Moving civilization forward

As we continue to rethink the way forward (with Solar system colonisation and Earth transformation in mind as we exorcise the cheerless ghost of Malthus), the possibilities posed by nuke rockets are well worth pondering: >>By Jeremy Hsu [Space dot com] March 05, 2010 Future Mars outposts or colonies may seem more distant than ever with NASA’s exploration plans in flux, but the rocket technology that could someday propel a human mission to the red planet in as little as 40 days may already exist. A company founded by former NASA astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz has been developing a new rocket engine that draws upon electric power and magnetic fields to channel superheated plasma out the back. That stream of plasma Read More ›

The C18 rediscovery/ re-invention of concrete . . . it had apparently been made by the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians [–> earlier, the Nabataeans] (and many natural, volcanic or sedimentary rocks are concrete-like) . . . opened up a world of new building possibilities; especially, when it is reinforced by steel. As, we can see all around us. But, concrete here uses a high energy process based on limestone, so how can we break through such barriers for the Moon or Mars? And, how could this be relevant to our home world, Earth? We could look at bones and teeth. For: >>The minerals found in human teeth and bones that give them their hardness and strength belong to a group Read More ›

Nikolai Kondratiev was a Russian economist in the 1930’s who was shot by Stalin on September 17, 1938, because he had the integrity and courage to say the economic crisis of that decade, on statistical evidence, was largely a generation(s) length cyclical oscillation; not the Crisis of Capitalism leading to global Socialist Revolution that Marxist theory as understood by Stalin demanded. (Echoes in current debates on trends vs oscillations in climate trends etc are not coincidental. [Note, climate, technically, is a 30+ year moving average of weather.]) Joseph Schumpeter picked up his thought, and there has been a (somewhat marginalised/ “misunderestimated”) school of thinking on long waves across time. One aspect of that, has been a focus on how key Read More ›

Our civilisation is haunted by the ghost of the Rev. Thomas Malthus. His core vision of resource exhaustion and population crashes haunts our imaginations. As BBC profiles in brief: Malthus’ most well known work ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ was published in 1798, although he was the author of many pamphlets and other longer tracts including ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent’ (1815) and ‘Principles of Political Economy’ (1820). The main tenets of his argument were radically opposed to current thinking at the time. He argued that increases in population would eventually diminish the ability of the world to feed itself and based this conclusion on the thesis that populations expand in such a way Read More ›

This video summarises a direct, molten salt based electro-reduction process for metals, especially Titanium: (Titanium, of course, is a rather abundant but hard to win “super-metal.” See Wiki here for a more detailed summary. The process extends to other metals and of course turns on having abundant electrical energy.) Let me add an illustration of the electrolytic cell: . . . with a broader overview, 2004: . . . nb here on universality, pardon the resolution, red — already in kg q’ties by 2004, blue achieved, grey, suitable . . . observe esp. not only Fe, Al etc but Si, Ge, Ga [not As though], W [= Tungsten, aka Wolfram], U, Th, Pu, as well as the rare earths that Read More ›