Clean Energy

“We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.” - Jimmy Carter

In this week’s article I’ll be talking about clean, efficient, and cheaper forms of energy.

              

  Right now in the United States we buy most of our oil from the Middle East. The area itself is a dry dessert that was once a paradise, the decayed plant life developed into oil. These are a people who are almost in a constant state of war, very poor where electricity is a luxury and the wealthy prey on the ignorant. Every time the Middle East is thrown into disarray our oil prices go up and many lose their jobs because it. Saudi Arabia is where we buy most of our oil from. They have plenty of oil; we drill some from the gulf and off the coast of Alaska. We don’t drill further off the coast because of the environmental risk, made very clear with the Gulf spill.

 

Currently the United States has been pushing for cleaner forms of energy, mainly due to a liberal office. Our first step was to make use of Wind Energy. We utilize wind energy by putting up wind turbines. Wind turbine’s work a lot like the hydro turbines. Gases behave a lot like water and flowing currents. The air flows through the turbine spinning the blade; from there kinetic energy is then transferred into electric. 

 

We could also use solar power.  Calculators, some cars, and homes currently use solar power. They do not work at night; have a high price that pays for itself in the end. With recent advances we can put solar panels on water, around round objects, building windows, roof tops, and pretty much anywhere the imagination leads you too. If you generate enough power, you can actually sell it back to the electric company. Solar power, wind, and hydro, are all forms of energy we can have within 5-10 years. Bio fuels, fusion, and so on would take a long time to develop, which tends to be what oil companies like BP want.

After we have finally begun to compete with the big bunch in clean energy we will be doing much better. Without having to  worry about having enough fuel we can start worrying about helping the Middle East, rather than hurt them by being their crutch. I can only imagine how much better a place it would be if they started working on other industries rather than oil. Even if we do stop our reliance on them we could still have a use for it.

Extending our time here

Hi everyone, I will be writing about one article a week, so it might seem like it takes forever to get a new one.  This week’s article is about extending your life span, living healthy, and the future of this endeavor.

Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope. -Robert Ingersoll
 
If you love life and everyone in yours, it is only natural to want to stay here with them. There is a reason why we all cry at funerals. It is a horrible thing to lose someone that you love, that you fought with and made memories. It is like a part of you has died. When one person dies, everything they knew, all their memories and everything they might have done goes with them. Imagine if FDR wouldn't have died, if JFK died and they brought one of his clones online. Where would we be? In this week’s article I will be talking about what you can expect to see within your life time and what is on the horizon. We are literally on the brink of adding years on to our life. There are many scientists looking for the proverbial fountain of youth. Not bull crap, but actual science such as diets and chemicals we need and so on. This is all excluding political and religious arguments. Of course these will hold us back, but not all the countries will allow this to keep them out of the market. If you feel that it is an arrogant and vain endeavor you could of course not use any of the fruit of their labor. It isn't like anyone would be making you use any of it. Some people just feel like to die is human, that's okay but I disagree.

The first thing you need to do is exercise, eat right, and sleep well. Adults need about 6 hours of sleep. If you don't like veggie food then take vitamins. If you take vitamins, ones with omega 3 & lithium if you can find any. As for diets just look at what you’re eating, odds are, the nutritional facts are on the back or online. Calories are not evil contrary to popular belief. We use them as a source of energy, the majority of which are burned off as a source of heat. For males about 2000 daily is healthy, for woman about 1800 calories. For exercising you really do not have to do that much. Jog 15 minutes a day or walk 1 hour, then do sets of 10 Abe work outs and your fine. Walking and running are about the same, if you have health problems I recommend you walk. The average human life span right now in America for a male is 75, female 80. If you eat like you’re supposed to and exercise normally then you might live as long as 100.

Scientist like Aubrey De Gray (pictured right), look at death as a disease, another problem to be solved by man. The first step in this endeavor is to eliminate cell death. Currently we have done this with jellyfish. We do this by precision drugs or gene therapy for a more permanent telomere extension. Then we would have to solve the problem of trauma or if the body is completely destroyed cloning. A telomere is at the end of every cell, every time it divides it gets shorter and shorter. Telomeres are a lot like anklets on the end of your shoe lace. I would expect the first human experiments on humans to extend telomeres would be sometime between 2020 & 2030. They would experiment on humans after extensive study with animals and such. Cancer in humans is actually immortal, the result of damage DNA gone rampant and reproducing. We hope to imitate its cellular immortality. Solving cellular immortality also reverses the aging process.

After the problem of cell death and cancer are solved we move on to death by blunt force trauma. We will not completely solve this problem for a long time off but, we can help the healing process from such events. Nanites, very tiny robots, they work within our body, repairing us, & aiding our white blood cells. They would be self-sufficient relying on readily available resources within the body to reproduce themselves. You get a cut they rush in start repairing and helping the blood dry there, making sure no blood clots get lose and shoot to the brain. We have been working on less ambitious forms of this and have working ones now. Making one that works to this extent will take some time. The current ones were designed to drop off precision drugs on cancer. They work a lot like miniature b-52 bombers.

On a future note, expect people to be backing up their minds and all their memories within quantum super computers, so that they truly become immortal. If a person's body is destroyed beyond recognition a clone of their body is made and everything they knew and what made them downloaded into that clone. At first political leaders, and people defined as invaluable would have this as an advanced insurance option, then as the process became more and more common place the middle class might get their hands on it. When people are conceived they might even start changing them from inside the womb using Nanites. Removing health problems, changing eye and hair color, or whatever the parent wanted. We have a bright future so long as were there to see it one of our nations will accomplish this goal. I can only hope that sooner or later the United States is one of them.

One giant leap for mankind

Ever wondered what it would take for us to start spreading to space. Well in this post I will talk about the steps, possibilities, a realistic time line, and how you will live to see it!

As of right now we have several problems. Each pound we send into space, cost us $1000 each. To send one 215 lbs. man into space it would cost about $215,000. We currently use chemical based propellants to escape earth atmosphere. In other words, we need a reliable, cheap, safe way to get into low earth orbit, the first problem. The second being, we need a way of paying for all this, making something so expensive much cheaper. Then when we get those two problems out of the way, everything else will fall like a domino effect. Of course all this is excluding politics. The public tend to forget the advantages we have simply because of the space program and because of this, I am sorry to say it won't be an American only ship that does this. That will take some time and a new office that actually cares about NASA enough to increase their funding.

Just because we abandoned our dreams to get there does not mean that China, European Union, Russia, and Japan with collaboration from U.S. it is possible. There is a lot of money to be made up there and everyone wants a cut. Japan plans to place a  robotic colony on the moon by 2015. The European Union plans to be there by 2025. China could land on the moon with a base by 2030. Russia wants to have one by 2025. So one or all of these nations will succeed. For us to get out of low earth orbit, we have to have this first. We have to become a multi planet species.

It could sole scores of problems we have back on earth, ranging from economic problems, to energy, over population, to even food. Most of the first lunar bases won't have humans with them. Robots go in remote controlled or a combination between automated or not, they set up the colony. Then We go in after it’s all been checked out and start putting even more infrastructure up. We found out that there is water on the moon. They sit in the craters frozen. So we have just about everything but food handled once we get there.

Once we set up the base on the moon, what do we do? Well it's simple actually. We mine the moon of Helium 3. This rare form of Helium bombards the moon constantly via the sun. Since our moon base is in the southern poll where there is a constant sunlight, it is presumed the area is extremely rich with the element. We can use HE3 as a cheap and easily accessible fuel on the moon. The HE3 could be shuttled back to Earth for even more profit. The moon has no atmosphere. So solar cells could literally be printed out on its surface.  There are some very ambitious concepts of just that. Some putting lasers at each side and constantly beaming power to the earth. That might be a bit too far off for you to see. After several successful years of mining we reach a point in our development where we can construct space elevators on the moon to easily build in space and leave the moons orbit. They cannot be constructed on earth because we do not have a material with the strength both tensile and durability to sustain the forces it would endeavor. A space elevator allows us easy, cheap transport of materials into space.

The year is about 2040, we have at least one successful moon base on our southern pole. The moon base mines HE3, and has Space elevators and has begun construction on our first near earth asteroid miners. At 1997 prices, a small metallic based asteroid 1 mile in diameter (1.6 km) contains more than $20 trillion US dollars’ worth of metals. All the metals we now mine from the earth's crust, came from space. The 2004 iron production exceeded a billion metric tons. One metric ton is 2,200 lbs., about the weight of a compact car. One M-Type asteroid, or an asteroid we know somewhat the composition of, with a diameter of 1 km could contain more than two billion metric tons of iron-nickel ore.

After all that, you look back at the earth from the moon at the wonderful blue oceans, green landscape and realize how close we came to throwing all that away with overpopulation, war, industry, and many other injustices. The words of an ancient astronaut come to mind.

"That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind." - Neil Armstrong

Thoughts of origin

My first blog post! I hope everyone likes it and if you do please subscribe for more random thoughts of mine. Expect articles about technology, science, books, movies, games, history, and varied thoughts of total randomness.


I feel I must add this disclaimer, I am not telling you what or how you should believe. I am only stating what I believe up to this point, from everything I have read, seen, and experienced. I have no intention of offending anyone. I might just bring something to your attention. This is not a religion; I am not a cult leader, just stop reading if you are easily offended by things like this, for this train of thought takes an open mind. You can read what I say, explore the possibilities as I have done and make your own opinion.

"Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size" - Albert Einstein

I think it is depressing when you contemplate how small, insignificant everything really is. Knowing humanity's only true purpose is to propagate so life goes on. Our only hope being to make a small hiccup on the grand scale of time. The truth is often an ugly thing. But it doesn't necessarily mean that "Ignorance is bliss." As humans we find ourselves biting into the forbidden fruit as many times as we forget what we are. It is too often the ignorant that decide our fate. We are undoubtedly one of the most curious, arrogant beings to ever exist. We like to think were special or that we were made from a perfect copy. But even that leads the mind to wonder if we’re all just clones of our creators. As if they were not advanced enough, to a point where they could perfectly clone themselves. It never really mattered what you believed, but that you did. Throughout my life I find myself torn between religion and curiosity (science). As soon as I discovered how small I really was, tears ran down my cheeks. I can never seem to get it out of my mind. From my city of Huntsville, in my​ home state of Alabama, on the continent of North America, on the planet Earth, in the solar system Sol, to our galaxy the Milky Way, to the dark matter surrounding it & the two known galaxy's colliding with it, to the rim of our known universe that some call the membrane​, beyond the membrane of our universe to an infinite amount of parallel universes, smashing together creating ripples to make new universes in a violent cosmic dance that transverses the eons. Realizing this you must think of how this means that time existed before our universe was created. Shooting way back through existence to my mind, sitting in this chair in Huntsville, Alabama you get a small picture of how tiny we really are.

As scientist and philosophers we cannot settle for the simple one sentence answer that he spoke it and it happened. As skeptics we will not stand for the famous sentence "I am." ​As dreamers we will not tolerate being anywhere near the ground with our dreams always being in the heavens. You might not understand a word I am saying, I don't expect you too. I cannot believe that I do. I can however point you in the right direction, and hope you will come up with your own opinion. I must say it has been infuriating, being one of the few who are willing to face the facts and not be so ignorant. I might not be an atheist but I am far from those brainwashed conservative religious people who believe everything people tell them. ​I suppose I can't really open your mind any much more than it already is. Just keep in mind, anything is possible.


Who started life on the lifeless rock of earth? This question single handedly enslaved thousands, killed many, advanced and saved many, organized some, and can be attributed to everything we know and love today. In a nut shell that question alone has propelled us to where we are today. If we were not so curious we would still be in that "garden". ​So at first our universe (membrane) collided with another. This created ripples, which resulted in the big bang. These ripples created matter, and the bubble that contains our universe. Inside it light elements, clouds of hydrogen and such float around condensing smashing together at the speed of light itself, creating black holes which went on to heat up the early universe, that made possible for clouds of dust and gas to cool down, these clouds eventually became so heavy and dense that they imploded, igniting into stars, some of the stars didn't have all the parameters it takes to be a star like earth, Jupiter, and other planets. These planets as we call them are simply failed stars. In our own galaxy we were fortunate to have a gas giant to throw comets to the inner solar system. This not only delivered water but the building blocks of amino acids. This started life on earth and possibly mars for a short time. ​Later about 4-6 million years ago the homo species was born. It is indeed possible that a more advanced race altered our evolution to speed it up. It is even possible that we are a "Noah's Ark" so to speak. Two female and male species are not enough to save their entire kind. That is only possible if they are indeed clones. Maybe we were just one accident, a natural evolution. I do not think the Ancient astronaut theory is completely garbage, is what that means. The guy with the crazy hair on the history channel has some merit. The topic deserves to be looked into but, honestly I think we did all that on our own.


First I read the bible, thoroughly in fact. I saw tall tells, lessons of virtue, hints at how all this came to be. Then I learned that Noah's flood really happened, that it was much smaller then thought, that if water did cover the entire earth then all life would die poisoned by the very thing we need, oxygen. I learned that two male and female species were not enough to sustain a population. I questioned everything I saw on there. Then I took a step back and thought to myself, if this is not the complete truth, what really happened? Then I find the writings of brilliant men. I read about the great Albert Einstein struggling with his religion, Socrates poisoning himself for "corrupting" people’s thoughts which was thought against god, Copernicus waiting till his death to publish his life’s work. This is a topic that deserves much debate and thought. If there is even a slight chance that people like me are right, then it is worth exploring. We have literally thousands of religions. Each one sought to satisfy the human curiosity, to give benefits for being a good person in a world where doing the wrong thing is so easy. Sometimes it was even used as a weapon, in business and war. No blood is spilled, and only men's souls are lost. They still look like the good guy in the end, & they get everything the land has to offer. For nearly 10,000 years it was working, but sometimes it went horribly wrong like the case of the inquisition.

We see in three dimensions but live in many. We have theorized that the final evolution of man is pure energy, living as it that is. Eventually we could do exactly that, maybe not as poetic as it is made out to be. Uploading our consciousness into computers, the proverbially immortality. We already have 1 billion people consciousness online. That places there online maybe not permanent but it still does it does it not? ​Every time a person dies, everything they knew goes with them. Every possibility they could have ever had come smashing together into that one moment, in which almost every possibility they died and so they did. Are we not still human if we have no body? If we cannot die would we still be human. Or would we grow up to understand that all things are one. I don't pretend to know what happens after death because; all I know is what happens here. Your organs, brain, and cells, everything stops working. Your body, your energy returns back to the earth from whence it came.​ Don't you dare think for a minute that immortality is impossible or thousands of years off either. We are already working on it. We have extended the life of worms so they live for six years from a few months, we have made immortal jelly fish. ​Maybe it is cowardice of us to think of such things. The whole point of that is, if it is possible for us to make the goals of our own religion a reality is it not possible that an advanced race already did this? It is entirely within the realm of possibility to me.

Going to have to cut this topic short for now but later on will get back to this. Keep reading subscribe, thanks for taking the time out of your day. Please keep the comments civil if you want them to show up.