Economics, Resources

[MrTwosheds]

You can indeed run anything on water, the problem is the energy needed to split the water takes more than the output power.

That's not really a big problem though, we have a potentially endless supply of power from our sun, use that to crack water and we have abundant clean fuel and lots of oil left to use for the things you really need oil for.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

Not sure if they are insinuating di-hydrogen oxide is being split real-time and then recombined to power the small car.

Sounds terribly inefficient to pass through electrolysis for mechanical movement.

[AcneVulgaris]

Not sure if they are insinuating di-hydrogen oxide is being split real-time and then recombined to power the small car.

Sounds terribly inefficient to pass through electrolysis for mechanical movement.

It looked like something you would plug in and "charge up". I'm guessing it's an electrolysis system bottling hydrogen to drive a fuel cell, but internal combustion would work too.

[MrTwosheds]

Sounds terribly inefficient to pass through electrolysis for mechanical movement.

Not quite as "inefficient" as using a fuel that will alter the chemical composition of your planets atmosphere and threaten the continued viability of your species.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

Not quite as "inefficient" as using a fuel that will alter the chemical composition of your planets atmosphere and threaten the continued viability of your species.

Not sure how intentional it is in most cases, but there's very little mention of all the nasty chemical processes and polluting manufacturing going into all the "green" machines starting to populate the roads. Not to mention the mountains of batteries and alternate power cells we'll soon be dealing with in a few years.

[MrTwosheds]

Well at least those potential pollutants will be containable and recyclable. Be even better if someone could develop a system to crack co2, that produced oxygen and diamonds as its waste

[Red Devil]

you guys have waaaaaay too much faith in people - we'll all nuke/kill each other before you see anything like that.

everyone wants to make everyone live longer, have cleaner energy, and be happy-happy, joy-joy, but the end result will just be longer lines, bigger traffic jams, a lot less to eat, and more there's-too-many-people-in-this-room wars.

remember, all you need is one or two good years of a nice drought and some funky plague to make everyone forget how loving and giving they are.

if anything, you guys should be talking about how to reduce the population, not make it bigger.

[Nielk1]

You can indeed run anything on water, the problem is the energy needed to split the water takes more than the output power.

That's not really a big problem though, we have a potentially endless supply of power from our sun, use that to crack water and we have abundant clean fuel and lots of oil left to use for the things you really need oil for.

No, we have a very finite amount of energy from our sun. It will in fact one day die.

Furthermore, the only solar energy to electricity conversion that is enough to be of any value thus far is solar thermal, which requires a large area. Solar panels by work via the photoelectric effects are useful in space for two major reasons: there is no atmosphere to scatter the light and make collection more difficult, and a lot less power is needed to move around in space than on the planet.

On this planet, solar power from photoelectric cells is a joke in comparison to nearly every other form of energy. Except possibly wind.

you guys have waaaaaay too much faith in people - we'll all nuke/kill each other before you see anything like that.

everyone wants to make everyone live longer, have cleaner energy, and be happy-happy, joy-joy, but the end result will just be longer lines, bigger traffic jams, a lot less to eat, and more there's-too-many-people-in-this-room wars.

remember, all you need is one or two good years of a nice drought and some funky plague to make everyone forget how loving and giving they are.

if anything, you guys should be talking about how to reduce the population, not make it bigger.

That is all the standard Malthusian argument, and yet we are all still here. The truth is that the more advanced a nation becomes, the more its birth rate drops off. So population growth is not a state of constant advance like the claim requires. Furthermore, technological advances defeat the availability of food issues simply because we have become able to transport food. There is enough food, at this very moment, to feed every person on the planet. The problem is that we do not yet have the ability to get that food to every person. However, for most first world nations, this is not an issue.

According to the standard Malthusian equations, humanity should have already died off.

[AcneVulgaris]

You're big on equations you don't comprehend.

[APCs r Evil]

No, we have a very finite amount of energy from our sun. It will in fact one day die.

True, but that's quite a while away. Heads up, the background on this site is extremely unpleasant to view.

The closest estimate there, if you couldn't bear to read it, is that our sun is 1.1 billion years from reaching a point where it will more or less destroy all life on earth. I certainly hope we'd be able to survive without Earth by then.

[MrTwosheds]

It is of course finite, but the quantity of it is vast, any school kid burning holes in things with a magnifying glass can see that, replace every roof tile with a solar panel and even my once rainy country will be wondering what we can waste it all on.
Anyone thinking humans will still be around when the sun dies is just fooling themselves, wrong time scale.

As far as population is concerned, there are definitely too many people for everyone to have a "western lifestyle". This lifestyle will not last, how it changes is up to us, that is why we are having this conversation. Some of you are just refusing to see what is happening because you want things to stay as they are, we better hope those in control wise up quickly or your going to have a real bad time of it. We don't have subsidised fuel here and its price is just going up all the time, that is making everything else expensive too, My nation will just go out of business if we let this continue too far. We need an alternative, we have alternatives, we are not using them because allot of people are just refusing to accept that change is actually unavoidable and has been unavoidable since the industrial revolution started.

you guys have waaaaaay too much faith in people - we'll all nuke/kill each other before you see anything like that.

This is what will happen if we don't change, we don't need to find ways to reduce the population, they will find us.

I certainly hope we'd be able to survive without Earth by then.

We won't be anything even remotely like a Human by then.

[AcneVulgaris]

I wonder what it would be like now if the Chinese hadn't implemented the one child policy. There would be another billion of them now, and they're having trouble holding the country together as it is.

[Red Devil]

we'll see with India:

http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/censu ... lion-95387

[AcneVulgaris]

"The highest population density is in Delhi's north-east district (37,346 per sq km) "

[Red Devil]

"Don't worry, we'll make more!"