Free Energy & Climate Change/Global Warming

I'll make a long ass post later, although that really isn't my style.

Discuss the legitimacy of global warming, possibilities of free energy, that sort of thing. I could have made the "the future" thread, but that is a little vague.

Global warming is bullshit, free energy will never happen because theres no money in it, and Al gore is a lying sack of shit who got D's in his college science classes.

The earth is in no more danger than it was when the dinosaurs existed. We're doing nothing more to the ozone than they did, did you know the ozone hole in the antarctic is actually shrinking now?

Like old George carlin said, the earth is going anywhere, WE ARE!!!!

Global warming can't be solved today.

Fatty probably expects me to post this magical graph which would settle things. It won't happen for two reasons:

i) If I had such a graph, I would be a world celebrity.
ii) The science is not there yet and it is not close. The numerical models aren't there. The empirical data just shows the recent temperature increase, nothing more. Oh yes, the CO2 graph is going up the roof too, just show me the LINK between Temperature and CO2. Nope, it is not obvious, far from it.

I don't believe in it, meaning that I don't think that it is a valid theory. Yet I can't formally disprove it.

The problem is that the most climatologists (and people supporting them) do not have such a cautious attitude. No, the urgency of the potential problem does not allow one to hunt his scientific adversaries.

1- We could not fix it even if it was real. Unless you close every factory and take everyone cars that is.

2- Mother Earth knows how to deal with it.

goh13 wrote:

1- We could not fix it even if it was real. Unless you close every factory and take everyone cars that is.

2- Mother Earth knows how to deal with it.

Wrong.

Fatty wrote:

goh13 wrote:

1- We could not fix it even if it was real. Unless you close every factory and take everyone cars that is.

2- Mother Earth knows how to deal with it.

Wrong.

Well, I’d like to see how you or anyone else can fix it. If it is true.

Free energy will not be because people will not get money from it. Like the company that wanted to give free ADSL to everyone but was called of because it will ruin the competition between others.

I wish politicians had the balls to, ahem, "waste" money on things like Fusion. If we get commercialized fusion, we are set for a thousand years. I'd like to be all cynical and emo and say "it will never happen", but heavier-than-air flight and moon landings were just as outlandish, and they got accomplished eventually, despite everyone shouting "no you can't!"

Once we get our free energy problem sorted out, then we can focus on more important issues like poverty and such (read: space flight). I just don't want a future with every 10 metres being another windmill and everything being a freaking touchscreen.

Also, comment I found, I liked:

Quote :

It's an unfortunate tale of the collective short-sightedness of human beings as a species and a concomitant lack of political will, isn't it?

Blatantly obvious to many individuals that we should be devoting the bulk of our resources (as a globe) to those technologies that give us a real prospect of changing the course of our destiny from one of rapid decline to one in which we clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Fusion is one such area of research. Nanotechnology is another. Technology is the only thing that can save us now. And it's an urgent priority.

But instead we'll all indulge in our petty tribal squabbling and fight (ideologically, politically, economically, physically, any way we can think of really). And we'll continue to do all that until the problems are right in our faces. By which time it will probably be too late. Heads are really buried in the sand here.

Human beings: capable of such individual brilliance, but mired in such collective stupidity. Maybe we deserve our fate.

^too much sci fi for this canadian.

Seriously practicality needs to come first.

and space is useless @ the moment.

No real purpose colonizing places.

Liquid* wrote:

Seriously practicality needs to come first.

Yes, we need to focus our trillions of dollars on more important things, like wars that aren't ours.

Dur.

You'll be dead before we get out of our solar system.

Face it zak.

Liquid* wrote:

You'll be dead before we get out of our solar system.

Face it zak.

So why not pour money into it if we are all going to die anyway?

Your turn for a long post. I will give you 30000 WoT gold if you make a decent post.

Zakatak wrote:

Liquid* wrote:

You'll be dead before we get out of our solar system.

Face it zak.

So why not pour money into it if we are all going to die anyway?

Your turn for a long post. I will give you 30000 WoT gold if you make a decent post.

Because we can pour money into things we can enjoy while we are still alive.

and no one reads walls of text, instant turn off.

short n sweet.

Zakatak wrote:

Liquid* wrote:

You'll be dead before we get out of our solar system.

Face it zak.

So why not pour money into it if we are all going to die anyway?

Your turn for a long post. I will give you 30000 WoT gold if you make a decent post.

Not to mention it's just not economically viable.
And don't say you can create more money because then that increases inflation.

Fatty wrote:

Zakatak wrote:

Liquid* wrote:

You'll be dead before we get out of our solar system.

Face it zak.

So why not pour money into it if we are all going to die anyway?

Your turn for a long post. I will give you 30000 WoT gold if you make a decent post.

Not to mention it's just not economically viable.
And don't say you can create more money because then that increases inflation.

Come on fatty, don't be trying to explain economics to the kids, their heads might explode!

Setting a goal for space exploration helps us drive forward and create new technologies, many of which will create jobs for its creation, maintenance and possible distribution, improvement and adaption to modern society's needs and demands.
Look at all the new technologies and scientific advancements NASA has created. If there's one program that should NEVER be touched, it's NASA. With the said, the only discussion involving NASA should be which missions it should aim to execute. For example, should we land on the moon again, or on a moving asteroid?
There should never be a discussion where one has to debate between an allocation of funds to NASA or "Humanitarian aid" to Iran.

Viva la technology. Screw the worthless programs.

Fatty wrote:

Zakatak wrote:

Liquid* wrote:

You'll be dead before we get out of our solar system.

Face it zak.

So why not pour money into it if we are all going to die anyway?

Your turn for a long post. I will give you 30000 WoT gold if you make a decent post.

Not to mention it's just not economically viable.
And don't say you can create more money because then that increases inflation.

How is it not economically viable?

How much money do we throw at NASA and the War on Terror? The reason fusion development is so expensive right now is because we are literally starting from scratch. You can't exactly jump inside the sun and take a look around, so we pretty much have nothing to go on. Once we get beyond the "break even" point, find out how to make it "work", it will become no more expensive then planting windmill seeds all over the place, and a fair bit more efficient.

Plus, there are other ways to combine atoms that we haven't tried yet.

EDIT: filmgrain = neutrons

I was meaning it is not economically viable to poor trillions of dollars into space exploration/travel/colonization (even if it's just the moon).

It's not economically viable because nothing of economic value comes form it.

What do you get from colonizing the moon? A base from which to gather scientific information? Yes, awesome, but to be honest that is just knowledge. And just knowledge that currently would be useless to us except being interesting. And interesting knowledge is not worth trillions of dollars currently.

The problem, as I see it, is that space science stuff needs a lot of funding in order to get a little done. And at the moment that little is nowhere near the worth the amount of funding required.
That is why the space shuttle program got shut down, it just wasn't producing anything really of economically value. Afterall, we can send satellites up without the need for humans to go too. And all scientific stuff such as blackholes, locating planets etc... all can be done from the ground. And the Hubble.

I don't think space travel out of our galaxy, or even beyond the milkyway will ever happen. I have faith we can get to Mars and asteroids, but beyond that..

Shit is just so far away and humans are just such fragile creatures that if we were to find another planet like ours, not only would it take millions of years to arrive, not to mention if we arrive, and once we are there, there would be no guarantees that that planet would in fact be able to support us.

And you can't "mine" other planets and/or asteroids, it's expensive enough going up at the moment let alone back and forward trips with large amounts of heavy cargo. Not to mention that increase in product in the market will drive prices down. You can't mine a billion tons of iron, put that all in the market and expect to get current rates.

It's just highly impractical to "waste" trillions of dollars in such things such as space travel, at this point in time, when nothing of economic value will come from it.

As for fusion. I guess because how would the government justify that to the public? "ah no sorry, you will not be receiving an education because we want a chance to get cheap power 10years earlier". Though I agree that war is a waste of money, however, if USA was not at war then that money would be spent on other things such as Obama's free healthcare program and such.
There is only so much money a country has. It is effectively a big business, it receives money from taxes, state owned assets (if usa has any??) among other sources and it has to use that revenue in order to pay off it's debt as well as general upkeep of the country such as the army, police/fire, roads etc... etc... It does have a limit amount of money to work with.
Yes it can create physically more money but then that drives inflation up devaluing the dollar which is not an economically good thing.

Oh, and at the end of the day it has to answer to the public and the public will not accept extreme expenditure on something such as developing anew power source that will eventually be developed anyway. Not with the likes of poverty and such in the country anyway.