Scuttlebutt

The future of energy

<click here to skip the equations and go straight to the upshot>

* The energy to vault one kilogram of something into orbit around the sun:
about 1500 watt-hours

(Determined by the kinetic energy equation, 1/2 mass * velocity squared, applied to the earth’s escape velocity of 11.2 kilometers/second. Wolfram alpha did my computation.)

* The energy produced by one kilogram of the new thin-film solar cells: 400 watts.

* The amount of time clouds, night, etc. obscure sunlight for a solar cell in orbit: approximately 0%.

* The amount of time a thin film solar cell would need to pay back the energy to put it into orbit, assuming a 1% efficiency of the launch mechanism: 375 hours, or about two weeks.

* The amount of solar energy reaching earth’s orbit: about 1300 watts/square meter.

* Thin film solar cell efficiency: over 15%

* The area available at the distance of earth’s orbit for solar cells (omitting light that actually hits earth): 2.8 * 10^23 square meters

The upshot

* The energy available from orbital thin film solar cells: 15% * 1300 watts/m^2 * 2.8 * 10^23 m^2 = 5 * 10^16 gigawatts (That’s 50 million billion gigawatts, or about 7 million gigawatts per person on earth.)

Of course, the limiting factor there is the mass available to make thin film:

The mass of the earth:  6 * 10^24 kilograms

The mass of the proposed solar cell array enveloping the sun: 5 * 10^16 gigawatts / 400 watts per kilogram= 1.25 * 10^23 kilograms

So it would require about 1/60th the mass of the earth to build the system, assuming that 1/60th of the earth was made of suitable stuff for making high yield thin film solar cells.  It is also ignoring maintenance, mass of delivery vehicles, etc.

On the other hand, it’s also not assuming any advances from today’s technology, and I was quite conservative on the efficiencies used in the equations.

That should hold us until we figure out how to convert matter directly into energy (or convert matter directly into antimatter, which is essentially the same thing).

Visit Aviation Consumer Protection Home Page from the US Department Of Transportation.  You have to click the “most recent report” link, then click the top “PDF Version” link in the Reports Issued in 2009 section.

Your reward for navigating their Byzantine site is tables ranking US air carriers by customer complaints, on-time percentage, etc.  If your carrier doesn’t even show up in the list, you’re screwed. (Note that Delta doesn’t show up in ANY of the lists.)

Examples (data from November 2009):

Another old draft that I never posted…

My friend Lee Ann sent me a link to this, and I thought “this is just the kind of crap my readers like!” (Hello to both of you!).

It’s a species of frog found in Indonesia that has no lungs – it lives in oxygen rich waters, and it just breathes through its skin.

This kid is playing DDR on some ludicrously high level while juggling. Must see to believe.

Links removed – the site has been taken over by pornography (and it’s not even good pornography). The video name is Qhrome-SoDeep0-3085.wmv if you want to try to search for it.

This beautiful graphic shows where your tax dollars go, by department and then by program within the department. This size of the circles is proportional to the dollars spent.

Too bad he didn’t show the deficit and debt for comparison. Of course, I guess the debt would pretty much crowd everything else off the chart.

This freaky face-stretching Flash app shows you what a face looks like when various muscles are contracted. The image here is from when the Frontalis (forehead muscles) are contracted. If you can figure out how to contract multiple muscles at once on the app, please post a comment.

Cell Biology Animation is a great little site if you can stomach flash. He has sterograms of amino acids, animated stereograms of deoxyribose-5-phosphate (a component of DNA), super-duper close up animations of mitochondria, and tons of other neat little microbiological tricks up his sleeve.

Neat-o!

Google Video is the shit.

I guess this fellow has a problem with Macs. He isn’t afraid to share. It’s all done in the style of a Mac advertisement, and it amuseth me greatly.

Sorry to post so much stuff that requires sound today. But you shouldn’t miss this…