It was my little joke Yoxa. I hope it brought a smile to your face.It has occurred to me that we would do much better with basic energy research if the USA was not so obsessed with their petro-dollar.
Pons and Fleischmann were crucified to save the petro-dollar. How many other novel discoveries languish? This whole "the oil companies would buy the patent" meme is the go-to in any conversation about alternative energy. It is a real conversation stopper.
Let us assume that we cannot model the conditions of a solid state accurately. I am comfortable with that assumption as complexity and the statistical nature of Quantum physics would turn a computers hair grey. Anyway, a far bigger assumption has been made; and that it is impossible for nuclear reactions to take place at room temperature.
And that little sacred cow took a battering with the discovery of very real Muons which are very heavy electrons. These muons are bombarding us at a rate of 1000 per second per meter squared. (If my memory serves me correctly) That means the chair you are sitting on is undergoing transmutation right now.
But with that assumption firmly entrenched in every chemists mind, why would he look for excess heat? He would assume that the laws of thermodynamics forbid any and so would miss a profound discovery. Pons and Fleischmann were first class electro-chemists and they did not miss the significance of the boiling heavy water.
I am afraid that a great undoable injustice has been committed. Thus we reward our pioneers.
Mafiosi backed Perto-dollar. Go get a real job, you lay-abouts.
Edit: Here is the website of the inventor from the conversation above.
I take my steer from Prof. Planck, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." It appears he knew a thing or two about the nature of science… and people.
We as a species appear to have gotten into the peculiar habit of believing theory with circumstantial proof is immutable law when it contains words and rituals that we don't understand. Any guesses as to where that leads us?
In my opinion science isn't supposed to prove what is true but rather disprove what is false. That is its virtue. So if the laws of thermodynamics break down at a particular point (just as the law of relativity breaks down at the singularity) then it needs to be amended. That's science, folks!
Personally I'd like to explore the Kardashev scale, as i like space, and energy.
Keynesian Economics?
In reading all these comments I think one thing we may be missing as an overarching problem that makes all this discussion about technology and consumption moot is that it doesn't really matter if there is new technology available that is more efficient and uses novel forms of energy, like electric cars. In theory these technologies could help us. But they won't, because the politico-economic system we are enslaved to requires that all new sources of wealth (energy and resources) be used up to feed the growth monster. Therefore, any advantages these new technologies offer will be more than used up by the system. Furthermore, growth in the rest of the global economy from traditional sources like fossil fuels outstrips growth in the renewables. We are being conditioned into a consumptive lifestyle where frugalness is not only not promoted, but is actually frowned upon, because frugalness leads to demand destruction, deflation, unemployment, and financial collapse. Economists don't know how to deal with that. All they can manage is growth. That is the nature of the system. And what's worse, the average person doing all this consumption will not wake up to the reality of it until it is too late and the whole thing collapses.
We are banker slaves and they have conditioned us to think collectively in the bankers' own short term interests.
This one deserves repeating and digesting;
We are banker slaves and they have conditioned us to think collectively in the bankers' own short term interests.I would add that this same thought applies to the banker's short, mid-term, and long term interests. 30 year mortgage anyone?
* That paper money of no intrinsic worth is wealth has been ingrained in us.
* That we should strive to live above our means… using debt to, "elevate" our lifestyles, and our stuff, has been ingrained in us.
* That growth must always be the objective has been ingrained in us by our gov't leaders and our corporate/banker/Wall street leaders.
* That as long as you can afford the payment… you can afford it.
I think this last one is the one I have become most aware of myself in the last year. When I think back to the opportunity lost over many decades through my own acceptance of this little nugget… I could cry. By constantly renting cars and houses, and by that I mean buying things with loans, I keep myself, "in the system" and much less able to build long term resiliency.
Nowadays my goal is to manage my way, over the next few years, God willing, to a homestead of sorts that will allow me to function with little or no money. Rather than paying installments to have stuff now, I want to invest in seceding from dependency on bankers as completely as possible.
How are we to expect our own leaders to stop spending our own kids futures today if we don't stop doing it ourselves?
Yep, that's pretty much how i see it. The House always wins.
Still, we must dissent
Keynesian Economics? suggested that
"In reading all these comments I think one thing we may be missing as an overarching problem that makes all this discussion about technology and consumption moot is that it doesn't really matter if there is new technology available that is more efficient and uses novel forms of energy, like electric cars. In theory these technologies could help us. But they won't, because the politico-economic system we are enslaved to requires that all new sources of wealth (energy and resources) be used up to feed the growth monster. Therefore, any advantages these new technologies offer will be more than used up by the system."
Well I have a little tiny device in my pocket that replaces all sorts of crap I used to need: my phone, camera, TV, video camera, encyclopedia, clock, calculator, compass, flashlight, address book, map, record player, record library, recording device, mail service, notebook, book library, newspaper, stock ticker, dictionary, thesaurus, numerous games, etc. etc. It does it all as well or better than all those old devices did their jobs with a tiny fraction of the materials, a tiny fraction of the energy, a whole lot more convenience and additional capacities we could only dream of a decade ago. Today I have been texting with my son on the other side of the world in real time for free, and I could also call him on skype for free any time. My dad called and we talked about his time in the army when he had to sign up a month in advance to call his parents in Connecticut from Japan and then was only allowed to talk for a couple minutes and how a letter took a month to get delivered.
Yeah our banking system is screwed up and our government is controlled by wealthy in ways it shouldn't be. And there are certainly wasteful stupid things we do in our society. Those are political problems we can work on and will hopefully prove solvable.
They do not negate the power of technology to immensely grow the benefits we all enjoy in our lives while also reducing the resources we need to get those services by equally immense levels. Growth in human prosperity doesn't have to mean growth in energy or material use. In fact the opposite seems to be the emerging reality.
Who knows what new solutions we will all take for granted a decade from now that are just as remarkably and unimaginably transformative as smartphones were a decade or two ago. We don't need to violate the laws of thermodynamics to create massive new sources of natural resources, we can and will continue to replace the need for all those resources with innovation. Such innovation will come with its own social and political challenges, as disruption always does. But it will make us all better off.
I can't disagree Mots that the devil is in the detail, and Ace strangely, hasn't got anything practical to show so far. Had I seen his website before the journalist's article I would possibly have moved smartly on. However I'd love to believe the lone obsessive has noticed things the experts have missed!
The second law isn’t just physical: it’s mathematical.
The second law, as applied to data compression, for example, limits lossless compression to nlog2(n) for general random data. It limits the speed of n-p hard problem solutions – and of fourier transform calculations, to nlog2 (n) operations.
As a result, if you’re going to overcome the second law of thermodynamics, you’re going to have to invalidate 1+1=2. But if you do that, our very ability to live will be questionable.
Some problems are not practically worth pursuing. Unless, of course, it is actually a different goal you are after.
In case you were wondering (I was), in 2011 some guys from UCSI & UC Berkeley estimated that the internet consumes about 170 to 307 gigawatts:
How much energy does the Internet use?
Ultimately, Raghavan and Ma estimated the Internet uses 84 to 143 gigawatts of electricity every year, which amounts to between 3.6 and 6.2 percent of all electricity worldwide. Taking emergy into account, the total comes up to 170 to 307 gigawatts. That's a lot of energy, but amounts to just under two percent of worldwide energy consumption.In 2011 there were 2.27 billions users on the internet. So that’s about 75W to 135W in average per user 24/7. It’s less than I imagined actually more or less the energy used by a fridge…
The view ‘growth and energy are linked’ is made and then examples cited. ‘If you want mountains to grow higher you need tectonic forces to push them there. If you want a child to grow taller, food energy is absolutely required. If you want more people building more houses, driving more cars, and wearing more clothes, you need energy, energy and more energy.’ Energy is necessary (as pointed out in the article) but it is not sufficient. Material (matter) is also needed. As the economist Georgescu-Roegen said decades ago “Matter matters, too”. Even the 4 year old quoted in the article knows that the food eaten provides matter for growth as well as energy to do the work. In view of this common lack of understanding of what really always happens, the article is most misleading despite making many sound points.
[quote=Fred Unger]Well I have a little tiny device in my pocket that replaces all sorts of crap I used to need: my phone, camera, TV, video camera, encyclopedia, clock, calculator, compass, flashlight, address book, map, record player, record library, recording device, mail service, notebook, book library, newspaper, stock ticker, dictionary, thesaurus, numerous games, etc. etc. It does it all as well or better than all those old devices did their jobs with a tiny fraction of the materials, a tiny fraction of the energy, a whole lot more convenience and additional capacities we could only dream of a decade ago.
…
They do not negate the power of technology to immensely grow the benefits we all enjoy in our lives while also reducing the resources we need to get those services by equally immense levels. Growth in human prosperity doesn't have to mean growth in energy or material use. In fact the opposite seems to be the emerging reality.
Who knows what new solutions we will all take for granted a decade from now that are just as remarkably and unimaginably transformative as smartphones were a decade or two ago. We don't need to violate the laws of thermodynamics to create massive new sources of natural resources, we can and will continue to replace the need for all those resources with innovation. Such innovation will come with its own social and political challenges, as disruption always does. But it will make us all better off.
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Thanks for your thoughts Fred, and I think this leads perfectly into a discussion around what people mean when they bring up the laws of thermodynamics. I would start by asking you this question: all of the innovations you mention in your first paragraph… what do they do? Specifically, can any of them… fuel your car? Heat your house? Fill your belly? Nope. What every single one (except for the flashlight) does is manage information, and unfortunately you can't live off information. In your pocket do you have an internal combustion engine capable of pushing your car? How about a field of corn to feed you for a year? A tank full of natural gas and a furnace that will heat your home in winter?
This is a very interesting topic and one I'm currently trying to hash out in my spare time, because there is near universal confusion out there concerning the difference between information management and energy transfer. Those are totally different processes, and the technology used to effect them is totally different. Basically, all technology can be categorized into those two classes, but virtually no one does. Unfortunately, economists have developed all their theories in total oblivion to this critical issue, and therefore, all mainstream economic theory, and pretty much all the rest of non-mainstream economics as well, can be considered to be invalid… Even many scientists and engineers don't understand the difference. I could even go so far as to say that the singlemost important reason that humanity is likely doomed to fail and enter a Malthusian Collapse is because the people who make decisions for us have not a clue about the difference between information management and energy transfer. They keep beating the drums about how technology needs to continue to advance and how it will save us all if it does, but the technology they're holding up is all about information management. What's causing the problems is energy transfer. Whenever someone points out the problems we are encountering with energy transfer, economists subconsciously and automatically switch over to information management technology and point out all the great stuff being done there.
None of the technology you mention generates thermodynamic entropy as a direct result of the process itself. Essentially, all that's happening in your pocket iPhone is that little bits of information are being moved around and organized. Those movements are macroscopic in scale (meaning, much larger than atoms) and do not alter matter at the molecular scale. Any energy requirements that these technologies have is what I call "facilitatory", not direct. I'll explain.
Imagine a jar full of plastic green and red beads. The two colours represent information. In order to separate them into piles of green beads vs. red beads, or to arrange them into a pretty picture (like, for example, pixels on your iPhone screen), you would have to go through and manually pick them apart. Performing that activity requires some energy on your part to move your fingers and the beads. But you aren't changing the beads at all – merely rearranging them. The energy required to rearrange them is what I call "facilitatory", in that you really don't care about it. This is basically what all of the devices you have listed do. What modern technology has done has been to greatly shrink the size of the beads, to find ways of automatically sorting them rather than you doing it by hand (for example, a calculator automatically does what an abacus used to do), and to sort them much faster. Also, modern technology uses electricity to do this sorting rather than your fingers, which is why all the devices you mention require energy (in addition to powering their illuminated screens), since no process is 100% efficient and there is always a little bit of waste heat generated when things are moved around. But none of that energy goes towards changing the nature of the matter in the devices at all (except for depleting the batteries…) All the heat generation from these devices is "incidental" or secondary to the information services they perform. You don't use an iPhone in order to generate heat and use its energy (except when using it as a flashlight but then it's not really being used as an informational device). The advances made in information technology over the last century have been impressive and still continue, since we are still a ways away from the limits imposed by the nature of the matter that would take us down into the atomic scale. I think that each microscopic "bead" in your computer's CPU today is around a million atoms large. These so-called quantum computers delve into this realm but I don't know much about them. At this quantum scale, the beads can switch around between read and green without you doing anything to them – they are non-deterministic. The reason large beads in the order of millions of atoms are deterministic while small ones comprising only a few atoms are not is because of simple statistics. Roll a dice and you can't predict what you will get. That represents the uncertain state of a single atom. But roll the dice a million times and you will be able to predict with very high precision that 3 will come up 1/6th of the time. The atomic uncertainty disappears.
Now, contrast this with the technology you use when when you want to heat your house, move your car, or have a meal. That good stuff is brought about by fundamentally different technology – furnaces, power plants, engines, and agriculture – big noisy stuff. The main purpose of this technology is to actually change the nature of the matter itself at the molecular scale, basically to generate thermodynamic entropy. In this case, you really do care about the energy, because that is ultimately what you are after here. What these devices do is actually burn the beads to get the heat or light. Burning it changes every single atom, at the atomic scale. Burning combines hydrocarbons with oxygen and the atoms get rearranged and out comes water, carbon dioxide, and heat. That is fundamentally different from just organizing the beads.
And whenever a piece of matter is changed on the molecular scale, thermodynamics enters the picture. The 2nd law describes what you can expect. As to why this law is the way it is, well that's a pretty deep topic that I don't fully understand, but basically quantum uncertainty becomes an issue. This "uncertainty" is manifested in the form of heat, which is the average speed of the random vibrations of the molecules comprising matter. When you burn something, what you generate is heat, or random disorder. This increases the entropy of the system, which is defined as the amount of heat generated, divided by temperature. Order has been lost on a molecular scale and cannot be regained. Useful activities can only be performed when energy is arranged in an orderly fashion. That heat can be converted back into other forms of useful energy (like electricity to charge your iPhone) by getting that heat to flow to colder places and changing matter (steam) as it moves, but only a certain percentage of it can be reclaimed – the "Carnot Limit" which is dependent on the temperature differential between the heat source and the heat sink. This isn't easy to do and requires big complicated power plants.
And while historical technological advancements made in information management have been astounding, advancements in energy infrastructure essentially stagnated a century ago. All we've been doing since then is minor efficiency improvements taking us closer to the Carnot Limit. For example, newer natural gas power plants added the Brayton Cycle (turbines turned by the exhaust gases) to the Rankine Cycle (turbines turned by the steam generated from the heat). This bumped efficiencies up from 40% on Rankine alone to 60% for Combined Cycle. Well, the thermodynamic Carnot Limit, the ultimate possible efficiency, is only 70%. So we are basically there.
Automobiles have gotten more efficient, and we are basically at their limits right now for practical cars. That's essentially what technological advancements have given us on the energy front over the last century. Oh, and solar panels, which add up to basically nothing on a global scale. Nuclear power plants are nothing new, they actually operate by generating heat to create steam and running a Rankine cycle, just like a traditional coal power plant.
I wrote a little introductory piece on this a while ago. The next step is to delve deeper into thermodynamics to explain why this happens and how it impacts the various "productive" activities occurring in the economy – basically, what are they actually "producing"? That's turning into a treatise…
Mark_BC,
You seem to be negating the power of learning that information transfer involves, as well as the reduction in consumption associated with information technology. Imagine the huge amounts of both material and energy resources consumed by that long list of technologies that my smart phone has replaced.
Think also how much we learn on a forum like this. I participate in similar forums on energy issues where I have been introduced to key concepts that I use in my work developing solar projects as well as my earlier work developing energy efficient buildings.
As for claims that we are basically at the limit of automobile efficiency, I find that hard to believe after reading about the demonstration car VW has on the road today that gets over 300 MPG. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2540618/The-fuel-efficient-car-world-Volkswagen-XL1-does-300-MILES-gallon-looks-cool-too.html.
Similar efforts toward efficiency are taking place at every scale of energy and material use. I was privileged to get a tour of the Colorado State University Energy Institute the other day. They are doing amazing science on improving efficiency and reducing emissions on everything from tiny cook stoves for third world kitchens to locomotive engines and entire electrical grids.
While we will still clearly always need to consume energy, raw materials, food and water, there are vast opportunities to improve the efficiency in how we consume all those resources, as well as opportunities to replace the nasty means of producing energy and other resources with more ecologically sustainable means of production. The learning and knowledge transfer opportunities now available can enable a transformation to a cleaner and vastly more efficient economy that can provide relatively comfortable lives for all the worlds billions of inhabitants, if we can find the political will to make that goal a priority.
We are banker slaves and they have conditioned us to think collectively in the bankers' own short term interests.I might also add two items to your list. I keep these in mind when I am tempted to spend on things that perpetuate the current consumerist system.
- Tax laws will always favor the banks. I was horrified as a twenty-something (in the mid 70s) to hear that at the time credit card interest was tax deductible. Nothing convinced me that banks just wanted to milk us for interest income, with the government's cooperation, like finding that out. Recently, I looked into the credit terms for buying an expensive hearing aid: GE Care Credit offered a "no interest for two years" loan that raked in 16% on a revolving credit that compounded every two weeks. If you made their minimum payments for two years, you'd have paid off only half of the principal and all that interest would come due: it was carefully calculated to NEVER be paid off. Nothing less than a nation–a world–of debt slaves would make lending institutions happy.
2. Lending guidelines are always slanted to get you in debt over your head. Always. around ten years ago I inherited some money and investigated buying a house. The lending institutions all tried to assure me that spending over half my pretax income on housing was just fine and dandy. Careful budgeting means you should spend no more than one third of your take-home pay on housing, even if it means living in a shack.
[quote=Fred Unger]As for claims that we are basically at the limit of automobile efficiency, I find that hard to believe after reading about the demonstration car VW has on the road today that gets over 300 MPG. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2540618/The-fuel-efficient-car-world-Volkswagen-XL1-does-300-MILES-gallon-looks-cool-too.html.
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I think what Marc meant is that we are close to the limit of efficiency for a car using a heat engine. An electric engine is much more efficient of course.
At constant speed on the highway the energy requirement is set by the air drag and the efficiency of the engine (in practice, 20% for a heat engine).
Of course a lighter vehicle using an electric engine (or hybrid) in town is a different story.
You might want to check this excellent piece from Tom Murphy on this topic:
100 MPG on Gasoline: Could We Really?
I am partial to the poetic Irony " Cut down trees , Erect big stones "
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I am partial to the poetic Irony " Cut down trees , Erect big stones "
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I could not contain myself. I had to cross link your conversation to Alexander Parkhomov's 2.6 to 1 energy conversion rate over at Cold Fusion.It is My Reality based upon My observations. I am deeply impressed.
Seek, and do not stop looking until you find. When you find you will be perplexed. When perplexed Astounded, and rule over all.Christ- Gospel of St Thomas. (I am of cause referring to the Quantum Erasure experiment. A back history has been loaded to allow for my observations.)
What caught my eye was your 2nd paragraph - "It is so simple it could be worked out by a clever 4 year-old. And yet it must not be so simple because the main narrative of every economy in every corner of the globe rests on the idea of endless, infinite growth."
Discussing the energy problem and new technologies is interesting, yet misses the solution to the world's current situation, which is the fact that endless infinite growth is not possible, unless we look at and think about life and living differently.
Some of you may be interested in reading an article on the "Limits to Growth" at http://livingatflow.com/limitstogrowth/
Some comments referred to needing a smaller world population, which won't happen without major wars and/or plagues. To keep world populations in check, the poor and uneducated people need to be educated better/differently.
Those in power, big business, and the media are not going to do their part in helping the situation, as they push for endless spending, consumption, and infinite growth, as a way to keep their power over the rest of us.
The people of the world subjected to their propaganda have no/little interest in doing anything other than behaving like sheep and doing as/what they believe others are doing, that is keeping up with the mythical "Jones".
In his book, @F-L-O-W, Mike Jay points out that we need to rethink how we look at success and happiness and work toward consuming 1/3 less than we currently do. In the process we will be redefining what success means to us and the result will be greater happiness, which is what most people want anyway.
Technology is great, yet do we need or even want every new gadget that comes to the market place?
To save our world we just need to think and act differently [easier said than done, for sure].
Thanks flawlessliving.The Limits to Growth gets a lot of comment on this site.
One of the aspects that needs to be taken into consideration is our very fragile fecundity. It is strongly argued that we are a hybrid, and as a hybrid we have difficulty breeding.
This may be counter-intuitive until you consider the amount of unproductive sex we engage in. This is highly unusual amongst any other mammal.
We are busy exacerbating this problem by flooding our environment with phytoestrogens. I guess that the LTG would place that under environmental.
I think our giant stones are the sports "industries" that amuse so many of us so well and so often.
All most of us can talk about is sports-related.
The sports our children play as we organize them to distraction, sports holidays (SuperBowl), and even our educational institutions spend billions of dollars on athletics while paying peanuts to a growing number of adjuncts to actually teach classes.
Our circuses of bread and circus fame.
So, to prosper in the coming times, I suggest finding a niche somewhere in "sportsing."
KK