Re: Off Topic: Some random thoughts...
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) May 17, 2020
- 1752 views
I confess that I'm a bit surprised by this part. Are you not able to get fresh fruit and veggies delivered by Instacart? Can you not order delivery from restaurants? Even pizza delivery is out?
Yes I'm not, no, and yes it is.
No delivery services here except Post Office UPS and Fed Ex.
Ouch. Sometimes I forget not everyone has the conveniences that come from living in a big city.
I could pick up from restaurants, except that the restaurants which serve good food (the locally-owned "Mom and Pop" types) have all closed and many have already closed permanently.
How unfortunate. IMVHO that's caused by bad governance. Either they should have gotten a susidy or at least a loan to keep them afloat until the lockdown ended, or else they should have allowed businesses to take out private insurance to guard against this sort of event.
The "you want fries with that?" chains have drive-thru service, and I can pick up pizza. But "man cannot live on grease alone" to paraphrase something someone once said.
Agreed.
So i get healthy meals delivered via UPS. Unfortunately, "healthy" seems to mean "lots of leftover bits of vegetables mixed with rice in a bowl". It probably is healthy, I've lost 15 lbs. I'm just not sure what I'm eating, and miss tasting the individual flavors of vegetables properly prepared.
But this too shall pass. Soylent green, anyone?
So, what sort of 100% clean, renewable energy will get a half-million pound can full of people up into the air and keep it there? If anyone knows, they will become insanely rich!
Oh that's easy. Any sort of ground-based power plant, perhaps based on geothermal energy or hydroelectric power in the right part of the environment, running for a sufficient period of time, could do the job.
Likewise, a clean coal power plant that was gradually transitioning to biofuels or some such..
The hard part is building the battery that can store that kind of power. I know scientists are actively hard at work right now on solving that problem (mining the moons of the gas giants would be quite impractical without it), but expecting a solution by 2030 seems quite optimistic at best.
That said, while I greatly respect your opinions, knowledge, and experience, I believe you may have fallen into the trap of the false dictonomy. Rather than having to use 100% clean & renewable energey to lift half a million pounds into the air or else eliminate air travel, I suspect that what would happen if the GND passed as described would be this:
We'd see much larger fleets of much smaller solar and hydrogen fuel cell powered aircraft for those trips that must be done speedily. These would hold far fewer people, but some of the difference could be made up by having a bigger fleet.
We'd see the return of blimps and other airships, but now moving faster than the old limit of 120mph thanks to new technology, for larger complements of passengers who can afford to wait a bit longer before arriving at their destinations - as well as for cargo that must go over air.
High speed rail for speedy ground shipment of cargo.
Finally, somewhat cynically, I'd expect that foreign airplanes would be exempt from the rule. So more traditional jets would go to foreign airlines (though perhaps they'd be limited to international travel only).
That said, considering the strength of the airline lobbyists, I doubt that we'd see this happen. More likely, if GND did pass, it'd have an exemption for them - or at least delay it for 50, 75, or 100 years.
Now, someone on Quora suggested that adding windmills to the airplane would generate power - which is true, sort of - see RAT. But that's pretty normal for Quora, where apparently physics is against the rules.
Seems unlikely to help much. You'd get extra drag, and the laws of thermodynamics says that you can't get more power out then was spent to make the airplane fly. And then there's loss of power as heat due to friction...
Admittedly, I haven't done the math, but I'd be surprised if this was worth the trouble.
