Republicans shoot down tax on rich

Don't make that assumption. And I'm not just addressing you; that's a general rule for everybody, a rule I follow myself. If someone else doesn't try to refute another member's stuff, there are multiple reasons. Maybe they have a tennis game in ten minutes. Maybe they want to track down an info source or something. Maybe they just don't want to bother starting another argument in a thread that already has lots of that. It's entirely normal for a poster to say "I disagree with X" and not explain why.
Yeah, true. I should probably stop looking for content in your posts.
 
A limit that is seemingly far away is still a limit, good sir.
But it's still far away. Very far away.

I love it when you refute yourself in your response.
And I love it when you claim things that are clearly not true.

If we are to count fission/fusion as self-generated energy, then yes, the sun's energy radiated to Earth came from the sun.
WRONG. That's completely impossible. Fission and fusion products are created in the cores of stars, and only released when those stars explode. I said very plainly that fission and fusion products currently available on Earth came from OTHER stars, not our own Sun. Our Sun can't possibly be delivering fission/fusion elements to Earth, because it hasn't exploded yet.

The Sun delivers energy to Earth. The only matter it delivers is in the form of charged particles (i.e. solar wind) which consists of free subatomic particles.

Fission/fusion as a whole is an interesting case, but one technology is always 20 years away
So was Captain Kirk's communicator. Fusion power will become a reality fairly soon. The reason the research is slow is because it's impossible to perform small-scale tests; there's no way to create a small reactor and start fusion at "half the temperature". It's all gotta be full-size tests.

and the other--well, I don't have a fission-powered car. And that fuel source is limited too, based on the amount of radioactive materials on Earth. Hence, my original statement is still true.
Actually, lots of people already have fission-powered cars--electric cars get a portion of their power from nuclear power plants......anyway, your statement is true but worthless. The amount of radioactive stuff available on Earth is in fact a strict limit, but nobody knows what it is. It's always changing because humans keep discovering new deposits, finding new fusion processes that use entirely different elements--and, eventually, discovering fusion power, which is the big unknown.

The overall conclusion is that the limit is simply too fuzzy for you to draw any conclusions about it.

Look at this from a mass/energy balance perspective: the only significant input is from the sun, and if the Earth consumes more energy than that (read, not just humanity, but every other species as well), then it is depleting the built-up reserve. Any reasonable definition of sustainability would require the output to be less than the input.
Of course. And so we get down to the bottom line:

Human output will always be less than the input. Yes, I said "will" and "always" I made a total blanket statement here. Remember, the Sun's delivery to the Earth is six thousand times humanity's usage.

And it's totally impossible for human population to grow large enough to use all of that--because of the food supply. The hard limit on how much food we can produce is far, far lower than the energy limit.


And that's the end of that. What a segue--taxes on the rich ==> astronomy. :)


So, I brought up conversion factors, which you also seem interested in. Does anyone want to humor me with a calculator of the amount of energy invested in producing a barrel of oil, and comparing that to the efficiency we get out of it? You'd have to take into account it started as an organism (there's the solar energy source!), all that pressure over millions of years, etc. Although it is energy-dense, that fuel can only be inefficiently produced and is not renewable on any realistic time scale.
Wrong. Oil and coal are constantly being renewed, via the death of plants and animals, at an unknown rate. Since the rate is unknown, it's impossible to say it's unrealistic.


Yeah, true. I should probably stop looking for content in your posts.
There's so much of it you don't have to look. :D I don't feel like explaining why I disagree with Grimes, because I don't feel like starting another argument (I'm already involved with him in the global warming thread, and global warming threads are like crack to me).
 
And it's totally impossible for human population to grow large enough to use all of that--because of the food supply. The hard limit on how much food we can produce is far, far lower than the energy limit.

Humanity's ability to live with itself in congested peace seems to be lower yet. Distribution problems with food arrive long before production problems anymore. We could increase food production massively if we were willing to absorb the cost of production. Hydroponics are terribly interesting if you get into it. Technical innovation may be sufficient to increase population carrying capacity both through energy and food production but I think we have cause to be far more pessimistic regarding the political and social innovation that would also be necessary.
 
In global warming threads, yes.

In this thread, it's moot. I didn't hit on this fact until I mentioned the "food limit"; any consideration of energy limits is pointless because the human race would hit other limits first (and by "first" I mean "first by twenty country miles").

Humanity's ability to live with itself in congested peace seems to be lower yet.
I agree. There are other limits in addition to the food limit.
 
WRONG. That's completely impossible. Fission and fusion products are created in the cores of stars, and only released when those stars explode. I said very plainly that fission and fusion products currently available on Earth came from OTHER stars, not our own Sun. Our Sun can't possibly be delivering fission/fusion elements to Earth, because it hasn't exploded yet.

just a useless bit of trivia, but...

even our sun is not large enough to produce gold/silver lead and mercury in its death throws

here is a totally interesting but usless link
http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/supernovas.html
 
Top Bottom