The energies flowing through these things are, interestingly, becoming more and more dense. If you take the amount of energy that flows through one gram per second in a galaxy, it is increased when it goes through a star, and it is actually increased in life…We don’t realize this. We think of the sun as being a hugely immense amount of energy. Yet the amount of energy running through a sunflower per gram per second of the livelihood, is actually greater than in the sun… Animals have even higher energy usage than the plant, and a jet engine has even higher than an animal. The most energy-dense thing that we know about in the entire universe is the computer chip in your computer. It is sending more energy per gram per second through that than anything we know. In fact, if it was to send it through any faster, it would melt or explode. It is so energy-dense that it is actually at the edge of explosion.

Kevin Kelly

I’m not usually taken in by futurist brain-dumps like this, but I did like the comments on how current technology is pushing the physical limits of energy density. I mean, wow … we are beyond suns! This excerpt is from a Jason Silva essay called “We Are Information Experiencing Information” that is typically Silva-esque in its breathlessness and excitement. A good read, though.

I’m not what you’d call a pure “singulatarian”, but I am fascinated by the coalescence of our minds and technology into these sort of super-organisms of connected thought and perception, at least as an idea if not in practice. I am not at all sure that we will one day exist completely beyond our meatspace as a result of that cooperative tech, but imagine what will be possible when our experience and the world which we can create is no longer limited to our solitary experience! When we become so self-aware that these technological mini-minds we all carry allow us to enrich our lives rather than merely distract ourselves from them.

(via inthenoosphere and wildcat2030)

Source: inthenoosphere

The Best Way to Find Aliens: Look for Their Solar Power Plants

“In 1960, mathematician, physicist, and all-around genius Freeman Dyson predicted that every civilization in the Universe eventually runs out of energy on its home planet, provided it survives long enough to do so. Dyson argued that this event constitutes a major hurdle in a civilization’s evolution, and that all those who leap over it do so in precisely the same way: they build a massive collector of starlight, a shell of solar panels to surround their home star. Astronomers have taken to calling these theoretical megastructures Dyson Spheres. Dyson’s insight may seem like nothing more than a thought experiment, but if his hypothesis is sound, it has a striking implication: if you want to find advanced alien civilizations, you should look for signs of Dyson Spheres.”

Meet Penn State’s Jason Wright, embarking on a two-year search for the solar energy plants of alien civilizations. Sci-fi meets sci.

Do you think alien civilizations have a special name for them too? Like, instead of “Dyson Sphere”, they call them “Blarglock Sphurgles”, named for famous alien storyteller Glibglack Blarglock?

Would Blarglock’s stories have predicted that there would be a planet somewhere without one, like us?

I’m taking this too far.

Don’t Worry, Drive On: Some Real Talk About “Peak Oil”

I’ve received a couple of questions from you fine folks about whether it’s true that new technologies have opened up access to untapped oil resources, and that “peak oil” is no longer something we need to worry about.

It’s wonderful news when innovative science and new technologies improve how we harness and use energy, but only when it’s based in reality. So yes, technology has provided new ways of accessing hard-to-reach oil and fossil fuels, and there’s a lot of oil left in the ground. That is true.

But when cost, environmental policies and climate change are added to the equation, just because we can get at it doesn’t make it good, or right, or worth it. We can’t afford it, financially or scientifically. Let’s keep moving forward and come up with a way to stop pumping the biomass of the Jurassic into our gas tanks and power plants.

Enjoy this video from the Post-Carbon Institute.

Source: youtube.com

Winds of Change for U.S. Electricity This is what an innovative energy policy looks like. Wind energy was second only to natural gas in new energy projects in 2011. This is just fantastic news for green energy and shows real progress in moving toward clean electricity and trying to reduce our impact on the climate. Be sure to check out the full report from the Department of Energy, with lots more infographic goodness.
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Winds of Change for U.S. Electricity This is what an innovative energy policy looks like. Wind energy was second only to natural gas in new energy projects in 2011. This is just fantastic news for green energy and shows real progress in moving toward clean electricity and trying to reduce our impact on the climate. Be sure to check out the full report from the Department of Energy, with lots more infographic goodness.
Zoom Info

Winds of Change for U.S. Electricity

This is what an innovative energy policy looks like. Wind energy was second only to natural gas in new energy projects in 2011. This is just fantastic news for green energy and shows real progress in moving toward clean electricity and trying to reduce our impact on the climate.

Be sure to check out the full report from the Department of Energy, with lots more infographic goodness.

Transparent Solar Cells: Clearly Amazing Imagine a skyscraper, gleaming with polished glass, that was generating electricity with every square inch of window space. Thanks to these UCLA nanochemists, that is a pretty realistic image. By impregnating plastic with silver nanowires (atomic-scale conductors) that are small enough to be invisible, and absorbing infrared light while allowing visible light to pass through, these solar cells (right, above) are 70% transparent. They take a slight hit in efficiency compared to traditional solar, but can be deployed almost anywhere. Within a decade, we could have buildings supplying their own electricity via building materials!  (via latimes.com)
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Transparent Solar Cells: Clearly Amazing

Imagine a skyscraper, gleaming with polished glass, that was generating electricity with every square inch of window space. Thanks to these UCLA nanochemists, that is a pretty realistic image.

By impregnating plastic with silver nanowires (atomic-scale conductors) that are small enough to be invisible, and absorbing infrared light while allowing visible light to pass through, these solar cells (right, above) are 70% transparent.

They take a slight hit in efficiency compared to traditional solar, but can be deployed almost anywhere. Within a decade, we could have buildings supplying their own electricity via building materials! 

(via latimes.com)

Source: Los Angeles Times

wired: Craig Venter has been on a tear of invention and exploration. In 2004 he sailed around the world, discovering thousands of new species and sequencing millions of new genes. In 2007 he unveiled his own genome, unexpurgated (it revealed a predisposition for risk-taking, among other things). And in 2010 he announced the first successful synthesis of life—a unique critter borne from two distinct organisms, thus proving for the first time that it is indeed possible to create new organisms for specific purposes and functions. He is, in every respect, the epitome of an icon—a figure who has pushed science forward, sometimes by sheer force of will. More @ Wired Science Photo: Joe Pugliese Everyone’s favorite genome cowboy, profiled at Wired Science. To get your appetite going, here’s some of his words about how the human genome project panned out, and where we’re going from here (emphasis mine): “… what most people think about when it comes to genetics is personalized medicine. If we sequence your genome or my genome, what can we interpret, what can we predict for the future, what can we change? That’s in its absolute infancy. We’re at the point where we don’t need one genome or just a few genomes to interpret your genome. We need tens of thousands of genomes as a starting point, coupled with everything we can know about their physiology. It’s only when we do that giant computer search, putting all that DNA together, that we will be able to make sense in a meaningful statistical manner of what your DNA is telling you. We’re just at the start of trying to do that.”
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wired:

Craig Venter has been on a tear of invention and exploration. In 2004 he sailed around the world, discovering thousands of new species and sequencing millions of new genes. In 2007 he unveiled his own genome, unexpurgated (it revealed a predisposition for risk-taking, among other things). And in 2010 he announced the first successful synthesis of life—a unique critter borne from two distinct organisms, thus proving for the first time that it is indeed possible to create new organisms for specific purposes and functions. He is, in every respect, the epitome of an icon—a figure who has pushed science forward, sometimes by sheer force of will.

More @ Wired Science

Photo: Joe Pugliese

Everyone’s favorite genome cowboy, profiled at Wired Science.

To get your appetite going, here’s some of his words about how the human genome project panned out, and where we’re going from here (emphasis mine):

“… what most people think about when it comes to genetics is personalized medicine. If we sequence your genome or my genome, what can we interpret, what can we predict for the future, what can we change? That’s in its absolute infancy. We’re at the point where we don’t need one genome or just a few genomes to interpret your genome. We need tens of thousands of genomes as a starting point, coupled with everything we can know about their physiology. It’s only when we do that giant computer search, putting all that DNA together, that we will be able to make sense in a meaningful statistical manner of what your DNA is telling you. We’re just at the start of trying to do that.”

Two Little-Known Facts About The Large Hadron Collider

  1. If the beam went off course, it carries enough energy to burn through six feet of solid copper.
  2. The amount of energy in a single LHC beam is still less than the energy present in the amount of chocolate that two Swiss people eat every year.

More facts about how much power is at the LHC here. And to answer that question you’re asking, here’s some opinions on what would happen if you stuck your hand in it. A Soviet engineer actually did that once, only he used his head.

Watch 2 square meters of sunshine melt steel

In this clip from BBC’s “Bang Goes the Theory”, a sunlight-reflecting mirror focuses light to a point so small that anything put in its path will instantly melt or catch fire.

What’s that? Steel not enough for you? How about melting rock?

The amount of sunlight that would hit a few people laying out on the beach is enough to destroy stone. It’s all about how you focus the energy. Just imagine if we could harvest this to provide energy for ourselves???

 (by BBC)

Source: youtube.com