Energy answers sought in Earth's crust

[Stephen Eisel]

cheap energy (clicky)

On paper, the Basel project looks fairly straightforward: Drill down, shoot cold water into the shaft and bring it up again superheated and capable of generating enough power through a steam turbine to meet the electricity needs of 10,000 households, and heat 2,700 homes.

[ryan costa]

We could have dug quite a few geothermal powerplant wells with all the money we blew on Iraq.

[Jeff Endress]

But, if we use all that core heat, acting like a giant heat sink, don't we risk causing the earth's core to cool? What happens then?

Jeff

[ryan costa]

But, if we use all that core heat, acting like a giant heat sink, don't we risk causing the earth's core to cool? What happens then?

Jeff

It is ok. We'll be dead before then. unless the pharmaceutical companies whip up some Doc Savage Immortality Pills. In which case we would later die in a civil war between the older and the younger. like in Rwanda.

[Stephen Eisel]

We could have dug quite a few geothermal powerplant wells with all the money we blew on Iraq.

Except for ending slavery, facism, nazism and communism, war has never solved anything... Sheesh, Thank God, Lincoln did not have your attitude.

[ryan costa]

be serious. Iraq was a turkey shoot. Now it is just an ongoing policing action, a combination of los angeles and detroit without the money. We can leave in one year or five years or 10 years, and there will immediately soon be some factions killing tens or hundreds of thousands of other factions: that would be them solving their problems with war. Their only success will be in re-establishing an equilibrium there before we invaded.

I'm not sure why you copied and pasted that line about problems war solved either, considering you were responding to a reference to the mass destruction in Rwanda wrought in a genocide themed population war. Interestingly enough, most of the casualties in that war were inflicted with Machetes: are Machetes a weapon of mass destruction?

And war never ended Communism. The Soviet Union collapsed on its own. The North Vietnam evicted their absentee landlords then defeated the Khmer Rouge themselves. Iraqi members of various communist parties thanked the U.S. for liberating them from Sadam Hussein. England and France were more socialist than the Iranian secular democracy we shut down for being "socialist" in the 1950s.

Your slogans are great, but put a little thought into them.

[Stephen Eisel]

be serious. Iraq was a turkey shoot. Now it is just an ongoing policing action, a combination of los angeles and detroit without the money. We can leave in one year or five years or 10 years, and there will immediately soon be some factions killing tens or hundreds of thousands of other factions: that would be them solving their problems with war. Their only success will be in re-establishing an equilibrium there before we invaded.

And war never ended Communism. The Soviet Union collapsed on its own. The North Vietnam evicted their absente landlords.

No, it had nothing to do with the arms race that spent Russia into bankruptcy..

[ryan costa]

it could just as easily be argued that the Soviet arms race was "good for the economy", just as we argue all our military contractor spending is "good for the economy". We will catch up with the Soviets accomplishment in this trajectory soon enough.

They also spent 8 years trying to take over Afghanistan. They lost way more people than we have so far, and also killed way more than we have so far.

An interesting news article I read was how our military is encountering difficulties training the new Afghani army or police. They describe all kinds of humorous ignorance their recruits have, like which way to hold a gun, or lighting cigarettes with bullets. At first this made me feel good, as though our guys were very relatively advanced. Then I realized they are training recruits in an area more or less at constant war for over twenty years: They are recruiting the few people who don't already know about shooting guns and participating in raids.

Undoubtedly war has solved many problems. The Civil War "freed the slaves", and prevented a seceded southern states from becoming like Brazil only poorer. However, most wars in human history have been about capturing slaves or serfs or coolie labor. As for this war, I guess it is the war that solves our currency collapse problem: We blew our industrial lead on unrestricted free trade to the point our currency collapse. Annexing Iraq and propping up the Saud Kingdom will maybe keep more oil trading in dollars rather than Yuan or Euros for a little while. Our big guns have defeated the hypothetical mythological free market They're always citing as justification for our factories closing, tax cuts for the rich, subsidies for suburban sprawl, and outsourcing.

So yeah, it is great there is a great potential supply of geothermal power. It takes a billion or two dollars to get a geothermal powerplant going. So, we could have built a few hundred of those, or we could have occupied Iraq.