Space Empires VI

SE4 came out iirc in 2000.
SE5 came out iirc in 2006.

Based on that, SE6 will be out in 2012.

What will you be doing in 2012?

I can't plan that far ahead, myself...

Have a random Canolli:

http://www.mikespastry.com/Merchant2/graphics/CANNOLIRICOTTA12CT_300.jpg

SEV needs more development. Better AI, and more community involvement. Give it time. It's like a well-cooked turkey when you do. I personally love the Space Empires cult and enjoy the development effort we as its fans bring in adding the larger value to Space Empires. Making an SEVI seems way too premature right now, as even though SEIV's modding and AI development is practically over, it is still greater than SEV's. Give the SEV community a couple of years to make SEV rock beyond IV. Do your part. Contribute to the Wiki, make better AI, contribute to mods, make your own, find a way to make the community better for all just by being here and engaging in the discussions. We are a brotherhood. Welcome to the family!

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My God, man! I'm not done modding SE5!

Lets let the dust settle on this version, so we have a clearer picture of what we want in the next.

"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod

Well the Mayan Calendar will end in 2012, but I plan to rule the world by that time, so I wouldn't have time for SE6

Why do you plan to rule the world in a time when it's already destroyed by me?

because I can, besides I know of easyer ways to destory the world then you

You can have this world, corporate pirates own it now anyway:) 2012, I plan on being one of the first colonizers of the moon (or where ever they want to send me)!!

If only I could get my cement mixer to fly....

inigma wrote:

SEV needs more development. Better AI, and more community involvement. Give it time. It's like a well-cooked turkey when you do. I personally love the Space Empires cult and enjoy the development effort we as its fans bring in adding the larger value to Space Empires. Making an SEVI seems way too premature right now, as even though SEIV's modding and AI development is practically over, it is still greater than SEV's. Give the SEV community a couple of years to make SEV rock beyond IV. Do your part. Contribute to the Wiki, make better AI, contribute to mods, make your own, find a way to make the community better for all just by being here and engaging in the discussions. We are a brotherhood. Welcome to the family!

Actually, its rather stunning how far the AI has been evolved in SE5 in such a short span of time by certain mods, when compaired to stock. Game development companies might want to take note.

"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod

Gideon wrote:

inigma wrote:

SEV needs more development. Better AI, and more community involvement. Give it time. It's like a well-cooked turkey when you do. I personally love the Space Empires cult and enjoy the development effort we as its fans bring in adding the larger value to Space Empires. Making an SEVI seems way too premature right now, as even though SEIV's modding and AI development is practically over, it is still greater than SEV's. Give the SEV community a couple of years to make SEV rock beyond IV. Do your part. Contribute to the Wiki, make better AI, contribute to mods, make your own, find a way to make the community better for all just by being here and engaging in the discussions. We are a brotherhood. Welcome to the family!

Actually, its rather stunning how far the AI has been evolved in SE5 in such a short span of time by certain mods, when compaired to stock. Game development companies might want to take note.

"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod

I would have to agree.
Groovy Baby Yeah!

Personally....being a married man and seeing how much my wife 'loves' this game as it is....I can't wait for 'seX'...

I feel that, if I'm lucky, I'll be playing SE4 in 2012, on some ultra-low power rechargable computer, which I get to use a couple times per week, against my neighbors (since the internet won't be sustainable post-oil, but local networks might be.. maybe). In-between doing my community chores and helping build/farm/raise livestock, of course.

Enjoy SE5 while you can!

Yep, I'm nutty enough to believe I might be (fore)telling the truth.

Mayan cosmology didn't allow for the world to ever cease to exist. All great cataclysms would be followed by rebirth and new life. Then again their view of things did allow for the human race to become extinct. that's almost as bad as the world ceasing to exist.

In short, they thought a severe world changing event would take place. They did not predict the extinction of mankind(though they allowed for it as a possibility), or the destruction of the world in general.

Centralized power requires people/vehicles to maintain it over long distances, and masses of replacement parts to be manufactured (which, in turn, requires power, often oil as a raw material -- think 'wire insulation' -- and centralized production, and then shipping)... therein lies the problem. Oil is required at so many steps as to make the whole concept of a post-oil internet pretty much impossible, or a least very very far in the future, maybe centuries past any oil crash. We'll be lucky to have cheap paper in 30 years, let alone computers.

In any case, I am desperately hoping for SE6 on the PS3 =) The Wii is too low rez to enjoy conquering the galaxy on... I could maybe put up with low rez on the PSP though, if the scrolling interface was decent.

Luckily we have many decades of oil production ahead of us. Even once we reach peak oil, there will still be tons of it coming out; it will just gradually become more expensive. 2012 is an absurdly alarmist date. And hopefully these guys aren't blowing smoke about making biofuel with backteria..

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oil is the dead backterias, that passed some million years under huge pressure. It is allready organic substance.
Like succinite is made of tar.
And coal made of burned trees.
And just a lot of time allow the first to become the second. So the egg-heads just need to speed up this process...

By Leonardo Maugeri
(Maugeri is the author of The Age of Oil: The Mythology, History, and Future of the World's Most Controversial Resource. As a senior vice president at the Italian oil corporation Eni SpA, he's also an oil-industry insider)

Issues 2007 - How much oil lies beneath the Earth's crust? The only thing we know for sure is that history is littered with estimates so far off the mark—usually below the mark—that they border on the comical. In the 1920s, for instance, the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. (now BP) refused to take a stake in Saudi Arabia, thinking that the country didn't hold a single drop of oil. In 1919, the U.S. Geological Survey predicted that the United States would run out of oil in nine years. Yet by the time nine years had passed, huge discoveries, topped by the Black Giant field in Texas, had created a massive oil glut that almost destroyed the industry. In the 1970s, the consensus turned grim again: oil production would peak in the mid-1980s and then drop precipitously. A famous CIA report predicted the "rapid exhaustion" of accessible fields, while President Jimmy Carter warned that oil wells were "drying up all over the world." Instead, in 1986, oil prices collapsed in the midst of a huge supply boom, as they had done many times before.

Now doomsday forecasts are back, predicting the end of oil in this decade or the next. Given our fundamental ignorance of what lies below, the best bet is that the oil market will remain cyclical, characterized by boom-and-bust periods, for decades. Yet the perception that we are running out of oil retains such a deep hold on the popular psyche, it's worth correcting. The reason we have seen so many bad guesstimates is that even the most advanced technology can't tell us how much crude the Earth holds.

New exploration methods have increased existing reserves over time, even without any new discoveries. The oil literature is full of examples. A most astonishing one is the Kern River field in California, discovered in 1899. In 1942 its "remaining" reserves were estimated at 54 million barrels. Yet from 1942 to 1986 it produced 736 million barrels, and still had another 970 million "remaining." The one thing we can be certain about is that our knowledge of oil reserves is subject to constant revision, usually upward.

Yep. but it's still finite.

Of course new fields are still discovered - but in the end they keep getting fewer:
Look at the figures 10 and 11 from this page - sums up the problem pretty well!
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/blanchard/

That and "many decades" assumes they don't figure out how to keep up the rate of extraction. If they do, the life span of the oil industry will be considerably less. Either way, a decade from now petroleum based fuels will be uneconomical based on cost alone.

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VAST??!?!? Who told you THAT? the only untapped proven reserves in Alaska are in a wildlife sanctuary. They are also moderate sized fields that won't last long after they get tapped. It's SPECULATED that the northern coast of Alaska might have decent oil resources available, but not yet known. The total is beleived to be about 8 billion barrels, for comparison, the current US reserve is 21 and Saudi Arabia claims it has 260(altough some estimates place it closer to 100).

Even 8/21 is a pretty large ratio to ignore.

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8(billion barrels) is enough to be worth using, but it's only a moderate amount of oil by today's standards. 21 is the figure for what US oil reserves are NOW. In the 70s, we had around 39.

8 is about what the US used up in 2007.

Regardless of if there are still enough reserves left for x years, let's not forget about all the other negatives that come with fossil fuels, which alone should be enough for us to move forward with conservation and new technologies.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

We can continue to be slaves to oil and oil producing countries or we can modernize to get our fuel from the most abundant fuel source in the Universe: hydrogen. You won't see this happen because hydrogen is freely available and easy to make by simply running electrical current through water...the folks who control the energy market NEVER want to see that happen. No money in it for them. Oh, and the pollution created when hydrogen is burnt is water. Win, win...except for energy corporations.

Loyalty above all else except honor.

Hydrogen is a net loss with current science; it takes far more energy to separate it from water than you can get from burning it. Thus, in the long run you'd end up having to burn more fossil fuels to use hydrogen in your car instead of gasoline... It has nothing at all to do with energy corporations, and everything to do with the science not being there just yet. Once the science is there, you can kick in your conspiracy theories full-tilt.

There was some research done a while back to find catalysts for cheaply separating hydrogen out of crude oil and such, but I'm not sure how that panned out.

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Fyron is quite right about the energy costs to get hydrogen especially from electrolysis. It is done on small scales but it is very inefficient for a world-wide hydrogen economy. Most hydrogen is actually produced economically from fossil fuels with about half being made into ammonia for fertilizers.

While hydrogen is abundant on Earth, and indeed is the most abundant element in the universe, manufacturing hydrogen does require the consumption of a hydrogen carrier such as a fossil fuel or water. The former consumes the fossil resource and produces carbon dioxide, but often requires no further energy input beyond the fossil fuel. Decomposing water requires electrical or heat input, generated from some primary energy source (fossil fuel, nuclear power or a renewable energy). The economics and environmental impact of any implementation of any future hydrogen economy will largely be determined by future energy development. There are other methods including one that is very effiecient but requires the use of platinum. So, it's very costly.

The other major problems with a hydrogen economy are that we will require the siting and construction of a distribution infrastructure with large investment of capital. Further, the technological challenge of providing safe, energy-dense storage of hydrogen on-board the vehicle must be overcome to provide sufficient range between fillups.

Storage of the hydrogen is probably the biggest problem. The most common method of on board hydrogen storage in today's demonstration vehicles is as a compressed gas at pressures of roughly 700 bar (70 MPa). Many people believe that the energy needed to compress hydrogen to these pressures presents a major barrier to a hydrogen economy. For example, if one considers the entire world using hydrogen just in their cars, then a large amount of energy would be needed simply to compress the hydrogen for storage, of the order of 30% of the total energy used for transport. If this energy was not recovered in any way, the net energy used to compress it would be wasted.

Currently, vehicle fuel cells are very expensive, typically 100 times more expensive per kW output than conventional internal combustion engines. It further has been suggested that cars utilizing Li-ion or Li-polymer batteries for onboard energy storage are capable of being more efficient than hydrogen-fueled cars would ever be, and that they just need to be mass produced to become cost effective. I know a bus company(they manufacture hybrid city buses) that has shifted the batteries from lead-acid to Lithium ion.

Other costs are hydrogen makes steel brittle over time so all tanks, pipelines, and transport rigs have to be coated in carbon fiber. Who's going to pony up a conservative 20 billion dollars just for the US for infrastructure. There are a lot of trial and pilot programs world-wide looking for the best solutions.

Eventually some of this may come to pass but I do not think in my lifetime.

we could use another gas maybe nitrogen it is the most abundant, though burning it may be bad..... lol

wind, HEP, Tidal and wave are all other sourses of energy even solar

ya' could use an ALUMINUM fuel tank. not everything needs to be made out of steel.

Anyways, solar power could in theory produce an endless supply of hydrogen gas, via electrolysis. sure it's not the most energy efficient way, but it's a renewable fuel source.

Hmm... I wonder if Iceland will remain the only country with mass implementation of geothermal power for long. in theory Yellowstone (volcano) could power a state or more.

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This looks sort of neat though:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/26/czeers-shows-off-worlds-first-solar-powered-speedboat/

With the increasing desparity between oil supply and increasing demand, the only affordable short term solution is more oil production. If we don't start producing more of our own, we won't be able to afford to develope the higher tech energy solutions.

People are so short sighted and ignorant of the economy. Dreamy eyed youth think that tech solutions grow on trees. Since they hav always had computers, cell phones and gameboys, they think that we already have all the technology sitting in a warehouse waiting to be implemented.

Our economy is sitting on the brink of collapse and congress is worried about steroids in baseball and buying more votes with transfer payments. We really are doomed.

Since DiHydrogen doesn't exists in nature on our little blue planet (the Earth is not massive enough to retain this light molecule), H2 is only another energy vector, just like electricity.

Hydrogen as an energy source is actually very practical but would take cultural change. You do not need to use fossil fuels to get it either. You simply utilize the energy of the sun. The problem is people say "well it takes more energy to produce hydrogen than you get in return" but these folks do not stop to consider is that energy in a form that is equally as practical to use as hydrogen.

Just recently a new sun mirror was built using common products available in most any town. It is the most energy efficient use of solar energy on the market. By running water through a coiled tube that is connected to the mirror the reflected sunlight instantaneously changes the water into steam, this steam can then be used to power a turbine, which can produce electricity. That electricity can then be used to make hydrogen. The mirrors are small and designed to be used like legos...add all you want to the system. Yes, energy is lost in the conversion but this system can be put on EVERY rooftop of every house in the country. Each system could essentially power the entire house and remove it from the grid. The trick is knowing when, where, and how much of that energy to convert into another more usable energy. Sunlight on its own is fairly useless in powering a car. Hydrogen is great at powering a car. So what if you lose 50% of the energy in the conversion? What else were you going to do with the sunlight? Once the initial infastructure is built it is easy to maintain.

The energy corporations have no desire to see such infastructure built though. But on small scale it is happening all over the country. There are many people who have effectively removed themselves from the power grid and in fact sell excess electricity back to the corporations. Fossil fuels are only necessary up until you have produced enough sun mirrors that those sun mirrors can then run the manufacturing plants that make sun mirrors. People are simply addicted to oil, the corporations know it, and so change will be slow to arrive. If we covered some of our most desolate desert areas with this technology we could power entire cities. Saudi Arabia and Northern Africa have enough desolate desert land to power most of the planet if they simply used that land to convert sunlight into another form of energy.

Loyalty above all else except honor.

Can we see your math on the energy efficiencies of this solar mirror > hydrogen > internal combustion engine system, please? How much land area of solar mirrors does it take to power each hydrogen vehicle? How does it compare to the efficiency of creating hydrogen from an algae bioreactor (ie: depriving certain algae of sulfur causes them to switch from the production of oxygen to hydrogen)? How about steam reforming of natural gas (CH4 + H2O → H2 + CO2)?

As an aside, it should be noted that placing solar mirror turbines on roof-tops is a less-than-stellar idea. For the mirror array to actually work, it needs to be large. You need a huge ring of mirrors and a huge boiler stem to get large enough temperature differentials for any sort of reasonable efficiency. Scaling it way down to fit on a roof-top will likely end up with far worse efficiency than traditional silicon solar panels. Plus you have the safety hazards inherent in placing a super-heated coil on top of a wooden building...

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For all the Enviro people who say we shouldn't drill; please stop using ALL petrol products and see how you standard of living is utterly destroyed. We have to drill, because if you think that oil is only used for fuel your kidding yourself. Please tell me why would you want a company in some other country to be drilling your oil for you?? The US has some of the best enviro standards in the world... so let us get OUR oil so that is can be gotten with the best means/standards.
Also, as long as there is animal/vegatable materials decaying in the crust... there will be oil. There is more being produced by the planet all the time (I'm not saying we aren't using it faster than its being produced, but it won't just disappear).
Oil is and will be the most efficient means of (portable) power for a long while. So why are we trying to cripple ourselves waiting for some alternative? It will take years, more like decades, to get anything even remotely close in efficiency to oil.
Also, if you want cheap and efficient non-portable power allow nuclear plants to be built again. We are allowing coal plants to still be built, but complain that nuclear is "dirty"... what? If you are really concerned with/about the enviro. then nuclear is THE way to go.
BTW, CO2 is NOT a green-house gas! Water-vapor on the other hand is.

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I think Arpeegy exaggerated the efficiency a bit. But it's still a proven technology. Solar steam turbines have already been built in many places. In theory, a large enough installation could power a city, and even more importantly, you could build it on top of the city. Also certain designs COULD comfortable fit on an apartment building, without being a fire hazard. Even more interesting is that California is currently trying to figure out how to power the State with it.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrating_solar_energy

Providing power to buildings is way below the scope of using such arrays to hydrolyze water, as Arpeegy was proposing, however.

Also, apartment buildings are not "every house in the country" as Arpeegy was proposing. They provide much larger, flatter surfaces, and are certainly more suitable for a mirror array than the randomly angled roofs of houses.

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Fyron, prove to me its a green-house gas... don't take the cheap way out. There is no correlation between temperature and CO2 levels (CO2 increases as the temp increases, not vice-versa).
Making personal attacks damages your creditability.

Anyway, my preferred soltution is the microwave starbase of doom!
http://spacesolarpower.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/final-sbsp-interim-assessment-release-01.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide

CO2 IS a greenhouse gas. Yes, like BlueTemplar wrote:

Searching new form of energy, instead of oil, it's vital to the long-term survival of the our species. Soon or later, oil will finish. It's best research new energy source NOW, when we have oil, than after the oil will be exhausted.

And... just one thing. In Italy (my country), I can't mantain a car because the oil price is simply TO HIGH. And I'm not the only one. And fishman in all europe have protested and striked for the high oil price.

This can't be a crisis?

I don't know much about new energy source, but... I think that we need it. Maybe not today. Not tomorrow. but soon or later we need it.

A "dish engine" is little more complex than mounting a satellite dish on your roof. Each reflector is a self contained unit and doesn't require other components to work.

Use of the "solar trough" design would prove problematic because of it's sheer size.

The solution is very easy, but no political body in their right mind will ever consider this...and no it doesn't require any new fancy tech!

Every one creates a carbon footprint on the Earth...(except some very few who live in the jungle). This footprint will be bigger or smaller depending on the country you live in and your lifestyle...but your footprint will be there, along with 7 billion more...all crushing the Earth into dust.

So isn't it obvious?...reduce the number of footprints...either by birth control and laws(look how well that works in China) or more directly... in SEV talk that would be spacing.

Drastic? yes! Will it work? Yes. Will it happen? . . .

----------------------------------------------------------------
Join PBW Emperor Of The Universe League Today. Follow the Link to EOTU
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We are not talking the giant solar farms you are thinking of...these latest solar mirrors are self contained, safe, and would not burn down a roof. You can find a newswire link to this technology at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,370212,00.html These devices produce enough energy to melt steel...I think they can produce enough energy to seperate hydrogen from water molecules. It is new technologies like this that would be buried by the energy corporations intent on continueing their energy/oil monopoly. This is one reason the inventor signed over the design to MIT in lieu of selling it...he knew it would never see the light of day otherwise. Why give people access to free energy when the corporations can charge you for it?

The text of this article reads:

A new type of solar energy collector concentrates the sun into a beam that could melt steel. Researchers say the device could revolutionize global energy production.

The prototype is a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish was made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror. It concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000 to produce steam.

"This is actually the most efficient solar collector in existence," said Doug Wood, an inventor based in Washington state who patented key parts of the dish's design — the rights to which he has signed over to a team of students at MIT.

To test the prototype this week, MIT mechanical engineering Spencer Ahrens put a plank of wood in the beam and generated an almost instant puff of smoke.

The thing does more than burn wood, of course. At the end of a 12-foot aluminum tube rising from the center of the dish is a black-painted coil of tubing that has water running through it.

When the dish is pointing directly at the sun, the water in the coil flashes immediately into steam.

Ahrens and his teammates have started a company, RawSolar, to hopefully mass produce the dishes. They could be set up in huge arrays to provide steam for industrial processing, or for heating or cooling buildings, as well as to hook up to steam turbines and generate electricity, according to an MIT statement.

Once in mass production, such arrays should pay for themselves within two years or so with the energy they produce, the students figure.

Wood, the inventor, said the students built the dish and improved on his design.

"They really have simplified this and made it user-friendly, so anybody can build it," he said.

Wood said small dishes work best because it requires much less support structure and costs less for a given amount of collection area.

"I've looked for years at a variety of solar approaches, and this is the cheapest I've seen," said MIT Sloan School of Management lecturer David Pelly, in whose class the project first took shape last fall. "And the key thing in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world."

Loyalty above all else except honor.

Currently, global hydrogen production is 48% from natural gas, 30% from oil, and 18% from coal; water electrolysis accounts for only 4%

If energy for hydrogen production were available (from wind, solar or nuclear power), use of the substance for hydrocarbon synfuel production could expand captive use of hydrogen by a factor of 5 to 10. Present U.S. use of hydrogen from fossil fuel is roughly 4 million metric tons per year. It is estimated that 37.7 MMT/yr of hydrogen would be sufficient to convert enough domestic coal to liquid fuels to end U.S. dependence on foreign oil importation, and less than half this figure to end dependence on Middle East oil. Coal liquefaction would present significantly worse emissions of carbon dioxide than does the current system of burning fossil petroleum, but it would eliminate the political and economic vulnerabilities inherent in oil importation.

As far as electrolysis goes, most of the hydrogen is as a byproduct, Electrolysis of salt water is then recondensed for use as drinkable fresh water. Most of the hydrogen byproduct is from electrolysis of brine. Brine is water saturated or nearly saturated with salt. Brine is electrolyzed in the chloralkali process to make sodium hydroxide, chlorine and hydrogen, as well as the hypochlorite and chlorate salts on an industrial scale for the chemical industry.

@ TakAhLah

Interesting ideas, but will you be at the head of the line for said birth control? Or your spouse/future spouse?

@ marhawkman

Use of an aluminum tank. As it turns out, Steel is stronger and more ductile than aluminum. So for a given tank size and pressure, the steel tank is cheaper and lighter than the aluminum tank as the tank walls have to be much thicker on the aluminum tank.

Generally 50 kWh of electricity consumed to manufacture one kilogram of hydrogen is roughly as valuable as the hydrogen produced, assuming 8 cents/kWh.

@ Arpeegy

Prototypes are good for exploring promising new technology,and it doesn't always mean they work out well in reality outside a lab, but it still wouldn't be free energy. Someone is going to be making these solar dishes and they aren't going to be handing them out for free down at Sam's Solar Discount Store. Most people will need it installed and possibly maintained. This may work fine for the Sahara, Phoenix and St Petersburg Fl. But what about those homes in Seattle or Pittsburgh which have more cloudy days. Use of solar turbine generated electricity means a remote power plant and transmission costs. Certainly not free. So we trade one energy monopoly for another. The only benefit is that solar won't run out like oil.

Without seeing actual numbers there are questions of efficiency. And what happens to those further away from the equator and have shorter daylight hours. And now that your making your home-brewed hydrogen, what are you doing with it? Most will probably be stored. Tanks, piping etc. Lots of infrastructure that no one is usually willing to pay for.

ps Today's news reported that scientists believe that the North Pole may be ice-free come September before it starts to get cold again. may or may not happen, but if not this year then probably next year. This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Santiago,

Agreed. All the more reason to begin the cultural change now. Yes, people will still make money on new energies...even the inventor of these solar mirrors. But my point is that a one time expenditure of funds is much smarter than a continuous dependence on oil. I would rather spend $2000.00 for a solar mirror that can fuel my home energy needs for the rest of my life then be stuck paying that same amount yearly to the energy companies. It is that very savings of money that the energy companies do not want...if their customers can lay out a one time fee and become independent then why would any company support this technology? Thus it is buried in government red tape, delays, and wild goose chases to drill for more oil.

Something tells me I can afford a professional to come out and check my new appliances and keep them in working order so I do not lose my power. I already have them check my AC and Furnace...heck, now they can make a few more dollars checking over my solar mirror.

For folks in less sunny areas, they could always purchase/trade power from their neighbors in the sunny zone. The best part is technologies like these are clean. If we had begun the cultural change years ago perhaps we could have saved the North Pole. When Florida and California are under water after the South Pole melts, and all that land trapped ice rejoins the oceans, maybe then people will believe our climate is under real attack from human activity. Hydrogen energy is the solution to our power and pollution problems...but without the necessary infrastructure we will never be able to exploit it.

Loyalty above all else except honor.

I would characterize this device as a "finished prototype" IE one that is ready to be mass-produced.

Carbon footprints are a myth perpetrated by political pundits of the other side. Industry needs to change. Energy production/storage/transfer needs to change. Technology needs to be made more efficient. What individuals do doesn't matter in the big picture.

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Well if you want numbers: http://www.psa.es/webeng/instalaciones/parabolicos.html

It's not directly related to the small dish units, but this facility uses the same basic principle to generate electricity. A facility the size of a city block can generate up to 1.2 Megawatts.

To put that into perspective: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/california-to-get-more-solar-thermal-968.html

That^ talks about a plan to build mass numbers of solar power facilities in California. It contains an estimate that 245 Megawatts would be enough for 20% of the California powergrid. Thus we can extrapolate that a solar power plant the size of a (large) city block could power a decent size chunk of a city.

Oh and Photovoltaic technology has improved greatly over the past 20 years.

I don't really agree most of the time with conspiracy theories, but something is puzzling me:
Why the compressed-air car, that has a working prototype since 2002, is only now starting to get any advertising at all, after Tata Motors has shown an interest in it?
Maybe it is because the traditionnal car companies tried to stifle this invention?

Not only do they stifle them they attempt to purchase these newer technologies and actively suppress them. This is not conspiracy, simply look to all the major patent owners. When the same people who own the vehicle manufacturing plants also own the energy producing/oil companies, and they also control govenrment via their lobby effort then we get zero progress. Simply watching the talking heads on both the red and blue sides of the camp is enough to make a person laugh (listening to Rush Limboil and Shaun Insanity is like watching a hundred clowns trying to fit in a Geo Metro). They do all they can to preserve the status quo instead of doing what is right for everyone. China already has hydrogen powered buses used for their mass transit needs. Iceland will be completely off of foreign oil dependence within the next 30 to 50 years due to their cultural change and developing their geothermal power production. The US is doing NOTHING except having folks debate where to put more holes in the earth...oh, and we are converting much needed food into fuel...always a good idea when millions of people are already hungry around the globe. How long exactly do we believe we can continue to dump fossil fuel pollution into our air before we corrupt the balance of life on mother earth to a point that only the cockroaches will enjoy the living conditions? I would really like to leave my children and grandchildren with at least a slightly livable world...not a giant trash dump.

And as far as the safety of California, under current climate models, once the South Pole land locked ice starts to melt your children will see a sea level rise of 80 feet within their lifetime. If all the Southern ice melts the level of the ocean is predicted to rise 200 feet. Yes, the mountainous areas of California will be fine, but say bye bye to all your coastline. This scenario will create hundreds of thousands of refugees worldwide who will need to find a dry place to live. The same global climate nay-sayers who have helped to do nothing about the problem will be eating crow in my, and your, lifetime.

I am amazed that folks continue to believe knuckle heads like Limboil and Insanity, instead of listening to global scientists, especially in light of the fact that all their predictions related to global warming are coming true...and at an even faster rate than they had originally modeled.

Loyalty above all else except honor.

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Some of the models I've seen predict that global warming is merely a prelude to the next ice age.

But that's probably a millenia or so away, or maybe 2 centuries, no one can calculate it since they're running on vague estimates.

Actually the whole "deserts will grow" thing is somewhat uncertain. It's all a matter of location and total water vapor available. The higher the global temperature the more moist the atmosphere will be. Where this moisture goes is difficult to predict. It is currently beleived that the Sahara is directly responsible for the existence of the Amazon. IE the rain that doesn't stay(if it rains in the Sahara the water usually evaporates) because of the heat blows west and falls on the Amazon. However, if the winds blowing IN to the Sahara were moist enough, things could change dramatically. *visualizes environmentalists reaction to news that the Sahara is shifting westward a few feet each year* However if such a cascade reaction happened, then the Amazon would dry up(at least partly).

How does the cascade reaction work? The Sahara is hot because almost all solar radiation is either reflected back into space or transformed into heat. Very little is absorbed by plantlife. If the environment was more moist then more plants would be able to grow. The more plants the cooler the environment and the lower the evaporation rate. The lower the evaporation rate, the more water sticks around so that plants can grow. Yeah it would require a major weather shift to actually happen, but we know it's happened already.

Nice charts, but I notice you do not share a reference to their source. My guess is they come from a conservative think tank. I will instead continue to rely on science with a known source and refer to the Keeling Curve: Atmospheric CO2 concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa Observatory for my take on the amount of greenhouse gases currently in the air. A simple internet search will bring you up several wonderful pictures of this chart.

The "separate corporations" line is a ruse. You know as well as I know that these corporations are all controlled by share holders, many of these share holders all represent the same powerful elite at the top 2% of American society. These elite control the energy market. Folks do not call it "big oil" for fun...they are a POWERFUL group that wield great influence on our political process (you don't get two Bush boys in office without their influence). I am not going to dig into all the shareholder reports on a game forum to try and prove cause and effect. You are capable of doing a few internet searches on your own. A post from me one way or the other will not change your mind about who controls our energy market.

As for sea rise levels you must not watch/read many scientific programs/journals. These numbers are not new they have been reported in mainstream media for the last several months, and recently again since the North Pole has become an object of focus. A quick search located the old ABC news article and a simple Wiki answer. If you are curious you can perform a much more exhaustive search on your own. I suggest a good subscription to one of the many scientific journals located via EBSCO host:

http://reference.aol.com/article/_a/north-pole-meets-south-pole-earth-is/20060302121809990001
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_would_the_world_look_like_if_all_the_ice_melted

These and other sources should tell you that Antarctica holds about 90 percent of the world's ice. This is about 7,000 feet thick and if it all melted, sea levels around the world would rise about 61 meters or 200 feet.

Rush & Shaun are not a red herring, they are idiots. I bring them into focus because they have a large following of ditto-heads who simply repeat their mantra without EVER reading a single shred of the science behind global warming. If Limboil or Insanity say the world is O.K. these ditto-heads will believe it right up to the point that their California/Florida homes are under water.

And WHAT scientific journal are you reading that claims we can continue to pollute at our current rate for the next two millenia without harm? I know of no credible scientific journal that would even make such a claim...where is this science that you speak of? If we continue to pollute our air at the rate we are now this debate will be pointless, because the human race will cease to exist.

Loyalty above all else except honor.

Another great model to look at is the global dimming model. Most folks forget to even look or reference this model and how it interacts with global warming.

But in a nutshell, during our industrial age of pollution we put many fine particulate matter into the air. These particles were carried by clouds and acted as giant mirrors to direct the sun's rays away from the planet.

At the same time we continued to make green house gases. These gases work to heat up the planet by not allowing sunlight to escape.

Now here is the irony. Global dimming, or polluting the air with these particles, actually helped to counteract some of the harmful effects of the green house gases because these "mirrors" shot the sunlight back out into space. Now with pollution standards for particulate matter improving this cloud of crap is no longer assisting to block the sun's rays. But we have done little to curb the production of green house gases. So now the problem is compounding...because we stopped polluting the air with particulate matter.

This is one reason why early global warming models are so off. No one put the global dimming science into place until after the 9/11 attacks. one scientist noticed the effect on accident...his clue was that all airplanes in the U.S were grounded on that day...and the amount of sunlight we received on that date was higher as a result. It appears the exhaust trails from all those many airplanes actually acted in the same manner for global dimming. Nova did a great show on it. I highly recommend watching it if you REALLY want to see how screwed we could be.

Loyalty above all else except honor.

Wouldn't it be getting hotter even without the whole 'global warming' scenario though? Surely the amount of heat our 'newly created' machines, engines, ovens, etc., create isn't inconsequential when it's happening on such a large scale?

If you wish to complain about the graphs being from the 2001 report, the 2007 report has the same general numbers for temperature and sea level rises:

IPCC 2007 summary

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How is a carbon footprint a myth? When it is a term used to describe the environmental impact, with regards to CO2, that an individual or organization has on the environment...and since everyone contributes to human induced environmental change why does the individual not matter when there is a human population of 7 billion and growing?

Reduce the population and you can reduce the problem...but maybe there should have been some foresight into controlling population growth 40 years ago...but everyone then was too worried about the behavioral problems of population density to even think about the environmental problems of such a huge population.

Great lets do nothing then... the Earth will just keep getting warmer...3 degrees C, then 4, 5 ,6 and so on. The problem is that if we stopped producing CO2 today...climate change will continue for at least 100 years...but we haven't, so every day more and more CO2 is produced and goes out into the atmosphere making the problem worse.

And yes at 3 degrees Celsius the world is still quite habitable for us humans, but maybe not so for much of the wild life which finds it much harder to adapt to rapid climate...and as I said above it wouldn't stop at just 3 degrees.

Since graphs seem quite in fashion today...lets take a trip back in the past and please take a good look at the maximum CO2 count in ppm.(just over 280ppm)

Now have a look at the current and predicted CO2 measurements in ppm...CO2 levels have never been so high!(380ppm)

Expect things to start happening much faster than expected and with a snowball effect...due not only to CO2 levels increasing every year, but with positive feedback loops kicking in.

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Something I forgot to include...there has been a 1 degree temperature increase over the last century so with even if Fyrons 3 degree increase is correct that means that in just 200 years we've increased the global temperature by 4 degrees C.

In the 1st graph, Temperature and CO2 concentrations, over the last 10,000 years temperatures have only varied by 2 degrees C at most.

That is some fast climate changing we are doing!

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Good. Someone posted the ML chart.

Cockroaches are happy in just about any state...thus the reference to them being the only creature that is happy, not that I believe they will be the only creature alive. Although you may wish you were dead if the future the global scientists are predicting comes about. Do you know that cockroaches can even live for a week without a head? Talk about resistent to change.

Loyalty above all else except honor.

I'd like to see a response to this post, Arpeegy:

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They may have been...but seeing that the Earth was a ball of molten rock at the time kind of makes the point null and void.

True.

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Hehe... silly peoples need to quit listening to environmentalists. Environmentalists are pundits. Take everything they say with a grain(or more) of salt.

Geological research has discovered that human history began during one of the worst Ice ages in Earth's history. So yeah, CO2 levels were WAY down during that point. For comparison:

In the more distant past, CO2 levels have at times been FAR higher than now. The current "spike" in CO2 levels ACTUALLY started around 10,000 years ago. Human actions have been making it worse, but they aren't necessarily the cause.

For sources see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png

and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age

Are you trying to mislead us by putting forward a model and then not explaining it...where did I put that salt?

There are problems with the CO2 Phanerozic calculations, it is not at all as clear cut as some would like to make out.

Degassing in the carbon cycle is very important in moving the CO2 around, something that has not really been happening since the Cretaceous period...but has been a very important factor in the Phanerozic studies.

Other factors that have been left out of such studies are how the change in plant life can have a cooling or warming effect. The changes during the Cenozoic period from forests to grasslands on the continents would have had a great influence on the surface, as would the position of the continents.

and coming back to the carbon cycle...something that has been represented quite simply in the Phanerozoic models and is much more complex than the one used.

Finally the graph itself allows for a huge margin of error...all that yellow.

It dose raise some interesting questions, but not without its own doubts and it does not help us predict what will happen with such a rapid increase in the CO2 level.

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Actually, we already know, at least in part, what will happen. Your graph of the Vostok Ice cores shows that, regular cycles of change. Each Ice age came to an abrupt end when CO2 levels started to peak, as they are now. The world becomes warmer and more humid(like now). Then after a while (millenia) it starts to slowly get colder. Until the next Ice Age sets in. Or maybe not. We still don't know exactly why it happened that way in the past.

Margin for error? Hehe.... Even at the MINIMUM estimate, the end of the Jurassic had more than now. Maximum? ouch....

Very true there have been regular cycles of change over the last 400,000 years...the problem is when you add in todays current data for CO2 and you find that the cycle looks very out of control...and no CO2 levels are not starting to peak and wont for quite sometime.

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Fyron,

Any orga