Tesla and the Laws of Physics

SUBHEAD: Reality prevents Elon Musk's lies about  new e-vehicles performance from being true.

By Tyler Durden on 25 November 2017 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-25/elon-musk-lied-about-performance-targets-new-tesla-roadster-semi-truck)


Image above: A prototype Tesla semi-tractor still driven by a human being. From (https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/16/16667366/tesla-semi-truck-announced-price-release-date-electric-self-driving).

When Elon Musk stepped on stage at Tesla’s product-launch event earlier this month, he knew the market’s confidence in Tesla’s brand had sunk to an all-time low since he took over the company a decade ago.

So, he resorted to a tactic that should be familiar to anybody who has been following the company:

Shock and awe!

While the event was ostensibly scheduled to introduce Tesla’s new semi-truck – a model that won’t make it’s market debut for another two years, assuming Tesla sticks to its product-rollout deadline – Musk had a surprise in store: A new model of the Tesla Roadster that, he bragged, would be the fastest production car ever sold.

Musk made similarly lofty claims about the battery life and performance of both vehicles. The Tesla semi-trucks, he said, would be able to travel for 500 miles on a single charge. The roadster could clock a staggering 620 – more than double the closest challenger.

There was just one problem, as Tesla fans would later find out, courtesy of Bloomberg: None of it was true. In fact, many of the promises defy the capabilities of modern battery technology:

Elon Musk knows how to make promises. Even by his own standards, the promises made last week while introducing two new Tesla vehicles—the heavy-duty Semi Truck and the speedy Roadster—are monuments of envelope pushing.

To deliver, according to close observers of battery technology, Tesla would have to far exceed what is currently thought possible.

Take the Tesla Semi: Musk vowed it would haul an unprecedented 80,000 pounds for 500 miles on a single charge, then recharge 400 miles of range in 30 minutes. That would require, based on Bloomberg estimates, a charging system that's 10 times more powerful than one of the fastest battery-charging networks on the road today—Tesla’s own Superchargers.

The diminutive Tesla Roadster is promised to be the quickest production car ever built. But that achievement would mean squeezing into its tiny frame a battery twice as powerful as the largest battery currently available in an electric car.

These claims are so far beyond current industry standards for electric vehicles that they would require either advances in battery technology or a new understanding of how batteries are put to use, said Sam Jaffe, battery analyst for Cairn Energy Research in Boulder, Colorado. In some cases, experts suspect Tesla might be banking on technological improvements between now and the time when new vehicles are actually ready for delivery.

“I don't think they're lying,” Jaffe said. “I just think they left something out of the public reveal that would have explained how these numbers work."

While Jaffe seems inclined to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt, there’s little, if anything, in Musk’s recent behavior to justify this level of credulity.

In recent months, Musk has repeatedly suffered the humiliation of seeing his lies and half-truths exposed. For example, the self-styled “visionary” claimed during the unveiling of the Model 3 Sedan that he would have 1,500 copies of the new model ready for customers by the end of the third quarter.

Instead, the company managed a meager 260 models as factory-line workers at its Fremont, Calif. factory struggled to assemble the vehicles by hand as the Model 3 assembly line hadn’t been completed.

Increasingly agitated customers who placed deposits with Tesla back in March 2016 have begun asking for refunds, only to be chagrined by the company’s sluggish response.

While nobody in the mainstream press has (somewhat bafflingly) made the connection, Tesla revealed earlier this month that it burned an unprecedented $1.4 billion of cash during the third quarter - or roughly $16 million per day - despite Elon Musk's assurance that Tesla had its "all-time best quarter" for Model S and X deliveries.

And let’s not forget the fiasco surrounding Tesla’s autopilot software. Musk has repeatedly exaggerated its performance claims. And customers who paid more than $8,000 for a software upgrade more than a year ago have been repeatedly disappointed by delays and sub-par performance.
Musk’s exaggerations about the Tesla Roadster were particularly egregious.

Tesla claims that its new $200,000 Roadster is the quickest production car ever made, clocking zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds. Even crazier is the car’s unprecedented battery range: some 620 miles on a single charge. That's a longer range than any battery-powered vehicle on the road—almost twice as long as Tesla's class-leading Model S and Model X.

To achieve such power and range, Musk said the tiny Roadster will need to pack a massive 200-kilowatt-hour battery. That’s twice the size of any battery Tesla currently has on the road. Musk has previously said he won't be making the packs bigger on the Model S and Model X because of space constraints. So how can he double the pack size in the smaller Roadster?

BNEF’s Morsy has a twofold answer. First, he expects Tesla will probably double-stack battery packs, one on top of the other, beneath the Roadster's floor. That creates some engineering problems for the battery-management system, but those should not be insurmountable. Still, Morsy said, the batteries required would be too large to fit in such a small frame.

“I really don’t think the car you saw last week had the full 200 kilowatt hours in it,” Morsy said. “I don’t think it’s physically possible to do that right now."

Is it possible that, thanks to incremental improvements in battery density and cost, Musk somehow manages to hit these lofty targets? Perhaps, though, as Bloomberg points out, the fact that Musk is basing these claims on a set of projections that haven’t yet been realized is hardly confidence inspiring.

To be sure, there’s an important caveat to Musk’s claims. While they may be staggeringly exaggerated, there’s still the possibility that incremental improvements in battery technology will make these targets more feasible by the time the models hit the market.

Again, Musk may be banking on the future. While Tesla began taking deposits on the Roadster immediately—$50,000 for the base model—the first vehicles won't be delivered until 2020. Meanwhile, battery density has been improving at a rate of 7.5 percent a year, meaning that by the time production starts, packs will be smaller and more powerful, even without a major breakthrough in battery chemistry.

“The trend in battery density is, I think, central to any claim Tesla made about both the Roadster and the Semi,” Morsy said. “That’s totally fair. The assumptions on a pack in 2020 shouldn’t be the same ones you use today."

However, in its analysis of the feasibility of Musk’s claims, Bloomberg overlooked one crucial detail: Back in August, the company's veteran director of battery technology, Kurt Kelty, unexpectedly resigned to "explore new opportunities," abruptly ending a tenure with the company that stretched for more than a decade, and comes at a critical time for Elon Musk.

Kelty’s resignation – part of an exodus of high-level executives that is alarming in and of itself - hardly inspires confidence in Tesla’s ability to innovate. We’ve noticed a trend with Tesla: The more the company underdelivers, the more Musk overpromises. In our opinion, this is not a sustainable business strategy.
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Why does life exist?

SUBHEAD: If you shine light on random clump of atoms for long enough, don't be surprised if you get a plant.

By Natalie Wolchover on 22 January 2014 for Simons Foundation -
(https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/)


Image above: Jeremy England at the blackboard. From original article.

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity.

The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.


Image above: Cells from the moss Plagiomnium affine with visible chloroplasts, organelles that conduct photosynthesis by capturing sunlight. From original article.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”

Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.

 England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.

“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”

A computer simulation by Jeremy England and colleagues shows a system of particles confined inside a viscous fluid in which the turquoise particles are driven by an oscillating force. Over time (from top to bottom), the force triggers the formation of more bonds among the particles.

At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses.

Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated.

Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed.

A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example. As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings.

 In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do.

A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In Schrödinger’s day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium.

In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.

This situation changed in the late 1990s, due primarily to the work of Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland, and Gavin Crooks, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up).

As entropy production increases, so does this ratio: A system’s behavior becomes more and more “irreversible.” The simple yet rigorous formula could in principle be applied to any thermodynamic process, no matter how fast or far from equilibrium.

“Our understanding of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics greatly improved,” Grosberg said. England, who is trained in both biochemistry and physics, started his own lab at MIT two years ago and decided to apply the new knowledge of statistical physics to biology.

Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath.

This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there,” he said.

The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.

“This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.


Image above: Frames from a computer simulation by Jeremy England and colleagues shows a system of particles confined inside a viscous fluid in which the turquoise particles are driven by an oscillating force. Over time (from top to bottom), the force triggers the formation of more bonds among the particles.

According to new research at Harvard, coating the surfaces of microspheres can cause them to spontaneously assemble into a chosen structure, such as a polytetrahedron (red), which then triggers nearby spheres into forming an identical structure.

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”

In a September paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, he reported the theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating.

He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its “Darwinian takeover” was perhaps not surprising.

The chemistry of the primordial soup, random mutations, geography, catastrophic events and countless other factors have contributed to the fine details of Earth’s diverse flora and fauna. But according to England’s theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.

This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”

Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid.

And in a paper appearing online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate.

These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. “This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying,” Brenner said.

Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize.

This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. “Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process,” he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.

“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,” said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. “I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.”

If a new theory is correct, the same physics it identifies as responsible for the origin of living things could explain the formation of many other patterned structures in nature. Snowflakes, sand dunes and self-replicating vortices in the protoplanetary disk may all be examples of dissipation-driven adaptation.

England’s bold idea will likely face close scrutiny in the coming years. He is currently running computer simulations to test his theory that systems of particles adapt their structures to become better at dissipating energy. The next step will be to run experiments on living systems.

Prentiss, who runs an experimental biophysics lab at Harvard, says England’s theory could be tested by comparing cells with different mutations and looking for a correlation between the amount of energy the cells dissipate and their replication rates.

“One has to be careful because any mutation might do many things,” she said. “But if one kept doing many of these experiments on different systems and if [dissipation and replication success] are indeed correlated, that would suggest this is the correct organizing principle.”

Brenner said he hopes to connect England’s theory to his own microsphere constructions and determine whether the theory correctly predicts which self-replication and self-assembly processes can occur — “a fundamental question in science,” he said.

Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email.

These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.

If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization.

They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.

“People often get stuck in thinking about individual problems,” Prentiss said. Whether or not England’s ideas turn out to be exactly right, she said, “thinking more broadly is where many scientific breakthroughs are made.”
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Black Hole Weather Report

SUBHEAD: Stephen Hawking shakes up physics theory (again) saying black holes are actually gray.

By Alan Boyle on 27 January 2014 for NBCNews -
(http://www.nbcnews.com/science/stephen-hawking-shakes-theory-again-black-holes-are-actually-gray-2D12001605)


Image above: Photo of Stephen Hawking by David Parry. From original article.


British physicist Stephen Hawking earned worldwide attention for his surprising claims about black holes, and he's doing it again with a new paper claiming that "there are no black holes."

Actually, Hawking isn't denying the existence of the massive gravitational singularities that lurk at the center of many galaxies, including our own Milky Way. He's just saying the classical view of a black hole as an eternal trap for everything that's inside, even light, is wrong. In his revised view, black holes are ever so slightly gray, with a chaotic and shifting edge rather than a sharply defined event horizon.

"The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity," Hawking writes in a brief paper submitted to the ArXiv.org preprint database. "There are, however, apparent horizons which persist for a period of time."

Hawking's paper, titled "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes," has kicked off a new round in the long-running debate over black holes and what happens to the stuff that falls into them. Theoretical physicists, including Hawking, have gone back and forth on this issue, known as the information paradox.

Back and forth over black holes
For decades, Hawking contended that the information that disappeared inside a black hole was lost forever. Then, in 2004, he reversed course and said the information would slowly be released as a mangled form of energy. That switch led him to pay off a bet he had made with another physicist about the fate of information in a black hole.

More recently, other physicists have suggested that there was a cosmic firewall dividing the inner region of a black hole's event horizon from the outside, and that anything falling through the event horizon would be burnt to less than a crisp. But that runs counter to the relativistic view of black holes, which holds that there should be no big difference in the laws of physics at the event horizon.

To resolve the seeming paradox, Hawking says that black holes would have "apparent horizons" — chaotic, turbulent regions where matter and energy are turned into a confusing mess. "There would be no event horizons and no firewalls," he says. Everything in a black hole would still be there, but the information would be effectively lost because it gets so scrambled up.

"It will be like weather forecasting on Earth. ... One can't predict the weather more than a few days in advance," Hawking writes.

Protests and jests
Hawking's paper wasn't peer-reviewed, but his peers are already weighing in on the accuracy of the black hole weather report.

"It is not clear what he expects the infalling observer to see," Joseph Polchinski, a pro-firewall physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, told New Scientist. "It almost sounds like he is replacing the firewall with a chaos-wall, which could be the same thing."

"The idea that there are no points from which you cannot escape a black hole is in some ways an even more radical and problematic suggestion than the existence of firewalls," Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, said in Nature's online report on Hawking's paper. "But the fact that we’re still discussing such questions 40 years after Hawking’s first papers on black holes and information is testament to their enormous significance."

If the "no black holes" quote is taken out of context, it makes Hawking's claim sound kind of ridiculous — and Andy Borowitz, a humorist at The New Yorker, has turned that take into an Onion-like jab at members of Congress. "If black holes don't exist, then other things you scientists have been trying to foist on us probably don't either, like climate change and evolution," Borowitz writes in one faux quote.

Fortunately, we're getting to the point where we won't have to take any theorist's word for the existence of black (or gray) holes. Astronomers are preparing to watch a huge cloud of gas fall into the black hole at the center of our galaxy — and over the next decade, they're planning to follow through on the Event Horizon Telescope, a campaign aimed at direct observation of the galactic black hole's edge.

As for Hawking, it just so happens that this is a big month: He turned 72 years old a couple of weeks ago, and he appears to be keeping active despite his decades-long struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

And this week marks the television premiere of "Hawking," a PBS documentary about the good doctor's life and work. For still more about the world's best-known physicist, check out his recently published memoir, "My Brief History."



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Tatooino is not alone

SUBHEAD: We are discovering more double stars. Some have planetary systems as in Skywalker's home Tatooini.  

By Jan TenBruggencate on 2 September 2012 for Raising Islands - 
  (http://raisingislands.blogspot.com/2012/09/tatooine-prime-is-not-alone-binary.html)

 
Image above: Jabba the Hut's palace on the desert planet Tatooini during a double star sunset. From (http://www.moddb.com/games/star-wars-jedi-academy/addons/jabbas-palace-tatooine-jedi-academy-mp).
 

The University of Hawaii managed to write about the discovery of planets around a binary star system without once mentioning the iconic planet, Tatooine.

Partly, that might be because there is far more about the new discovery than just the fact that a planet exists around two stars spinning in their own tight orbit. In this case, two planets (maybe three) around the two stars.

Tatooine, of course, is the desert planet in the Star Wars film series, which is the home planet to both Anakin and Luke Skywalker. In many of its scenes, Tatooine’s twin suns are displayed above the horizon.

University of Hawaii astronomer Nader Haghighipour was part of a team that discovered what they called Kepler-47, naming it after the Kepler space observatory, which was launched in 2009. The funding for the team’s work came from NASA and the National Science Foundation.

The team announced the finding at the triennial International Astronomical Union meeting in Beijing, and published it in Science—under the daunting title: “Kepler-47: A Transiting Circumbinary Multiplanet System.” The abstract is here.

What’s cool about this?

Binary star systems are cool, although this is not the first one that’s been found.

That this binary star system has a complement of planets is cool—first time that’s been seen. It proves that it’s possible for a solar system to exist around twin suns. The stars of Kepler-47 orbit each other roughly weekly—every 7.5 days.

And ultimate cool for science fiction fans and astronomers is one of the planets is within the stars’ habitable zone, meaning liquid water could exist on their surfaces. The question still unanswered is whether this planet even has a surface on which to have liquid water. It could be a gas giant like Jupiter—but maybe not.

The inner planet is smaller, three times Earth’s radius, and spins a full orbit around its suns in 49 days. The other—the one in the habitable zone—is Jupiter-sized at 4.6 times Earth’s radius and orbits every 303 days—not far from Earth’s 365.

And there may be a third planet, although the evidence isn’t yet strong enough to say for sure.

Here is the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomyrelease, with links and images.

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The Sun is Round

SUBHEAD: Even the Earth bulges a little as it spins, but the Sun...the Sun is nearly perfectly round. By Jan TenBruggencate on 21 August 2012 for Raising Islands - (http://raisingislands.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-sun-surprisingly-is-as-round-as-it.html) Image above: Near sunset off Puolo Point in Hanapepe, Kauai. Photo by Juan Wilson. The Sun is rounder than almost anything else--and that's a surprise. University of Hawai`i scientists were among those who recently conducted state-of-the-art measurements using a device called the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite. They found that it is amazingly round. The sun spins, an activity that tends to widen objects at the equator and flatten them between the poles. But not Ol’ Sol. The solar research team on this project includes Jeff Kuhn and Isabelle Scholl of the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Rock Bush of Stanford University, and Marcelo Emilio, of the Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa, Brazil. They reported their findings in the August 16, 2012, Science Express in an article entitled The Precise Solar Shape and Its Variability. The abstract is here.

First, the measurement. They found that if you shrank the Sun to a ball one meter across, then the distance measured through the poles would be only 17 millionths of a meter less than the distance measured at right angles to the poles, through the equator—the equatorial diameter. A sheet of paper is five or six times thicker than that. Most human hair is significantly thicker. Our Sun spins fully every 28 days and it ought to flatten more than that, according to predictions based on that rotation. With all the sunspots and moving plasma and other stuff, you might also think there would be lots of variance in its shape. There isn’t. "For years we've believed our fluctuating measurements were telling us that the sun varies, but these new results say something different. While just about everything else in the sun changes along with its 11-year sunspot cycle, the shape doesn't,” lead author Kuhn said. In fact, the sunspot cycle seems to have no role, the authors say. It is “completely unaffected by the solar cycle variability seen on its surface.” Their best guess: subsurface forces like solar magnetism may be having a much more powerful impact than anyone predicted. The sun's massive gravity, along with other subsurface forces, may counteract the effects of its spin, and keep it in a rounder shape. This work was supported by NASA grants to Stanford University and the University of Hawaii. More about the Solar Dynamics Observatory here and here.

The University of Hawaii press release on the discovery is here.

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Will Quantum Fusion save the day?

SUBHEAD: The fact is, most societies have collapsed WITH the means to avoid collapse in their technical grasp.  

By Sharon Astyk on 1 May 2012 for Casaubon's Book - 
  (http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2012/04/will_quantum_fusion_save_the_d.php)

 
Image above: Utopian city of the future rendering by Staszek Marek titled "Center of the Universe". Click to enlarge. From (http://coolvibe.com/2010/futuristic-city-complex/).
 
The Astrophysicist, when he has time, will have something to say about his reading of the physics of the material Tom Whipple sums up.

This situation however seems to be changing following a lengthy interview with a fellow out in Berkeley, California by the name of Robert Godes of Brillouin Energy. He has been working in this field for the last ten years and says that he not only has a reliable heat-producing device, but also understands the physics behind it - which he calls the Quantum Fusion Hypothesis. He says that this theory of just how low-energy nuclear reactions work has allowed the development of a device which produces heat immediately and reliably. Most interestingly, Godes says he has shared his insights with scientists at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratories and SRI International, one of the leading US laboratories investigating the phenomenon. He says that both have verified that his theory does indeed work and that they can now produce heat from hydrogen every time they try.

Godes' hypothesis is interesting for those with even a smattering of physics in their background. First of all, he holds that the heat which is coming from infusing hydrogen into nickel or palladium is not coming from "cold fusion" in the classic sense of the term. It is not a deuterium fusing with deuterium reaction as takes place in the sun or H-bombs and which requires extremely high energies.

What seems to be happening in this new kind of fusion is that when hydrogen is "loaded" into nickel or palladium and subjected to the proper kind of an electromagnetic pulse, the hydrogen nucleus which is a positively charged proton acquires an electron which turns it into a low energy free neutron. Now a low energy free neutron is something very nice to have for it quickly combines with other protons to form deuterium, tritium and finally quadrium. The quadrium only lasts for an instant before undergoing a process called beta decay turning it into helium. This is where Einstein and E = MC2 comes in. The beta decay of quadrium results in a loss of mass which is turned into heat. If all this pans out as claimed, it could be one of the most important secrets of nature that has ever been discovered, for our energy problems are over.

Without the flow caliormetry, it is pretty hard to say whether there's anything under the smoke and mirrors - and who knows, there may be. At this particular juncture, as I personally understand it (not that my understanding is worth much), atomic mass remains constant when the conditions for changing protons to neutrons exists and decay energy is always smaller, but I'm certainly not the person to evaluate these results.

That said I'm inclined to skepticism - hang around energy issues long enough and you find lots of people saying they can contravene the laws of physics, or invent new ones. What makes this even worthy of consideration is that it comes from Tom Whipple, who is incredibly smart and knows energy issues really well. Still, Whipple seems to be going out of his way to overstate things, perhaps anticipating skepticism.

Eric's rather dry comment in his first reaction to Whipple's mention that it is "not yet a theory" was "Ummm...yes, you could say it is definitely not yet a theory." In fact, it isn't even in the ballpark of a theory - it is one person's hypothesis with data that has not been released, no peer reviewed papers on the subject whatsoever, in an application where he is attempting to find commercial funding. No, definitely not a scientific theory, or even in that ballpark. Which doesn't mean it won't become one someday.

I admit, though, I find myself thinking of Richard Feynman's comments on perpetual motion machines. This is not the same thing, of course, but it is a useful cautionary tale to remember:

Mr. Papp talked about how the motor worked, using vague and complicated phrases about radiation, atoms, different levels of energy, quanta, and this and that, all of which made no sense whatsoever, and would never work.

But the rest of what he said was important, for every fraud has to have the right characteristics: Mr. Papp explained that he had tried to sell his engine to the big automobile companies, but they wouldn't buy it because they were afraid it would put all the big oil companies out of business.

So there was obviously a conspiracy working against Mr. Papp's marvelous new engine. Then there was a reference to the magazine articles, and an announcement that in a few days the engine was going to be sent to the Stanford Research Laboratory for validation. This proved, of course, that the engine was real. There was also an invitation to prospective investors to get in on this great opportunity to make large amounts of money, because it was very powerful. And there was a certain danger!

There were quite a few wires running from the engine down to where Mr. Papp and the spectators were standing, into a set of instruments used for measurement; these included a variac, a variable transformer with a dial which could put out different voltages. The instruments were, in turn, connected by a cord to an electrical outlet in the side of the building. So it was pretty obvious where the power supply was.

The engine started to go around, and there was a bit of disappointment: the propeller of the fan went around quietly without the noise of an ordinary engine with powerful explosions in the cylinders, and everything- it looked very much like an electric motor.

Mr. Papp pulled the plug from the wall, and the fan propeller continued to turn. 'You see, this cord has nothing to do with the engine; it's only supplying power to the instruments,' he said. Well, that was easy. He's got a storage battery inside the engine. 'Do you mind if I hold the plug?' I asked? 'Not at all,' replied Mr. Papp, and he handed it to me.

It wasn't very long before he asked me to give me back the plug. 'I'd like to hold it a little longer,' I said, figuring that if I stalled around enough, the damn thing would stop.

Pretty soon Mr. Papp was frantic, so I (Richard Feynman) gave him back the plug and he plugged it back into the wall. A few moments later there was a big explosion.

I'm not claiming this is a scam at all, or that if it is, it is an intentional scam like the one above. What I would say is that there is a reason why most devices that seem unlikely are, and skepticism is the appropriate human response. We have yet to see a high-EROEI device that didn't come with significant unintended consequences - if this was one, it would be the VERY FIRST in human history.

While I'm going to wait for the astrophysicist to comment on the physics, I do think I might add something is with the hyperbolic bits of this essay, such as when Whipple says "our energy problems are over!" Because even if this were true, the above statement represents a non-sequitur in its most literal sense - something that does not follow from the previous statement. I don't blame Whipple for going there, but because so many people do, I think it is worth unpacking why this is not necessarily true.

So let us imagine that in fact, such a limitless source of energy does exist. Does it actually solve all our energy problems? Because this is a real and interesting and important question - and one many people believe to be the case. In fact, I would argue that the reason we need to talk about this is that the assumption that something being possible solves the problem is incredibly pervasive even among well educated people who ought to know better.

Last year I had the pleasure of spending an hour talking with (some might say grilling ;-)) my Congressman, Paul Tonko, about energy and fuel issues. At one point in our rather lively discussion, Tonko talked about ethanol and its returns. I argued that he was overstating the returns - and realized shortly that he was conflating cellulosic and algae ethanol with corn ethanol production - and speaking about AS THOUGH those latter two things were already real and widely available. When I called him on that, Tonko agreed that neither one of those were ready for prime time, but rejected the idea we should speak only about the technology as it stands now, because, of course, the fact that we know we can make ethanol on a very small scale from these things means it will inevitably become a near-term factor. In fact, it is nothing of the sort - neither one is fully ready for prime time or at all cost competetive, so when we speak about ethanol as an energy source RIGHT NOW we are talking almost entirely about food (Corn, mostly in the US) going to produce gas, and that's so far neither scalable or without consequences.

I mention this not to pick on Paul Tonko who I think is awfully smart and an extremely congressman, but to point out how universally we believe that technology IN AND OF ITSELF is right there to save us simply by existing. That is, because things exist, we tend to assume that economic, social and technological barriers will magically be overcome. And yet, that's not true - we've known, for example, how to use hydrogen as an energy storage mechanism for a very, very long time, and yet the once much-touted "hydrogen economy" has never become even remotely real, because of technical and economic issues. Technical feasibility, despite our desires and assumptions, does not translate into "make it so." We often assume it does, but that isn't factually correct, as I wrote in this essay:

One of the hardest concepts for many Americans to absorb is this - that technical feasibility rests on a complex bed of other feasibilities and never stands alone. Thus, simply observing that it is technically possible to, say, create zero impact cities or to run our cars on corn waste does not usefully tell us whether we are going to do so or not. This historical reality stands in stark contrast to the perceptions that many of us have, which is that technology operates as a kind of vending machine into which one puts quarters and gets inevitable results.

For example, it has been technically possible to eliminate most causes of death in childhood for the world's poor for thirty to forty years, and periodically the UN and other agencies explain how this might technically come about. But without other base elements of feasibility - a real commitment to saving impoverished children worldwide - it turns out that it is technically infeasible.

The same, of course, is true of addressing climate change and peak energy - it was wholly technically feasible for us to begin transitioning to a renewable energy economy in the 1970s, and had we done so, both issues would be vastly more manageable and comparatively minor concerns. It is still technically feasible, although enormously difficult, that we could drop industrial emissions dramatically or reduce our fossil fuel consumption. It is not, however, economically or politically feasible that we do so, as evidenced by the fact that we're not, despite emergent consequences.

We are in the habit of forgetting the basis of will, energy and money that technical capacities rest on - we assume that because an outcome is desirable, it is therefore likely. But low infant mortality is eminently desirable, something I suspect most of us can agree on - and there are no major technical barriers.

I'm willing to concede that if this does work as described, we are probably looking at an incredibly high EROEI. If it turns out as claimed that heat and water are the only outputs (and not any of those neutrons or beta radiation), that the casing materials are not consumed and it turns out to be fairly easy to build them, the research gets published, verified and duplicated rapidly and production gets started on multiple fronts, and we have time and resources to get the kinks out, find the funding, run the demo plants, see how the long term unintended consequences if any shake out, the retrofit our entire society, I can totally hang up my hat on peak oil and turn to writing about other stuff - I'm assuming I'll write cute stories about my kids and post pictures of cats like most folks on the web. And hey, that'll give me loads more time for my garden.

By any chance did you notice the chain of things that are necessary to getting from an article about a hypothesis on which we have no data to "hey, I'm going to put some shrimp on the quantum fusion-powered barbie tonight!" There were quite a few of them, weren't there? Now it is taken as a given in our larger culture that those are trivialities can be erased by something we call "innovation" and "market forces" - which we really translate as "our ability to make all this stuff happen." Unfortunately, when we look back at the history of technology, what we find is that innovation alone, market forces alone don't work all that well in many cases. Sometimes they do - the amazing cases are pretty easy to spot. But neither is it that difficult to spot examples of things that we could technically do, that would have been an awesomely great idea, but that didn't happen, despite ingenuity and resources.

Even if all of the ducks that need to be in a row to make this happen are there, we need to remember two other things. The first one is that solving our energy problems may not solve our other fundamental problems. I know Tom Whipple understands the distinction, but it would be an easy mistake for a reader to translate "energy problems" to mean "problems." For example, if climate is as sensitive as some scientists suggest, the time frame for development of this technology may not be sufficient to have it come online before we've crossed critical climate tipping points.

Now having all the energy we want and no limits on its use would certainly help us mitigate an extreme climate disaster, but there's really no evidence that it would be ENOUGH.

It would be great if, for example, we could run air-conditioners 24/7 without worrying for billions of people as the planet heat up, or afford to medivac in people with free electric emergency vehicles, but a planet eating up 1/5 or more of its economic resources annually in disaster mitigation is still going to be a planet in crisis. The same is true with our agricultural and other ecological crises - more energy can help in some measure. But it would be a huge mistake to believe that energy alone is sufficient. Add in a considerable time frame to get from 0-60, and it behooves us to be cautious even if we think this would work. Collapsed societies historically have a hard time bringing major new technologies on line - this resource would have to come into play at the right moment - and the last possible moment to do so get closer all the time.

In fact, most collapsed societies have collapsed WITH the means to avoid collapse within their technical grasp, as Jared Diamond so eloquently describes in Collapse - most of them could have planted more trees, or not drawn down their resources so rapidly. They had all the tools in place to prevent a disaster - and didn't. One can easily make a compelling case that we too have needed no technologies that we did not have at any point in this process - had we started shifting to renewable energies earlier in the game, as was proposed in the 1970s, we too could avoid crisis. Technologies themselves are not saviors. This is hard to remember, but critical - technology is great, but it always has unintended consequences, and in the end, usually doesn't make or break societies.

It would be wise to remember this bit from the 30 year Update of The Limits to Growth:

"The most common criticisms of the original World3 model were that it underestimated the power of technology and that it did not represent adequately the adaptive resilience of the free market. It is true that we did not include in the original World3 model technological progress at rates that would automatically solve all problems associated with exponential growth in the human ecological footprint....[But] in several scenarios we test accelerated technological advance and possible future technical leaps beyond these 'normal' improvements. What if materials are almost entirely recycled? What if land yield doubles again and yet again? What if emissions are reduced at 4% per year over the coming century?

Even with such assumptions, the model world tends to overshoot its limits. Even with the most effective technologies and the greatest economic resilience that we believe is possible, if these are the only changes, the model tends to generate scenarios of collapse." (TLTG:TTYU p. 204-5)

Whether this discovery turns out to be true or false, the question of whether it or anything else can "save" us in the sense most people would like to be saved - let us go on as we have been - is dependent on a number of variables that go beyond "can we build it." At a minimum, it seems wise not to put too many eggs in any basket, for it is perfectly possible to imagine us with a solution at our fingertips that is still out of our functional reach.

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Pepper Spraying the Future

SUBHEAD: Black Friday - a video game where shoppers punch, spray, and shoot each other for choice Xmas gifts.  

By John Michael Greer on 30 November 2011 for Archdruid Report - (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/11/pepperspraying-future.html)

 
Image above: Chaotic scene inside a Walmart store on Black Friday. From (http://www.bangstyle.com/2011/11/wal-mart-shoppers-will-pepper-spray-for-bargains/).

A whiff of pepper spray rising from a suburban big box store, a breathtakingly absurd comment by an American politician, a breathtakingly cynical statement from a Canadian minister: three scraps of data sent whirling down the wind unnoticed by most of today’s disinformation society, which are also three clues to the exceptionally unwelcome future the industrial world is making for itself. Let’s take them one at a time, in reverse order.

On Monday, as a new round of climate change talks got under way in Durban, Canadian environment minister Peter Kent confirmed earlier media reports that Canada will refuse to accept any further cuts in its carbon dioxide output under the Kyoto treaty. Since Canada is one of only two countries on Earth that uses more energy per capita than the United States—an impressive feat, really, when you think about it—you might be tempted to believe that there was room for some modest cuts, but that notion is nowhere in Kent’s view of the universe.

Those same media reports claimed that Canada was preparing to extract itself from the Kyoto treaty altogether; Kent dodged that question, but as Bob Dylan sang a good long time ago, you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. The week before, in a debate among candidates for the GOP’s presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich responded to a question about oil supplies by insisting that the United States could easily increase its oil production by four million barrels a day next year, if only those dratted environmentalists in the other party weren’t getting in the way. This absurd claim was quickly and efficiently refuteded by several peak oil writers—Art Berman’s essay over on the Oil Drum is a good example—but outside the peak oil blogosphere, nobody blinked.

 Never mind that the entire United States only produces 5.9 million barrels a day, that it took twenty years for the Alaska North Slope fields (peak production, 2 million barrels per day) to go from discovery to maximum output, or that the United States has been explored for oil more thoroughly than any other piece of real estate on the planet; the pundits and the public alike nodded and went on to the next question, as though a serious contender for the position of most powerful human being on the planet hadn’t just gone on record claiming that two plus two is whatever you want it to be. All of which brings us inevitably to a Los Angeles suburb on Thanksgiving, where a woman seems to have peppersprayed her fellow shoppers to get a video game console to put under her Christmas tree.

To be fair, the situation seems to have been a bit more complex than that sounds at first hearing. If you’re still thinking of Thanksgiving Day in America in terms of lavish turkey dinners and visits from relatives, think again. Nowadays it serves mostly to mark the beginning of the year’s big shopping season, and stores on the cutting edge of American marketing open their doors Thanksgiving night to give shoppers their first shot at whatever overpriced gewgaws the media has decreed will be the hot item this year.

The store where the pepper spray incident happened was one of these. There, the mob that formed, waiting for the sale to start, turned unruly; there was apparently shoving and shouting, and then the pepper spray came out. According to witnesses, the woman who used it incapacitated enough of the competition to get to one of the video game consoles that were the center of the agitation, hurried off with it to a checkstand, bought the console and got away. Twenty people, some of them children, needed treatment by medics at the scene.

A fair amount of self-important clucking in the American media followed the incident, though I don’t think anyone quite had the bad taste to point out that at least this year nobody was trampled to death by mobs of shoppers—yes, this happens every few years. Stephen Colbert, as usual, landed one in the bull’s-eye by pointing out that the incident would make a great video game.

He’s right enough that I wouldn’t be the least surprised if Black Friday, in which shoppers punch, spray, stab, and shoot each other to get choice gifts for Christmas, turns out to be the hot new video game sensation next year, and no doubt inspires pepper sprayings and tramplings of its own. What all these three news stories have in common is that they display an attitude—it could as well be described as a belief, or even a religion—that treats the satisfaction of short term cravings for material goods as the only thing that really matters.

The shopper with her pepper spray, the politician with his absurd claim, and the government with its blind disregard for national survival, each acted as though getting the stuff is all that matters, and any obstacle in the way—whether the obstacle was other shoppers, the laws of physics and geology, or the fate of Canada’s future generations—was an irrelevance to be brushed aside by any available means. In recent years, there’s been a fair amount of intellectual effort devoted to the attempt to prove that this is inevitably how human beings will act, and this effort has had an influence well beyond the borders of, say, cognitive neuroscience.

Glance over anything the peak oil blogosphere has to say about the absurdity of today’s public policies on energy, the environment, or the economy, for example, and it’s a safe bet that somebody will post a comment insisting that this is how human beings always behave. In point of historical fact, though, this is far from true. The popularity of the monastic life across so many cultures and centuries is hard to square with such claims; it has not been uncommon for anything up to ten per cent of the population of some countries and times to embrace lives of poverty, celibacy and discipline in a monastic setting. Clearly, whatever drives push our species in the direction of the satisfaction of short term cravings are not quite as omnipotent as they’ve been made out to be.

 More to the point, those of us who had the chance to get to know people of the generation that came of age in the Great Depression have a solid counterexample to mind. A great many Americans who lived through that long ordeal came out of the experience with a set of attitudes toward material goods that were radically different from the ones we’ve just been discussing. They were, to judge by the examples I had the chance to know, as materialistic as any other American generation has ever been, but the shadow of 1929 lay permanently across any notion that pursuing short term gains at the cost of long term disaster could possibly be a good idea.

 It’s not accidental that the gutting of regulations on banks that made the current economic debacle possible did not happen until the generation that had witnessed 1929 had passed from public life—nor that it was the generation of the Baby Boom, the first to grow up after depression and war had definitively given way to Pax Americana, that first put today’s culture of short term satisfaction into overdrive.

The behavior of a society, in other words, has at least as much to do with its recent experience of the world as it does with the deeper but more diffuse influence of the biological drives its members share with the rest of the species. Ironically, Gingrich’s response in the presidential debate pointed this up, though I suspect he himself will be the last person on the planet to realize this. He insisted that just as the United States was able to crush the Axis powers in the Second World War, a mobilization on a similar scale guided by the same optimism and can-do attitude could overwhelm any conceivable petroleum shortage and crash the price of oil. It’s a common metaphor—how many times have people in the peak oil scene, for example, called for a new Manhattan Project?—but in the present context it’s hopelessly misleading.

The Second World War, if anything, is a textbook case in what happens when optimism and a can-do attitude runs up against the hard facts of thermodynamics. All things considered, the Axis powers had better generalship, more disciplined military forces, and a much keener grasp of the possibilities of mechanized warfare than the Allies had at first, and Germany, at least, was ahead of the Allies in advanced military technology all the way through the war.

 What they did not have was secure access to fuel—and lacking that, they lost. Russia’s Baku oilfields and the immense US petroleum deposits in Texas and elsewhere more than made up the difference, providing the Allies with practically limitless supplies of energy, and thus of troops, weapons, mobility, and everything else that makes for victory in war. Having those things, they won. It’s all the more ironic in that a similar struggle had a similar result on Gingrich’s home turf a century and a half ago.

No one can possibly accuse the Confederacy of a shortage of optimism or can-do attitude, and the chief Confederate generals were incomparably better than their Union rivals. What those same Union generals finally figured out, though, was that the North’s larger population and vastly greater economic base meant that generalship didn’t matter; the North simply had to force the South into one meatgrinder battle after another, because even if the Union losses were larger, they could be replaced and the South’s could not.

Appomattox followed in due order. One of the points that needs to be drawn from these examples, and the many others like them, is that optimism and a can-do attitude are in large part effects rather than causes; or, to put matters a little differently, they are relevant to certain circumstances and not to others. In the twentieth century, a nation with abundant supplies of coal, oil, and iron ore could well afford boundless optimism, and got along better with boundless optimism than without it, because the resource base was there to back up that optimism and give it muscles—and, when necessary, teeth.

A nation that lacks such resources but still sets out to act on the basis of boundless optimism, on the other hand, risks ending up in roughly the same condition as the American South in 1865 or Germany and Japan in 1945. Such a nation needs to foster entirely different qualities than the ones just mentioned: circumspection, patience, and a keen sense of the downside risks of any opportunity come to mind. Equipped with these, it’s possible for a nation with few resources to distract, dissuade, and ultimately outlast its potential enemies.

That’s the secret of Switzerland’s survival, to cite one example among many. The wild card in these calculations comes into play when shifts in technology, on the one hand, or the depletion of nonrenewable resources on the other, changes the status of a nation faster than its internal cultural shifts can adapt. Britain’s history is a case in point. Britain’s empire happened to come of age just as the Industrial Revolution was dawning, and coal—of which Britain had huge and easily accessible deposits—was the essential fuel of that revolution, powering the steam engines and (in the form of coke) the iron and steel foundries that were essential to economic and military power in the 18th and 19th centuries.

With the dawn of the 20th century, though, petroleum—far more energy-rich than even the best anthracite coal, and irreplaceable as fuel for gasoline and diesel engines, which were busy putting coal-fired steam power out of business—elbowed coal out of the way. Britain had next to no petroleum supplies of her own, since the offshore drilling techniques that made the North Sea fields accessible were still decades in the future. The result was a tremendous new range of vulnerabilities that next to nobody noticed in time.

Twice in twenty-five years, accordingly, Britain blundered into a land war in Europe and found itself abruptly scrambling for survival. In both cases, it had to turn to its erstwhile colony, the United States, to bail it out, and the price tag on those bailouts finally included Britain’s empire and its status as a major world power. There were several other countries just as eager as we were to buy Britain’s empire and status, but—well, basically, we peppersprayed them and left the store with our prize.

Optimism and a can-do attitude counted for very little, for example, when German submarines could throw a noose around the British islands that Britain alone couldn’t break. The end of the age of petroleum promises another set of upsets on the same scale, but this time it’s not because some more convenient and concentrated resource has suddenly come on the scene. It’s because the world’s production of conventional petroleum peaked in 2005 and has been declining ever since.

A desperate scramble to fill the resulting gap with what appear on the charts as "other liquids"—ethanol, biodiesel, tar sand extracts, you name it, if it can be poured into a fuel tank and burnt, it gets counted—has filled in the gap, at least for now, but all these "other liquids" require much more energy to produce than ordinary petroleum does, and of course those energy inputs aren’t accounted for in the totals.

Thus, on paper, we’ve been chugging along a bumpy plateau for six years now, while in the real world—because of the rising energy inputs demanded by the "other liquids"—the supply of fuel available to do anything other than produce more fuel has been steadily sliding. The problem we face right now is that it’s only been a few short years since world petroleum production was expanding, and next to nobody has begun to think through the implications of the shift.

Neither the United States nor anybody else has the vast supplies of energy and other raw materials that would be needed to back up the confident, brash optimism of an earlier day, and yet we still cling to the notion that those attitudes are the appropriate response to any crisis, because that’s the approach we know. Patience, prudence, hard realism, the cold-eyed assessment of potential risks—those are foreign concepts to the leaders and the populace alike in most of the world’s industrial nations, and especially so here in America, where the cult of enthusiastic optimism has been welded solidy in place since before the birth of the Republic. It has always worked before, and most Americans at every point on the socioeconomic spectrum are firmly convinced that it will work again.

 But it will not work again, because the resources that would allow it to work again no longer exist. That is why, dear reader, if you happen to live for another few decades, and have the chance to look back from that vantage point on the years just ahead of us, you are likely to see those years littered with the scraps of any number of grandiose plans meant to overcome the rising spiral of crises taking shape around us right now.

None of them will have worked, because none of them will deal with the driving force behind that spiral of crisis—the hard fact that we’ve exhausted most of the easily extracted, highly concentrated energy sources on this planet, and are going to have to downscale our expectations and our collective sense of entitlement to fit within the narrower and more burdensome limits that dependence on renewable energy sources will impose on us.

Quite the contrary; every one of these projects will start from the assumption that optimism and a can-do attitude can overcome those limits—and the tighter the limits press and the more obvious it becomes that the limits aren’t budging, the more passionate the claims that one more heroic effort will defeat them once and for all. Those claims will come from every point on the political spectrum, and will wrap themselves in every conceivable scrap of rhetoric that comes to hand. Before all this is over, I expect to see people who now call themselves environmentalists advocating for the stripmining of our national parks—in an environmentally sensitive manner, to be sure.

We’ve already seen erstwhile environmentalists such as Stewart Brand and George Monbiot championing nuclear power; how poisoning the biosphere with radioactive waste makes more sense than flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide may well puzzle you as much as it does me, but straining at greenhouse gnats and swallowing nuclear camels is apparently a job requirement in their field these days.

What neither the pundits nor the politicians nor ordinary people are willing to consider, in turn, is the one option that offers a meaningful way forward: learning the old and necessary lesson that our desires need to be held within the bounds that the universe provides for us, and that long term goals and values need to trump short term cravings, especially where material goods are concerned.

We can no longer afford the sort of attitude that insists that it’s okay to pepperspray our fellow shoppers to get that brand new video game console, or pepperspray the laws of physics and geology to get that extra four million barrels a day of oil (or, more precisely, to get the presidency by pretending we can get that extra four million barrels a day of oil), or pepperspray Canada’s grandchildren to get the right set of pretty figures on the national balance of trade and federal budget.

 Still, for the foreseeable future, pepperspray will be popular in the corridors of power and the corner tavern alike, and it will take a certain number of unnecessary disasters before that ends and people in the industrial world begin to come to terms with the new reality. This, finally, is why I’ve spent the last year and a half passing on what I learned, decades ago, of the do-it-yourself green wizardry of the Seventies, and why I’ve supplemented that over the last two months with some of the basic elements of magic—the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will—which I also began to learn in the Seventies, and which had rather more than a nodding acquaintance in those days with the movements focused on appropriate technology, organic gardening, and the rest of it.

During the years immediately ahead of us, unless I’m very much mistaken, the political, economic, and cultural institutions of the industrial world can be counted on to do just about anything other than a meaningful response to the crisis of our age, and any meaningful response that does happen is going to have to come from individuals, families, and community groups. During those same years, I suspect, every available effort will be made to convince as many people as possible that the nonsolutions on offer are actually meaningful responses, and the things that might actually help—using less, conserving more, and downscaling our burden on the planet—are unthinkable.

That’s the sort of thing that happens when the world changes, and structures and institutions adapted to an old reality turn out to be hopelessly unworkable in the new one. Next week we’ll talk about what might follow that period, and wrap up the discussion of green wizardry and magic alike for the time being.  

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Santa Isn't Bringing Gigawatts

SUBHEAD: What energy resources will allow us to keep the electricity grid and cars running? - There aren’t any! By John Michael Greer on 22 June 2011 for ArchDruid Report - (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/06/santa-isnt-bringing-gigawatts.html) Image above: Mashup of Coke and Areva ads by Juan Wilson. From (http://www.experiencingla.com/2010/12/happy-st-nicholas-day.html). Through the clouds of wishful thinking that too often make up what we are pleased to call a collective conversation on the subject of energy, a ray of common sense occasionally shines through. This week’s ray came by way of a study on the Earth’s thermodynamic balance, soon to be released in no less a scientific publication than the Proceedings of the Royal Society. The study found among other things that there’s a fairly modest upper limit to the amount of energy that wind farms can extract from the atmosphere without changing the climate. So far, at least, the peak oil blogosphere hasn’t responded to this study at all. That’s not surprising, since the idea that renewable energy resources might also be subject to environmental limits is about as welcome in most alternative circles these days as a slug in a garden salad. These days, for many people who consider themselves environmentally conscious, a vision of giant wind turbines in serried ranks as far as the eye can see fills a pivotal emotional need; it allows them to pretend, at least to themselves, that it’s possible to support today’s extravagant lifestyles on renewable energy – to have our planet, one might say, and eat it too. In the real world, things don’t work that way, but we’ve had a long vacation from having to deal with the real world. Three hundred years of ever-increasing production of fossil fuels have misled most of the population of the industrial world into thinking that it’s natural and normal to have as much cheap energy as you want and are willing to pay for. As petroleum production wobbles along a bumpy plateau and approaches the point of irreversible decline, and other fossil fuels move implacably toward their own peaks and declines, one of the prime necessities of sanity and survival involves unlearning the mental habits of the age of abundance, and coming to terms with the fact that all human activities are subject to ecological limits. It’s as though we’re a bunch of children with very, very short memories, who wake up one morning to find that it’s Christmas Day and there are heaps of presents around the tree. Giddy with excitement, we open one package after another, revel in our shiny new toys, then delight in the holiday atmosphere of the rest of the day. As night falls, we doze off, thinking happily about how there will be another round of presents and another big meal the next day. Then the next day comes, and it’s not Christmas any more; search as we will, the area around the tree stubbornly refuses to yield any more presents, and if we strain our memories as far as they will reach, we might just remember that the other 364 days of the year follow different rules. Especially in America, but not only in America, a great many people are basically sitting around on the day after Christmas, waiting for Santa Claus to show up with gigawatts of bright shiny new energy in his sack. The people who insist that we can keep our current lifestyles powered with giant wind farms or solar satellites or Bussard fusion reactors or free energy devices – that latter is what they’re calling perpetual motion machines these days, at least the last time I checked – are right in there with the folks who chant "Drill, baby, drill" in the fond belief that poking a hole somewhere in a continent that’s been more thoroughly prospected for oil than any other part of the Earth will somehow oblige the planet to fill ‘er up. I have too much respect for magic to dignify this sort of logic with the label of magical thinking; an initiate whose grasp of occult philosophy was that inept would be chucked out of any self-respecting magical lodge on the spot. The realization that has to come is the realization that most current chatter about energy is trying desperately to avoid: that Santa isn’t bringing gigawatts or, if you prefer, that no law of nature guarantees us a steady supply of enough energy to maintain the fabulously extravagant habits of the recent past. Once people begin to grasp that the only meaningful answer to the question "What energy resources will allow us to keep the electricity grid running and cars on the road?" is "There aren’t any," it’s possible to ask a different question – "What energy resources will allow us to provide for the actual necessities and reasonable wants of human beings?" – and get a more useful answer. That’s more or less the discussion I’ve been trying to further with the posts on energy here in recent months, in the course of surveying those ways of working with energy with which I have some personal experience—conservation first and foremost, but also homescale solar and wind power. There are also plenty of other other options that I haven’t worked with personally, and they also deserve to be brought into the discussion. "Micro-hydro" and "mini-hydro," for example, are potentially options of great importance in the broad picture of a post-abundance energy future, but they’re not options I’ve explored personally. The "hydro" in each of these phrases, of course, is short for "hydroelectric;" micro-hydro is homescale hydroelectric power, usually produced by diverting a small amount of a stream or river on one’s property through a small turbine and using the latter to spin a generator. Back in the day there was a certain amount of work done with simple undershot waterwheels made from scrap metal, hooked up to truck alternators of the sort discussed in an earlier post on wind; I have no personal experience with how well these worked, but the concept may well be worth revisiting. Mini-hydro is the next step up, hydroelectric power on the scale of a neighborhood or a rural town. Unlike what I suppose would have to be called mega-hydro, this doesn’t require damming up whole river basins, devastating fish runs, and the like; a small portion of a river’s flow or a small and steep stream provide the water, and the result under most circumstances is a supply of sustainably generated electricity that doesn’t suffer from the intermittency of sun and wind. Of course it depends on having the right kind of water resource close by your community, and that’s a good deal more common in some areas than others; it also requires a good deal more investment up front; but if you can get past those two obstacles, it’s hard to think of a better option. Small amounts of electricity can be generated in a variety of other ways. Still, one of the great lessons that has to be grasped is that the thermodynamic costs of turning some other form of energy into electricity, and then turning the electricity back into some other form of energy such as rotary motion or heat, can be ignored only if you’ve got a half billion years or so of stored sunlight to burn. There are situations where those losses are worth accepting, but not that many of them, and if you can leave the energy in its original form and not take it through the detour into electricity, you’re usually better off. Methane is an example. Methane production from manure on a small scale is a going concern in quite a few corners of the Third World; you need more raw material than a single human family will produce to get a worthwhile amount of gas, but small farms with livestock yield enough manure to keep a small kitchen stove fueled on this very renewable form of natural gas. (The residue still makes excellent raw material for compost, since only the carbon and hydrogen are involved in methane production; the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other plant nutrients come through the process untouched.) Since cooking fuel is higher on the list of basic human necessities than most things you can do with modest amounts of electricity, this is probably the best use for the technology. Flatulence jokes aside, I don’t have any personal experience with small-scale methane production. Wood heat, on the other hand, is a technology I’ve worked with, and it’s probably going to be a major factor in the energy mix in North America in the future. It’s a simple, robust technology that works very well on the home scale – in fact, it’s not too easy to use it on any larger scale – and many wood stoves come with what’s called a waterback, which uses heat from the stove to heat domestic hot water. Combine solar water heaters with a cooking stove equipped with a waterback, and you’ve basically got your hot water needs covered year round. The problem here is that wood heat is a major cause of deforestation worldwide; whether or not too much windpower can mess with the climate, as the study referenced earlier in this post suggests, it’s a hard fact that too much harvesting of wood has devastated ecosystems over much of the world and caused a range of nasty blowbacks affecting human as well as biotic communities. There’s at least one way around that problem, though it needs to be implemented soon and on a large scale A very old technique called coppicing allows for intensive production of firewood off a fairly small acreage. The trick to coppicing is that quite a few tree species, when cut down, produce several new shoots from the stump; these grow much more rapidly than the original tree, since they have their root system already well in place. When the shoots get to convenient firewood size, the coppicer cuts them again, and yet another set of shoots come up to repeat the process. I’ve dabbled in coppicing – the vine maple of the Pacific Northwest, which grows like a weed and produces decent firewood, made that easy enough, and other regions have their own equivalents. As other fuels run short, the owner of a few acres who uses it for coppicing and sells dry wood nicely sized for wood stoves may have a steady income, or at least a perennial source of barter, on his or her hands. Biofuels such as ethanol and vegetable oils are another source of heat energy that will probably see a great deal of use in the future, though here again the limits on production are not always recognized. In a world with seven billion mouths to feed and an agricultural system at least as dependent on fossil fuels as any other part of industrial civilization, diverting any substantial portion of farmland from growing food to producing biofuels risks a substantial political backlash. I wonder how many of the proponents of biofuels production have thought through the consequences of a future in which the hazards of driving might just include being stopped by makeshift barricades and torn to pieces by an impoverished mob that is all too aware that every drop of ethanol or biodiesel in the tank represents food taken from the mouths of their children. Biofuels are likely to play some role in the early stages of the end of the age of abundance, then, but thereafter, at least until the world’s human population and post-petroleum agriculture have settled down into some sort of equilibrium, it’s unlikely that this role will be very extensive. Later on, it’s anyone’s guess, and the answer will be up to the people of the twenty-fourth century and onward, not us. Methane, wood, and sunlight, then, will probably account for the great majority of heat energy in common use in the centuries immediately ahead of us. What about mechanical energy? The breakthrough that launched the industrial revolution was the discovery that heat from burning coal could be turned into mechanical energy by way of a steam engine, and much of what sets our civilization apart from other civilizations in history is precisely the ability to put almost unimaginable amounts of mechanical energy to work. If a car with a 100-horsepower engine literally had to be pulled by a hundred horses, for example, and each of those horses required the care and feeding that horses do, the number of such cars on the roads would be a very small fraction of the present total. There are good reasons, some historical and some pragmatic, to think that the major source of mechanical energy in the post-abundance future will be what it was in the pre-abundance past, that is, human and animal muscle, amplified by a variety of clever tools. If anything, some of the more ingenious inventions of the last few centuries make muscle power even more useful now, and in the centuries ahead of us, than it was before the first steam engine hissed and groaned its way into a new age of the world. The extraordinary efficiency with which a bicycle converts muscular effort into movement is a case in point. The relatively simple metallurgy and engineering needed to build a bicycle is very likely to survive into the far future, or to be reinvented after some more or less brief interval, and the sheer value of a technology that can move people and supplies a hundred miles a day on decent roads will hardly be lost on our descendants. It’s far from unlikely, for example, that wars will be won in the post-petroleum era by those nations that have the common sense to equip their infantry with bicycle transport. More generally, the invention of really effective gears may turn out to be one of the nineteenth century’s great contributions to the future. The Roman world had some very complex machines using cogs and gears, but the designs used at that time did a poor job of transmitting power; gearing systems originally evolved in the late Middle Ages for clockwork underwent dramatic changes once steam power created the need to transfer mechanical motion as efficiently as possible from place to place and from one direction to another. Once invented, effective gears found their way back down the technological pyramid to the realm of hand tools; anyone who has ever compared beating egg whites with a spoon to doing so with a hand-cranked beater will have a very clear idea of the difference in effort that such simple mechanical devices make possible. That difference may not seem like much in comparison to the gargantuan achievements of current fossil fuel-powered technology, or the even more grandiose fantasies served up by a good many of those who insist that the end of the age of petroleum must, by some kind of technological equivalent of manifest destiny, usher in the beginning of the age of some even more titanic energy resource. Still, if these claims amount to sitting around the chimney on December 26 waiting for Santa’s boots to appear – and I think a very good case can be made for the comparison – it’s past time to shelve the fantasies of limitless energy and the hubris that goes with them, and start paying attention to the tools, technologies, and modest but real energy sources that can actually have a positive impact on human existence in an age when only natural phenomena have gigawatts at their disposal any more. .

Water Generating Star

SUBHEAD: Star shooting intense water jets into space spotted by Herschel telescope. By Dean Praetorius on 17 June 2011 for Huffington Post - (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/17/star-shooting-water-jets-herschel_n_879211.html) Image above: NASA image of water spouting star from original article. A star shooting water is almost an oxymoron.

But a young sun-like star seems to have been spotted 750 light-years from Earth doing just that, as researchers have apparently discovered, according to PopSci. Their findings indicate that the proto-star is shooting water from its poles at about 124,000 miles per hour.

Essentially, it's creating water bullets that it shoots deep into interstellar space, according to National Geographic. This star is no more than 100,000 years old, and is located in the northern constellation Perseus.

The star was found by ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory, which was able to see through a dense layer of gas that surrounded it. According to PopSci, the telescope picked up the light signature of both hydrogen and oxygen which are coming together as liquid water before vaporizing near the massive jets of gas that spew from the the star's poles.

It's not until the water vapor is far from the star that it returns to a liquid state. At that point the water is moving at about 124,000 miles per hour, writes National Geographic. As Lars Kristensen, lead author of the study -- which has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics -- points out, that's "about 80 times faster than bullets flying out of a machine gun."

The really interesting part of this discovery however, is just how far the water is propelled and the possibility that this stage may be a part of the life of many more protostars. If this is the case, the prospect of stars like these distributing water throughout the universe is incredible, considering the implications for life that water brings.

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