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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (135453)	6/3/2004 1:25:10 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

If The Prize isn't particularly insightful, why read it? Life is too short to read bad books.

To: carranza2 who wrote (135453)	6/3/2004 2:43:21 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

C2, regarding "The Prize", I was far too busy to read it [or much of anything that I didn't need to read to do what I was doing]. While enmeshed in doing the Big Oil thing, I was quite busy enough without reading about what I was doing and what I hoped Big Oil and Big Governments would do about oil issues such as pollution and technology development. It's more interesting and useful to be making history than reading about the history that has been made. I still haven't read "The Prize". I've dabbled through it, filling in some details, not really getting a big picture, which I already had from 16 years of being in oil and generally being interested for a lot longer than that [in geopolitical things]. History has gone. I've never been much interested in history. The future is what is coming and what we can change to what we want. I prefer to drive looking out the front rather than in the rear view mirror. But I'd recommend "The Prize" for historical perspective. <I want to examine the reasoning so I can think about some investments in the oil industry since the oleaginous and methanical markets seem to be able to to provide future investment opportunities on the scale that wireless did last century. > I'm obsessed by cyberspace [via CDMA mostly] so oil is of little interest to me these days. But a thing I dreamed of was a zeolite process from gas to gasoline in a single step. That would be the Mother Lode, Phlogiston, Philosopher's Stone and Rosetta Stone rolled into one. There's a LOT of methane. Polymerizing it into liquid phase would be useful. Another idea is good old fusion, especially if a cold fusion process could be found. There was the con-fusion process of Stanley Pons and Marty Fleischman amazon.com How it's supposed to work: essayworld.com I actually think that making super-hot monster fusion systems seems a lot of hard work. I have the advantage of ignorance, so don't see a problem with just sneaking a couple of hydrogen nuclei up on each other, a bit like match-making isn't always easy and the result isn't always stable but plenty of marriages and the resulting emotions are as powerful as a law of nature such as gravity. There's normal garden variety hydrogen [made by dissolving zinc in acid to produce explosive gas - useful for children to have fun with], there's deuterium and tritium and maybe quaterium? I'm sure there must be some tricks to get them to hook up on a voluntary basis. A bit like Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes fame, doesn't seem likely to be married one day [nor Bart of the Simpsons]. Maybe hydrogen just needs a bit of aging, growth hormone and testosterone [of the particle physics equivalent]. Anyway, there's also photovoltaics. BP is big on that. bpsolar.com I like that one. There is a LOT of silicon and a LOT of desert and a LOT of sun. Photovoltaics set an upper limit on carbon price, and the cost of photovoltaics continues to reduce as economies of scale and technology develop. Also, making cellulose into liquid fuels would be a good trick. There are vast quantities of cellulose [plants] going to waste as crops are harvested. AgriGenesis, which is a new company run by an old university friend, Peter Lee, is on the case: agrigenesis.co.nz That also puts a limit on crude oil prices. I like the idea of fuel cells, but platinum and the technology are too expensive [I think, but maybe not]. I like superconductors and electronically and photonically controlled, magnetically levitated and linear motor propelled, flying carriages. There's no shortage of nitrogen for cooling. Having people 'drive' industrial revolution internal combustion engines on 'freeways' is absurd. And people are unfit for such a thing, with reaction times much slower than a microsecond, attention spans held together by Ritalin, emotions under control with Prozac and they lose their way easily. Computers don't lose attention, they react fast, they communicate instantly, they don't get road rage and with gpsOne, they can always know where they are and where to go. People have trouble talking on a cellphone and driving their huge SUVs simultaneously; computers can do both easily, AND chew gum while driving a straight line. Efficiency on existing roads could be phenomenally improved by handing the driving job to cyberspace to do. Travel by land would replace aircraft. Partial vacuum tubes would make ground travel faster than air travel and a lot safer. Hop in the pipe in the superconductor car and zip across to New York from Los Angeles at 1000 kph. No airport hassles, delays and queues, no crashing from 10 km high, and less drag in a cheap little carriage. China won't need oil and millions of SUVs and highways, just tubes. Photovoltaics could cover the tube to keep the sun off. That's a start, Mq PS: I also think there must be an easy way to get a proton off mercury, to make gold and big profits. Or, better still, remove two and get platinum for huge profits. Or, drool, remove 4 protons to turn cheap lead into platinum. Make a stream of anti-protons and just drop them in! Bingo, energy out and protons obliterated and platinum, gold and profits formed. Easy peasy!