Monthly Archives: January 2008

Hydrogen on the Cheap

Yesterday, in response the the latest Better All the Time post I commented:

I do have one prediction about hydrogen. We will find much more efficient ways to get it than water electrolysis. For example, green plants get hydrogen from water as part of the process of photosynthesis. This is done very efficiently (and why would nature bother to get hydrogen from water if hydrogen were useless?). We are beginning to understand how this works and we might use that method to get hydrogen.

Or, we might use John Kazius’ microwave method.

Or there might be some other way that that I won’t know about until… today. According to Technology Review, scientist have known since the 70′s that a material called titania serves as a catalyst for breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen in the presence of light – specifically ultraviolet light.

The problem is that sunlight is only partly UV. The process would be much more efficient if titania split water with visible light too.

Nanotech to the rescue. Scientists with the startup company Nanoptek have just announced that putting titania on dome-like nanostructures stretches the bonds between the titania atoms so that it begins splitting water with visible light.

This process is said to be as cost effective as the current cheapest way of obtaining hydrogen – from natural gas. But since the natural gas process releases a significant amount of CO2 and this method releases only oxygen, this is the environmentally friendly approach.

One way this could really be useful is in storing solar power for night use. These dishes could produce hydrogen during daylight for powering fuel cells 24/7.

Now this is what I'm talking about…

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…well almost.

This is the Karma plug-in hybrid. It’s fast, its beautiful, and it will go 50 miles before burning a drop of fuel. The one feature that I could do without is the $80,000 sticker price.

Maybe if I planned an eco-friendly mid-life crisis…

Nah. I’ll wait for others to pay for the R&D that went into this car and then purchase the $30,000 Honda Accord plug-in that will follow in 3 or 4 years.

On the other hand, that Accord probably won’t go 0-60 in 6 seconds. Sigh.

Better All the Time #32

Are you as sick of election coverage as we are?

Well, take heart. There are only 10 months left until the presidential election! So if you’d like something else to think about in the mean time, may we suggest these nine positive developments on the energy front?

No need to thank us — it’s all in a day’s work here at The Speculist.

FastForward Radio

This show was a transhumanist round table with Tyler Emerson, PJ Manney, Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon.

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They discussed the meaning of transhumanism, what tranhumanists hope to accomplish, and the risks of a transhuman future.

Click “Continue Reading” for listening options and the show notes:

Can Push Prizes Take us Back to the Moon?


Georgy Bailey: What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the Moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey. That’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give you the Moon, Mary.

Mary: I’ll take it. Then what?

Mary’s last question has been NASA’s problem for the last 39 years. What do they do now? A manned mission to the Moon was such a big endeavor that topping it has proven impossible for… well… my entire life. The next obvious goal – Mars – is a much bigger step. It seems obvious that going to Mars means going back to the Moon.

In his last post, “Not Everyone Keen on Return to Moon,” Phil suggested that a push prize might be the best and most cost effective way of returning to the Moon.

I’m a big believer in push prizes. The Ansari X Prize was only $10,000,000, but it resulted in a man being put in space… twice. It also launched a private space tourism industry that looks almost ready to go. Who would have thought that any space program could be started for $10,000,000?

That said, I’m not sure that a push prize for putting a man on the Moon would work. My “Push Prize Rules for Success” are:

  1. Have a realistic goal that is within the grasp of foreseeable science,

  2. Offer a sum that’s sufficient to inspire serious efforts to achieve that goal, AND
  3. Be someone (or a foundation or whatever) that potential competitors will trust to actually pay the prize when its won.

A push prize to the Moon wouldn’t really break any of these rules. People have already been to the Moon, so it’s obviously possible. NASA could, theoretically, offer a BIG prize. And the US Government is probably trustworthy to actually pay the prize.

But maybe I should add a fourth rule:

  1. The contemplated goal must be within the organizational capability of the pool of potential competitors.

Unfortunately, a manned Moon mission will be outside of the organizational capability of pretty much any corporation or academic institution. Maybe a big corporation like Boeing could do it, but its stockholders wouldn’t allow it.

Push prizes could still be instrumental. NASA, for example, isn’t offering a prize to create a space elevator, but they are holding annual contests for ever-better crawlers and tethers. Perhaps a similar incremental approach – or prizes for necessary subsystems – could allow competitors to contribute.

Incidentally, we may be seeing the limit of the big-bite-approach to push prizes with the Google Lunar X-Prize. Last year Google announced a $20,000,000 prize for sending a small rover to the Moon. Apparently they now have a single competitor signed up for this contest.

I guess I’ll go out on a limb and be a naysayer. I doubt that anyone will win the Google Lunar X-Prize.

Not Everyone Keen on Return to Moon

Some apparently think there are better ways of getting back into serious space exploration, and on to Mars:

NASA’s current plan for manned space exploration focuses on establishing a base on the moon, as a vital stepping stone for a visit to Mars. The initiative has been trumpeted by the Bush administration, which wants the first mission to launch by 2020. But trouble is brewing as a growing group of former mission managers, planetary scientists and astronauts argues against any manned moon mission at all. One alternative, they say: Send astronauts to an asteroid as a better preparation for a Martian landing.

The dissenters plan to gather in mid-February at a meeting of the Planetary Society at Stanford University. “We want to get a positive recommendation to the new administration,” says Planetary Society executive director Louis D. Friedman. He supports an eventual mission to Mars, but argues that the current moon scheme was selected with inadequate debate after a speech by President Bush in January 2004. “If you said ‘humans’ and ‘Mars’ [to NASA officials] in the same sentence, you would receive a figurative slap on the face, and then four months later [the moon-to-Mars plan] was the main point on a viewgraph at the highest levels.”

The real shame here is that everything is viewed in such either/or terms. Rather than having NASA spend bazillions on what will almost certainly be a big compromise mission to who-knows-where 12, 15, or 20 or more years from now, why not take that money and start some serious push prizes. How about a $2 billion push prize for a permanent private space station in earth orbit? Maybe a $5 billion prize for a permanent settlement on the moon? A $10 billion prize for a manned mission to Mars?

Perhaps my prize figures are far too low, but you could multiply them each by ten and we would still see:

  1. Faster progress than NASA is likely to make

  2. At a lower net cost

This model of having government committees endlessly debate this stuff while some guy at the top named “the administrator” calls the shots is beyond tired. And I don’t mean any disrespect to him or any of the fine folks at NASA who are making heroic efforts to get something going. It just seems like it’s time for a new model, and we already have substantial evidence as to what kind of model will work.

Vacation Photos

Stephen shouldn’t feel bad (see update) that he didn’t catch anything out of the usual with the photo he took near Stephenville, Texas a while back. When taking vacation photos, the main thing to focus on is capturing memories of the great time you had. For example, I’m particularly pleased with this image I caught of Cathedral Rock near Sedona, Arizona while vacationing there last year, even though there is clearly nothing unusual about it.

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UPDATE:

Well, maybe there’s more here than I realized. Look at the highlighted area of the image….

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And now look at this extraordinary photograph from Mars…

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It appears we have another astounding Mars connection!

Aliens Are Stupid

I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I don’t see any other way of interpreting the data. The recent Texas UFO sitings make this very clear. Consider the facts:

STEPHENVILLE, Texas – In this farming community where nightfall usually brings clear, starry skies, residents are abuzz over reported sightings of what many believe is a UFO.

Several dozen people “including a pilot, county constable and business owners” insist they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it.

Machinist Ricky Sorrells said friends made fun of him when he told them he saw a flat, metallic object hovering about 300 feet over a pasture behind his Dublin home. But he decided to come forward after reading similar accounts in the Stephenville Empire-Tribune.

“You hear about big bass or big buck in the area, but this is a different deal,” Sorrells said. “It feels good to hear that other people saw something, because that means I’m not crazy.”

Er, well, technically… But never mind. Go on with your story, there Rick:

Sorrells said he has seen the object several times. He said he watched it through his rifle’s telescopic lens and described it as very large and without seams, nuts or bolts.

I know the aliens are like, way sophisticated and advanced and all, and their motives are hard for us to understand, but I’d like to suggest that surely one of the following must apply:

  1.  They want to be seen.
  2.  They don’t want to be seen.

Assume either of these to be true, and the aliens come off looking pretty bad. If they want to be seen, why the few random sitings in semi-rural Texas (and other places, more on that later) from time to time? Forget the White House Lawn and by all means, forget Devil’s Tower. Yes, DO the Close Encounters of the Third Kind thing, only pre-arrange it with some good publicists and have the mothership rise up from behind Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

Now that is called being seen, class.

Okay, so let’s say they don’t want to be seen. They have starships and advanced materials technologies (whoah — no rivets!) but their stealth technology is apparently about as lame as it can be. Just the other night, Stephen and Michael D. were talking about the defense department working on cloaking technology that approximates the invisibility technology used in the Predator movies. (Somebody throw me a link on that, if you have it.) [Link thrown - Stephen] If we are a few years out from that, and we still think it’s a big deal going to the moon, my guess is that by the time we’re buzzing the primitive planets in the local interstellar neighborhood looking for nubile women or rich mineral deposits or whatever it is that keeps bringing these losers back here, we’ll be able to do it completely undetected.

I wonder if Ricky’s rifle was loaded when he was scoping out the alien craft? With such poor cloaking at work, there’s no reason to assume their shields are any good. He should have tried to take them down.

Anyway, it’s not just me saying that aliens are stupid. Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter have a whole trilogy out devoted to that very theme. Of course, they leave it to the reader to figure out that the aliens are stupid, but I don’t see what other possible conclusion one could come to.

alien-1534979_640In the new Time Odyssey series (I’m two books in) the First Born are back, playing a whole new set of pranks on hapless human kind. You’ll remember from the Space Odyssey series that these aliens are an ancient race, who trace their roots back to the very early days of our universe. In the Space Odyssey books, they put big black rectangular things on the moon and out by Jupiter and then led us to our next stage in evolution. (There’s more to the story, but we’re on a tight schedule, here.) I think we were supposed to figure out that they were stupid in that original series of books, but Clarke was so subtle that we missed the point. So now he and his protege have given us three new books to drive the point home in no uncertain terms.

A few mild conceptual spoilers ahead, but I’m not saying who wins the war between Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan or anything.

In the new series, the First Born are very energy conscious. They don’t want new civilizations coming along and using up the universe’s precious resources which will only last a few more billion years, after all. So naturally, when they encounter a new upstart species like humanity, they re-build their entire planet — apparently in a parallel universe — making a temporal patchwork of that species’ entire history.

It apparently never occurred to the First Born that if they have access to other universes, their little resource problem might be solved. On the other hand, it’s possible that they’re actually creating this new universe — which strikes a primitive earthling like me as an awfully big expenditure of energy. I think even the First Born are a little shaky on that exercise. No coherent reason is given for it in Time’s Eye, and by the time you get to Sun Storm, it’s all but forgotten.

In the second book, the First Born forget all about temporal patchworks and awesome historical cage matches and get down to the serious work of destroying humanity. You would think that a civilization that can build a whole new planet earth stitched together from multiple eras of history would use some of that “indistinguishable from magic” technology of theirs just to make us, like, disappear.

But no. When it comes to destroying other civilizations, their technology becomes a lot more pedestrian. Basically, they hurl planets through interstellar space. Lucky for us, they don’t deploy that technology the way you or I (or Scott Evil) would. They do something much more subtle and elaborate, something that Scott’s dad would refer to as easily escapable (see second quote), which fortunately gives us the technology to have a fighting a chance against their attack.

Lucky for us, of course. But this doesn’t reflect particularly well on them. I can’t wait to read the third book in the series to find out just how stupid these aliens really are. As for the ones currently buzzing Texas, maybe in a few billion years they will be as stupid as the First Born. But they’re really going to have to work at it.

Category: UFO

Unlikely Terminator Plot Lines

From Glenn Reynolds, some dramatic possibilities that will probably go unexplored on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronices:

Hey, here are two plotlines that won’t make it to TV: (1) With the help of Ray Kurzweil, they develop a “friendly” AI that subverts and converts Skynet as soon as it’s hooked up; or (2) With the help of Miles Dyson’s widow — a recurring character already! — they tie Cyberdyne up in endless intellectual-property litigation, ensuring that nothing ever gets built. This would probably work, but Litigator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles doesn’t have quite the same appeal . . .

How about a story arc in which Sarah and John elicit the help of the Lifeboat Foundation in warding off the rise of the machines? I’d like to see a heavily armed paramilitary cell within the foundation all decked out in camouflage and talking trash about “tearing Skynet a new memory cache” and the like.