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Quote:
That probably won't be necessary. It will take much less energy (perhaps from Solar, or other means) to extract Carbon from our atmoisphere and Hydrogen from water and manufacture Iso-Heptane here, than it would to travel to another planet, extract the oil, and ship it to Earth.
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Forming opinions as we speak |
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As a minor side note, I always thought the idea of using water as fuel kind of creepy. There's already six and a half billion of us. There is only going to be more. Do we need yet another strain on our fresh water supply system?
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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah |
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Must be a joke ! Too private for me to undestand !
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the use of Hydrogen as a substitute energy tool in the future would be more cost affective than cost effective especially for the developing countries of this world. But it will be pretty useful to maintain the layor of ozone intact. kyoto agreement too will be successful when the world will start the use of hydrogen as comprehensive energy resource. technically the developing countries are not that master in maintaining, using, implementing it economicaly more effective, may be the reasons are different, only the option will rest to them to import it and this is the case where the cost hampers.
if we say the use of solar energy will become more effective, the solar output is restricted and the technique today which is normally used particularly for conduction of energy, storage, there are many barriers, even of transportation of solar energy cel to the different place, the freight charges also hampers cost. As big don said water base is quite nice, but for steam engine maintainance charges also drops impact on the cost of usage. then what could we do? |
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Several points have been made in this thread; lets try to deal with some of them.
Water can’t be used as a fuel in the same way as oil can, oil contains a massive useable surplus of energy, but water has to be split up into oxygen and hydrogen using already available energy. Hydrogen obtained in this way can be used as a fuel, but it contains only stored energy; in some ways hydrogen fuel is nothing more than a battery, storing energy used elsewhere. As far as fresh water goes, we are certainly not running out of water on our planet; as global warming proceeds, the seas will rise and we will find we have too much. A hundred million people in the world already depend on desalinated water; to help solve the fresh water problems of the world this figure will doubtless increase. But better use and conservation of existing resources will go a lot further in the short term. Think how much fresh water is lost into the oceans at the mouths of the great rivers of the world, especially the Amazon. The problem boils down once again to the availability of energy on Earth rather than lack of other resources; this availability is the crux of these questions. Could we find oil or hydrocarbons out there to bring back to burn? There may well be plenty of hydrocarbons on Titan which could be used as fuel here. But once you have launched into space, travelled hundreds of millions of miles to Titan, extracted the hydrocarbons, accelerated them back towards Earth, decelerated them and landed hem in bulk back on Earth these oils would be far more expensive than artificially manufactured oil created in chemical factories here on Earth. So there would be no point. How about other minerals? Well, the Earth has a wealth of minerals in its crust, and because it has been, and is, so geologically active those deposits are rich; few other bodies in our solar system would have comparable resources on their surfaces. I bet Io has some good deposits; Mercury, perhaps, probably Venus, although Venus would pose certain other problems. The Moon is a little disappointing if you are looking for certain metals and other useful materials, while Mars may hold some surprises yet (Jon Clarke being far better qualified to answer on this subject). Probably the best skymining would be found among the asteroids, at least to begin with. But almost none of this material would be cheap enough to compete with material mined or recycled on Earth, because of the cost of getting it to the surface. Only if the solar system was actively being exploited as a whole, as a place for habitation and colonisation, would most of the mineral wealth in the solar system start to become truly valuable. |