Anybody know anything about Solar or Geothermal energy?

AirTech wrote:Of course the downside of ammonia gas is that a good lung full will kill you stone dead ... You can also run fuel cells on diesel ...

You can also run a fuel cell on gaseous hydrogen -- and a host of other substances. But whether you power your electric trucks and cars with batteries, fuel cells, overhead power lines, or embedded power transmission cables in the highway, Electric transport is far cleaner than thousands or millions of IC engines spewing poison into the air.

The main point is that going to primarily electric transport with an emphasis on mass transit, will conserve fossil fuels -- especially crude oil -- for lubrication and chemical feed stocks (uses from which it can be recycled) and consolidate generation and pollution into fixed locations where massive anti-pollution measures can be applied.

Once a decent electrical grid is in place, upgrading electricity generation can be accomplished without re-designing and re-building infrastructure with every technological leap.

Safehold has an opportunity to plan ahead for ever-improving technologies with minimal cost and disruption.

fallsfromtrees wrote:
And 175 years ago, before the advent of the railroad and automobile, you would either have had a small town with a general store close at hand, or you would have been completely self sufficient, which is the situation in Safehold. I suspect that Merlin will put the brakes on personal transportation to avoid this problem until it is solvable with a solution better than the IC engine, just to avoid the problems that Earth had with it.

And later, you would have had the Sears-Roebuck catalog to provide A) products not available in local businesses and B) toilet paper.

Keith_w wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:
And 175 years ago, before the advent of the railroad and automobile, you would either have had a small town with a general store close at hand, or you would have been completely self sufficient, which is the situation in Safehold. I suspect that Merlin will put the brakes on personal transportation to avoid this problem until it is solvable with a solution better than the IC engine, just to avoid the problems that Earth had with it.

And later, you would have had the Sears-Roebuck catalog to provide A) products not available in local businesses and B) toilet paper.

With the advent of the railroads, Sears-Roebuck becomes feasible on a national scale. I was looking at the period before railroads, when transportation options were very limited.

fallsfromtrees wrote:
With the advent of the railroads, Sears-Roebuck becomes feasible on a national scale. I was looking at the period before railroads, when transportation options were very limited.

Right, wagon deliveries were usually local. Extended travel by stagecoach and supply convoys. The caravans of the old silk and tea routes come to mind.

I'm sitting here with a song from The Music Man running through my head. Guess which one .
Cheers
John

TN4994 wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:
With the advent of the railroads, Sears-Roebuck becomes feasible on a national scale. I was looking at the period before railroads, when transportation options were very limited.

Right, wagon deliveries were usually local. Extended travel by stagecoach and supply convoys. The caravans of the old silk and tea routes come to mind.

n7axw wrote:

PalmerSperry wrote: "Castenea" Electric vehicles will be a niche item as long as ranges on full charge are under 100 mi, and recharge times are measured in hours. quote

Well the second part is pretty much a non issue already. Chargers that will take an empty battery to 80% full in about 30 minutes are widely available in the UK for instance! As the for the first part, how often does the average person do >100 mile trips anyway? The average UK commuting distance is 10 miles each way, not really sure why I'd need a car with a 100+ mile range for that! (Actually if I had a 10 mile commute, I'm not sure I'd need a car at all but that's another story!)

quote As a comparison most cars sold in the US today have a range of 250 to 300 mi on a full tank and can fill the tank at most service stations in under 15 min. quote

That's a shockingly bad tank range! The car-derived vans I drive for work will do >400 miles on a tank if driven sensibly. And that 15 minutes you quote for refuelling? Well you have to be there for all of it, apart from plugging in and disconnecting your EV will refuel itself whilst you go and do something useful with the time!

I live in South Dakota where we tend to drive a bit more, I think. We live in a small community where most of the necessities are present, but the large box stores which people patronize are 40-50 miles away in Sioux Falls. And by the time you make four or five stops, it's pretty inevitable to have 125 miles round trip. For us to visit family is about 100 miles one way. As a clergyman when I was fully employed, it was not uncommon for me to drive 100+ miles to a conference or even just making calls. When I think of places like England or any of the other countries in Western Europe, what goes through my mind is small.

Also, what plays into this is that small cars never really became overly popular with most of the population here, at least in our part of the Midwest.. People like their cars big and roomy. My work car is small car, but we have a mini-van for travel. For example we are going to a family funeral next week after Christmas which will be about a 2000 mile round trip. As long as the thing is driven conservatively, we can expect 23-24 miles per gallon.

Love of the automobile has meant that public transportation is not really very good here. If you live near a large metro area, flying is not too bad, but from small airport to small airport, it gets very expensive.

So, I guess I'm as bad as most people out here with what I will refer to as a Midwest mentality. I like my car. I like coming and going as I wish, stopping where I want to and the notion of a bus or plane really doesn't seriously enter my thinking. For what it's worth, that's the way it is...

Don

*nods* Mass transit just isn't practical for most of the US either. It's only a practical solution for large cities. I live in the countryside as well and there is no way that mass transit, or even taking a train/bus into town would work (you'd have to take multiple trips just to get everything you need if you were shopping in bulk). You can pack a car or truck with what your getting and make it all in one trip. That's not possible with public transportation.

fallsfromtrees wrote:And 175 years ago, before the advent of the railroad and automobile, you would either have had a small town with a general store close at hand, or you would have been completely self sufficient, which is the situation in Safehold. I suspect that Merlin will put the brakes on personal transportation to avoid this problem until it is solvable with a solution better than the IC engine, just to avoid the problems that Earth had with it.

It seems like a fair number of people here hate the IC engine with a passion for some reason. So I'd like to ask those that don't like it, WHY don't you like the IC engine? Despite the problems an IC engine has, it is extremely convenient for a lot of people. It frees up people from needing to live within walking distance of their work or a railroad. It seems like thew benefits outweigh the costs to a large degree.

fallsfromtrees wrote: quote="Keith_w" quote="fallsfromtrees"

And 175 years ago, before the advent of the railroad and automobile, you would either have had a small town with a general store close at hand, or you would have been completely self sufficient, which is the situation in Safehold. I suspect that Merlin will put the brakes on personal transportation to avoid this problem until it is solvable with a solution better than the IC engine, just to avoid the problems that Earth had with it. /quote

And later, you would have had the Sears-Roebuck catalog to provide A) products not available in local businesses and B) toilet paper. /quote

With the advent of the railroads, Sears-Roebuck becomes feasible on a national scale. I was looking at the period before railroads, when transportation options were very limited.

I would like to point out that 175 years ago, in 2 weeks, would be 1840. The Baltimore & Ohio railroad, chartered in 1827 to build a steam rail line from Baltimore to the Ohio River, ran it's first train on it's first segment of track on May 24, 1830, and the first common carrier railroad in the Northeastern US, the Mohawk and Hudson ran it's first train in August 1831. For contrast, the Erie Canal, from Albany NY, to Buffalo, NY, opened on Oct 26, 1825, so the trains weren't all that far behind the canals and were probably easier to build. And although the popular image of US Western development was the Conestoga wagon train, truly the west was opened by railroad development and the alternating quarters of land granted to the railroad companies, post Civil War/War of Northern Aggression, depending on where you live.

Edited for this PS: Sears, Roebuck & Company started in 1886, publishing their first catalog in 1888.

Zakharra wrote:It seems like a fair number of people here hate the IC engine with a passion for some reason. So I'd like to ask those that don't like it, WHY don't you like the IC engine? Despite the problems an IC engine has, it is extremely convenient for a lot of people. It frees up people from needing to live within walking distance of their work or a railroad. It seems like thew benefits outweigh the costs to a large degree.

Depends on how you count those costs. (Very well known bit of systems theory; things that are positive to individual participants in the system can be very bad for the system as a whole.)

IC engines are major sources of really problematic pollutants. The short-term stuff kills a lot of people every year; the long-term stuff might manage to kill us all by breaking agriculture.

In terms of being drivers for development patterns, you get suburbs, which are really bad land use; dense land use (cities, more than 10 houses/acre) and light land use (less than 1 house/10 acres) are both (at least potentially) OK in ecological terms; it's the stuff in between that's the problem, and there you go, suburbs. Cars pry cities apart -- all that space for parking and freeways -- when what is good about cities arises from density. (And then you hit really intractable capacity problems on freeways and everything slows to a crawl anyway.)

You get a bunch of nasty, nasty wars over control of oil. You get fracking, you get the social consequences of unpopular wars, you just generally get a very large indirect expense. You get Dutch Disease/resource-cursed regions like Nigeria, Venezuela, Alberta, the whole middle East, and Russia, which causes no end of trouble. The direct expense when it isn't possible to live without having one car per adult member of the household is pretty high, too, and big swathes of Anglo NorAm have been developed so that's the only thing possible. Made a lot of money for someone.

Personal transportation is a fine thing; anybody with three kids doesn't want to take the subway with only one adult available for kid wrangling. People do live out in the country. Machine traction for agriculture is essential. It doesn't have to be powered by IC engines or fossil carbon, it's just that's what we happen to have, in large part because of the Great War and historical accidents around aircraft.

It's been pretty obvious since 1970 or so we should be doing something different; it hasn't happened, in part because half of everything is invested in an oil stock somewhere. And now it's getting to it's going to be extremely expensive, maybe cultural discontinuity expensive.

Didn't have to be. A certain amount of annoyance results.

Graydon wrote:Personal transportation is a fine thing; anybody with three kids doesn't want to take the subway with only one adult available for kid wrangling. People do live out in the country. Machine traction for agriculture is essential. It doesn't have to be powered by IC engines or fossil carbon, it's just that's what we happen to have, in large part because of the Great War and historical accidents around aircraft.

The historical ignorance is breath taking. Hit and miss one lung engines of under 30 HP were rapidly displacing all other engines out on farms from 1890 to 1910, well before the first world war.

Steam traction engines had two problems on many farms, obtaining fuel and obtaining water. There was barely enough thatch on a farm to fuel the engine, and getting it into the burn box took a lot of labor. Then there was the issue of getting water, as most steam engines were used on farms did not have condensers.

The hit and miss gasoline engines were lighter, faster to get operating, and cheaper to obtain and run. Gasoline powered tractors were lighter than steam tractors.

Graydon wrote:

Zakharra wrote:It seems like a fair number of people here hate the IC engine with a passion for some reason. So I'd like to ask those that don't like it, WHY don't you like the IC engine? Despite the problems an IC engine has, it is extremely convenient for a lot of people. It frees up people from needing to live within walking distance of their work or a railroad. It seems like thew benefits outweigh the costs to a large degree.

Depends on how you count those costs. (Very well known bit of systems theory; things that are positive to individual participants in the system can be very bad for the system as a whole.)

IC engines are major sources of really problematic pollutants. The short-term stuff kills a lot of people every year; the long-term stuff might manage to kill us all by breaking agriculture.

In terms of being drivers for development patterns, you get suburbs, which are really bad land use; dense land use (cities, more than 10 houses/acre) and light land use (less than 1 house/10 acres) are both (at least potentially) OK in ecological terms; it's the stuff in between that's the problem, and there you go, suburbs. Cars pry cities apart -- all that space for parking and freeways -- when what is good about cities arises from density. (And then you hit really intractable capacity problems on freeways and everything slows to a crawl anyway.)

You get a bunch of nasty, nasty wars over control of oil. You get fracking, you get the social consequences of unpopular wars, you just generally get a very large indirect expense. You get Dutch Disease/resource-cursed regions like Nigeria, Venezuela, Alberta, the whole middle East, and Russia, which causes no end of trouble. The direct expense when it isn't possible to live without having one car per adult member of the household is pretty high, too, and big swathes of Anglo NorAm have been developed so that's the only thing possible. Made a lot of money for someone.

Personal transportation is a fine thing; anybody with three kids doesn't want to take the subway with only one adult available for kid wrangling. People do live out in the country. Machine traction for agriculture is essential. It doesn't have to be powered by IC engines or fossil carbon, it's just that's what we happen to have, in large part because of the Great War and historical accidents around aircraft.

It's been pretty obvious since 1970 or so we should be doing something different; it hasn't happened, in part because half of everything is invested in an oil stock somewhere. And now it's getting to it's going to be extremely expensive, maybe cultural discontinuity expensive.

Didn't have to be. A certain amount of annoyance results.

Thanks for the reply.

Any engine, even a steam engine or a stirling, would be polluting if it burns fuel for heat, so you'd still have pollution by driving no matter what. Fossil fuels such as oil burn faster and produce a lot more energy for each unit burned than anything out there. It's one reason we still burn it and why ethanol fuel is bad. Ethanol or alcohol based fuels simply aren't near as effective or efficient. What are the ling term effects of fossil fuels on agriculture? I was under the impression that overfarming and such would do in the soil, not burning gasoline/diesel.

Cities? So you want everyone packed into highrises because that is an efficient use of space? That doesn't seem very healthy for anyone, mentally or physically, to be forced to live like that. I know I'd hate living in a city. I like having lots of space around. For such a population dense area, you'd need a LOT of mass transit to move millions and millions of people around. That means more trains, buses and taxis (assuming you'd allow buses and taxis). That's a lot of fuel being burned anyways just moving people. It would also limit what you could carry so stocking up on groceries would be harder since you wouldn't be able to buy in bulk without a personal vehicle.

The wars happen anyways. People find reasons to kill each other no matter what. The story of human history. There are ways of combating the Dutch disease you mentioned. All it needs is reasonable people. with the backbone to stand up and get it done. It's not a death sentence for a nation to have an abundant resource.

The broad expanses on the North American continent and the spread of the population dictates we have something like the IC engine and automobiles, which is a good thing, otherwise we'd all be concentrated in huge mega-cities and there would be massive swaths of land that would be literally empty of anyone unless they liked slower methods of transportation or used trains. Machine powered agriculture is essential because it would be too hard to grow so much food otherwise. It would take a LOT more manpower to grow and harvest the food. I don't see anything other than diesel/gas tractors and other machines that have the power to do what they do and don't require a crap load of maintenance over what those machines already have.


Good answers
It was clear in the 1970s that we should have been developing better and cleaner running more efficient engines. Until there is somehing that can equal the effectiveness of oil/gasoline/diesel engines nothing is going to replace it