Collapsitarians are described the Technium. Former President Reagan defined a recession as when your friend lost his job and a depression as when you lost your job. Collapse is when no one has a job; in fact, there are no longer any such things as jobs to be had. Various types of doomers/collapsitarians/dystopians: * Luddites, …
This is analysis of past underground nuclear tests which did contain all of the radiation for the initial tests. There is a question about how well the radiation has been contained in the decades since, but the leakage is to the Ocean and is not increasing the health risk to people. The largest underground nuclear …
The typical analysis of the nuclear Orion external pulse propulsion rocket is to use constant charges (bombs) every 1.1 seconds to launch with people inside who experience 4Gs or less. Nuclear Orion can achieve launch costs of less than $1/kg and perhaps a tiny fraction of that. This is 1000 to 20,000 times cheaper than …
Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC) is based on a design from Berkeley Bionics of California, but Lockheed says they have enhanced the basic HULC. Raytheon’s rival XOS mechwarrior suit, which at last report still trails an inconvenient power cable to the nearest wall socket. * Soldiers will be able to carry loads up to 200 …
A Goldman Sachs study on “The Expanding Middle: The Exploding Middle Class and Falling Global Inequality” While America laments the loss of its middle class as there is divergence between a mass affluent and wealthy class and those at middle class, there is the rise of the global middle class. The global middle class is …
Straight up storing CO2 as a gas in the ground or saline is happening now at several tens of millions of tons/year worldwide. The amount of CO2 offset by solar power is on the same scale. Civilization is generating abut 25 billion tons of CO2 per year. Nuclear power worldwide offsets 2 billion tons of …
This is an analysis from a discussion of scenarios prompted by some events in Battlestar Galactica. This is a follow up to my previous article about problems with the usage of technology in Battlestar Galactica This article will not discuss specific spoilers in Battlestar Galactica, but one could be indirectly spoiled for the last season. …
Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have carried out the first comprehensive assessment of the relative merits of different geoengineering schemes in terms of the climate cooling potential. Their paper appears in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions. [H/T Greencar congress Using a mix of these geoengineering techniques and mitigating production of …
Single atom quantum dots created by researchers at Canada’s National Institute for Nanotechnology and the University of Alberta make possible a new level of control over individual electrons, a development that suddenly brings quantum dot-based devices within reach. It is demonstrated that the silicon atom dangling bond (DB) state serves as a quantum dot. Coulomb …
A 60 slide presentation Chinese HTR Program: HTR-10 results & Work Progress on HTR-PM by Zuoyi ZHANG, Institute of Nuclear and new Energy Technology (INET), Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China The Chinese High Temperature Reactors is one of the top 16 programs for the Chinese Government from 2006-2020. They figure that as they make their …
The Times UK reported claims that Alan Windle’s team at Cambridge University had created the world’s strongest ribbon. I finally tracked down specifics of this work. UPDATE: Details on hypersonic skyhooks/rotovators [orbital ropes] that would be enabled with these materials as well as lunar and Mars space elevators. Background on strength of materials, units of …