Techonomy

Brian Wang Outlines Proposals and Expectations for Reduced Coal and Oil Usage

Written by Brian Wang of nextbigfuture.com

I have criticized Amory Lovins energy plan. Here is an outline of my energy expectation and suggestions.

62% of the world's energy usage is from coal (26%) and oil (36%).

50% of oil is used for cars and trucks. There are one billion cars and trucks in the world and we add 55-65 million each year. So getting older cars and trucks to be much more efficient can have up to twenty times larger and faster impact than rules for making more efficient new cars and trucks.

Retrofitting old cars and trucks and motorcycles with aerodynamic shells and attachments (commercial CIY aeromodding) can reduce fuel usage by 30-100% at highway speeds.

Retrofitting the older cars and trucks and motorcycles with aerodynamic shells and attachments (commercial CIY aeromodding) can reduce fuel usage by 30-100% at highway speeds.

Retrofit cars and trucks with engine modifications or overhauls to reduce fuel usage. A Honda 125 cc Innova was increased from 114 mpg to 214 mpg with an aerodynamic shell

There are several do it yourself aerodynamic modifications of Honda Civics to get 90-114 mpg.

Amory Lovins on Energy in 1976 Versus Today

Written By Brian Wang of nextbigfuture.com

Amory Lovins wrote the Energy Strategy : The Road not Taken? in 1976 for Foreign Affairs.

Cogeneration at that time was 4% of the energy of the United States. It is now 18%, and Amory now calls it micropower. Amory talked then of coal, conservation and soft technologies (wind and solar) reducing energy demand and squeezing oil and gas usage. He also called for the elimination of nuclear energy. He also indicated that there would be reduced use of some capital intensive energy sources. He has repeated the mostly the same points in his new Reinventing Fire proposal to eliminate oil and coal usage by 2050.

Here is what actually happened with US energy. The US energy usage is 7-11 quadrillion BTU lower because of imports from China of energy intensive manufacturing.

A Techonomic Engineering View of Life Extension

Written by Brian Wang of the nextbigfuture.com

There was a writeup by Chris Mooney about the Longevity Dividend session with Jay Olshansky. There is a lengthier presentation of Jay Olshansky's case for a Longevity Dividend. I agree that longer and healthier lives provides a massive economic boost. This is seen by the historical rise of life expectancy from about 35 years to 80 years over the last hundred years. It can also be seen by the economic devastation when life is shortened and health is destroyed by Aids in Africa.

However, Jay Olshansky is only talking about extending current life and health expectency by 7 years. Standard medicine and public health are providing increases in life expectancy of 0.1 to 0.3 years for each calendar year that passes. There is an another approach to life extension which is strategies for engineered negligible senescence (SENS). This is an engineering (techonomic) approach that was initiated by Aubrey de Grey.

 

 

Bullish on Longevity

About seven years ago, I reported regularly on the science of longevity, and the prospect of human life extension, for a site called Sage Crossroads. And then I stopped—pretty much dropping the topic for a while and going on to other things.

So when I attended the Techonomy session yesterday entitled "The Longevity Dividend,” it was a perfect chance to hear just how far scientists think their field has come since I last reported on it closely. And I have to say, I was struck by the difference in tone.

Seven years ago, scientists who study aging—so-called biogerontologists—already thought it was possible or even likely that at some point in the future, we would find a way to retard its rate in humans. After all, there were already numerous studies showing that genetic interventions could lengthen the lifespan of other species, particularly mice and roundworms. And caloric restriction—reducing dietary intake by about 1/3—had also been shown to extend lifespan in a number of animal species. (That’s why some humans themselves are already trying it.)

Erika DeBenedictis - Robotic Piloting to Anywhere in the Solar System and using Space Based Resources

Written by Brian Wang of nextbigfuture.com

Erika DeBenedictis is a high school student who wrote a prototype software system that would allow a spacecraft to autonomously calculate and fly low-energy orbits.

Erika is one of ten winners of the Intel Science contest who were at the Techonomy conference.

The Interplanetary Superhighway is based on a mathematical concept known as invariant manifolds (the tubes).

<blockquote>
One may be able to travel large distances in the Interplanetary Superhighway without any propulsion. However, this may not always be the case. This is because the manifolds are actually in phase space which includes both position and velocity. Thus for true intersection to occur, the velocities must also match. Since the manifolds more frequently intersect in position space than in phase space, a change in velocity may be required. The energies required by the trajectories to travel on the Interplanetary Superhighway are typically cheaper propulsively than standard transfers. But this may require much longer time.</blockquote>

The full writeup is 22 megabytes and takes some time to download.

Erika has already been given a tour of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
NASA engineers did show her the latest work on ion drives. Different kinds of ion drives can be matched to the composition of different asteroids. This would enable a vision of mostly autonomous robotic spacecraft using low energy orbits who could go to the asteroids and refuel themselves and mine asteroids for material for near earth colonies and projects.
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Geoengineering: The Most Important Technology Nobody’s Heard Of

 In a breakout session here at Techonomy, David Keith of the University of Calgary and Margaret Leinen of the Climate Response Fund led a discussion of the prospect of geoengineering the climate—in other words, engaging in some type of deliberate intervention to alter the planet and thereby counteract global warming.

The reason scientists and policymakers are increasingly thinking about geoengineering is clear: Major climate change now looks increasingly unstoppable. As Leinen put it, even if the proposals on the table at Copenhagen had been adopted, we’d still end the century with an atmospheric carbon dioxide of 700 parts per million--more than enough to cause climate upheaval, raise seas dramatically, and so forth. 

So it seems clear that if we can’t cut emissions, at some point we’ll be forced to consider a more radical alternative, at least if we want to preserve a planet anything like the one our species evolved on.

And as it happens, geoengineering does indeed appear to be on offer. According to Keith, the most popular and prominent idea for doing it—injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere that would reflect sunlight away from the Earth, thereby causing a global cooling—could be begun almost immediately. “You could do this with current technology now,” Keith said, and he estimates that moreover, you could do so for about $ 1 billion a year. “Venice could pay to do it based solely on real estate prices,” said Keith.

My Critique of Amory Lovins on Nuclear Energy

 Written By : Brian Wang of nextbigfuture.com

Amory promotes micropower as the great new hope for energy and how it is better than oil, coal and nuclear energy. I am with him that micropower is better than oil and coal for electricity.  However, micropower  is mostly diesel, biomass and natural gas of small and big sizes. Natural gas has 4 deaths per TWH (Externe source). So 2500 Twh (to displace nuclear power) would be 10,000 deaths per year. The diesel (oil) portion is 35 deaths per TWH. The biomass about 10 deaths per TWH (35,000 deaths per year if diesel was the main source). The blended rate of deaths per TWH from micropower is over 12 deaths per TWH. Far higher than the 0.65 deaths per TWH calculated by Externe for nuclear power. Even if the micropower deaths per TWH was cut in half for lower distribution losses the number is still far higher. Diesel and natural gas are not renewable. Over 75% of the power that Lovins is talking about is diesel, natural gas and biomass.

Amory also tries to use distorted statistics to indicate that nuclear power will not be growing or is too slow to add power.

Nuclear power had massive growth through the 1970s and even through the 1990s. This was because of improved operations and power uprates and the during the eighties with the French buildout. The new nuclear buildout will start having large impact starting at the end of 2010 with two reactors in China and then in 2011 with over ten reactor completions.

2010 9 new reactors, 6.2 GWe
2011 11 new reactors, 9.3 GWe
2012 10 new reactors, 9.92 GWe
2013 12 new reactors, 13.08 GWe
2014 14 new reactors, 13.63 GWe

My projection for world nuclear generation is

2009 2559 TWhe
2010 2700 TWhe
2011 2800 TWhe
2012 2885 TWhe
2013 2964 TWhe
2014 3120 TWhe

World wind is now at about 300 TWhe and solar electricity is at 20 TWHe.

The Non-Radical Environmentalist

 Yesterday at Techonomy--before the fun started--we heard from Stewart Brand, famed founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and author most recently of Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. With his latest book, Brand is pioneering a new brand of environmentalism that discards some of the movement’s anti-technology habits, and reacquaints the green impulse with an openness to innovations that may be the key to solving our biggest problem—climate change.

According to Brand, environmentalism has a “legacy resistance” to nuclear power, and to transgenic crops or GMOs. In other words, the resistance isn’t really based on strong evidence of dangers, so much as an instinctive distrust of certain types of meddling with “nature.”

Techonomy Plenary Session - Philosophy and Turning the World to a Techonomic Direction

Several speakers in the first talk spoke about the philosophy of using broadly defined technology to solve the worlds problems. This is shown in the videos below.

The raw notes from the talk are at this link

 

Popular Techonomy: Can the world be turned in a techonomic direction?

Tweet your questions to : @TCMTQA
Speakers: Deborah Hopkins, Citi
Kevin Kelly, Author, What Technology Wants
Lisa Randall, Harvard University
Eric Schmidt, Google

Moderator: David Kirkpatrick

Kevin Kelly - technology is the most powerful force in the world

Deborah Hopkins (Chairman, Venture Capital Initiatives and Chief Innovation Officer Citi)
Future is about partnership and collaboration
Bring capabilities to customers, clients and cities. Cities is a future focal point beyond countries.

Eric Schmidt of Google: Assumes that people are not ready for the technology that is coming.  Every two day we create as much information as was created by all of humanity up to 2003. Smartphone location devices can say where you are and you can tell your friends. With AI can predict where you will go with high accuracy. With 14 photos we can with high accuracy determine who you are. These technologies and other raise fundamental societal issues

Both Kevin Kelly and Eric Schmidt highlighted the importance of transparency and accountability to reduce the negatives and dangers of technology. I agree and the work of David Brin on transparency and accountability should be reviewed for a deeper understanding on the details of the processes of transparency and accountability.

Technology safety needs to look at larger analysis physical analysis of dangers. This is discussed on an ongoing basis at the lifeboat foundation and on my site in detail. I will provide some links and summary in a follow up article.

Techonomy - Stewart Brand - Why We Should All Think Like Engineers

Q - What does a Biologist know about being an engineer ?
A - I [Stewart Brand] have the genes of an engineer. My father and brother were engineers and I was bit by the hacker bug early.
Q- Reinventing Infrastructure
Bridge is infrastructure, river is also infrastructure.
Radio spectrum is infrastructure but so is the environment
We are terraforming the planet but doing it badly, we should do terraforming well
Tweet your questions to:
@TCMYQA
whole Earth Catalog was libertarian. Ask not what your country can do for you, do it for yourself. Now we must act on a global scale.

Getting rid of coal - Fiat [government] driven or innovation drivent
Previously thought population control had to be fiat driven, only China really did it. Turned out that wealth and social trends caused population growth reduction.
fiat- good government policy can accelerate a solution
Be pragmatic - be an engineer and solve the damn problems
Environmental movement has legacy resistance to nuclear energy and genetically modified food. But no resistance to synthetic biology which is way more radical then GM food.