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Day to day business? We've been around for what? like 200,000 years? If it was super duper simple we would have been doing it 100,000 years ago. Who knows, we may have thousands of years before we are able to really figure it out, we may never figure it out. I think science fiction narratives in pop culture can give us a false sense of reality.
Wow civilization itself is less than 10,000 years old. But you may well be left over from that 200,000 year old guy. What seems like science fiction to you is just high school science to many.
Wow civilization itself is less than 10,000 years old. But you may well be left over from that 200,000 year old guy. What seems like science fiction to you is just high school science to many.
High school science? You're delusional
If the human species took 190,000 years just to arrive at civilization what makes you think we can just solve the energy problem overnight? Heck, If civilization is 10,000 years old why didn't we figure this out 5,000 years ago?
Modern humans are no more intelligent than we were 150,000 years ago. Maybe they were even smarter than us...Our collective knowledge may be much larger but we are not more intelligent.
If the human species took 190,000 years just to arrive at civilization what makes you think we can just solve the energy problem overnight? Heck, If civilization is 10,000 years old why didn't we figure this out 5,000 years ago?
Modern humans are no more intelligent than we were 150,000 years ago. Maybe they were even smarter than us...Our collective knowledge may be much larger but we are not more intelligent.
The fundamental physics challenges have been solved for 50-100 years. All we are working on is cost reduction. Right now new solar and wind are cost competitive with overall grid power. That cost will continue to drop. Most of the new electrical generation capacity being installed in the US is renewable.
There's no doubt in my mind that Lucy was a bit brighter than some posters on this board. Those of us with engineering degrees benefit from education unavailable to Lucy.
IMO,
They that choose alternative energy methods do 2 things positive.
1. make their own power and some even push their surplus into the grid for other to use.
2. some of them are off the grid no longer drawing any thing from it.
If you are doing neither you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
If the human species took 190,000 years just to arrive at civilization what makes you think we can just solve the energy problem overnight? Heck, If civilization is 10,000 years old why didn't we figure this out 5,000 years ago?
Modern humans are no more intelligent than we were 150,000 years ago. Maybe they were even smarter than us...Our collective knowledge may be much larger but we are not more intelligent.
The progress we've made in the last 150 years is truly astonishing.. once the ball got rolling and we hit the industrial revolution, things just took off.. then you introduce the computer chip.. we will solve the energy problem within 100 years, I'm convinced of that.
Will we be evolved enough as a species to use this technology to better ourselves? We still have these very animistic primitive drives within us that lead man to self destructive behaviors. The next sort of breakthrough would be able to re-sequence genes on the fly using an inject-able solution though that could backfire on itself too... or we could breed out the really self destructive parts of our psyche in the womb via in vitro fertilization... even the most advanced cultures have their disruptive elements due to our genetics, and psychopaths with a lust for power will continue to find ways to get that power no matter how advanced we get... without genetic engineering these destructive traits will literally take thousands of years to breed out of our genetic makeup.. even with optimal cultural conditioning. Can we make it through the next 500 years without destroying ourselves or sending ourselves back to the stone ages?
We could install enough wind power in places nobody would ever see the windmills to power half our needs.. it would be extraordinarily expensive to do but it could be done. If the tax credit on wind energy is kept in place, steady progress will be made, and I'm not convinced there's any threat to any species from hitting them.. they will adapt to avoid them. Even if they don't, the native range of many birds like the bald eagle is massive, in areas where there will never be wind power. Even if we increased wind capacity by 100X from current levels, the relative landmass it would take up compared to where birds migrate would be well under 1%. No bird species is going extinct from hitting windmills.
If you've never lived in the great plains you can't appreciate how barren it is, and how windy it gets. I live in eastern South Dakota and the hundreds of windmills within 20-30 miles don't bug me one bit. The western half of these states like Nebraska you're talking about no towns of any size for 100+ miles.. nothing over 20,000 people if you even find a town that large. hundreds of square miles of ranchland, too hilly for crop farming. In South Dakota you've got Sioux Falls, Brookings, Watertown, Aberdeen, Pierre, Mitchell, and Rapid City, and that's pretty much it for "cities" meaning anything over 10K people... and not much in the way of Suburbs except in Sioux Falls.. the rest of the really small farmer towns are stable if they manage 5,000 people, otherwise they are in decline if they're not 5-10 miles from one of the above mentioned cities and there's a lot of "ghost towns" in the great plains.
One of the problems however is getting that power from the source to everyone else.. lack of powerlines to transmit all this power has been a limiting factor in my area.
And very unlikely to get any priority under Trump. Lots of jobs involved.
There are not nearly as many jobs as are in the coal and natural gas industries which are competitors.
Although there are many who hope things in the energy fields will change dramatically, all I'm saying is that I hope a more objective cost/benefits analysis will be done to replace the obvious political ones in the past.
Out here I've seen big plans for ethanol production, even to the point where the company had purchased the land, disappear overnight. Experienced farmers around here, even the ones who stand to make significant profits on wind energy production, will not be heartbroken, or even surprised, to see the wind people have to go and get other jobs. They've seen it happen in the past.
I do know plans for the wind farm that was proposed for here four to five years ago must have changed since construction on the first tower has not yet started. Even the meteorological tower is looking pretty haggard and weedy.
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