The inventor's burden
(Filed: 24/02/2004)
Justin Marozzi reviews Conquerors of Time by Trevor Fishlock
Few things in life are as satisfying as knocking a Jeremiah off his perch. One of the most entertaining aspects of Trevor Fishlock's beautifully written study of the technological developments which propelled and were propelled by exploration is the parade of doomsayers whose predictions about the limits to invention represent an object lesson in when to keep one's mouth shut.
Thus Reverend Dr Dionysius Lardner in 1835, dismissing the prospect of a transatlantic crossing by steamship: "As to the project announced in the newspapers of making the voyage directly from New York to Liverpool . . . they might as well talk of making a voyage to the moon."
The venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica was no more optimistic about the potential of electricity. There had been talk of using it to convey secret intelligence, it reported in 1824, but this was "not likely ever to become practically useful". Even the Admiralty, scourge of imperial Britain's foes across the oceans, could get it wrong. "There is no greater fallacy than to suppose that ships can be navigated on long voyages without masts and sails," the Navy's instruction book warned in 1862.
If ever there was a doubt about it, Conquerors of Time shows why we will always be captivated by the one eccentric visionary who makes things happen rather than the 100 sensible accountants who say they cannot. It is to this free-wheeling cast of adventurers and entrepreneurs, scientists and crooks that we owe the discoveries which have transformed our lives.
Without the maniacal drive of Trevor Williams, for example, a provincial solicitor in Wales, the Admiralty might never have hit on copper-bottoming its ships. For centuries their hulls had been ravaged by the warm-water shipworm Teredo navalis. Then along came Williams on a one-man mission to become the Copper King and the Admiralty never looked back.
Mastery of the seas, of course, was Britain's great challenge and her destiny. Much as France and other nations constituted her enemies, disease was a far greater obstacle to the imperial adventure. What use sailing around the world (even in copper-bottomed vessels) to take possession of new lands if sailors and settlers alike were wiped out before they got there by scurvy, smallpox, typhus and yellow fever?
The Navy's new recruits shuddered at tales of Admiral Hosier's Caribbean expedition of 1726, in which 4,000 of the 4,750 sailors were felled by fever. The Napoleonic wars had their fair share of death at sea, but only one in 12 was killed in combat. In India and West Africa, malaria was the great terror for the colonial class as the deadly Anopheles mosquito fed on the empire's finest. In time, science and exploration - the travelling botanist Joseph Banks spanned the divide - together provided the answers. What better example than the British botanists who combed the treacherous South American forests in the 1850s looking for cinchona bark, the vital ingredient of quinine? One by one the most fatal diseases were tamed.
One of Fishlock's greatest strengths is his writing on the sea, placing him in a fine tradition of British authors. Fact-filled and highly evocative, his prose recounts the early forays across the high seas and the abject conditions of the men who staked their lives on these pioneering crossings.
His painful researches - too vivid, perhaps for more faint-hearted readers - prove what an extraordinarily disgusting olfactory experience travel by sea was for the vast majority. With cramped decks swamped in vomit, excrement and rotting straw, heaving with unwashed, disease-ridden bodies, steerage was not a happy business.
Although Conquerors of Time takes in developments across the Atlantic (canals, railroads, Wells Fargo) and in Australia (the telegraph, exploration of the interior and the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition) for the most part this is a splendidly British affair. Those of an unfriendly disposition towards the empire will doubtless scoff at this celebration of the science which made it possible, but the sheer romance of the story is irresistible.
Fishlock roves so widely that at times it can be difficult to keep up with him as, magpie-like, he fastens on one subject before quickly flying off to another and then another. But what the book may lose in terms of structural integrity it gains in its joyful, wild eclecticism and in the quiet elegance of the writing.
So beware all those who knock the new technologies of the modern age. There may be some undesirable consequences attendant on them, but what can resist the relentless human quest for progress? The Duke of Wellington was unmoved by railways. They would only "encourage the lower classes to move about". He got away with it lightly. What would he have made of Ryanair and Easyjet?
Justin Marozzi's 'Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World' will be published by HarperCollins in August.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/02/22/bofis22.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/02/22/bomain.html(Full Article)
http://www.asi.org/adb/02/09/he3-intro.html The supply
Some He3 is available on Earth. It is a by-product of the maintenance of nuclear weapons, which would supply us with about 300 kg of He3 and could continue to produce about 15 kg per year. The total supply in the U.S. strategic reserves of helium is about 29 kg, and another 187 kg is mixed up with the natural gas we have stored; these sources are not renewable at any significant rate.
In their 1988 paper, Kulcinski, et al. (see ref note below), estimate a total of 1,100,000 metric tonnes of He3 have been deposited by the solar wind in the lunar regolith. Since the regolith has been stirred up by collisions with meteorites, we'll probably find He3 down to depths of several meters.
The highest concentrations are in the lunar maria; about half the He3 is deposited in the 20% of the lunar surface covered by the maria.
To extract He3 from the lunar soil, we heat the dust to about 600 degrees C.
We get most of the other volatiles out at the same time, so we'll be heating up the rocks anyway. (To get the oxgyen out, we'll turn up the furnace to about 900 deg C and do some other nasty stuff; but that's a different story.)
The Energy
That 1 million metric tonnes of He3, reacted with deuterium, would generate about 20,000 terrawatt-years of thermal energy. The units alone are awesome: a terrawatt-year is one trillion (10 to 12th power) watt-years. To put this into perspective, one 100-watt light bulb will use 100 watt-years of energy in one year.
That's about 10 times the energy we could get from mining all the fossil fuels on Earth, without the smog and acid rain. If we torched all our uranium in liquid metal fast breeder reactors, we could generate about half this much energy, and have some interesting times storing the waste.
The Value
About 25 tonnes of He3 would power the United States for 1 year at our current rate of energy consumption. To put it in perspective: that's about the weight of a fully loaded railroad box car, or a maximum Space Shuttle payload.
To assign an economic value, suppose we assume He3 would replace the fuels the United States currently buys to generate electricity. We still have all those power generating plants and distribution network, so we can't use how much we pay for electricity. As a replacement for that fuel, that 25-tonne load of He3 would worth on the order of $75 billion today, or $3 billion per tonne.
The Payoff
A guess is the best we can do. Let's suppose that by the time we're slinging tanks of He3 off the moon, the world-wide demand is 100 tonnes of the stuff a year, and people are happy to pay $3 billion per tonne. That gives us gross revenues of $300 billion a year.
To put that number in perspective: Ignoring the cost of money and taxes and whatnot, that rate of income would launch a moon shot like our reference mission every day for the next 10,000 years. (At which point, we will have used up all the helium-3 on the moon and had better start thinking about something else.)