[Glenn Millam]

I created the art that Reswan posted at the top of this topic. I would like to clarify my intentions when I came up with it. Here is a breakdown of my concept for the new t-shirt design.

The problem I had with my earlier designs wsa that they were trying to say too much. The point of the design should be “Will this peak the interest of someone who has never heard of fusion, much less focus fusion, and will it make them go to the site and find out?”

Thus, I abandoned the expositionary approach of showing aneutronic fusion in action with lots of words and other symbols, and instead did a design based on a stylized plasmoid formation meant to be pleasing, energetic and a bit enigmatic. I then put more effort in choosing the typography for both a sense of energy and conservation of space on the substrate (the small area on the front of the t-shirt that Cafe Press can put an image on).

The colors were chosen to symbolize the two components, hydrogen and boron, but more importantly, I chose them to draw people’s attention and get them to consider the question, “What is focus fusion?” The reversal of the type through the ellipses played a key role in choosing the saturation of the colors. The type had to be instantly readable, but the graphic portions need to be enigmatic. I want the viewer to get out their smart phone or go home and google “focus fusion.”

The copy on the back uses the same colors and font as on the front, providing symmetry of design. The typography and message was deliberately simple, meant to create more questions in the mind than are answered. Is it possible we are close to having a clean, cheap, and unlimited power source? Who is working on this? What is this focus fusion thing again?

I hope this clarifies the design concept a bit. I would also like to add that I don’t think it is a good idea to get too representational with the t-shirt design. We want to attract people who may not know or care what a neutron is, and get them on board.

[Glenn Millam]

I’m sure someone has said this already, but this subject is one of my pet peeves. Immortality is the WORST thing that could happen to us.

First, the tech will be very expensive and exclusive. It will create the ultimate have/have-not economic crisis. Think the US healthcare debate got ugly? Wait until we debate why only the hyper-rich get to live indefinitely. Think civil war and revolution.

Next, what happens when dictators live indefinitely, and keep power by granting indefinite life status to key people who prop up their regime? Seriously… what if Dear Leader in North Korea didn’t die? What if [em]Stalin[/em] never died? Humanity stagnates, nothing ever passes on to someone else, and everything becomes like some ridged hindu caste system with the untouchables being the ones who die regularly. Think thats impossible? That is what it will look like if humanity survives the wars that will be fought over the privilege of immortality. The winners will be the ones who get to be immortal.

And immortality will be a drag. Think of never getting a promotion, never retiring, never hoping anymore because it will always be the same. The economy will change only according to the suicide/accident rate and the death rate of the underclasses who can’t afford the treatments. And forget having children, unless you want to eat soylent green.

The best we could hope for is a scenario like in Michael Moorcock’s [em]Dancers at the End of Time[/em] series, where humans are extremely low in population but immense in power, so much so that anything they do to the planet doesn’t really matter anymore. The Earth is merely a substrate for their artistic whims. Personally, I don’t want that future.

People like Kurtzweil who want immortality drive me crazy.

[Glenn Millam]

That was a cool link. Answered a lot of questions. Here is one in return.

[Glenn Millam]

CRACKPOT THEORY ALERT:

One thing I have wondered about since they found that the Universe is expanding at a faster rate is what could be causing it. Could it be that over time, areas in space are gaining overall positive charge (more protons than electrons) and this is causing a repellant effect, expanding the Universe faster as the forces grow over time? I do not have the physics chops to say what would cause this other than to think that maybe fusion in stars are producing proton waste at a slightly higher rate than electrons, and these protons are being blown out by solar winds to form plasma filaments that repel at long distances.

All those protons in the interstellar medium had to come from somewhere. The physicists who have downplayed Alfven’s theories over the years have assumed that interstellar medium is neutral electrically, thus plasma and electromagnetism does not play a large role in large scale physics like gravity does. These pictures say otherwise, but I don’t see people acknowledging it. I’d really like one of the smart people at LPP (maybe even Mr. Lerner?) look at this and write a few words of explanation.

Or perhaps a proton imbalance could come from some other phenomenon. “Thus the effective charge of an electron is actually smaller than its true value, and the charge decreases with increasing distance from the electron.”

[Glenn Millam]

Here is whats on Nature’s website (emphasis is my own):

“The interstellar medium of the Milky Way is multiphase, magnetized and turbulent. Turbulence in the interstellar medium produces a global cascade of random gas motions, spanning scales ranging from 100 parsecs to 1,000 kilometres (ref. 4). Fundamental parameters of interstellar turbulence such as the sonic Mach number (the speed of sound) have been difficult to determine, because observations have lacked the sensitivity and resolution to image the small-scale structure associated with turbulent motion. Observations of linear polarization and Faraday rotation in radio emission from the Milky Way have identified unusual polarized structures that often have no counterparts in the total radiation intensity or at other wavelengths, and whose physical significance has been unclear. Here we report that the gradient of the Stokes vector (Q, U), where Q and U are parameters describing the polarization state of radiation, provides an image of magnetized turbulence in diffuse, ionized gas, manifested as a complex filamentary web of discontinuities in gas density and magnetic field. Through comparison with simulations, we demonstrate that turbulence in the warm, ionized medium has a relatively low sonic Mach number, Ms ≲ 2. The development of statistical tools for the analysis of polarization gradients will allow accurate determinations of the Mach number, Reynolds number and magnetic field strength in interstellar turbulence over a wide range of conditions.”

Magnetized turbulence in diffuse, ionized gas? They are talking about plasma here. Is there a reason they don’t describe it for what it is? Can someone with better knowledge on the subject explain these images and their significance?

[Glenn Millam]

OK, let me get this straight. There are a lot of unknowns to me here.

To get a 747, fully loaded, into the air you would need to know:

– The amount of thrust necessary to get the thing flying at cruising speed

– The amount of electric fans necessary to produce the thrust

– The difference in weight between the electric and liquid-fuel engines they are replacing (hopefully a nice savings)

– The landing weight the plane must have to land safely

– The number of DPFs to provide energy and some level of redundancy

– The weight of those DPFs

– The weight if the capacitors and other plumbing to make the DPFs work

– The weight of the transformers and other equipment used to capture the energy and direct it for use by the airplane

– The weight of the lead-foil “onions” to capture X-ray energy bleed-off

– The weight of extra X-ray shielding to keep ANY hint of X-ray radiation outside the reactor chamber

– The weight of neutron shielding

– The weight of the superstructure to house the entire reaction chamber and keep it stable on a moving vehicle

– Considerations such as extra equipment or personnel necessary to run the reactor (assuming that the pilots or other crew cannot be trained to handle this task

– Safety considerations for such events as lightning strike and turbulence. Would a DPF be affected by a lightening storm? Would its magnetic nature be disrupted by passing directly through one, or near one? Would you need more shielding, or would the X-ray shielding work for this problem?

– How much of the cabin must be sacrificed to deal with the energy plant being housed in the fuselage

Then compare all this to what current technology is providing in terms of weight, volume, and aerodynamic performance.

Does anyone have these answers? I know that the current plan for FF is to be housed in garage-sized power plants. Thats very small for a power plant but kind of big on a jetliner. But where there is a will there is a way….

[Glenn Millam]

nemmart wrote: Why not just power the airplane with FF’s? Just checked some numbers. A 747 burns on average a gallon a second during flight. Jet A has roughly the same energy per weight as gasoline which has 121 MJ per gallon. Therefore a 747 uses 121 MW/hr, which means 20 FFs to produce the juice.

You wouldn’t want to put FFs on an airplane. X-ray shielding alone will make the weight prohibitive.

Also, don’t confuse joules and watts.

As for your numbers… are you sure you are factoring in the jet engine’s efficiency? When using any fuel to power an engine, it is not just the total amount of potential energy in the fuel that matters, but the efficiency of the engine in extracting useful energy from the fuel.

Jet engines are not terribly efficient at extracting energy from fuel. In fact, most fossil fuel based engines aren’t. Car engines get about 20% efficiency. So if you put a gallon of gas in a car, with a total energy of 130 MJ, you end up only getting 26MJ of useful energy out of it. The rest is wasted.

In terms of cars, the efficiency and local nature of FF would make it a great solution for powering electric cars. Part of the argument about electric cars is that the sources we currently have of producing and transmitting electricity gives only about 33% efficiency, thus making an electric car about 25% fuel efficient. If we had FF, with its potential 80%+ efficiency and ability to have the plant closer to the end user, you could see a dramatic increase in the efficiency of the drive to work. This, of course, depends on a lot of problems to be overcome. Not only does FF have to work, but you need a better battery than current technology.

And that’s just cars. With planes, you need to have weight in consideration. To make a good electric airliner, you would need a phenominal battery technology that is light, stable, incredibly energy-dense, and won’t randomly catch on fire or arc lightning about the cabin. I think carbon-based fuels will be used in airplanes for a long time. But that’s OK, because if the only thing we are using fossil fuels for are airplanes, then the oil reserves of the planet will last a long, long time.

And, you could always take one of these instead.

[Glenn Millam]

vansig wrote:
I think it’s accurate. “Fake fitness” being the key term.
— http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/why_we_havent_met_any_aliens/

As recent, general traffic on the forum site seems to be covering the AGW debate, and movies, and games, better than real progress toward exceeding unity, I’m finding myself suddenly deeply dissatisfied.

Read that article you linked. I think that it’s author is misguided. Look through history and you will find people lamenting the “current” state of people’s laziness and our impending failure. The author just fails to see that he is just another in a long line of doomsayers.

I see a situation quite opposite from him. He predicts a dying humanity which fails to procreate due to laziness and bad eating habits. I see a world that is still reproducing way too fast and is using up its resources without properly recycling them. He sees movies and games as idle entertainments that substitute for real exploration and growth, and I see these things as human expression and necessary for the exploration of truth.

Are we fit to explore the stars? We don’t even have the means. The first step in doing so would be to create a cornucopia energy technology, like focus fusion. Wasn’t this project an outgrowth of a spacecraft propulsion research project at NASA?

I also don’t like his assumptions about how human evolution could not prepare us for the world we have today. Yeah, we have junk food and porn. But this is not new. Just look at the Kama Sutra. People have always like to eat too much and have sex. They also have always liked to do a lot of things. We have also always liked to get to the point where we do whatever we like.

Humans will always be “lazy.” Why? Because laziness is the way to efficiency. Oddly enough, it is our urge to be lazy that pushes us to achievement, since we are willing to go through short-term effort for long term laziness.

http://twentytwowords.com/2008/07/16/how-laziness-breeds-efficiency/

The focus fusion project seeks to turn several years of research and development time into thousands of years worth of practically free energy, which will pay for “laziness” on a massive scale and allow for new forms of “laziness” as yet undreamt of. And we humans will work hard at it, trust me.

[Glenn Millam]

I thought transparent aluminum had already been invented.

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

[Glenn Millam]

For those who are unaware, or would like better clarification about what Rezwan refers to as “’53,” a good book to read is Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner. It, among other things, tells the full story of the CIA’s orchestrated overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran. It is a lso a great book for understanding just how screwed up that organization has been over its history, and how its mandate has been abused my numerous US administrations.

The one thing to remember about all this is that most of these really bad decisions were made by people trying to lead the US through the Cold War. Their minds were filled with Alger Hiss, the spy campaign in the Manhattan project, communist threats, communist infiltration into our government (imagined and otherwise), and the sense that things were spinning out of control towards communist enslavement and forced atheism, or nuclear holocaust. I believe this caused a great amount of paranoia in the US, and this mental disease became infectious, with the US government doing things that it otherwise wouldn’t consider, and by the injury to others turning otherwise stable, peaceful countries and cultures into paranoid, introverted ones. Iran’s current stance towards the west comes from this injury, and it, in my opinion, suffers from the mental disease began in the Cold War by the tension between the Soviet Union and the West. It is a disease we stopped suffering from in the early ’90’s but Iran still has it. And Iran isn’t alone.

I am hoping President Obama’s current approach will begin to ease the paranoia and start allowing the leadership and people in Iran and other countries to think more clearly, and perhaps begin to trust again. We need to heal from the wounds of the Cold War.

[Glenn Millam]

JimmyT wrote: The ice caps are melting on Mars too.

Hence the debate about it being man-made global warming. But, its like John McCain has said, if we get off fossil fuels and it didn’t cause global warming, then we’ll have cleaner air, and fewer oil dictators funding extremists.

[Glenn Millam]

JimmyT, here is a link to a Scientific American article from 1998, which describes the problem. The book I mention in my previous post also ties Chinese and Indian energy consumption curves to the info in the SciAm article to find that soon, oil will become so expensive it may break down the world economy.

http://dieoff.org/page140.htm

We aren’t running out of oil. We are just using it way too fast, and we have crossed over the peak of world total production. We will have to take drastic steps to just survive peacefully until focus fusion and/or other similar projects come to fruition. That is why this project is so important, why this website is important, and why the people working on the project are very important.

One other consideration is man-made, CO2-based global warming. If it is true (there is still debate) then it needs to be worked on now. Anything we do to offset the increases in crude oil use in the growing economies in Asia needs to not add to the CO2 problem.

[Glenn Millam]

Go to the website and listen to the podcast. They go much more in-depth with EEStor and the state of the technology.

[Glenn Millam]

I get Zenn’s investor communication emails. Here is the one I got today.

______________

ZENN Motor Company held its Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders today. For those of you are interested, a podcast of the meeting can be found at http://www.ZENNcars.com and http://www.newswire.ca

For a quick summary of the meeting, please see our news release below which outlines our plans for the future .

All the best,

Ian Clifford

Chief Executive Officer

ZENN MOTOR COMPANY DETAILS PLANS FOR
HIGHWAY CAPABLE ZENN POWERED BY EESTOR!

Toronto, Ontario

[Glenn Millam]

I agree with everything you’ve said, Brian.

Brian H wrote: Oh, about EEStor: Google EEStor and Lockheed. Big news!

I know. This means that they have actually done it, and its now a matter of getting the processes for full-scale production finished. I am currently researching how to start a Zenn dealership. Its gonna be big!

[Author]

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