Posted on 08/03/2013 12:14:07 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I agree with you about water desalinization and thorium. If electricity were cheap enough, instead of battery powered cars, we could electrify the roads. Quantum computing will be big, but it is a very new programming paridigm and will take a while to learn how to program them.
I need a Grande Latte to think about this...
Solar isn’t very practical on Mars, given the lower solar radiation levels. Wind power, maybe?
yeah I saw that. that company actually announced that google and nasa were two of its customers. things may move faster but I think the true potential of quantum computers is much higher and much more versatile than the D wave shows. and that will take time to reveal that potential.
If electricity were cheap enough, instead of battery powered cars, we could electrify the roads.
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I wouldn’t invest in Tesla but if imho if anyone can make an industry model work—it would be Elon Musk. (That’s actually why his stock is so high. The bet is not on the car but on the man.)
Maybe the infrastructure would be cheaper for electrified roads—than for batteries...but likely not. Even though the electricity would be cheap —people would be killed by the capital and maintenance cost of the electrified road infrastructure. Ideally they would just make the batteries take more charge and charge faster easier cheaper. Rather than rig the us interstate system with some kind of electric trolly system.
Solar isnt very practical on Mars, given the lower solar radiation levels. Wind power, maybe?
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There’s lots of thorium on Mars and the moon. That’s part of the reason for the excitement surrounding thorium reactors.
Rearden steel
I haven't done any cost comparisons between something like this and battery powered cars, but it seems like with an electrified road, you get to distribute the costs of the road among the cars, and the cars themselves wouldn't need as big of batteries, and could be made cheaper. I would think it would be less expensive per vehicle.
They’ll only be around another 3 years. If we dodge the Hillary bullet we’ll be okay.
I don’t think the wind is very consistent except during the global dust storms that occasionally happen
The eco-nuts dream of a world in which everyone but themselves is a subsistence farmer and earning about $E2 a day.
Lots of mainstream sci-fi movies about the future, even up to the mid-1990's, had big CRT screens, even in spaceships. The producers couldn't even imagine thin-screen monitors and TV sets. I always laugh at that, as well as the control panels with lots of hardware dials and knobs. They couldn't imagine control displays within windows on a display panel, let alone a touch-screen interface.
That's one approach. Mine, is to eliminate the need for this many cars. But not in the same fashion that the control freaks in local government are forcing on us. Stricter licensing rules (no illegal alien drivers as a start, criminal drivers permanently banned). More buses, jitneys and taxis along with more lenient rules allowing more professional drivers. I mean, why can't you or I pick up carpoolers and earn extra money without requiring an expensive taxi license? A lot of stuff can be changed at the political level without the need for fancy expensive technology, like boondoggle high-speed trains to no where.
The Dual Fluid Reactor - A new Concept for a Fast Nuclear Reactor
Want to have fun? Look into TechShop. I spent time there with my son-in-law, helping him build prototypes of electronic equipment he later sells in large production elsewhere. Lots of expensive equipment to play with, along with courses on how to use the tech, including 3D printers. We spent a lot of time on $250G CNC machines, on the cheap, making control panels and parts from aluminum, steel and stainless steel. He then used metal brakes and powder coat tools while there and finished fabrication. Techies who will create future technology may be at TechShop using their equipment. You want to play but not commit big bucks in equipment, check out TechShop.
I didn’t know about the wireless angle. That would cut the capital and maintenance cost of the infrastructure—especially if they could move energy over distance via microwave. (You’ll see proposals for solar collectors in space that beam their collected energy to earth via microwave.)
However, this technology looks even more nascent than quantum computers. It looks like it’ll be more than a decade or two before it becomes sufficiently robust for implementation.
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