicate things significantly.
Beyond that, though, I suspect that the falling EROEI will begin to qualititatively affect the level of complexity which is sustainable by a globe-girdling civilization. A high-tech masterpiece like a functional tokamak will require, by its nature, designing to the limits of alloying and fabrication technologies. Our current reality, in which nearly any element is available in a reasonable time at a reasonable price, is the output of the most complex evolved extractive system ever to exist, operating at its all-time peak efficiency. That evolved infrastructure is an integral part of things from tokamaks to space shuttles, they don't exist independently of it; and that infrastructure is changing in fundamental ways. It will not well tolerate or recover from hiatus.
Building rail is great precisely because it does NOT require the current infrastructural complexity.
Don't misunderstand; I'm not opposed to giant tokamaks. I even think that a few will be built and will function for awhile. I would help if I could. But unless some plague were to wipe out 90% of the human population and buy more time, I don't see it happening. The project isn't being pursued with the necessary desperation and probably isn't scalable.
I was that odd environmentalist who was for O'Neill colonies, superconducting supercolliders, and mankind as the responsible high-tech stewards of a healthy oasis in space. My preferences went unrealized; and continue to be.
best hopes for my being wrong about reality.
I understand your point. One analogy would be German (and Japanese) efforts during WW II, where certain available resources (oil & mercury in Japan, oil & rubber in Germany) were far short of requirements, and bombs kept falling on the infrastructure.
I do prefer robust infrastructure (hydroelectric dams kept producing in North Korea and Albania despite isolation, and PRK RRs as well).
Still, if a workable economic design of a tokamak can be built, I think more will be built at erratic speed and places. Not a smooth curve of worldwide construction but brief clusters here and there.
The Nordic areas might be one center of design and construction post-2050. A disciplined and desperate Japan might be another. Perhaps Russia, the USA (the USA has a large strategic stockpile), EU or even Brazil.
And the remaining islands of high tech metallurgy & electronics (the two most critical basic skills to building tokamaks) could trade with each other.
Best Hopes for Fusion,
Alan
There are tech answers to population overshoot. The problem is getting people to use them. :)
Paradoxically, they're only answers IF people use them. That, as it turns out, is a damn big IF.
As a chemical engineer currently debottlenecking a polyimide film production line, I can absolutely understand the intense time, effort, and capital required to make incremental improvements to established processes.
I don't have experience with determining the feasibility of theoretical projects; however, I imagine the same generalities apply as materials, technologies, and markets evolve over time.
Progress is neither quick nor easy.
Technical improvements are hard won any more, but we don't have much in the way of technical problems. Political and organizational improvements can come in a flash. We desperately need some of those, starting with leadership that is a little less useless than the Bush administration ...
HONC if you're organic