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This topic is available for direct communication with Spaniard.
It is also available for NewMars members to point to particularly interesting posts by Spaniard.
I'll open with this one:
http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php … 45#p220545
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For Spaniard re contributions to the Forum since 2008 or so ...
Thank you for making the effort to exercise your English! We all benefit from your investment.
We are fortunate to hear from Quaoar from time to time. As you probably know he is a retired doctor who lives in Italy. He has written science fiction novels and may still be writing.
Your posts give me the impression you would appreciate the book I showed on the forum a while back. It was published by the Cato Institute, which is so far to the right of even our rightmost members, and they are looking centrist by comparison.
The book I'm referring to supports (what I understand to be) your position on the power of human ingenuity to overcome any obstacles that appear to block the road toward prosperity.
Here is one post in which I refer to the book I have:
http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php … 78#p213878
Here is a post in which I report arrival of the book:
http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php … 72#p203372
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For Spaniard re 89 posts ...
It is usually impossible (or impractical) to review all the posts a member might have made, but in your case I was able to scan all 89 ...
You've been interacting with folks who are still here, and with a number (such as Louis and Tom Kalbus) who are not.
You started out with some interesting ideas about the Moon, and have explored quite a range of topics since then.
I'd like to remind you that we (Admins) are open to the idea of setting up our Google Meetings at a more convenient time than midnight UTC, if one of our European members were to wish to meet others via an online session.
Right now we have a four hour time difference, so 7 PM your time would be 3 PM in New Hampshire or 2 PM in Houston.
I cracked open my copy of the CATO Institute book today, more or less at random, and found this:
This is from the opening of Chapter 7:...
The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is the difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today. Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions(1)
It seems to me the points of view you have taken recently are somewhat sympathetic to Mr. Sowell's sentiment.
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Hi!
I have an RSS "Livemarks" add-on for firefox (to replace the old scrapped functionality), to see the last forum posts titles in my browser. But it's just a few one. Like fifteen, and I checked it from time to time, so it's easy I miss interesting posts.
In any case, as you will see, I was in "sleep mode" (mostly only read from time to time) for a long time, with very few posts here and there.
The only reason of my recent high activity is because the thread about energy. I hope it isn't going too far.
It's just... it's a matter where I have debated for years, and because it has so important implications, I think it's very important to say it multiple times for people to get some ideas and spread them.
In fact, if you read my old posts, you will find the ideas about massive IRSU. The idea of the need of more and more resources, or fuel, as the colony is farther from Earth, or more physical things like the rocket equation, its very close to the idea than a energy source that feeds from itself uses more and more energy. The concept of EROEI becoming close to 1.
That's the reason I saw IRSU will be a must to make it a viable and massive space program. Similar reasoning behind.
Speaking about that, we should check soon about the idea of a mainly robotic-only colony on the Moon, if the recent advancements on AI make it cheaper.
Anyway. Thanks for the greeting, although I guess I will return to my "sleep mode" soon.
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I cracked open my copy of the CATO Institute book today, more or less at random, and found this:
This is from the opening of Chapter 7:...
The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is the difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today. Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions(1)
It seems to me the points of view you have taken recently are somewhat sympathetic to Mr. Sowell's sentiment.
(th)
I don't know Mr. Sowell ideas, but I can agree without problems with that sentence.
Specially when I hear someone "We are doomed because we lack resources".
When I'm a little sarcastic I said something like
"Man... You are over a planet with septillions kilograms of mass, under the sunlight that provides more than a hundred petawatts of energy. Maybe we are using the wrong elements, or the wrong technology. Maybe we are too dumb to use the resources right. BUT WE DEFINITELY DON'T LACK RESOURCES".
About CATO Institute, I know they are pretty much a liberal lobby.
Personally I'm not a market fanatic, the kind about "any market intervention will ALWAYS things worse".
I think the market (besides have significant flaws in certain circumstances) it's a lot more reactive (when the problems arises) than proactive (before the problems arises). Private investment exists, of course, but there are a lot of ideas that generate more benefit to society than to the investors, so that kind of work is very difficult to be funded by the market.
In that sense, I think the state policies can have a significant impact pushing the market in the right or wrong direction, forcing proactive politics. Also punish business against transfer costs to others (like waste).
But on other side, market does a wonderful job finding the real cost of real implementation of a working process.
In that sense, I think the state shouldn't try to replace the market. No matter how much we try to predict the future, the risk of error is high, and paper projections could be shattered easily against the reality.
I think it's a lot better just general pushing here and there, through incentives and taxation, with a constant inspecting over the data and projections and leave the market to solve the internal details of the problems, with gradual and constantly revised plans.
So... I guess I'm very afar from CATO ideas.
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For Spaniard re #6
Thank you for your thoughtful response to Mr. Sowell's quote. Mr. Sowell himself is associated with the Hoover Institute, which is another right wing organization. The CATO Institute is NOT a liberal organization, although I have seen it characterized as libertarian.
Here is a snippet from it's web site:
Cato Institute | Individual Liberty, Free Markets, and Peace
www.cato.org
Promoting an American public policy based on individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peaceful international relations.
Here's a snippet from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute
Cato Institute - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Cato_Institute
The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Ed Crane, Murray Rothbard, and Charles Koch ...
Cato's Letters · Ed Crane (politician) · Robert A. Levy · David Boaz
However, in this topic, depending upon your interests and how much time you have, we have an opportunity to focus on Spain. I've not had the opportunity to visit, but Dr. GW Johnson wrote me recently about his experiences in Spain. He attended a conference there. He gave a paper at one of them. The topic was planetary defense.
I have wanted to read Don Quixote since reading about it, but never found (or made) the time.
You have the distinct advantage of being able to read Cervante's work in the original language.
Don Quixote - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Don_Quixote
Don Quixote is a Spanish epic novel by Miguel de Cervantes. It was originally published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. Considered a founding work of ...
List of Don Quixote characters · Don Quixote (disambiguation) · Don Quixote (opera)
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For Spaniard re Apache Internal Server Error ...
Sooner or later this bug bites all of us ...
Several of us have spent some time trying to isolate the problem.
In some cases I have found that a single word can cause the error....
I noticed your observation about longer posts.... kbd512 is not the best example to follow ... longer posts are NOT ideal, from the perspective of the reader. If you are thinking only of kbd512, then obviously he is fine with long posts, because he creates so many of them.
However, if you want anyone else to actually read your posts, please consider keeping them short.
And I understand you have attempted to deal with one of kbd512's long posts, in composing your reply.
Something to consider is the role of the Moderator ... kbd512 is a Junior Administrator, which is a step above a Moderator. It is possible that a moderator might wish to stimulate members to argue instead of actually achieving a useful result. Please consider if you are being lulled into argument, which will produce nothing useful.
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tahanson43206,
Spaniard should feel free to use as many 1s and 0s as he requires to convey his complete thoughts. The written word has to be expressive to convey meaning and intent. If a topic requires more in-depth explanation to convey complete thoughts, rather than bits and pieces of ideas, then it does.
As far as my response to him are concerned, I want to understand if he understands how orders of magnitude (power laws) and percentages relate to one another.
If you become 50% more efficient at using energy, but your new energy source(s) require 100X to 1,000X greater mass of materials, and therefore energy input to create or transform those materials into working energy generating or consuming machines, then whether or not that is sustainable depends entirely on whether or not you have enough of those materials and enough energy to complete the transformation.
The simple answer is that it's not remotely practical to do. It may be technically feasible by the loosest definition of that term, but if the end result is that most of your materials and energy are consumed by the ravenous appetite of your new energy generating and consuming machines, then you end up with fewer and fewer material and energy resources for all other possible use cases. You're turning your economy into solar panels and batteries because you don't know what the broken window fallacy is, as it relates to economics.
The broken window fallacy illustrates why breaking all the windows in the city is not how you deal with the problem of not having enough glass workers. It's not an economics solution, it's a failure to understand that all the energy, labor, and capital expended to make new glass to replace all the windows you just broke, doesn't translate into more economic prosperity. Your glass makers may see a massive temporary boost in glass sales, but what about the energy and materials to make food or expand medical access? If you spend all your money replacing broken glass, then you're not spending it on anything else.
It's an irrefutable and quantifiable fact that the energy received from the Sun is greater than the energy received or produced by all other sources used by humanity, by quite a lot. As nice as that factoid is to know, unless we cover the entire surface of the Earth with solar panels, there must be some practical limit as to how much we can harness, implying some limit to how much of the land and sea we're willing to turn into a giant photovoltaics farm. Since the energy to make enough panels to cover the Earth does not presently come from existing solar panels, and does in fact come almost entirely from coal and gas, if the end goal is to actually reduce CO2 emissions, then at some point whatever technology we use to do that, actually has to lead to that outcome. If the only answer to how much you should invest is "more", then you fail to grasp that not everything about our economy can be another solar panel. At some point, we need energy and materials for food, water, medicine, clothing, and shelter.
Switching to a source of energy like natural gas, with twice the energy density of coal, per kilo or metric ton of CO2 generated, doesn't imply less burning of burnable fuel, especially when the CO2 emissions levels from burning natural gas are rising to the same level they previously were when we were burning more coal. It does mean we're consuming twice as much energy as we received from coal.
I'm left wondering how long Spaniard thinks we can keep doing that, given that renewable energy generating capacity is not keeping up with the rate of increase in our demand for more energy. Sooner or later, something has to give. I'm guessing it will be the supply of energy and materials to keep creating more renewable energy machines. It's not arguing for sake of arguing. I actually want to understand why this makes sense to anyone. Is it because they want to believe it, or do they truly believe that they're seeing the opposite of what's actually happening?
You are free to believe that nothing useful will come of this discussion. I would like to know if other people can at least conceptualize what I see, even if they want to ignore it because it runs afoul of their beliefs, and at what point will it become so obvious to them that what we're presently doing is not working as intended, because the plan is based upon deeply flawed assumptions about efficiency improvements, energy usage, and where all of the materials come from.
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For Spaniard ...
Thanks for working to make your posts valuable to readers who are not directly involved in the discussion, but who find the back-and-forth intensely interesting and helpful.
You have created one topic long ago, but it didn't catch fire. You seem to be engaged now in a discussion that has potential to grow, as more facts become known, and as the "invisible hand" of countless individual decisions creates the flows reported in market reports.
Can I interest you in creating a topic that is closer to your interests and long term objectives?
It seems highly likely to me that it is possible to make solar panels using nothing but solar energy for input.
Is that a goal you would find worth pursuing?
Are you in a position to make something happen along those lines?
Nature has filled the Earth's surface and much of the ocean with life forms, using nothing but solar energy as input.
Are humans incapable of doing the same? Perhaps! Perhaps not.
What humans ** have ** demonstrated is the ability to live well on the yolk of the egg Nature laid up for us.
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It seems highly likely to me that it is possible to make solar panels using nothing but solar energy for input.
Is that a goal you would find worth pursuing?
You must consider that if you use a source of energy that can't control the input, then the difference between the input profile and the output profile becomes too great.
It can be done, but it's a lot more expensive than a mixed combination.
One of the reasons is because solar+wind has a better match to our demand curve than any of them alone.
Also, they have a lot of times where if they lack one you have more than the other (anticyclons usually reduce wind but increase solar, while storms increases wind and decreases solar).
Still, it's not a perfect match, so other techniques and technologies are suited for different profiles of offer-demand coordination.
For example, the classic duck-curve of solar is better suited to be matched via batteries as it's a very frequently circumstance and the storage required is way below a day. (Still needs lower prices for batteries, but the goal of 50$ per kwh for sodium ion seems a LCOE of cycled kwh good enough).
The small variations and clear differences between seasons are better mitigated through some levels of curtailment with the participation of new consumers designed for very low fixed costs that can operate a small numbers of hours per year to reduce the costs of the energy generated over the unregulated demand.
While very low generation days, the infamous dunkelflaute can be solved via some generation backup through fuel and demand management.
For example you can pay to some industries that accept the accord, of being disconnected when the generation is extremely low.
That comes from the circumstance that if the number of hours per year is very low, is a lot cheaper to adapt an industry to turn of for some days per year, than pay the equivalent storage just to be used a very low number of days.
It's the smart and big equivalent to an offgrid model where the consumer adapts to the availability of energy to certain extend, to reduce the requirements on the storage.
It's not that you can't build the storage. But reduce the consumption is just cheaper if it's a small number of times per year.
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For Spaniard...
I have no way of knowing your background or interests, other than the posts of your's I've seen from recently, or earlier when I went looking.
It seems to me you have deflected my offer of an opportunity to design a facility to make solar panels using nothing but solar energy.
It appears that you want to have more than just solar energy, so I'll enlarge the scope of the input to any and all renewable sources.
The argument you seem to be having with others here on the forum could lead to a productive outcome if you can (with others of course) design and build a facility that makes solar panels using nothing but renewable energy as input.
At the moment, you would not win the argument, because your correspondents would rightly say that all solar panels in existence have been made using fossil fuel as the energy source.
There are some innovative people in Spain. If memory serves, the first successful mirror tower was designed, built and operated in Spain.
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For Spaniard re business development using renewable energy ....
Your conversations/discussions/arguments with other members of the forum suggest you may have some understanding of business operations.
The forum includes members with actual business experience, but there aren't many who've revealed their backgrounds, and in any case, I get the impression their experiences were far in the past.
You may have the opportunity to collect and to inspire investors willing to accept the patient path that an all renewable industry would require.
If you search the writings of both Calliban and kbd512, you will find several (perhaps even many) examples of clearly written descriptions of what an all renewable industry might look like.
It will take someone with business talents to turn these interesting ideas into reality. The Universe is offering a near infinite amount of energy for humans to exploit, starting with our own Sun, which booms out massive amounts of energy of which humans collect only the tiniest sliver. Even the Earth itself over millions of years has only collected a slice of that output.
All the claims of gloom and doom you find in the forum archives are reflections of human failure to capture the enormous outpouring of energy from the Sun, let alone all the other sources of stored energy the Universe has laid up for us.
The Universe has been creating elements for us over billions of years, and it appears that element creation is still going on, although perhaps at a slightly slower pace than in earlier times.
If you are so inspired, and if you have the needed talents, you may be able to create an industry able to harness solar power and produce all the goods and services currently provided by fossil fuel.
Fossil fuels represent the yolk of an egg the Universe has laid up for us to give us a running start on living comfortably.
It is time for us humans to begin the transition to living on the flow from the Sun and other similarly untapped resources.
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For Spaniard re testing of clone and possible new forums...
It would be helpful to the Admins if you might be able to spare some time to help with evaluation of the phpBB3 software, and with finding remaining bugs in the updated clone of FluxBB.
If you want to help to evaluate the phpBB3 package, you can request an id there by writing to newmarsmember@gmail.com. That email is checked every day.
If you would be willing to help find bugs in the clone, you can log in using your existing credentials.
The information about how to log in is available in dedicated topics for the clone and for phpBB3.
If you have questions at any time, or if you find a bug, please post in the related topic.
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