The legislature and unelected regulators enjoy magical thinking because the time frames are long, they will never be held responsible and perhaps engineers can meet the goals. Automakers have long been burdened with fleet economy standards that must be met. The Laws of Thermodynamics are problems for engineers, not legislators. Cars became lighter and less safe while also becoming more complex and expensive.
The idea that the United States can quickly “transition” away from hydrocarbons—the energy sources primarily used today—to a future dominated by so-called green technologies has become one of the central political divides of our time.
For months and months, the world’s richest man has been talking about the “woke mind virus”—let’s call it WMV for short. He describes it as a threat to “modern civilization” and says those concerns motivated his decision more than a year ago to buy the social-media platform now known as X.
Musk is the richest person in the world and with Tesla and SpaceX, owns two companies that dominate their highly technical market sectors. He also owns companies that may be critical to the future in the fields of boring tunnels, artificial intelligence and a brain/computer interface. Since Musk is bringing us the future more than anyone else on Earth, it may be worth trying to comprehend his message.
When it comes to how he defines that threat, however, he has been vague in public—painting a picture of something akin to hysterical groupthink by liberals against merit-based achievement and free speech, a catchall for what he expresses disagreement with.
That seem pretty clear. While a few large investment companies, corporate media and politicians are banging on about diversity, inclusion and equity, it may be worth asking where they see DIE taking Western democracies.
With recent congressional testimony and charges of plagiarism against the current president of Harvard, it seems obvious that she is a diversity hire with scant accomplishments to be account for her lofty position. How much of the rest of our institutions are led by unqualified people who are above accountability?
Musk is arguing for merit in judging applicants and with his obvious success, it’s worth considering his opinion.
On the Moon, astronauts will need protection from a different set of hazards. They’ll have to contend with cosmic and solar radiation, meteorites, wild temperature swings, and even impact ejecta. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has found hundreds of lunar ‘skylights,’ locations where a lava tube’s ceiling has collapsed, making a natural opening into the tube.
The International Space Station is only about 300 miles high. That gives the ISS some protection from cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are positively charged particles moving at relativistic velocities. Alpha radiation consists of some of the same positively charged particles, and is the type of radiation that Putin has used to assassinate opponents. He used polonium which emits alpha radiation. Those particles are big and slow, and can be stopped with a piece of paper. When a person ingests polonium, the radiation attacks the person from the inside, with nothing stopping the particles.
Cosmic rays are moving at nearly the speed of light. Shielding with lead, as one might use to block Superman’s vision, doesn’t work because the particles hit lead atoms and knock them free. Those heavier atoms would act like shrapnel.
Hydrogen atoms are good for shielding from cosmic rays, so water, ice or plastic works, but you need a lot of it, on the order of several meters. A lunar lava tube would provide meters of rock and would be excellent shielding.
On the Moon, astronauts will have to contend with the temperature swings. Earth’s natural satellite is a world of temperature extremes. One side of the Moon is in direct sunlight for half of the time, and surface temperatures reach as high as 127 degrees Celsius (260 °F.) The side that’s shrouded in darkness sinks as low as -173 °C (-280 °F.)
The Moon is a world of temperature extremes only on the surface. Apollo astronauts did experiments with thermal conduction on the surface of the Moon. Go down half a meter, and the temperature is a constant temperature of about -4 °F. It gets colder than that in Ohio.
Because the Moon has no atmosphere, heat is not conducted through convection, but only from radiation from the lunar surface to the -450 °F of space and through conduction through Moon rock. A lava tube on the Moon be -4 °F. An enclosure that is insulated from the floor of the cave would lose very little heat.
China’s future plan, after successful exploration, is a crewed base. It would be a long-term underground research base in one of the lunar lava tubes, with a support center for energy and communication at the tube’s entrance. The terrain would be landscaped, and the base would include both residential and research facilities inside the tube.
This is likely to be every nation’s plan. China has 30 million people living in caves, so maybe the idea doesn’t seem as novel to them.
A space solar power prototype, SSPD-1, has achieved wireless power transfer in space and transmitted power to Earth. The prototype, including MAPLE, a flexible lightweight microwave transmitter, validates the feasibility of space solar power, which can provide abundant and reliable power globally without ground-based transmission infrastructure.
This is one of those dangerous ideas that sound wonderful until you understand it.
Sunlight in space has much higher energy than the sunlight that reaches us. The atmosphere screens out gamma rays, x-rays, and most of the ultraviolet. That’s good because these high frequency waves of the electromagnetic spectrum would give us cancer and break down all organic molecules. Solar panels in space could capture much more energy than they do on the ground.
If that energy is captured and beamed down to the Earth, we are adding energy to our environment. The idea is analogous to putting mirrors in space to direct additional sunlight to ground-based solar panels. More solar energy would be added to our system, so the climate would warm up.
With only a couple of satellites, the warming would be negligible as a few power stations generate electricity and profit. When internal combustion engines were invented, nobody worried about adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Beaming energy from space is not a utopian solution, but a bad idea.
The energy beam coming from the satellite would be focused and powerful. When the beam hits the target, electricity is generated. When the beam hits something else, it’s a death ray. Tesla wrote about this, and his papers remain classified. Interlocks would be installed to terminate the ray if it wonders. Those interlocks could be removed when a target needs to be destroyed. That makes beaming energy from space a dangerous idea.
Making a good electric car is challenging. It’s also difficult to make a good aircraft. Making a flying car isn’t likely to be very good at either function, but it’s fun to see them try.
Electric motoring is, in theory, a subject about which I should know something. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems.
When General Motors began outlining plans in 2020 to fully switch to electric vehicles, it didn’t account for one critical factor: Many of the battery minerals needed to fulfill its plans were still in the ground.
“I remember seeing a report from our raw-materials team at the time saying, ‘There is plenty of lithium out there. There is plenty of nickel’,” said Sham Kunjur, an industrial engineer now in charge of securing the raw materials for GM’s batteries. “We will buy them from the open market.”
GM executives soon came to discover how off the mark those projections were, and now Mr. Kunjur’s 40-person team is scouring the globe for these minerals.
“Why Magical Thinking isn’t Whimsical” or “No Shit, Sherlock” would also have been serviceable titles for this article.
If 3 million cars are sold in the US each year, and each car needed a 100 pounds of lithium for the battery, that’s 300 million pounds of lithium needed each year. That’s a shitload. Before we switch to electric cars, someone should be thinking this through.
Those cars also need a shitload of electricity. The US doesn’t have a lot of surplus generating capacity and we build a new nuclear power plant about every 10 years.
Not paying attention to the basic requirements prior to a big policy shift isn’t a clever way to induce technical advance. It’s a way to insure that the general population will live a life that is needlessly frustrating and expensive.
This isn’t my invention. One of my students told me that her dad built a system to use the heat from the central air conditioning heat pump to warm the water for their swimming pool.
