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Shoot, I expected gremlins. I guess some flooded oil refineries as a substitute?
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How about a few in flames, as a freebie twofer?
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I don’t know where those photographs came from, but I know that oil wells, pipelines, and refineries have been sabotaged in the past by native activists, unionists, climate activists, and wars.

Eliminating oil doesn’t make the world safer. It’s just going to make it a lot colder and slower until we figure things out. And what we’ve already figured out, back when I was a child, but never managed to deal with correctly, was nuclear energy production.

So the world doesn’t get safer, it gets more technical and dangerous. Everything else we’re doing right now takes more energy in than it gives back out, and operates at a loss to the world, in order to prototype some new power systems that are on the whole proving kind of dicey.

But until we started testing those windmills we didn’t know that they were gonna have a very short service life compared to their construction cost, and were going to be very expensive in terms of maintenance and the amount of property they occupied.

Now that we have built a whole lot of them, the engineers know a whole lot more, and so when politicians starting demanding impossible things, the engineers have some documentation to prove their experience.

Each new technology goes through this teething phase. Early gasoline cars would be considered total death traps nowadays. There was a lot of engineering that went on to get the gas tank out of your face and under the backseat.

It’s never easy to tickle the tail of the dragon. It doesn’t matter which dragon it is. I remember when they wanted to put atomic reactors inside of cars.

Nobody could figure out how to keep people from opening up a sealed atomic reactor. Or stealing it.

Those terrorists wouldn’t have gone after Marty and Doc Brown. They could’ve picked up some platonium at any Chevy dealer.

Remember the Chrysler turbine car? Probably not. That was back in like 1961. They put jet turbines in passenger cars and sent them out for testing. The darn things always sounded like jet engines going down the road, so you can imagine how loud the world would be if everybody drove a turbine car. The other thing was that the exhaust was hot enough to melt the plastic off your bumper if you got in back of one.

Those are things we wanted to do, because they would’ve been very efficient in terms of energy. But engineering could not solve the practical problems of their existence.

In each case we have to look to better engineering, and security, because we just can’t throw away the baby with the bathwater.

Resources are too hard to come by. People are too hungry.
 
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Ulu said:
I don’t know where those photographs came from, but I know that oil wells, pipelines, and refineries have been sabotaged in the past by native activists, unionists, climate activists, and wars.

Eliminating oil doesn’t make the world safer. It’s just going to make it a lot colder and slower until we figure things out. And what we’ve already figured out, back when I was a child, but never managed to deal with correctly, was nuclear energy production.

So the world doesn’t get safer, it gets more technical and dangerous. Everything else we’re doing right now takes more energy in than it gives back out, and operates at a loss to the world, in order to prototype some new power systems that are on the whole proving kind of dicey.

But until we started testing those windmills we didn’t know that they were gonna have a very short service life compared to their construction cost, and were going to be very expensive in terms of maintenance and the amount of property they occupied.

Now that we have built a whole lot of them, the engineers know a whole lot more, and so when politicians starting demanding impossible things, the engineers have some documentation to prove their experience.

Each new technology goes through this teething phase. Early gasoline cars would be considered total death traps nowadays. There was a lot of engineering that went on to get the gas tank out of your face and under the backseat.

It’s never easy to tickle the tail of the dragon. It doesn’t matter which dragon it is. I remember when they wanted to put atomic reactors inside of cars.

Nobody could figure out how to keep people from opening up a sealed atomic reactor. Or stealing it.

Those terrorists wouldn’t have gone after Marty and Doc Brown. They could’ve picked up some platonium at any Chevy dealer.

Remember the Chrysler turbine car? Probably not. That was back in like 1961. They put jet turbines in passenger cars and sent them out for testing. The darn things always sounded like jet engines going down the road, so you can imagine how loud the world would be if everybody drove a turbine car. The other thing was that the exhaust was hot enough to melt the plastic off your bumper if you got in back of one.

Those are things we wanted to do, because they would’ve been very efficient in terms of energy. But engineering could not solve the practical problems of their existence.

In each case we have to look to better engineering, and security, because we just can’t throw away the baby with the bathwater.

Resources are too hard to come by. People are too hungry.
Click to expand...
The turbine Indy car attempt threw gravel and other debris out of the exhaust behind it.
 
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I’m looking at that video of people waiting in line to charge the cars, and you know they are going to be there for hours.

The electric car is like a beautiful woman, you fall in love with and take her home, only to find out that she has “issues” which blow the whole romance.

Everybody’s worried about the future like somehow we can have control of it. Human beings are not in control of the earth in any way. We are just along for the ride.

We don’t know for sure if electric cars or petroleum are going to destroy the planet or save it. Probably neither, but what we do know for absolutely certain is that earth will have more volcanoes, more earthquakes, more floods, more storms, and of course rocks falling from space will hit us again and again.

Every now and then one of the big planets will tickle something out of its orbit and it will fall towards the sun. We can reverse entropy on a small local scale, because human beings can feed energy into a system.

But we have no macroscopic powers over the universe. Exactly the opposite is true and always will be.

Science and engineering should proceed with all due speed, but we must never forget our place in the scale of things.

We haven’t even conquered the small engineering battles in this world. Go watch McMaster try to get out of this electric Porsche Taycan when the battery goes dead and the electric doors cannot be opened except by special emergency manipulations.

His emergency was just sitting in the car in the sun, with a glass roof, and the solar heat gain was starting to kill him. He could not open the door and step out.

But it takes time to die in a hot car, and he was able to yell for help, and they could eventually figure out the emergency door release . . . after pulling on the plastic door handle so hard in a panic, that he broke it.

In an emergengy, you don’t just pull the handle or push the button to get out of the Taycan, as you do every day in every car.

In an emergency you have to remember/do/look up some special emergency procedure to exit the car.

Imagine the car is filling with smoke and you cannot operate the electric doors and windows? If you’ve ever seen an electrical fire you know that smoke is dense, and also it is choking with toxic gas. Maybe you could last about 30 seconds.
 
Ulu said:
I don’t know where those photographs came from, but I know that oil wells, pipelines, and refineries have been sabotaged in the past by native activists, unionists, climate activists, and wars.

Eliminating oil doesn’t make the world safer. It’s just going to make it a lot colder and slower until we figure things out. And what we’ve already figured out, back when I was a child, but never managed to deal with correctly, was nuclear energy production.

So the world doesn’t get safer, it gets more technical and dangerous. Everything else we’re doing right now takes more energy in than it gives back out, and operates at a loss to the world, in order to prototype some new power systems that are on the whole proving kind of dicey.

But until we started testing those windmills we didn’t know that they were gonna have a very short service life compared to their construction cost, and were going to be very expensive in terms of maintenance and the amount of property they occupied.

Now that we have built a whole lot of them, the engineers know a whole lot more, and so when politicians starting demanding impossible things, the engineers have some documentation to prove their experience.

Each new technology goes through this teething phase. Early gasoline cars would be considered total death traps nowadays. There was a lot of engineering that went on to get the gas tank out of your face and under the backseat.

It’s never easy to tickle the tail of the dragon. It doesn’t matter which dragon it is. I remember when they wanted to put atomic reactors inside of cars.

Nobody could figure out how to keep people from opening up a sealed atomic reactor. Or stealing it.

Those terrorists wouldn’t have gone after Marty and Doc Brown. They could’ve picked up some platonium at any Chevy dealer.

Remember the Chrysler turbine car? Probably not. That was back in like 1961. They put jet turbines in passenger cars and sent them out for testing. The darn things always sounded like jet engines going down the road, so you can imagine how loud the world would be if everybody drove a turbine car. The other thing was that the exhaust was hot enough to melt the plastic off your bumper if you got in back of one.

Those are things we wanted to do, because they would’ve been very efficient in terms of energy. But engineering could not solve the practical problems of their existence.

In each case we have to look to better engineering, and security, because we just can’t throw away the baby with the bathwater.

Resources are too hard to come by. People are too hungry.
Click to expand...
This is a delicate topic, unfortunately drained with politics, especially at this moment. I am not going into politics about it.

I personally am having trust issues about the energy/climate narrative since knowing a thing or two about agriculture. And certain institutions seem to grab a negative point about a topic and magnify it for their own means.

Due to the distortion I am currently avoiding the energy debate.

But I do like to have a 'simple' life. Have a no-dig vegetable garden, do most things by bicycle and get meat/vegetable products at local farmers.


Ulu said:
Science and engineering should proceed with all due speed, but we must never forget our place in the scale of things.
Click to expand...
I do wonder about this sometimes. I think it depends on which field and with which motivation.
There is a lot of knowledge regarding the complexity of nature which science does not seem to comprehend. Science is quite reductionistic and has trouble with holistic systems.

But the answers are never this or that :thumbsup:
 
Politics is like those astroids waiting to crash into the earth. You know it’s gonna happen. You can’t waste your life on it.

But I’m not a politician, so I don’t believe that everything is solved by politics and diplomacy. I’m an engineer and I believe that all our problems are solved by Engineering. Or not! (Porsche door handle!)

We’ve had a great number of engineering failures whose true magnitude did not become evident until forensic examination. In the early days of pressurized flight, windows exploded out of jet airliners, and we didn’t know why.

It took a lot of study to understand the issues of the DeHavelin Comet.

“…investigators at the RAE were able to conclude that the crash of G-ALYP had been due to failure of the pressure cabin at the forward ADF window in the roof. This window was one of two apertures for the aerials of an electronic navigation system in which opaque fibreglass panels took the place of the window glass. The failure was a result of metal fatigue caused by the repeated pressurisation and de-pressurisation of the aircraft cabin. Another fact was that the supports around the windows were riveted, not glued, as the original specifications for the aircraft had called for. The problem was exacerbated by the punch rivet construction technique employed. Unlike drill riveting, the imperfect nature of the hole created by punch riveting caused manufacturing defect cracks…”

It took a lot of testing ,and they destroyed a full-size airliner in the process of figuring out, why these most advanced planes were falling from the sky.
 
By the way, I don’t wanna blame the crashes on any one engineer or group.

The constructors modified the original design slightly, not knowing what effect that was going to have in the end. They punched holes where holes should not have been. So the manufacturing engineers bear a good part of this burden, even though I’m sure that the application and product engineers signed off on the mods.

The politicians at BOAC tried to soft-pedal all this, but the engineers went fullbore on the recovery & testing.

I didn’t publish all the grizzly details of how people died in the last crash, before they pulled the ticket on the Comet jet.

It took four crashes and probably in excess of 100 fatalities to forever ground the worlds sleekest and most advanced airliners.

It is most fortunate that we took the trouble to find out why and how. This has definitely saved thousands of people from future defects in aircraft design and manufacture.
 
I’m not sure how he cracks the water to make hydrogen. Most of those things have a problem with creating enough gas on demand without having to compress and store it. Also the hydrogen generators tend to be explosion hazards, but I haven’t looked into his particular process. I know a lot of people have tried to do this.
 
I think they’ve been trying to build a practical fuel cell for every day use in vehicles but it’s proving way too expensive to make one which provides the necessary power. Plus they tend to produce a lot of gases that we don’t want to deal with.

I remember reading years ago that someone was going to build a fuel cell that ran on ordinary gasoline, so we wouldn’t have to have new infrastructure.

Then something happened (?) and that all disappeared. Might have something to do with the expected rising cost of petroleum. Maybe it was just someone’s pipe dream.
 
Ulu said:
I think they’ve been trying to build a practical fuel cell for every day use in vehicles but it’s proving way too expensive to make one which provides the necessary power. Plus they tend to produce a lot of gases that we don’t want to deal with.
Click to expand...
We use hydrogen fuel cells to power all the heavy lifting equipment at the warehouse. I could lift a car and put it on the roof with my truck. The exhaust is pure clean water.
 
MattiThundrrr said:
We use hydrogen fuel cells to power all the heavy lifting equipment at the warehouse. I could lift a car and put it on the roof with my truck. The exhaust is pure clean water.
Click to expand...
Toyota’s been talking about hydrogen fuel cells for a long time now. Good luck getting them certified in the state of California without paying $1 billion.

The big problem is that you can’t buy hydrogen at the local store, but you can buy gasoline everywhere. That’s what made the gasoline powered fuel cell attractive as an idea.

Evidently it’s not a practical one so far.

Also the production of gases inside a fuel cell can cause explosions. Do you remember the Apollo 13 where the fuel cell exploded in outer space?

If I understand correctly, it is the intermediate chemical reactions in the fuel cell are very dangerous and need to be well-contained.

My concern is always been that hydrogen is so tiny. It leaks through everything. Did you ever read about the enormous task of making a hydrogen dirigible? What you had to do to keep the hydrogen gas from leaking out?

Remember the Hindenberg?

In my mind, the key to using hydrogen in a car has always been to be able to produce as much as you need, as you need it, but not any more than that, and to not actually store excess hydrogen on the vehicle.

This was a problem with early steam cars. You could only store so much steam on board at one time and you could exhaust it quickly before you had the time to make more.

Then Doble invented the “flash” boiler car, which could make as much steam as it needed, as it needed it. The Stanley was never really a practical steam car, although it was very fast for short distances. The Doble was.

I think this is the key to having a practical hydrogen car: You need a “flash” generator that can make as much hydrogen as the car can use, continuously, but no more than that.

I do not think that driving around on the public streets with thousands of cars carrying tanks of compressed hydrogen is very safe, compared to use in an industrial environment.

Go read the rules for transportation of compressed gases if you ever have trouble getting to sleep at night.
 
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