Posted on 02/09/2017 7:44:32 AM PST by rktman
You are correct! I call it earth’s blood. I also think it functions like a hidraulic shock absorber, cusioning shifting land, and perhaps causing shifts like magma does. Its hard to say how long it takes to make oil in the earth, but as long as it isn’t used up faster than it can be made, it will last a long time. It’s renewable.
A lot, by any measure.
Some bible theologians push back to support a model that entailed incurring “six 24-hour days” in a physical universe. This gets into technicalities which I, a crazy evangelical, have not been persuaded are absolutely necessary. For God qua creator and the universe being created to carry on in different time frames is a quite plausible theory by virtue of the general relativity we know. Who’s keeping score in this game, and where, is a crucial question.
I tend to side with the old earth creationist camp for this reason. That makes the earth no less special. It also doesn’t help any sane mathematical model support a theory of self sustained evolution. It also means we do not need to sweep an ancient celestial history, which counterbalances such things as our modern global warmism craze, under the rug.
Peak demand for electricity is 5pm.
You’ll need a great big battery to get through the night...
which I called a fried from the gecko
lizard meat has its uses...
Oh my yes... like I said earlier, the idea of “doomed” is vastly exaggerated. Some people WANT this. Grant it to them. But eagle-chopping is really bad form. (I don’t think the older style of windmill, such as we see in pictures of Dutch countryside, had this problem. Modern long bladed turbines do.)
That’s one theory. Of course coal deposits seem to indicate otherwise. In any case, the hydrocarbon is nature’s battery, it is how the sun’s energy is converted and stored. So yes, I have a solar powered car. ;)
I remember aerogel being mentioned.discussed during my Shuttle days. Wasn’t quite perfected enough at the time.
Dang erf is always tossin’ a monkey wrench in to things.
I would believe it fairer to ascribe the shock absorber role to the magma, which is hot enough that oil in contact with it would decompose even with no oxygen available. The oil we know of would exist in pools in cooler regions of the earth’s crust, closer to the surface than is the magma. Not a literally infinite amount, but perhaps lots, lots more than anybody has dreamed of. Well enough to tide humanity over until the Lord ends history.
In your experience, what’s the break-even period for a home solar installation? How much longer would that break-even period be if we had “real” interest rates instead of the current fairyland, Fed-depressed, zero interest rates?
Is this stuff priced like gold? Does it have safety issues for architectural use? It would seem to me people would be clamoring for it. There would be some kind of practical limit, since literally airtight buildings have proven undesirable, and ventilation must be purposely added to buildings that are near-airtight in order to render them safely and comfortably habitable.
But you're right, by the time we might have exhausted our supply of fossil fuel, we'll have moved on to other more efficient alternatives.
They won't be mass-produced solar or wind. Excellent ideas on an individual size, but they don't scale up well. The sooner we get over them, the sooner we can start thinking out of the box and looking for other sources. Tidal or wave energy strikes me as a likely possibility.
Heck, it's not as sexy as solar or wind power, but investing Billions into revamping our infrastructure (instead of flushing it on useless pet political projects....) would recoup a massive amount of energy and extend the current life of our current grid.
But I'm just an electrical engineer, not a politician, so I'm not qualified to discuss such things....
I have read some of that, and it is plausible.
Six days from the viewpoint of a creator could easily be billions of years from our perspective.
____________
I do not see how survival is possible for any poor bird that is unfortunate enough to attempt flight through a wind farm. These groupings are tragic.
https://www.wind-watch.org/faq-size.php
Excerpt:
The widely used GE 1.5-megawatt model, for example, consists of 116-ft blades atop a 212-ft tower for a total height of 328 feet. The blades sweep a vertical airspace of just under an acre.
The 1.8-megawatt Vestas V90 from Denmark has 148-ft blades (sweeping more than 1.5 acres) on a 262-ft tower, totaling 410 feet.
Another model being seen more in the U.S. is the 2-megawatt Gamesa G87 from Spain, with 143-ft blades (just under 1.5 acres) on a 256-ft tower, totaling 399 feet
It seems that the hydrophilic properties are the chief problem to overcome in a cost effective and non reactive manner.
How is that coming on silica based or carbon based materials?
The works of the Lord are awesome by any measure, and that could well include the ability to, in essence, whip around the forming globe at such speed (the bible speaks of hovering or brooding) that general relativity would kick in. While the Lord can’t lie, it’s certainly possible for humans to misunderstand. The question didn’t come up at a scientific level until there was such a thing as science, and science began as a means of studying the glories of God in the creation. Only later was it pressed into a warped service of self-justifying atheistic worldviews, and we saw where that can go when we beheld the Al Gore scam. It stops being even good science, since good science depends on honesty and integrity.
Yes, of course include nuclear and remove some regulations (except where they apply to engineering safety).
How about manufacturing those windmills and solar arrays and batteries? Steel and glass - pretty much completely fossil there. How about transporting the finished product? Oops! More fossil!
My point is that alt-energy cannot even power enough industry to sustain its own operation. It cannot this create any excess power beyond that which it consumes.
For what it’s worth...
Of all the planets in the solar system other than Earth, Mars has arguably the greatest potential for life, either extinct or extant. It resembles Earth in so many ways: its formation process, its early climate history, its reservoirs of water, its volcanoes and other geologic processes. Microorganisms would fit right in. Another planetary body, Saturn’s largest moon Titan, also routinely comes up in discussions of extraterrestrial biology. In its primordial past, Titan possessed conditions conducive to the formation of molecular precursors of life, and some scientists believe it may have been alive then and might even be alive now.
To add intrigue to these possibilities, astronomers studying both these worlds have detected a gas that is often associated with living things: methane. It exists in small but significant quantities on Mars, and Titan is literally awash with it. A biological source is at least as plausible as a geologic one, for Mars if not for Titan. Either explanation would be fascinating in its own way, revealing either that we are not alone in the universe or that both Mars and Titan harbor large underground bodies of water together with unexpected levels of geochemical activity. Understanding the origin and fate of methane on these bodies will provide crucial clues to the processes that shape the formation, evolution and habitability of terrestrial worlds in this solar system and possibly in others.
Methane (CH4) is abundant on the giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—where it was the product of chemical processing of primordial solar nebula material. On Earth, though, methane is special. Of the 1,750 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) of methane in Earth’s atmosphere, 90 to 95 percent is biological in origin. Grass-eating ungulates such as cows, goats and yaks belch out one fifth of the annual global methane release; the gas is a metabolic by-product of the bacteria in their guts. Other significant sources include termites, rice paddies, swamps, leakage of natural gas (itself a result of past life) and photosynthetic plants [see “Methane, Plants and Climate Change,” by Frank Keppler and Thomas Röckmann; Scientific American, February 2007].
Volcanoes contribute less than 0.2 percent of the total methane budget on Earth, and even they may simply be venting methane produced by organisms in the past. Abiotic sources such as industrial processes are comparatively minor. Thus, detection of methane on another Earth-like object naturally raises the prospect of life on that body.
In the Air
That is what happened with Mars in 2003 and 2004, when three independent groups of scientists announced the discovery of methane in the atmosphere of that planet. Using a high-resolution spectrograph at the Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii and at the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, a team led by Michael Mumma of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center detected methane concentrations in excess of 250 ppbv, varying over the planet and perhaps over time.
Vittorio Formisano of the Institute of Physics and Interplanetary Science in Rome and his colleagues (including me) analyzed thousands of infrared spectra collected by the Mars Express orbiter. We found methane to be much less abundant, ranging from zero to about 35 ppbv, with a planetary average of approximately 10 ppbv. Finally, Vladimir Krasnopolsky of the Catholic University of America and his colleagues, using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, measured a planetary average of about 10 ppbv. They could not determine the variation over the planet because of poor signal and spatial resolution.
Mumma’s team is now reanalyzing its data to try to determine why its value is the outlier. For now, I will take the 10 ppbv value as the most likely. It corresponds to a concentration of methane (in molecules per unit volume) that is only 40 millionths of the concentration in Earth’s atmosphere. Nevertheless, even the barest presence of the gas demands an explanation.
Although astronomers detected methane on Titan as early as 1944, it was only the additional discovery of nitrogen 36 years later that generated the immense interest in this cold and distant moon [see “Titan,” by Tobias Owen; Scientific American, February 1982]. Nitrogen is a key constituent of biological molecules such as amino acids and nucleic acids. A body with a nitrogen-methane atmosphere, where the ground-level pressure is one and a half times that of our home planet, may have the right ingredients for molecular precursors of life and, some have speculated, even life itself to form.
Methane plays a central, controlling role in maintaining Titan’s thick nitrogen atmosphere. It is the source of hydrocarbon hazes, which absorb solar infrared radiation and warm the stratosphere by approximately 100 degrees Celsius, and of hydrogen, whose molecular collisions result in a 20-degree warming in the troposphere. If the methane ever ran out, temperatures would drop, nitrogen gas would condense into liquid droplets and the atmosphere would collapse. Titan’s special character would change forever. Its smog and clouds would dissipate. The methane rain that seems to have carved its surface would stop. Lakes, puddles and streams would dry up. And, with its veil lifted, Titan’s stark surface would lay bare and readily accessible to telescopes on Earth. Titan would lose its mystique and turn into just another satellite with thin air.
could it be that methane on Mars and Titan has a biological origin, as on Earth, or does it have another explanation, such as volcanoes or impacts of comets and meteorites? Our understanding of geophysical, chemical and biological processes has helped narrow the field of possible sources on Mars, and many of the same arguments apply to Titan as well. ...”
continued...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/methane-on-mars-titan/
Eco crap simply cannot meet the demand.
That simple statement says it all, yet it doesn’t sink in.
Eco can meet about 10-15% of the demand.
So if we eliminated fossil fuels, it’d be comparable to a monthly power outage that lasted about 25 days.
People squawk when it’s out more than 24 hours. Even in those circumstances, you have some energy available, namely via generators and vehicles.
So, unlike the typical short term power outage, for 25 days you would have absolutely nothing.
Can’t drive to the grocery store - even if your electric car has charge, what about the trucks needed to deliver food?
Can’t use public transportation. No communications either.
Out would really be OUT!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.