No one was going to try to sustain humanity on wind or tide energy anyway. They're variable energy resources. You only use them to replace energy from a main resource while they are generating. As someone else said, people just need to get over the worries (I'm looking at you, USA) and build some thorium reactors.

That's not how it works.

Isn't it? Nobody cares about those planets. There's no life on them, or nearby, they haven't done anything except circle a sun for billions of years, and we could use the resources. It's not ecological damage if there's no ecology there

This is not like that. Environmental damage does not only concern life but the environement i.e. all. There are areas in USA, Canada, Europe which are protected only for geological uniqueness. So, destroying a planet for its resources, whether there is life or not is a crime. Who tell you that life could not have appeared on that particular planet ?

By the way, it poses also the problem of the ethic of terraformation.

Again, who cares? The chances of life arising on a rocky planet with no real chemical activity are so very small, and the number of planets in the galaxy so very high, that *who cares*? Nobody cares. There are no ethics of terraforming here, because there's nothing to be ethical about. It's a rock in space, it just happens to be a big one. There are hundreds of trillions of them, and not a single being, sentient or otherwise, gives a single damn about them. We're almost certainly going to be the only creatures to ever lay eyes on them, since the start of the universe, to the death of it. There are also enough planets out there that it's totally viable to choose one that's not pretty, if you want to keep one for aesthetic value - but again, nobody else will ever see it. Those areas on earth are kept because people can see and appreciate them, nobody will ever see and appreciate these planets, and they have lovely minerals inside.

How do you know that?

It is not a crime to harvest planets and alien life to further our interest. It would be stupid to allow unsustainable expansion, but it wouldn't be a crime to harvest planets to serve humanity's best interests. Just because we protect certain areas doesn't mean non-earth objects somehow get the same protections. Earth must be preserved because the enviroment of Earth is vital to human life. A strip mined exo-planet doesn't hurt us in the least.

Also, what does it matter if life could have existed on a planet? If there isn't life on it we should harvest away! And if there IS life on a planet we should probe away! Other planets should be studied, and exploited.

There seems to be some fallacy in the concept of renewable energy, nothing is completely renewable. Hell, the universe might not even. We have no idea right now. There's a good chance there might be some ultimate end to the universe simply due to a lack of energy. After it's been used up by everything.

I dunno. I think fusion is a waste of time, what we really need are ZPMs

Everything has a cost. Everything, in some unrelated way (in appearance) has an energy cost that can cause energy bleeding.

Obviously I don't know it for a fact, but statistically? The likelyhood of, assuming FTL travel is impossible, any human ever seeing an alien race before the heat death of the universe is microscopic, the chances of our territories overlapping aren't even worth thinking about. Of course, if FTL travel is possible then all bets are off, but even so, why is an FTL-capable race going to care about a few planets here and there? They did the same thing, after all.



Well, in the same way we're now coasting to fusion, fusion can be coasting to ZPMs, which can be coasting to tapping into the hyperspace grid, which can be coasting to...

There are 2 debates here.
First there is the concept of environment itself. Why do we protect our environment ? Is it for us to survive (or live) a better life, the idea of preserving life as a whole, the idea for us to have the opportunity to retrieve some hidden knowledge in the preserve environment (like medecines in plant), or the idea of preserving the universe ?

Sure, if you believe the first and second idea, you can exploit the rocky planet as you want. But if you think that a destroyed asteroid could have been hiding a new mineral, a new form of organic component etc... then you might think differently. Finally, if you consider that we know almost nothing on the universe, to rule out the possibility of life development on an asteroid or a rocky planet is a bit presomptuous. So I think that considering rocky planet like a place we could destroy quietly is bad. You will feel it bad if we were destroying the Sahara or another desert. We are protecting the environment because there are so many things to understand that destroying it is stupid and very short sighted.

Second question is about renewable energy. Sure some sources of energy are renewable but the problem is to have the whole chain in renewable energy. Else creating a renewable energy might turned out to be more polluting than non-renewable. There are a lot of things to take in consideration but at the end, you can summarize it to one question: if I invest 1 watt to extract/produce energy, how many watts do you harvest ? Problem is that both on the side of big trust and green parties, the calculation is wrongly done.

The problem with that is we do understand asteroids. Life isn't going to spontaneously arise out of rock, and we'd obviously do surveys to make sure we were right before stealing everything of worth.

What I'm talking about is using only what we really need, rather than, to quote a song:

Rip rip, woodchip
Turn it into paper
Chuck it in the bin
No news today

These days, a large part of our society/culture is built on consumption. In my mind, that is bad in the long term (and short term, come to think of it). If demand is always increasing, we will have to keep supply increasing to match if we are to continue our lifestyle. That means ever increasing infrastructure, too. And that's not the only logistical problem.

And it makes for an unstable society. Not because of the people within it, but because it becomes easy to disrupt it significantly. Look at 2008. That was just banks screwing up. Imagine if we were reliant on interplanetary or interstellar imports, and they got cut off for a while.

To me, it seems far more sensible to eat with restraint than to gobble down as much as we can shovel into our collective mouths. The later inevitably results in an unhealthy case of obesity .

My brain isn't entirely booted yet, so I may need to revise things from this post :hehe:.


Yes it is. We use the turbines to collect energy to power our giant space-propeller. The only hurdle we have at the moment is working out the optimal air-o-dynamics for the blades. Or, to be precise, working out the bugs in the software we're using to calculate it. For some reason, its completely refusing to come up with anything helpful...

Spain has this one solar plant that uses a series of v-shaped troughs into which a tube holding water is piped, the rest of the trough is filled with rock salt.
The sunlight heats the water, the salt helps it retain it's heat, and the resulting steam spins turbines that generate electricity. The only downside it that it has to be in sunny, warm weather, inclement or cold weather makes it useless.

My mom and I joke that we wish we could turn mucus (snot) and dog fur into fuel, because we have plenty of it. :teehee:

Er, clarification: we have two dogs that shed copiously year-round, and several of my family members have seasonal/pet allergies (hence the snot).

I think poo would work too, since there's no end to its production. Quick! To the crap-mobile! :batman:

Methane is a suitable fuel for most low-combustion fuel needs. There isn't a mass-produced internal combustion engine for methane, so it may not really be the car fuel of the future, but it already heats houses.

Not sure if anyone does it already, but they could just dispose of feces and biological wastes in the same place. BUZZOW!! Methane farm! Who wants some of my nasty poo gas to heat their water and houses?

Your Batman emote demanded a response with an interjection.

Something like... http://www.cleanenergycouncil.org.au/cec/resourcecentre/casestudies/Bioenergy/melb-water.html?! [On "this", imagine me suddenly pulling out a photo or sheet of paper]

I'm confused here. Asteroids have no atmosphere. They are, literally, rocks in space. Rocks in space with no life. And mining them would reveal any new minerals / organic components anyway. It is way more likely that random asteroid X has no life on it, but is made up of a whole lot of mineral Y than it is to assume that there is life on asteroid X and therefore we shouldn't take mineral Y. If you want to do the research and figure out how life can live / evolve on an asteroid, I'm sure we'd all like to hear it.

Huh? "Renewable" energy sources are those that, for all intents and purposes, do not harm the environment in which they operate. Solar is the best example of a renewable resource - no worrying about winds slowing down or rivers drying up. Likewise fusion power would be considered a renewable resource, since it could be (as far as I know) a self-renewing reaction like the one that occurs in our sun. Of course, renewable does not mean the same thing as "infinite" here. The sun, one day, will burn out of hydrogen and that will signal the "death" of the star - and of its massive energy production.

That's true, and I'm certainly not advocating going nuts, but there's no reason for us to go *backwards*.

Also, I'm pretty sure a giant space propeller couldn't work - every action with an equal opposite and all that. Any force you get from spinning the blades would be put on the air, which would either have to actually be flung out of earth's effective gravitational pull, or it'd cancel out the force while interacting with other particles!

I didn't say anything about regression, nor did anything I said require regression.

Look at the next wave of technology for displays (computer, TV, etc.): about all of them, as far as I am aware, boast a reduction in power consumption. Its a matter of making better use of what we already have/consume, not returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle or whatever .


That's why the blades will be outside the atmosphere .

Country needs to wake the "F" up and go back to using coal as a major energy source.

I heat my house with coal. Best thing I've ever done. I haven't paid the oil man to heat my home. I haven't cut down any trees as I did last year to heat my home. Coal is cheap. Burns for a long time and is toasty warm. Oh, and it's considered a "clean" fuel as opposed to oil.

The smoke coming from coal fired power plants is not "dirty smoke" its steam.

My chimney produces no smoke.

burning coal produces sulfur, carbon, and nitrogen based oxides, along with chemicals like hydrogen cyanide that are toxic to humans. Sulfur Trioxide that results from coal burning can react with water in the atmosphere to form sulfuric acid. Carbonic acid can also be formed from reactions of Carbon dioxide produced during coal burning and water in the atmosphere. Heavy metal impurities in the coal can also lead to radioactive waste products afer combustion. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5174391/

http://www.worldcoal.org/coal-the-environment/coal-use-the-environment/

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2007/IowaCoal_20071105.pdf

Ah, but they'll always require some power, and as most of the world isn't yet at the same level as us, we're going to need a lot of extra power even to maintain the same usage per-person. I mean, a *lot* of extra power.


Ah, but of course.

If only we had a teleporter to mars, we could solve that pesky population problem.

A sewage plant in Californa uses the methane from the poop to power the plant, purifiy the water, and sells the excess energy.
It's not like humanity is going to run out of feces anytime soon.