Mike Hord wrote: > I've always wondered if we wouldn't be doing bad things by > tapping into ANY source of energy. > > For example, if we capture too much wind energy, then not > enough is available to carry water in from the ocean and our > inland fresh water supplies dry up. > > If we capture too much solar, same thing. Or maybe > something else. > Actually, someone has even studied this. The sunlight level is so great on the Sonoran desert that the captured sunlight would probably result in INCREASED plant and animal life because there is shade some places. > What about fusion using lunar helium-3? Now we're importing > and releasing energy into our "energy sphere" that was not > intended to be there. Result- more warming. > Yes, standard nuclear reactions in nukes generate considerable more warming. > Most of these would require HUGE scales of energy > production to make a dent, but we ARE headed that way. > > The only REAL solution is to stop releasing so damn much > energy into the Earth's biosphere. So we either need to > moderate our consumption or get off Earth. > > I'm all for getting off Earth. > I would have left already if I could. Some days I feel like I was put here as a test; it must have been something I did REALLY BAD in my last life. > For interesting reading about energy "solutions", look > up Freeman Dyson's theories about levels of civilization. > This is from a distant memory, so don't be too hard on me. > A level zero civilization uses fossil fuels, nuclear energy, > and maybe some solar. A level 1 civilization uses ALL of > the energy which is incident upon its homeworld. A level > 2 civilization uses ALL the energy which escapes its > primary. A level 3 civilization uses all of the energy which > escapes from its local stellar cluster. > > So on a galactic scale, we aren't much better than > cavemen roasting mastodons over fire that has to be > kept rather than created! > Yes, that's about it. Except the cavemen didn't leave a heaping mound of radioactive trash for the next 1000 generations to deal with. Conservatively, I'd say the cavemen were about 10 steps ahead of us. > Also continue (dragging the conversation in a (hopefully) > less inflammatory direction) to consider that any > civilization above level one would be, for all intents and > purposes, largely invisible to outside observers. After > all, we can't see its primary (or local cluster), and any > energy radiated would be in the form of heat which > would red shift as they move away from us, causing it > to look even less like what we're looking for as likely > ET candidates. So there could be tens of thousands > of these civilizations all around us and we'd never know... > > I could be wrong, of course, but calling us "civilized" is a real stretch, from any standpoint. -- Bob > Mike H. > > -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist