Thermionic generation of electrical current....


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Here is an article on how to generate electric current from heat or light.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/dec/09/new-generator-creates-electricity-directly-from-heat

Devices of this type can use heat from any sources (how about the sun) to drive electrons from a warm plate to a cold plate. The moving electrons can be channeled into an electric current. The theoretical maximum efficiency of thermionic generators is 40 percent which is not bad at all, considering that most heat engines (using steam or other fluid to do mechanical work) rate at under 25 percent efficiency. The theoretical maximum for a Carnot Cyclic heat engine is 54 percent (assuming reversibility) and maybe half as much can be realized in practice.

Imagine putting up thermionic generators in orbit that derive their input energy from the sun, produce a current which can, by electronic means, make a microwave to beam down to a ground receiver. The atmosphere is transparent to microwave frequencies (they are well below infra-red) and once received on the ground can be transformed back into current for delivery to users. A world wide power grid can overcome the inconvenience of having only half the earth in sunlight at any given time.

These thermionic generators can be built on the ground as well but they wont work as efficiently as those in space that can produce cold plate temperatures near absolute zero.

Don't believe anyone who tells you there is an energy shortage. There is only a shortage of wits and imagination.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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I have always worried that a microwave broadcasting device would be weaponized but I will think about your post, Bob. It would require a receiver away from population centers, like in the desert. I typed in space and generator and found the following old letter.
Peter

From: "Dennis May"
Reply-To: Starship_Forum@yahoogroups.com
To: Starship_Forum@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [starship_Forum] Cosmology
Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2003 10:50:05 -0600
Forwarded from [atlantis_II] Re: Infant Universe
Jeff Olson wrote:
>Seriously, I've been wanting to ask you a couple of questions on this subject for a long time. You've been highly critical if not dismissive of the "Big Bang" in several posts, but: 1) I'm not sure you've ever offered a substantive critique of it (I recall you making a series of criticisms, but I don't think you ever developed them into a full-bodied rebuttal; 2) and I don't think you've offered your cosmological alternative?

The "Big Bang" theory is a series of theories concerning gravity and the reasons why the universe takes on its present appearance. The origin of the theory is Einstein's General Theory of Relativity [1915] melded with the observation of galactic red-shifts formulated as Hubble's Law [1929]. The concept of the universe starting from a "primeval atom" originated with Lemaître [1927]. The common assumption that galactic red-shifts implied galaxies were receding from each other lead to the present model where the universe began a finite time in the past and has been expanding ever since.

Information viewed as supporting the hot "Big Bang" model:

A. Hubble's Law [galactic red-shifts] [1929]
B. Cosmic microwave background radiation [1950's]
C. Cosmological abundances of elements
D. Observation that the passage of time is slower in the distant past
E. The distribution of quasars [mixed evidence]
F. Olbers' Paradox [darkness of the night sky]

Weaknesses in the hot "Big Bang" theory:

A. What is the source of the "Big Bang"?
B. Unknown and unobserved dark matter and dark energy is required. Not only required but all sorts of complex arrangements are needed for even the most basic observations to agree with General Relativity.
C. Where did the anti-matter go?
D. Unexplained quantized red-shifts among galaxies and within individual galaxies.
E. The unexplained existence of very high energy cosmic rays [the cosmic microwave background should slow them down]
F. No known source for the required introduction of "inflation" and questionable reasoning concerning an increasing speed of universal expansion.
G. There is a great deal of mixed evidence concerning the distribution of various bodies, the age of bodies at various red-shifts, and how fully formed apparently old galaxies and stars exist at the very edge of observation near the time the "Big Bang" is expected to have occurred.
H. The universal expansion conveniently expands between galaxies but not within galaxies due to the careful placement of dark energy and/or dark matter.

What began as a simple fitting of General Relativity to Hubble's Law has morphed into a large number of fixes having no basis in observation beyond the need to make the "Big Bang" theory work. The most damning observation is that General Relativity does not even closely predict the shape of galaxies unless one introduces unseen sources of mass. This unseen and undetectable mass is actually expected to compose 90%+ of the universe, yet there is no reason to expect that it exists except to fix General Relativity. It is also known that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are fundamentally incompatible, though the correctness of neither is fundamentally questioned.

What is my cosmological alternative? I have not offered one in any detail for a number of reasons:

A. Peacemeal approaches to overturning the "Big Bang" theory cannot work in the atmosphere of today’s referred journals.
B. No new cosmological theory will be take seriously unless it generates a repeatable experiment which can be performed locally. The "Big Bang" is now infinitely malleable. A theory which is equally good is not good enough, it must produce a new previously unknown physics with real applications.
C. The absence of a suitable reward structure. Let's say there are 10,000 researchers worldwide gaining an average income plus benefits of $100,000 per year for supporting the "Big Bang" model in one way or another. That is about a $Billion a year times the last forty years. Add to that the cost of research equipment and the cost is probably doubled.

What would be the reward structure for overturning this gravy train? A couple books, the lecture circuit?, an academic post?, Late Night with David Letterman? More money can be and has been made with local rental properties or running a good small business.

D. The cynical attack dogs. If you think Atlantis is full of those salivating to crush babies as they are being born, you cannot imagine the heavy weights that will come down on any theory less than a completed, sealed, and delivered done deal. There will be no period of reasoned discussion or evolution. It must be a finished package out of the chute. A process similar to a 135 lb woman giving birth to a 300 lb linebacker - helmet, shoulder pads, and all.
Dennis May

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Here is an article on how to generate electric current from heat or light.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/dec/09/new-generator-creates-electricity-directly-from-heat

Devices of this type can use heat from any sources (how about the sun) to drive electrons from a warm plate to a cold plate. The moving electrons can be channeled into an electric current. The theoretical maximum efficiency of thermionic generators is 40 percent which is not bad at all, considering that most heat engines (using steam or other fluid to do mechanical work) rate at under 25 percent efficiency. The theoretical maximum for a Carnot Cyclic heat engine is 54 percent (assuming reversibility) and maybe half as much can be realized in practice.

Imagine putting up thermionic generators in orbit that derive their input energy from the sun, produce a current which can, by electronic means, make a microwave to beam down to a ground receiver. The atmosphere is transparent to microwave frequencies (they are well below infra-red) and once received on the ground can be transformed back into current for delivery to users. A world wide power grid can overcome the inconvenience of having only half the earth in sunlight at any given time.

These thermionic generators can be built on the ground as well but they wont work as efficiently as those in space that can produce cold plate temperatures near absolute zero.

Don't believe anyone who tells you there is an energy shortage. There is only a shortage of wits and imagination.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Step 1:

Stop all subsidies of the petroleum industry.

Step 2:

Stand back. Get the hell out of the way. Let the free market work.

Without subsidies, prices of petroleum products will go up. (Instead of price out of pocket plus tax, it will be price out of pocket and no tax.) Higher prices will lead to development of alternative sources of energy such as thermionic, photovoltaic, ocean waves, wind, ocean currents, whatever. Also, to make these energy sources more practical, would be development of a better energy storage system than the lead acid battery. And aerogel insulation and led lights, to not need as much energy.

As long as petroleum is subsidized, forget it.

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Petroleum is only used significantly to generate energy in Hawaii. (I believe it's 100% sans any home or business using solar panels.) It's much too expensive.

Coal, nuclear, hydo and natural gas are the main economical sources of energy generation. Hydro is the only significant renewable energy and little expandable as the big dams have been built. Solar and wind are un-amortisable in large scale application but have small scale uses, like a windmill pumping water out of a well on an off the grid ranch.

This outer space source isn't going to happen for thousands of years, if ever. Too much capital required relative to result. Is there a problem with the science? Not too much of a question, for if there is nothing will be sent into space. Thousands of years from now energy needs could be much different, even less than they are today. All the huge power plants and grids and concentration of generation might be replaced by a small nuclear plant on or very close by your property. Maybe yes, Maybe no. I'd guess two hundred years. Huge buildings and factories could be heated by electricity with petroleum for fuel still needed for airplanes.

The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades!

--Brant

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Market forces won’t transform an unprofitable energy venture into a service used by millions. Yet the market keeps chugging along (even with debacles like subsidized energy companies.) We have even better flashlight bulbs and car batteries. Calculators that routinely use sunlight to operate. Emergency TV’s that you crank to get a picture and one radio and CD player I own uses six D batteries that last for over a year. I have three emergency lanterns that have a low setting that lasts for hundreds of hours. Roadside devices used by counties and the agricultural department that utilize sunlight for power. For a while there was a stationary bike power source to run a TV being advertised . . . on TV. Water troughs for cattle are still all over that stay filled using pumps powered by wind power. Those have been around since the 1930’s or even earlier. Other than hydroelectric dams I can’t think of any other common uses for water power still used.

So I tend to agree, we are hundreds of years from an Ayn Randian device that pulls power out of the atmosphere or beams it from space to earth. I liked the Star Trek TNG that featured a civilization that built a solar powered dome around an entire sun capturing nearly 100 percent of the energy released. It was immense. But that level of engineering could not keep their civilization from collapsing. What is the energy source that could keep a civilization from becoming extinct? The right Philosophy, genetic tinkering, and always envisioned, new frontiers.

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  • 1 year later...
1 hour ago, Jules Troy said:

What about Hydrino energy?  Pretty much everyone thinks Mills is a quack but is he?

Hydrionos are quack quack crackpot bullshit.  Right up their with perpetual motion and luminiferous aether.

Mr. Blacklight Inc   has totally denied quantum theory which is the most experimentally corroborated theory physics has. 

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Quacks? There are a bunch of them.

Peter

September 28, 2016 FEATURE ARTICLE Elon Musk's Ticket to Nowhere No, We're Not Going to Colonize Mars by Robert Tracinski

There's a fine line between "visionary billionaire" and "huckster," and Elon Musk just soared right over it. On Tuesday, Musk gave an overview of SpaceX's plans, such as they are, for a rocket transportation system that would colonize Mars. All of this is pure Elon Musk, his by-now familiar pattern of distracting from an immediate, practical failure by asserting some new, exciting, impossibly ambitious goal. A guy gets killed using Tesla's Autopilot? Time to announce Master Plan Part Deux. A SpaceX rocket goes boom, and you're not quite sure why? Time to announce the plan to colonize Mars.

Look, I get that this is the sort of thing a guy like Musk says to bolster his reputation as a forward-thinking visionary. And if he doesn't come through, I don't think anyone is going to hold him to it because we always thought it was kind a long shot to begin with. Unfortunately for Musk, the markets will hold him to his more mundane promises, like being able to build 500,000 cars in a year.

Nonetheless, isn't there some value to dreaming big and imagining unlikely but incredibly aggressive goals? It is certainly inspiring to imagine mankind's future as a spacefaring "multi-planet species." Too bad it doesn't really make any sense. I'm not just talking about the implausibility of Musk's specific proposal, which is extremely vague on a lot of really crucial questions. The key observation is that Musk estimates it would require only a $10 billion investment to start putting people on Mars. As one observer noted, this is no more than twice the amount of capital Musk has raised for the much more prosaic task of starting a small electric car company, which is still bleeding cash. So either one of these things is way too cheap or one of them is way too expensive. I'm guessing Musk's estimate for the Mars mission is the one that's way too cheap. The bigger question is whether it makes sense for anyone to try to colonize Mars in the foreseeable future.

Remember that we're not just talking about a small, short-term Mars mission of the kind depicted in last year's blockbuster film The Martian, where six people are sent to Mars for a month (and one of them unexpectedly ends up staying a lot longer). Musk's plan is to send tens of thousands of people to Mars with the goal of eventually having a million people living there in a "self-sustaining city."

But why? Why would they go there? There's plenty of reason to go to Mars for scientific curiosity, though with current technology, we can accomplish that with robots--as NASA has been doing brilliantly for so long we've grown to regard it as routine. It's an approach that is much less expensive, since robots don't need food, heat, and air, are less sensitive to radiation, and don't need to lug a whole artificial habitat along with them. And they don't need to come back home, either. So if we go through the trouble of sending humans to Mars instead of just robots, it's not because we need to but just to show that we can. Which is fine. In many ways, that's what landing on the Moon was about. The Apollo program would have been worth it if all it did was give us the phrase, "If we can land a man on the moon..."--which means: "anything is possible." If landing humans on Mars helps renew that sense of unlimited possibility, there's a definite case for doing it.

But a whole permanent colony of human settlers is a very different proposition, and it makes a whole lot less sense. Space exploration sounds exciting and futuristic, and we're all encouraged by years of watching science fiction to agree that becoming a spacefaring civilization is the path toward the future. But that all crashes up against some very basic scientific and economic realities. The problem with human settlements in space--given what we know now and the technology we have today and can expect in the next fifty years or more--is that there is nowhere to go.

The history of settlement on Earth is a history of finding new places to settle and live, places that were not barren and did not need to be coaxed into supporting life. On Earth, colonization was usually fueled first by the quest for high-value commodities that were worth the cost of shipping back home: precious metals, exotic furs, sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco. Or the refined products of agriculture, like rum and whiskey. Consider the causes of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, which was set off by a tax on whiskey. The reason this tax was so incendiary is that farmers West of the Appalachians could not easily send their grain to market, so instead they distilled it into whiskey and sold that. That's why they saw a special tax on whiskey as a punitive measure unfairly targeting them.

This is why asteroid mining is the only space exploration idea with any semi-plausible economic potential. The theory is that asteroids are unusually high in precious metals like gold and platinum, which would--again, in theory--make it worthwhile to send robots to mine them and bring the products back to Earth. There are still a lot of assumptions there that have yet to be tested, and the first step will be NASA's Osiris-REx probe, which will test the actual composition of an asteroid. But none of this applies to Mars.

What usually comes next as an engine of colonization is regular agriculture, as settlers spread and create farms and produce a self-sustaining economy. Then as the last stage, a new settlement grows to the point where it has sufficient wealth, population, and skills to produce its own manufactured goods. So what is Mars going to produce? It is not likely to be a source of minerals, at least none that would be economical to send back to Earth. Its barren soil and frozen atmosphere are definitely not ripe for agriculture, and even in artificial greenhouses, nothing is going to grow there that doesn't grow much more easily here. Economically speaking, a Martian colony would have to be supported almost entirely from without for the indefinite future. As for Martian manufacturing, this is the worst outsourcing idea ever. Anywhere on Earth can make it cheaper.

The basic problem is that Mars is a dead planet. You can coax life to exist on it with a great deal of effort, but you're up against some fundamentally hostile physics, and boosters for Mars colonization tend not to be straight about this.

The biggest thing the Earth has going for it is that we have a giant spinning ball of molten iron at the core of our planet, which generates a strong magnetic field. That magnetic field diverts a lot of outside radiation and especially the solar wind. The solar wind is a constant flow of charged particles cast off from the surface of the sun, which encounter the Earth's magnetic field and are channeled to the poles, where they light up the atmosphere as the Northern Lights.

This turns out to be crucially important, because planets without magnetic fields tend to get their atmospheres stripped off by the solar wind. Such as Mars. This, by the way, is a bit of planetary science that was not well understood thirty years ago, which is when a lot of the plans for colonizing and terraforming Mars were hatched. It's a sobering scientific update.

The most likely reason Mars has such a thin, cold atmosphere and no liquid water is because of a combination of its small size and lack of magnetic field. This allows the solar wind to rake across its atmosphere. Meanwhile, the planet's low gravity means that lighter molecules that tend to gather at the top of its atmosphere, like hydrogen, can easily drift away, depriving the planet of one of the key components for water.

Low gravity, intense radiation, thin atmosphere, and lack of water are huge, immediate problems for would-be Mars colonists. The thin atmosphere and the radiation it lets through mean that humans can't really live on the surface of the planet but have to tunnel underground. Nobody even knows what would happen to humans who tried to live long-term (let alone have children) in a mere 38% of Earth's gravity. And the lack of water makes agriculture on any large scale impossible. (Note that in The Martian, our hero has to synthesize water from rocket fuel, which is not the safest activity.) And the basic planetary physics of Mars means that none of these conditions are likely to change.

Maybe someday we'll find a way to counteract all of these problems, and maybe we'll even be able to afford to do it. But the idea that Elon Musk is going to do this in the next five, or fifteen, or fifty years is--well, let's be kind and say that it is very implausible.

In the end, Musk basically admits that a Mars colony has no economic viability. That's why he begins by pitching us on the idea that we need to become a "multi-planet species" to avoid "existential risk," i.e., the chance that some great cataclysm could wipe out the human race on Earth. You can see the huckster's sale pitch: I mean, seriously, do you want human beings to go extinct? No? Then you'd better get behind a "public-private partnership"--translation: lots of federal dollars--to fund Elon Musk's dreams.

In reality, there are very few things that would make Earth as incredibly inhospitable as Mars. A giant meteor strike? Maybe, but it would be far cheaper and easier to devise a program to spot and divert incoming asteroids. A gamma ray burst from a nearby supernova? But that would fry Mars, too. Maybe a supervolcano, but that doesn't seem to quite fit the bill, either. After all, the Earth has been through numerous similar mass extinction events over its history, and none of them has ever wiped out all life or made the planet uninhabitable.

In effect, Musk's "existential" argument amounts to telling us to that he's worried about a planet that has supported life for three and a half billion years--so let's set up shop on a planet that has never supported it. It doesn't make nearly as much sense when you put it that way, does it?

Maybe in the very far future, in the 22nd Century or beyond, we will figure out a way to settle Mars. Then again, maybe we'll also figure out faster-than-light travel and head off in search of a much more promising exoplanet to settle on. At the very least, if we get rich enough and technologically advanced enough, maybe we'll use the solar system for some really awesome space tourism, which is basically what is depicted here. To attempt to make any real prediction that far into the future would be foolish.

But in this century, it's likely we will settle Mars in the only way that makes sense. My local coffee shop used to have a daily trivia question, and they really stumped me with this one: Which continent has the highest average level of education? The answer wasn't Europe or North America. It was Antarctica, because almost everyone who lives there has a Ph.D. That's what the real Martian colonies will eventually look like: a set of small research stations populated by scientists who stay for a limited time and depend almost entirely on supplies, tools, and materials sent from Earth.

When you think about, that’s a pretty ambitious and inspiring plan in itself--nor is there any shortage of interesting, ambitious, and inspiring goals back here on our lovely, friendly blue planet. We have plenty of options to choose from to take us boldly into the future, and we don't the ticket to nowhere that Elon Musk is trying to sell us. 

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56 minutes ago, Peter said:

Quacks? There are a bunch of them.

Peter

September 28, 2016 FEATURE ARTICLE Elon Musk's Ticket to Nowhere No, We're Not Going to Colonize Mars by Robert Tracinski

There's a fine line between "visionary billionaire" and "huckster," and Elon Musk just soared right over it. On Tuesday, Musk gave an overview of SpaceX's plans, such as they are, for a rocket transportation system that would colonize Mars. All of this is pure Elon Musk, his by-now familiar pattern of distracting from an immediate, practical failure by asserting some new, exciting, impossibly ambitious goal. A guy gets killed using Tesla's Autopilot? Time to announce Master Plan Part Deux. A SpaceX rocket goes boom, and you're not quite sure why? Time to announce the plan to colonize Mars.

Look, I get that this is the sort of thing a guy like Musk says to bolster his reputation as a forward-thinking visionary. And if he doesn't come through, I don't think anyone is going to hold him to it because we always thought it was kind a long shot to begin with. Unfortunately for Musk, the markets will hold him to his more mundane promises, like being able to build 500,000 cars in a year.

Nonetheless, isn't there some value to dreaming big and imagining unlikely but incredibly aggressive goals? It is certainly inspiring to imagine mankind's future as a spacefaring "multi-planet species." Too bad it doesn't really make any sense. I'm not just talking about the implausibility of Musk's specific proposal, which is extremely vague on a lot of really crucial questions. The key observation is that Musk estimates it would require only a $10 billion investment to start putting people on Mars. As one observer noted, this is no more than twice the amount of capital Musk has raised for the much more prosaic task of starting a small electric car company, which is still bleeding cash. So either one of these things is way too cheap or one of them is way too expensive. I'm guessing Musk's estimate for the Mars mission is the one that's way too cheap. The bigger question is whether it makes sense for anyone to try to colonize Mars in the foreseeable future.

Remember that we're not just talking about a small, short-term Mars mission of the kind depicted in last year's blockbuster film The Martian, where six people are sent to Mars for a month (and one of them unexpectedly ends up staying a lot longer). Musk's plan is to send tens of thousands of people to Mars with the goal of eventually having a million people living there in a "self-sustaining city."

But why? Why would they go there? There's plenty of reason to go to Mars for scientific curiosity, though with current technology, we can accomplish that with robots--as NASA has been doing brilliantly for so long we've grown to regard it as routine. It's an approach that is much less expensive, since robots don't need food, heat, and air, are less sensitive to radiation, and don't need to lug a whole artificial habitat along with them. And they don't need to come back home, either. So if we go through the trouble of sending humans to Mars instead of just robots, it's not because we need to but just to show that we can. Which is fine. In many ways, that's what landing on the Moon was about. The Apollo program would have been worth it if all it did was give us the phrase, "If we can land a man on the moon..."--which means: "anything is possible." If landing humans on Mars helps renew that sense of unlimited possibility, there's a definite case for doing it.

But a whole permanent colony of human settlers is a very different proposition, and it makes a whole lot less sense. Space exploration sounds exciting and futuristic, and we're all encouraged by years of watching science fiction to agree that becoming a spacefaring civilization is the path toward the future. But that all crashes up against some very basic scientific and economic realities. The problem with human settlements in space--given what we know now and the technology we have today and can expect in the next fifty years or more--is that there is nowhere to go.

The history of settlement on Earth is a history of finding new places to settle and live, places that were not barren and did not need to be coaxed into supporting life. On Earth, colonization was usually fueled first by the quest for high-value commodities that were worth the cost of shipping back home: precious metals, exotic furs, sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco. Or the refined products of agriculture, like rum and whiskey. Consider the causes of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, which was set off by a tax on whiskey. The reason this tax was so incendiary is that farmers West of the Appalachians could not easily send their grain to market, so instead they distilled it into whiskey and sold that. That's why they saw a special tax on whiskey as a punitive measure unfairly targeting them.

This is why asteroid mining is the only space exploration idea with any semi-plausible economic potential. The theory is that asteroids are unusually high in precious metals like gold and platinum, which would--again, in theory--make it worthwhile to send robots to mine them and bring the products back to Earth. There are still a lot of assumptions there that have yet to be tested, and the first step will be NASA's Osiris-REx probe, which will test the actual composition of an asteroid. But none of this applies to Mars.

What usually comes next as an engine of colonization is regular agriculture, as settlers spread and create farms and produce a self-sustaining economy. Then as the last stage, a new settlement grows to the point where it has sufficient wealth, population, and skills to produce its own manufactured goods. So what is Mars going to produce? It is not likely to be a source of minerals, at least none that would be economical to send back to Earth. Its barren soil and frozen atmosphere are definitely not ripe for agriculture, and even in artificial greenhouses, nothing is going to grow there that doesn't grow much more easily here. Economically speaking, a Martian colony would have to be supported almost entirely from without for the indefinite future. As for Martian manufacturing, this is the worst outsourcing idea ever. Anywhere on Earth can make it cheaper.

The basic problem is that Mars is a dead planet. You can coax life to exist on it with a great deal of effort, but you're up against some fundamentally hostile physics, and boosters for Mars colonization tend not to be straight about this.

The biggest thing the Earth has going for it is that we have a giant spinning ball of molten iron at the core of our planet, which generates a strong magnetic field. That magnetic field diverts a lot of outside radiation and especially the solar wind. The solar wind is a constant flow of charged particles cast off from the surface of the sun, which encounter the Earth's magnetic field and are channeled to the poles, where they light up the atmosphere as the Northern Lights.

This turns out to be crucially important, because planets without magnetic fields tend to get their atmospheres stripped off by the solar wind. Such as Mars. This, by the way, is a bit of planetary science that was not well understood thirty years ago, which is when a lot of the plans for colonizing and terraforming Mars were hatched. It's a sobering scientific update.

The most likely reason Mars has such a thin, cold atmosphere and no liquid water is because of a combination of its small size and lack of magnetic field. This allows the solar wind to rake across its atmosphere. Meanwhile, the planet's low gravity means that lighter molecules that tend to gather at the top of its atmosphere, like hydrogen, can easily drift away, depriving the planet of one of the key components for water.

Low gravity, intense radiation, thin atmosphere, and lack of water are huge, immediate problems for would-be Mars colonists. The thin atmosphere and the radiation it lets through mean that humans can't really live on the surface of the planet but have to tunnel underground. Nobody even knows what would happen to humans who tried to live long-term (let alone have children) in a mere 38% of Earth's gravity. And the lack of water makes agriculture on any large scale impossible. (Note that in The Martian, our hero has to synthesize water from rocket fuel, which is not the safest activity.) And the basic planetary physics of Mars means that none of these conditions are likely to change.

Maybe someday we'll find a way to counteract all of these problems, and maybe we'll even be able to afford to do it. But the idea that Elon Musk is going to do this in the next five, or fifteen, or fifty years is--well, let's be kind and say that it is very implausible.

In the end, Musk basically admits that a Mars colony has no economic viability. That's why he begins by pitching us on the idea that we need to become a "multi-planet species" to avoid "existential risk," i.e., the chance that some great cataclysm could wipe out the human race on Earth. You can see the huckster's sale pitch: I mean, seriously, do you want human beings to go extinct? No? Then you'd better get behind a "public-private partnership"--translation: lots of federal dollars--to fund Elon Musk's dreams.

In reality, there are very few things that would make Earth as incredibly inhospitable as Mars. A giant meteor strike? Maybe, but it would be far cheaper and easier to devise a program to spot and divert incoming asteroids. A gamma ray burst from a nearby supernova? But that would fry Mars, too. Maybe a supervolcano, but that doesn't seem to quite fit the bill, either. After all, the Earth has been through numerous similar mass extinction events over its history, and none of them has ever wiped out all life or made the planet uninhabitable.

In effect, Musk's "existential" argument amounts to telling us to that he's worried about a planet that has supported life for three and a half billion years--so let's set up shop on a planet that has never supported it. It doesn't make nearly as much sense when you put it that way, does it?

Maybe in the very far future, in the 22nd Century or beyond, we will figure out a way to settle Mars. Then again, maybe we'll also figure out faster-than-light travel and head off in search of a much more promising exoplanet to settle on. At the very least, if we get rich enough and technologically advanced enough, maybe we'll use the solar system for some really awesome space tourism, which is basically what is depicted here. To attempt to make any real prediction that far into the future would be foolish.

But in this century, it's likely we will settle Mars in the only way that makes sense. My local coffee shop used to have a daily trivia question, and they really stumped me with this one: Which continent has the highest average level of education? The answer wasn't Europe or North America. It was Antarctica, because almost everyone who lives there has a Ph.D. That's what the real Martian colonies will eventually look like: a set of small research stations populated by scientists who stay for a limited time and depend almost entirely on supplies, tools, and materials sent from Earth.

When you think about, that’s a pretty ambitious and inspiring plan in itself--nor is there any shortage of interesting, ambitious, and inspiring goals back here on our lovely, friendly blue planet. We have plenty of options to choose from to take us boldly into the future, and we don't the ticket to nowhere that Elon Musk is trying to sell us. 

A very good essay.  

Right now we are stymied on extended manned expeditions into space by  the our propulsion  systems.  Basically todays  burn and coast rocket flights are based on the same principles as Tang Dynasty rockets.   To overcome the problem of extended 0 g  flight we need rockets that can accelerated over an extended period of time and  that are big enough to employ certrifugal force as a gravity surrogate.  The move  -The Martian- illustrated that brilliantly.  Until we can develop ion-drive propulsion were are not going anywhere.  

Right now a manner flight to Mars is virtually a suicide mission.  Enthusiasts like Robert Zubin are not willing to see the problem. 

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 10/1/2016 at 2:06 PM, Jules Troy said:

What about Hydrino energy?  Pretty much everyone thinks Mills is a quack but is he?

Hydrinos are crackpot nonsense.   Totally at odds with quantum theory  which is massively corroborated by experiment and application'

Our conversation over a computer network is yet another corroboration of quantum theory.

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