The U.S. space shuttle program is winding down amid talk of space tourism and even an eventual mission to Mars. If you could travel to any point in the universe in an instant and return safely, where would it be? The rings of Saturn? The event horizon of a black hole? To the point where the big bang
The Last Chevy Corvair?
As we found out a few years ago in the Lost and Found column in Hemmings Classic Car, things get a bit tricky when declaring one car or another to be the last Corvair. In fact, as Corvair historian Dave Newell put it, "The mystery of [the last Corvair's] fate is one of the greatest in GM's histo
Swiss Quadrocopters' Flight Controlled With Hand Gestures, Via Kinect
From Popular Science:
The quadrocopters at ETH Zurich's Flying Machine Arena already have some amazing autonomous moves. But engineers want to make them easier and more intuitive to control, so they turned to the Kinect.
Read the whole article and watch the video
Scavenging Ambient Electromagnetic Energy to Power Small Electronic Devices
From Gizmag:
As you sit there reading this story you're surrounded by electromagnetic energy transmitted from sources such as radio and television transmitters, mobile phone networks and satellite communications systems. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a
Airbus and DLR Testing Fuel Cell Technology to Cut Aircraft Pollution and Noise Emissions
From Gizmag:
The goals of the Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe (ACARE) to reduce CO2 emissions by 50 percent, NOx emissions by 80 percent and noise cut by 50 percent by 2020 has seen aircraft manufacturers and airlines looking at alternative fuels such as biofuel. Whil
Ultrawideband Takes Us Closer To Star Trek Tricorders
From InformationWeek:
The use of ultrawideband (UWB) technology to monitor a person's vital signs through sophisticated body-area networks could usher in the next generation of mobile devices for healthcare monitoring. But the development of this technology will take time and more bandwi
New Solution Can Help 'Permanently Get Rid of Germs'
From BBC News:
A new anti-microbial treatment that can make clothing - including smelly socks - permanently germ-free has been developed by US scientists.
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Who’s the mystery Texas spaceport customer?
A decade ago the Texas spaceport scene was relatively active. No fewer than three spaceports had been proposed by various local entities to attract RLVs and other commercial launch vehicles. One was the Gulf Coast Regional Spaceport, located in Brazoria County, south of Houston; the second was the West Texas Spaceport, near Fort Stockton; and the third was the Willacy County Spaceport, located on the Gulf coast north of Brownsville. (A summary of the status of those spaceports at the time can be found in the 2002 edition of the FAA’s “Commercial Space Transportation Developments and Concepts” report.) However, as the RLV boom went bust, these spaceport plans either went dormant or, in the case of the Gulf Coast Regional Spaceport, were cancelled.
Now, through, one of those proposed spaceports may have found new life. A recent article in the McAllen (Tx.) Monitor (which is actually a reprint of one last week in the Valley Morning Star in the Rio Grande Valley) reports that Willacy County officials have found a new tenant for their proposed spaceport. According to the county judge John F. Gonzales Jr., an unnamed aerospace company is planning to lease 50 acres spread across two sites; it would invest up to $50 million for its facilities and hire 100 to 200 people. At least one site would be on the coast, apparently to be used for launches over the Gulf into orbit.
Judge Gonzales, though, declined to disclose the name of the interested company, saying that he was bound by a confidentiality agreement. He did say that the company did test its rockets in December and it “recovered a reusable container similar to 1960s-type space capsules”, according to the article. “They’re the first private company to have successfully launched a low-altitude space flight and successfully recovered it,” Gonzales said. All those comments make the company in question sound like SpaceX: it launched a Falcon 9 in December from Cape Canaveral, placing the Dragon capsule in orbit. That capsule returned to Earth later the same day, making SpaceX the first non-government entity to recover a spacecraft from orbit. However, it’s not clear why SpaceX would have any interest in the Texas site, given its investment in developing its Cape Canaveral site.
Some have suggested that the company in question could be Blue Origin, which already has a test site in west Texas, north of the town of Van Horn. As RLV and Space Transport News pointed out earlier this year, Blue Origin has a patent for a “Sea Landing of Space Launch Vehicles and Associated Systems and Methods”, which covered the powered landing of a booster stage on a barge or other ship in the ocean after launch from a coastal launch site. However, what we know of Blue Origin’s activities don’t seem to match what Gonzales said in the article, but then, there’s a lot about Blue Origin we don’t know about.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Trailer 3
I think I'm a little too excited about this upcoming movie, but the animal uplift themes have put me over the top.
Medardo Rosso, Balla, Prampolini, Sironi Out of Storage!
Enrico Prampolini, Animismo geometrico, 1952
Le storie dell’arte. G.randi N.uclei A.rte M.oderna II
June 24 – October 23, 2011
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Roma
Catalog (Electa)
images here
This is the second exhibition of a series in which the National Gallery of Modern Art shows groups of works belonging to its own collection.
This cycle is dedicated to protagonists of the Italian art panorama of the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, from Medardo Rosso to Pino Pascali.
It includes works by Balla, De Pisis, Mafai, Morandi, Prampolini, Sironi and others, some of which have never been shown to the public before.
Tactile Dinner Car in D.C.
Banished? Productions presents:
July 7,9, 21-24, 2011
Baldacchino Gypsy Tent
607 New York Av NW DC
September
Flashpoint Gallery, 916 G St NW DC
The premier of Tactile Dinner Car is presented as a part of the 2011 Capital Fringe Festival, a program of the Washington, DC non-profit Capital Fringe.
Tactile Dinner Car will serve up playfully audacious “dishes” appropriated from F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook, a tome of avant-garde experiments that use jarring sensory experiences to renew the art of eating. Marinetti, the “Father of Futurism” and his artist-chefs looked at food as materials to be put together sculpturally, experientially, and oftentimes contradictorily, serving up inedible food for sensorial contrast and theatrical entertainment. By reconnecting the act of consuming with all five senses and encouraging playfulness with food, audiences visiting banished? productions’ Tacti le Dinner Car will embark upon a one-of-a-kind sensory/gustatory journey, with a renewed relationship to food at the destination
Pulling inspiration for its shape from Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Car, Ernest Trova’s “Falling Man” sculpture and the Mercedes F-Cell Roadster among many other influences, the TACTILE DINNER CAR aims to mobilize the pseudo-edible Futuristic fusion of cuisine and theatre. TACTILE DINNER CAR will serve up playfully audacious “dishes” appropriated from F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook, a tome of avant-garde experiments that use jarring sensory experiences to renew the art of eating.
Tickets will be sold in 15-minute increments during the operation hours and the length of each person’s experience will be self-determined.
Rotating A la Car(te) Items:
THE CHOSEN
DUPELICATION
LIBYAN AEROPLANE*
THE MANOEUVER
ANOSMIA STIX
THE SUSHI INJECTURE
OX IN THE COCKPIT*
(FOOD) FETISH
BLACK & WHITE*
BATTAGLIA*
DEVIL IN BLACK KEY*
PRELABIAL EXERCISE
BETWEEN HUNGER | BOREDOMComplimentary Assorted Palate Cleansers
*Prepared from the Original Futurist Recipe
Read review in Washington City Paper
Previous Banished? Productions Tactile Dinners
The End of Petrotyranny
As oil prices remain high, we once again see murmurs of anticipated doom from various quarters. Such fears are grossly miscalculated, as I have described in my 2007-08 articles about how oil at $120/barrel creates desirable chain reactions, as well as my rebuttal to the poorly considered beliefs of peak oil alarmists, who seem capable of being sold not one, but two bridges in Brooklyn. Today, however, I am going to combine the concepts in both of those articles with some new analysis I have done to enable us to predict when oil will lose the economic power it currently holds. You are about to see that not only are peak oil alarmists wrong, but they are just about as wrong as those predicting in 1988 that the Soviet Union would soon dominate the world, and will soon be equally worthy of ridicule.
Unenlightened Punditry and Fashionable Posturing :
As I mentioned in a previous article, many observers incessantly contradict themselves on whether they want oil to be inexpensive, or whether they want higher oil prices to spur technological innovations. One of the most visible such pundits is Thomas Friedman. For example, has many interesting articles on the subject, such as his 2007 piece titled 'Fill 'Er Up With Dictators' :
But as oil has moved to $60 to $70 a barrel, it has fostered a counterwave — a wave of authoritarian leaders who are not only able to ensconce themselves in power because of huge oil profits but also to use their oil wealth to poison the global system — to get it to look the other way at genocide, or ignore an Iranian leader who says from one side of his mouth that the Holocaust is a myth and from the other that Iran would never dream of developing nuclear weapons, or to indulge a buffoon like Chávez, who uses Venezuela’s oil riches to try to sway democratic elections in Latin America and promote an economic populism that will eventually lead his country into a ditch.
But Mr. Friedman is a bit self-contradictory on which outcome he wants, as evidenced across his New York Times columns.
In short, the best tool we have for curbing Iran’s influence is not containment or engagement, but getting the price of oil down
So here’s my prediction: You tell me the price of oil, and I’ll tell you what kind of Russia you’ll have. If the price stays at $60 a barrel, it’s going to be more like Venezuela, because its leaders will have plenty of money to indulge their worst instincts, with too few checks and balances. If the price falls to $30, it will be more like Norway. If the price falls to $15 a barrel, it could become more like America
Either tax gasoline by another 50 cents to $1 a gallon at the pump, or set a $50 floor price per barrel of oil sold in America. Once energy entrepreneurs know they will never again be undercut by cheap oil, you’ll see an explosion of innovation in alternatives.
And by not setting a hard floor price for oil to promote alternative energy, we are only helping to subsidize bad governance by Arab leaders toward their people and bad behavior by Americans toward the climate.
All of these articles were written within a 4-month period in early 2007. Both philosophies are true by themselves, but they are mutually exclusive. Mr. Friedman, what do you want? Higher oil prices or lower oil prices? Such confusion indicates how the debate about energy costs and technology is often high on rhetoric and low on analysis.
Much worse, however, is the fashionable scaremongering that the financial media uses to fill up their schedule, amplified by a general public that gets suckered into groupthink. To separate the whining from the reality, I apply the following simple test to verify whether people are actually being pinched by high oil prices or not. If a large portion of average Americans have made arrangements to carpool to work (as was common in the 1970s), then oil prices are high. Absent the willingness to make this adjustment, their whining about gasoline is not a reflection of actual hardship. This enables us to declare that oil prices are not approaching crisis levels until most 10-mile-plus commuters are carpooling, that too in groups of three, rather than just two. Coordinating of carpools is thus the minimum test of whether oil prices are actually causing any significant changes in behavior.
Fortunately, $100 oil, a price that was considered a harbinger of doom as recently as 2007, is now not even enough to induce carpooling in 2011. This quiet development is remarkably unnoticed, and conceals the substantial economic progress that has occurred.
Economic Adaptations :
This leads me to make a declaration. 32 billion barrels at around $100/barrel is $3.2 Trillion in annual consumption. This is currently less than 5% of nominal world GDP. I hereby declare that :
Oil consumption worldwide will never exceed $4 Trillion/year, no matter how much inflation, political turmoil, or economic growth there is.
This would mean that oil would gradually shrink as a percentage of world GDP, just as it has shrunk as a percentage of US GDP since 1982. Even when world GDP is $150 Trillion, oil consumption will still be under $4 Trillion a year, and thus a very small percentage of the economy. Mark my words, and proceed further to read about how I can predict this with confidence.
The Carnival of Creative Destruction :
There are at least seven technologies that are advancing to reduce oil demand by varying degrees, many of which have been written about separately here at The Futurist :
1) Natural Gas : Technologies that aid the discovery of natural gas have advanced at great speed, and supplies have skyrocketed to a level that exceeds anything humanity could consume in the next few decades. The US alone has enough natural gas to more than offset all oil consumption, and the price of natural gas is currently on par with $50 oil.
2) Efficiency gains : From innovations in engine design, airplane wing shape, reflective windows, and lighter nanomaterials, efficiency is advancing rapidly, to the extent that economic growth no longer increases oil consumption per capita, as described earlier. There are many options available to consumers seeking 40 mpg or higher without sacrificing too much power or size, and I predicted back in early 2006 that in 2015, a 4-door family car with a 240 hp engine would deliver 60 mpg (or equivalent) yet still cost no more than $35,000 in 2015 dollars. People scoffed at that prediction then, but now it seems quite safe.
3) Cellulose Ethanol and Algae Oil : Corn ethanol was never going to be suitable in cost or scale, but the infrastructure established by the corn ethanol industry makes the transition to more sophisticated forms of ethanol production easier. But fuels from switchgrass and algae are much more cost-effective, and will be ramping up in 2012. Solazyme is an algae oil company that went public recently, and already has a market capitalization of $1.5 Billion.
4) Batteries : Most of the limitations of electric and hybrid vehicles stem from shortcomings in battery technology. However, since batteries are improving at a rate that is beginning to exceed the traditional 5-8% per year, and companies such as Tesla are able to lower the cost of their fully electric vehicles, the knee of the curve is near.
5) Telepresence : Telepresence, while expensive today, will drop in price under the Impact of Computing and displace a substantial portion of business air travel, as described in detail here. By 2015, geographically dispersed colleagues will seem to be closer to each other, despite meeting in person less often than they did in 2008.
6) Wind Power : Wind Power already generates almost 3% of global electricity consumption, and is growing quickly. When combined with battery advances that improve the range and power of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, we get two simultaneous disruptions - oil being displaced not just by electriciy, but by wind electricity.
7) Solar Power : This source today generates the least power among those listed here. But it is the fastest growing of the group with multiple technologies advancing at once, and with decades of steady price declines finally reaching competitive pricepoints. It also has many structural advantages, most notably the fact that it be deployed to land that is currently unused and inhospitable. Many of the countries with the fastest growth in energy consumption are also those with the greatest solar intensity.
Plus, these are just the technologies that displace oil demand. There are also technologies that increase oil supply, such as supercomputing-assisted oil discovery and new drilling techniques. Supply-increasing technologies work to reduce oil prices and while they possibly slow down oil demand displacement, they too work to weaken petrotyranny.
The problem in any discussion of these technologies is that the debate centers around an 'all or none' simplicity of whether the alternative can replace all oil demand, or none at all. That is an unnuanced exchange that fails to comprehend that each technology only has to replace 10% of oil demand. Natural gas can replace 10%, ethanol another 10%, efficiency gains another 10%, wind + solar another 10%, and so on. Thus, if oil consumption as a percentage of world GDP is lower in a decade than it is today, that itself is a huge victory. It hardly matters which technology advances faster than the others (in 2007, natural gas did not appear as though it would take the lead that it enjoys today), what matters is that all are advancing, and that many of these technologies are highly complementary to each other.
What is also overlooked is how quickly the pressure to shift to alternatives grows as oil becomes more expensive. If, say, cellulose ethanol is cost-effective with oil at $70, then oil at $80 causes a modest $10 dollar differential in favor of cellulose. If oil is $120, then this differential is now $50, or five times more. Such a delta causes much greater investment and urgency to ramp up research and production in cellulose ethanol. Thus, each increment in oil price creates a much larger zone of profitability for any alternative.
The Cost of Petrotyranny :
However, as we saw in the 2008 article, many of these regimes are dancing on a very narrow beam only as wide as the span between oil of $70 and $120/barrel. While a price below $70 would be fatal to the current operations of Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, even a high price leads to a shrinkage in export revenue, as domestic consumption rises to reduce export units to a greater degree than can be offset by a price rise. Furthermore, higher prices accelerate the advance of the previously mentioned technologies. For the first time, we can now estimate how long oil can still hold such an exalted economic status.
Quantifying the Remaining Petro-Yoke :
For the first time, we can make the analysis of both technological and political pressure exerted by a particular oil price more precise. We can now quantify the rate of technological demand destruction, and predict the actual number of years before oil ceases to have any ability to cause economic recessions, and regimes like Iran, Venezuela, and Russia no longer can subsist on oil exports to the same degree. This brings me to the second declaration of this article :
From the start of 2011, measure the dollar-years of area enclosed by a chart of the price of oil above $70. There are only 200 such dollar-years remaining for the current world petro-order. We can call this the 'Law of Finite Petrotyranny'.
Allow me to elaborate.
Through some proprietary analysis, I have calculated that the remaining lifetime of oil's economic importance as follows :
- From the start of 2011, take the average price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) or NYMEX oil, and subtract $70 from that, each year.
- Take the number accumulated, and designate that as 'X' dollar-years.
- As soon as X equals to 200 dollar-years, then oil will not just fall below $70, but will never again be a large enough portion of world GDP to have a significant macroeconomic impact.
Keep in mind the Law of Finite Petrotyranny, and on that basis, welcome any increase in oil prices as the hastening force of oil replacement that it is. My personal opinion? We average about $100/barrel, causing depletion of the X points in 2017 (scenario 'C' in green).
Conclusion :
So what happens after the Law of Finite Petrotyranny manifests itself? Let me pre-empt the strawmen that critics will erect, and state that oil will still be an important source of energy. But most people will no longer care about the price of oil, much as the average person does not keep track of the price of natural gas or coal. Oil will simply be a fuel no longer important enough to cause recessions or greatly alter consumer behavior through short-term spikes. Many OPEC countries will see a great reduction in their power, and will no longer be able to placate their citizens through petro-handouts alone. These countries would do well to act now and diversify their economies, phase in civil liberties while they can still do so incrementally, and prepare for a future of much lower leverage over their current customers.
So cheer oil prices higher so that the X points get frittered away quickly. It will be fun.
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