SF fen have (I think because of the demise of the mags, as a market for short stories) gotten a bit wimpy about disasters. I don’t hear the kind of dialogue that used to go on at cons, ie, how do we geeky guys save the world from—be it asteroid impact or fuel shortage or whatever.
Time for some positive thinking, people. The planet’s got plenty of energy. But sf-dom has gotten seduced by the glitzy special effects of the movies into doing too much gosh-wow and not enough how-to.
Why do I say the planet’s got plenty of energy? Because it does. Wind, tide, gravity (water movement)…all these things are there to use: the Sun minute by minute blasts enough energy for all of human history past us, and someday we’ll retrieve a fraction of that. But what hits this atmosphere and what happens as a result of tidal forces is plenty for any application. We’ve been grubbing up the muck from the destroyed forests of dino days and boo-hooing that the world is coming to an end because we’re running out of it…
Worse, we’ve let the short-term pundits infect kids with that defeatist notion, and a lot of kids shooting up and partying like there’s no tomorrow are underinformed. Way underinformed. There’s plenty of energy for the third world; there’s plenty for us. What we need to do is use it. Global warming’s become an untouchable phrase on a lot of boards because it’s (shudder) political. Well, there’s nothing political about it. The planet’s ice caps are melting. We’re continuing a melt that started 13,000 years ago, possibly hurried on by an asteroid impact, but whether or not human activity has accelerated the final stages of the melt is really a silly debate. The fact there’s ocean where there should be ice is pretty incontrovertible. And again, if we stand pointing fingers at this side and that side instead of applying our ingenuity to the question, we’re fools. It is possible—just possible—that our pollution has actually staved off a faster melt. It’s possible it’s accelerated it. We don’t know that. And it doesn’t matter at this point. The question is whether we want to bring things back to where they were in, say, the 1890’s. And can we?
Possibly we can. There are techniques like cloud-creation. There are ways in which we can modify planetary weather. We kinda want to be right when we sink all our megabucks into doing one particular thing, but personally I think we need some sf folk talking about the problems without wearing political badges while doing it: just the badge that says ‘fan’ and convention member, eh? and quit stamping red or blue on certain ideas…(American fans will know what I mean). We need to do something outrageous like pick a course of action and actually kick the planetary machinery and see if we can budge the numbers; and if we succeed in budging them, see what other numbers react. That’s my opinion.
@berylkit, send me an email at: josephaclark@embarqmail.com, I’ll reply to it so you’ll know it’s my correct email, and we can discuss getting you some pure beeswax.
The major complication with ‘alternative energy’ such as wind and solar, for example, is that they are sources of energy derived in the here and now, to meet demand. This is unlike the potential energy of hydrocarbons that has been accumulated over geological spans of time and from which energy is pretty much supply on demand as is similar from a fully charged battery. So the challenge is about how to accumulate the alternative energy, for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
In some cases in the third world, this is achieved by way of solar cells charging a single 12v car battery that runs an AC inverter. But the cost of such technology results in choosing to run a single light bulb or run the vaccine cooler.
As a slight aside, it is interesting that there is much talk of colonising the Moon or Mars, but so few people live on the Tibetan plateau or the desert regions of the US, North Africa or Central Asia, where there is at least Oxygen and gravity, and the capability of supplying the means of living, such as food and water.
Those teenagers have plenty to occupy their minds 🙂
The grid, if fully utilized, is a help in spreading the solar/wind wealth.
But you are quite right: it is a problem. There are certain sources that operate day and night, wind and calm, notably the rivers, and I’m definitely an advocate of submerged river turbines—not so much dams, in every location. The Mississippi is a highway, besides having a heck of a debris flow that would pose a maintenance problem; but it has tributaries that aren’t, and since any stream of any size with a steep gradient has a lot of energy, it doesn’t have to be just the really big rivers. I was once passionately against big dams, however, but having seen how a good one (Coulee) can work, and how it actually helps the environment, I’ve switched views. Given a good gradient, there is a place for big dams. Since you can get power from almost any change, one wonders if there isn’t a direct way, for instance, to utilize the extreme shift between day and night temperatures in some regions. These things happen on a regular very short-term cycle and don’t rely on/aren’t vulnerable to atmospheric movement, which is less predictible.
The most likely technology that can deal with a differential in temperature, is an implementation of the Stirling Engine. By coincidence, this cropped up as an item on euronews.net, this lunchtime.