Smart guys at Rensselaer Polytechnic (a cold place where smart people congregate and where 50% then turn insanely liberal in adult life) have done it again:
Shawn-Yu Lin, professor of physics at Rensselaer, and his team’s new nanoengineered reflective coating absorbed 96.21 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that only 3.79 percent of the sunlight was reflected and unharvested.
It’s almost perfect!
We have some serious crapola coming our way politically. Only science can save us. We need information, medical and energy singularities stat!
Put another way, if we persist in repeating the tragedy of socialism we should do so with infinite resources.
Our need for good science is obvious. That is why diversions like global climate change, which politicize science concern me so much. We can’t afford to waste our smart people.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:53 am
U.S. electricity consumption last summer peak was about 200,000 KW. U.S. area is about 9.8 million million square meters. Solar cells put out 200 W/sq. m. today. The whole U.S. covered would put out about 800,000 KW. Think that’s the way to go?
Wind? Supplying only NYC would cover all of Connecticut with towers!
November 4th, 2008 at 9:27 am
I don’t think solar has much more then incremental aid. Nuke and/or something totally new (Blacklight) is the ticket.
November 4th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Neither science nor technology can save society from organizational problems. Science only tells us how nature works; technology exploits science (or causes new science to be born) to create new ways of doing things. We have had 200 years of rapid tech advance that has improved our average standard of living without solving the basic societal dilemma. The power struggles of 1708 before the Industrial Revolution sound like the slow-motion analogy of power struggles of 2008.
Organizational questions like the relative merits of socialism don’t look to science for the answers. We amateur political scientists try to answer the questions ourselves despite our scant knowledge of sociology and much of the political thought of our ancestors. Unfortunately, we cannot resurrect Hamilton or Franklin or Madison or Washington to help us with perspective. Modern societies, including the USA, have been quite successful with various degrees of “socialism”. No modern society has no degree of “socialism.” In modern politics, “socialism” seems to mean more public control of means than the author agrees with. I have listened to the term being used pejoratively for at least fifty years.
Since we believe in science, we believe in studying the workings of nature, including climate, with the best scientists willing to take on the task. We need to know how climate works before we decide our approach to dealing with it. If the answers that emerge don’t align with our intuition or our preferred societal goals, too bad. We can’t demand that science give us the answers we want to hear.
November 4th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
It isn’t that science wants to prevent organizational problems. Clearly it can’t. What it can do is make organization moot. If we have infinite resources, who needs politics to divide them?
I believe in studying climate, but I also believe we cannot trust the politicized climatologists. Like journalism, the area has attracted a certain kind that knows the answer they want.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Sir Thomas More created the folly of pure socialism near 1500.
Sir Francis Bacon invented a methodology to examine “things” for the good of man versus mere navel gazing near 1600.
Thomas Hobbes married the two in Leviathin (1651)
David Hume sued for divorce around 1740 claiming it couldn’t work because man was basically nuts.
It’s been a scramble ever since!
Capitalism was invented in the “Garden of Eden” by a woman.
A Venn diagram of all these is a bunch of soapy bubbles.