Oil and NASA's mission statement change

So if we are ever able to economically import hydrocarbons from the cooler parts of the Solar System as far as the Earth, then we have nothing to worry about, because if we could do that we could do almost anything. Earth would then be a Technopia.

Such hydrocarbon importation wouldn't become a greenhouse gas problem either, because it would probably be too valuable to burn, and even if it was, the Earth's Carbon Cycle would take care of it, as discussed earlier in this thread.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Peter Nielsen</i>
<br />So if we are ever able to economically import hydrocarbons from the cooler parts of the Solar System as far as the Earth, then we have nothing to worry about, because if we could do that we could do almost anything. Earth would then be a Technopia.

Such hydrocarbon importation wouldn't become a greenhouse gas problem either, because it would probably be too valuable to burn, and even if it was, the Earth's Carbon Cycle would take care of it, as discussed earlier in this thread.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

I agree. If we had the energy - propulsion ability to go to the outer solar system and collect hydrocarbons, it certainly would not be for fuel. The fuel energy of hydrocarbons would not even begin to match the fuel energy expenditure of the round trip. One might bring such material to Mars where it is highly deficient. But for purposes of setting up plant life.

Gregg Wilson

There could also be a network of heavy industries, petro-chemical industries and so on going on amongst asteroids, Saturn's rings or wherever, upon planetisimal's small enough to facilitate economic import-export, large enough to make life pleasant for Earthlings, just enough gravity to stop jumpers escaping and so on.

That dispersed heavy industrial space colony would be exporting within itself more than to Earth and they'd all be growing fast as a consequence, much as the Soviet Union developed heavy industries very rapidly in Siberia after WW2. Most Earth import-exports would be of people, high tech and precious materials, and that "Earth's Carbon Cycle" I referred to in my last post would be an enhanced, gene-engineered, Technopic Carbon Life Cycle.

But the main propulsion means cannot be chemical rocketry. I propose "cold" fission rather than "cold" fusion. If we discover a means to make the "hydrogen" bomb work on a small scale - without using a plutonium trigger - then we are there. I think this is what Pons and Fleischman stumbled across, but they had the wrong theory.

Gregg Wilson

Yes, I¡¯ve been disappointed at how Cold Fusion has been put into the Crank basket by Hot Fusion mainstreamers in the usual, careerist way, when the only thing that is really ¡°wrong¡± with Cold Fusion (CF) phenomena is that they are elusive.

A similar thing happened to ball lightning for the same reason when I was a kid, illustrating the same kind of corruption of Science values (concerned with Truth, Beauty and so on) by Science career values (concerned with political correctness (PC), the surest way to make a career, get funding and so on).

Quantum Mechanics (QM) is hard to do, so has not been worked out comprehensively for all interactions in all crystalline stuctures. My intuition is that there may well be very particular structures which somehow cause CF to really happen.

These might be rare structures which rarely occur in contemporary electrode manufacturing processes. They may depend on peculiarities of those processes, unusual combinations of impurities in those electrodes which we may not have been aware of and so on. These structures might even have evolved biologically, given selective advantage to some microbe, as photosynthesis did, and so on.

Sorry for not contributing to this forum for a few days, I was out of town.

On coal production. CO2 reuptake by the oceans provides the basis for ocean plantlife growth. The death of that plantlife then falls to the ocean floor where geological heat and pressure eventually help to create coal.

The ocean's warming has caused iceberg calfing, it has also caused the increase in evaporated water in the forms of vapor, clouds, and eventual precipitation.

If all goes according to the Global Warming to IceAge prediction, then there will be an overabundance of water in the atmosphere available for precipitation, the rapid influx of super cold air will allow vast areas of the northern hemisphere and south pole to be covered in snow. Albedo change will cause millenia of below average temperatures and will replace ice reserves.

Albedo change is the topic I wish to explore. To this date has any scientific study been made of the albedo change of Earth. With rapid expansion of human populations and the use of so much dark colored materials, loss of farmlands, etc has the albedo changed sufficiently to allow more solar radiation to be absorbed then before. Can we cover some vast tracks of land in some white sheets or material and fix global warming?

Mark Vitrone