From Streetcars To Spaceships

Are you familiar with the Open Luna project? It's an open source, egalitarian, very reasonable plan to get humans living and settled on the moon in a way that isn't built around the agendas of any one bullying nationstate.

Sounds like a damn good idea to me.

I really wonder. Now that Iceland's economy is so laid waste by the banking fiasco, how long will it be before the people holding their debt use that leverage to force them to withdraw from their very progressive energy policies, reform their all-too-unestablishment parliment, and otherwise knuckle under to the preferences of the handful of large corporations that already control far too much of our world.
My friend Sara is guessing two years and that sounds about right to me.

Nice piece on how sometimes you *can* fight city hall. And win. And sometimes not even have it end up feeling like a fight. http://www.urbanophile.com/2010/01/21/you-cant-fight-the-state-dot-or-can-you/

If you want to know about what's going on in Haiti, then you really should ask some Haitians.

I know that the earthquake and resulting several crises in Haiti have a lot of us struggling for answers or at least a better sense of the variables. Like a lot of people I've gone to the sites of CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, and all the other usual suspects.

But some of the best perspective I've gotten has come from a little site called Haiti Exchange. They're not glossy or high tech but whatever you find there will be straght from Pascal Antoine and other people who know these subjects from the inside.

If you have the time, you might also want to visit the site of the U.S. Haitian Consulate. Plenty to see there or to find out about from there as well.

Let's all do the best that we can.

-Rustin

I understand those whose sole concern right now is emergency aid for Haiti but it seems to me that we should hold back ten percent of that energy or so to spend on seeing this as an opportunity to help with structural problems. You want to help Haiti? Study the impact of international interventions in Banda Aceh since the tsunami.

It's unreal the number of writing projects I have underway right now. Possibly the most unreal thing about it is that almost all of them are already in the form of some kind of rough draft. Gods; I'm actually going to try to get all of these things written.

I think that Cringley has a point, as usual. We're seeing all these "about to be brought to market" devices and we really have no idea how many of those will even make to market at all. Ever.
I'm delighted with the directions this year's CES and related announcements seem to show but, personally, I'm going to wait until early February and then blow a few hours on Pocketables, Liliputing, and UMPCPortal before I even try to get a real sense of what's out there. Then I'll head down to MacWorld, get some facetime with guys at the relevant companies, wait for *that* tussle to die down, and probably buy my next portable machine round about the beginning of March.

In case you're wondering, yes, I'm just as much fun as you may suspect reading the news from CES. It's so good to finally see all of this happening that I've waited so very long for. I don't know about y'all but I've been waiting for a wave of high-function, low cost, open source-enabled, varable geometry devices like these since a long talk with Bob Pinchbeck in Grand Army Plaza in the summer of 1989.

The best way to biofuels is gerrrrrms.

Over at the University of Texas, they're breeding bugs. Buuuugs.

Well, actually cyanobacteria, but "bugs" sounds better.

Anyway, what they're breeding for is bacteria that excrete sugars and easily processed forms of cellulose. Ones that can be readily converted to fuels.

What this means is more fuel created per acre, fuel created without using either land or fresh water that would otherwise be used for growing crops, and, let's not forget, a fuel creation means that can be done, at least on a small scale, in any frackin' wet place that can take the load and gets any sun. Not a lot of sun. Any sun. After all, Fresnel lenses and mirrors really are pretty cheap. So concentrating a whole bunch of sun on, say, squares of a Louisiana parking lot that is kept flooded with brackish water should work just fine. And, in some cases, it may even make sense to provide artificial or piped in supplementary light to areas that get lots of waste heat and will "feed" the microorganisms partially on that. Say, the area on top of a bakery.

It will take some expertise and effort and there will be lots of trial and error involved, but you get the idea.

We should note, however, that like most biofuels production means, this is fundamentally conversion of sunlight to high stored-energy organic compounds. In other words, the more sun per area, the more fuel produced. Seems to me that we're probably heading towards a time when biofuels are largely a thing produced in sunny places with long days, available "scrub" land, and plenty of water. Ideally water that's too salty or otherwise "low value" to be good for watering conventional crops. So my beloved Oregon will never be a good contender, east or west. Malaysia, otoh, may do very well, indeed, especially since they're already investing in biofuels infrastructure.

Another factor is that this looks like it will create yet another round of plantation agriculture. Look to see horrific worker abuses in the future from massive, corporate owned pond farms and tank complexes destroying human lives to cut that last tenth of a penny off their production costs.

I've written about related research before, most notably my note about gliocladium roseum. Now that microbiologists understand what to look for and breed I suspect that we'll be seeing hundreds of species of microorganism being put forward, which is wonderful.

In fact, I wonder if the best solution for most people will turn out to be some "cocktail" of several microorganisms so as to keep the tanks more resistant to changing conditions and better able to fight off unwanted "intruder" microorganisms coming in and bullying out the desired ones. After all, we're seeing folks breed bugs for maximum energy retention, which, by definition means that that they're, shall we say, kinda fat, and therefore, not up to fighting off less aggressive energy burners.

A tank of the organisms we want are kinda like a village full of couchpotatoes who just sit around and eat steak and cheesecake all day. Steak and cheesecake that we provide. People chosen precisely because they were the ones who moved around least and got the fattest. So what happens when a bunch of Mike Tyson and Bad Xena bugs decide that they want some of that steak and cheesecake?

So I'm guessing that corporations will go for their usual monoculture bullshit, complete with expensive and resource hungry "narrow range" control while homebrewers will discover a community of various bugs that may not yield as high (in theory) as the "pure" cultures of the corporate tanks but will be a lot more tolerant of the occasional intrusion of uncleaned air, water, and food.

But what's the bottom line? In about five years we can expect to see significant fuel production coming from tailored microorganisms. In about another three it should be enough to have a significant economic and international policy impact. In fifteen (if we all survive that long as a society), we should see petrochemical producers getting caught moving beyond disinformation (like the recent Exxon takeover of a biofuels study group such that it then announced that biofuels just weren't practical) to flat out sabotage.

Because by then they should be running scared.

-Rustin

What America really needs is a federal statute against playing Pat Benatar at low volume. Crank it, boys and girls!