Is This a Good Idea? A nationwide government-supported electric car-charging network?

November 18, 2009

What's not to like about electric cars? They can perform on the road as well as the gasoline-powered variety, and they would help us to decrease our dependence upon imported oil and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from traffic that are a significant contributor to climate change. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the average U.S. car that is driven 12,000 miles a year puts 1.3 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Here is what's not to like about electric cars: Their range limitations.  A gasoline powered car typically can go 300 or more miles between refuelings, but most electric cars can't get anywhere close to that on battery power alone. The old 1990s-vintage lead-acid battery EV-1s of "Who Killed the Electric Car"  fame could get between 55 and 75 miles on a single charge, and even the advanced lithium-ion batteries in the new all-electric Nissan Leaf needs a recharge after 100 miles. At the high end, the Tesla Roadster sports car claims a range of 244 miles without recharging under normal conditions—but that’s presuming that you want to drive a two-seater and can afford to pay $101,000 for one.

As a result, EV owners tend to develop a peculiar psychological malady known as Range Anxiety.  A study of EV drivers’ behavior in Japan a few years ago found that they tended to be so wary of running out of juice that they only ultilized half of their batteries’ 93-mile driving range, and that some seldom strayed beyond 10 miles of their charging station.

But a newly-formed alliance of electric utilities, EV makers and corporate EV supporters called the Electrification Coalition has a solution for the problem. Earlier this week, they issued a report which, among other things, called for building of a nationwide network of charging stations that would make it as easy to recharge your EV as it is to buy a tank of regular. But relying upon private companies to underwrite the development of a national EV charging infrastructure, they say, is a non-starter. Even though the necessary equipment only costs $2,000 to $3,000 per station plus installation, the low prices they would have to charge and the initially small number of customers would make a station owner wait for 10 years to earn back the initial investment. To make it worth their while, the coalition is calling for the federal government to give $124 billion in incentives, including $13.5 billion in tax credits for building charging stations, over the next decade. But Sam Ari, one of the report’s authors, told the Washington Post that that the amount "pales in comparison to the cost of U.S. oil dependence, which has huge environmental, economic and national-security costs."

Assuming that you're not already gagging on the $124 billion number, however, another question arises: Do we really need a federal crash program to create an EV charging infrastructure? And are charging stations the best method? There is already an EV network startup, Palo Alto-based Better Place, which is building robotic battery-swapping stations in six countries. Last year, the company struck a $1 billion deal with several northern California cities to build an EV infrastructure there.

So let me know what you think of the proposal for a publicly-backed network of EV charging stations. Don't be bashful.

Is This a Good Idea? Do we all need to become vegetarians to fight global warming?

November 10, 2009

After you get done marveling at the record-breaking 185-pound cheeseburger cooked and garnished earlier this year by a Detroit-area sports bar, consider the controversial change in our diets recently advocated by Professor Lord Stern of Brentford, the economist who formerly served as the UK government’s top advisor on the impacts of climate change. He’s the same Lord Stern whose ominous 2006 report predicted that global warming’s unabated effects would eat up 20 percent of the planet’s economic output and cause millions of people to go hungry. In a provocative interview with the Times UK newspaper, Stern argued that raising animals for meat is a significant contributor to the greenhouse effect that causes global warming. He pointed out that animal waste and flatulence releases vast quantities of methane, a gas that is even more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. If we want to stave off the impending climate catastrophe, Lord Stern said, we soon will have to give up meat completely, and switch to a vegetarian diet.

He predicted that people’s attitudes would evolve until meat eating became unacceptable:

“I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating,” he said. “I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”

But Lord Stern isn’t content to wait for the public to embrace the environmental virtues of vegetarianism. He’d like to see the upcoming UN climate change conference in Copenhagen put taxes on meat--and other foods with a high carbon cost--that would discourage people from eating them.

If you want more background on Lord Stern’s reasoning, here’s a sobering report on the environmental effects of meat cultivation and consumption by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Lord Stern’s proposition immediately provoked an outcry on both sides of the Atlantic. The Times web site was inundated with hundreds of scathing comments from carnivorous Brits outraged at the prospect of giving up bangers and mash, steak-and-kidney pie and the other bizarre items that pass for cuisine on their island. Columnist Christopher Booker of the conservative Daily Mail newspaper in the UK accused Lord Stern of vastly exaggerating the amount of methane from cattle flatulence, and proclaimed that “the claims of all these veg-obsessives don't stand up to scientific scrutiny.” In the US, Fox News commentator Glenn Beck ranted that the Copenhagen conference could mean “the end of U.S. sovereignty,” and depicted Stern’s proposal as part of an international anti-animal protein cabal that also included Baltimore school officials who recently began offering “Meatless Monday” vegetarian meals in school cafeterias once a week. To Lord Stern, Beck offered this impassioned riposte:

"Good, eat your carrot. I’m going to have a steak. Americans love our steaks, we love our chops, we love our burgers, and I ain’t gonna stop till you throw me in jail, my last meal will be a giant steak!"

But it wasn’t only global warming pooh-poohers like Beck who disagreed with Lord Stern. A New York Times op-ed article by rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of the book “Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms, pointed out that vegetarian diets can also contribute to global warming. The soy substitutes upon which many non-meat eaters depend for protein sometimes are grown on land carved out of the Amazon rainforest, and carbon dioxide is emitted transporting them from Brazil to U.S. consumers.

Moreover, Niman wrote, carnivores don’t have to feel guilty about accelerating global warming, so long as they stop buying meat from animals crammed into pens in giant factory farms, and instead dine on meat from small local farms, whose proprietors raise animals with in an old-fashioned, less environmentally destructive fashion.

"To a rancher like me, who raises cattle, goats and turkeys the traditional way (on grass), the studies show only that the prevailing methods of producing meat — that is, crowding animals together in factory farms, storing their waste in giant lagoons and cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them — cause substantial greenhouse gases. It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian."

So what’s the truth here? Is Lord Stern a visionary savior of civilization, or a supercilious tofu-monger? Is Glenn Beck right that eating big slabs of marbled beef a matter of personal choice, or are future generations going to revile him as an enabler of the self-centered,short-sighted gluttons who helped devastate the planet? Or is Niman correct in saying that there’s an environmentally conscious way to consume meat?

If you’re expecting me to take a side, well, I have to confess that I’m feeling a bit conflicted here. I switched to a mostly vegetarian diet a few years back -- not because of concerns about climate change, but because I felt increasingly uncomfortable taking one cute, loveable species of mammal for a walk in the park, and sticking another, equally cute and loveable species between halves of a sesame seed bun slathered in mayonnaise. On the other hand, I have a wife who needs an iron-rich diet, and a 10-year-old son from Vietnam who has what may be a hereditary craving for pork ribs. (You can imagine how complicated it gets at mealtime in my household.) So just tell me what you think, below. Don’t be bashful.

Is This A Good Idea? Solar-powered Airships?

October 26, 2009

Unless you’ve been locked in a sensory deprivation tank for the past 10 days or so, you probably were horrified by the recent “balloon boy” that played out on the cable news networks, which authorities now allege was nothing more than cheesy publicity stunt. And while you may have relieved some of the tension by playing the Balloon Boy Game that some snarky software developers quickly posted on the web, this still probably isn’t the best time for me to be touting the advantages of lighter-than-air craft. In fact, it might be the worst possible time since the German hydrogen-inflated zeppelin Hindenberg burst into flames while tethered in Lakehurst, NJ in 1937. That disaster that pretty much put the kibosh on airships as a mode of transportation, even after non-flammable helium became available as an alternative lifting gas.

But I’m going to tout a revival passenger airships anyway, and not just because I’m a knee-jerk contrarian. A Spanish-based company named Turtle Airships hopes to launch new generation of solar-powered airships, equipped with banks of lightweight CIG photovoltaic cells on their exteriors for daytime flying and biodiesel generators for night flights, could make it possible to travel across the country or even around the world without adding much, if anything to your carbon footprint. That’s a big deal to environmentally-conscious travelers, since jet airliners are a small but significant source of the greenhouse gas emissions that threaten to wreak havoc upon our planet. (For a basic primer on the effects of human-caused climate change, read this.)

But solar-powered airships would have other advantages, too. Since they’d generate most of their own power rather than relying upon costly jet fuel, lighter-than-air travel conceivably could become a much cheaper way to get around. And since the airships would fly at a lower altitude than jets do, passengers would have a much more interesting view of the landscape. They’d also have a lot more space to move around. In charmingly fractured English, here’s how Turtle Airships’ web site describes the experience:

Airship passengers will enjoy private staterooms with showers. Large picture windows that can be opened for fresh air during flight. Meals prepared in on-board kitchens and served in fine dining salons. Dance floors Libraries, Internet connections. Airships flight is silent. There is no "turbulence", or banking as on an airplane. Airship flight is so smooth that the FAA does not require seatbelts. Passengers can walk throughout the airship while in flight, including take-off and landings. Airships fly at very low altitudes above the surface; allowing passengers the opportunity for the most spectacular aerial sightseeing! And, in many instances, airships will are able to stop in mid-air and silently float above scenic attractions below such as wildlife, whales, volcanoes, icebergs, city lights, etc.

Naturally, there would be some disadvantages, too. Perhaps the biggest drawback is that airships are way slower than jet aircraft. Turtle Airships is envisioning a top speed of 200 miles per hour, which skeptics view as a bit, well, over-enthusiastic. But even if that 200 mph can be achieved, it’s less than half the 530 mph cruising speed of a Boeing 767. That would turn a typical six-hour cross-country flight into a 15-hour journey. On the other hand, it’d be a lot more comfortable trip, and it’d be easier to get some productive work done in the relatively spacious confines of an airship—without being confined to a seat, it’d be possible to hold business meetings, for example.

Turtle Airships is just one of a number of companies interested in the promise of lighter-than-air craft. Projet Sol’R, a French group, has built a solar-powered airship called the Nephelios that it plans to fly across the English Channel. Late 19th-early 20th Century airship pioneer Ferdinand Count Zeppelin’s eponymous company, amazingly, is not only still around, but they’ve developed an updated airship called the Zeppelin NT that a California company, Airship Ventures, uses for sightseeing tours. Another California-based outfit, Aeroscraft, is aiming to build a massive airship that could function as a flying hotel and/or conference center. And earlier this year, Lockheed Martin won a $400 million Pentagon contract to develop a high-altitude military airship—not for transportation, but as a geostationary platform for surveillance and communications.

So what do you think about solar-powered airships for transportation? Express your opinion below.

Is This A Good Idea? A Lunar Hotel?

October 19, 2009

If you watched one of my favorite TV dramas, Mad Men, the other night, you may have been intrigued—or puzzled—over the fictionalized version of hotelier Conrad Hilton’s insistence that an ad campaign include his fantasy of building a hotel on the moon. Indeed, the script writers were using a bit of creative license. In real life, it actually was Barron Hilton, Conrad’s son and successor as company president, who publicly brought up the idea in a 1967 speech at a space conference.

I firmly believe that we are going to have Hiltons in outer space, perhaps even soon enough for me to officiate at the formal opening of the first. If the world powers continue to restrict outer space to peaceful pursuits, there will be travelers in outer space—and where there are travelers there must be Hiltons.

This was no idle fantasy. Barron Hilton said that he had consulted researchers at Cornell University, who actually had written a feasibility study on the project, and went on to describe his moon hotel in more detail:

Entrance to the Lunar Hilton will be on the surface of the moon, but most of the Hilton will be situated beneath the surface—say 20 to 30 feet—to establish constant temperature controls and a more workable hotel area. The experiments of Surveyor Three seem to indicate that excavations on the moon are possible and that the moon soil might be used for construction.

The Hilton will have three levels. At the bottom mechanical equipment will be housed. The center level will consist of two 400-foot guest corridors crossing in the middle core. These corridors will contain 100 guest rooms. The top level will be used for public space. Off the dining room we will place necessary machines and storage areas. The various sections will be lined with plastic which can expand under air pressure. Each section will be separated from the others by air locks. Thus, should leaks develope [sic? is it spelled that way in original?] in these pressurized cells they can be repaired as an automobile tire is repaired here on earth. The Cornell boys assure us that "leaks that develop in the system will be a nuisance rather than a disaster".

To start with we will have only three floors, which will eliminate elevators and minimize power requirements. The multi-storied underground hotel will come later. But—and this is very important—in almost every respect the Lunar Hilton will be physically like an earth Hilton.

We know that most guests are uneasy unless their accommodations are a reflection of their style of living. We will have none of those science-fiction "cells". The rooms will be large, with carpets and drapes and plants; the artificial lighting will reflect the sunlight. There will be wall-to-wall television for programs from earth and for views of outer space.

Barron Hilton also reassured future lunar visitors that they would be able to dine upon cuisine similar to what they could order from room service back on Earth. He envisioned freeze-drying steaks and reducing them to the size of silver dollars for shipment to the moon, where they would be reconstituted in the hotel’s nuclear-powered kitchen to be as “tasty and nourishing” as the fresh kind, and an automated bar that would serve martinis reconstituted from pills. He even anticipated that guests would be able to use their Carte Blanche credit cards on the moon.

Barron Hilton’s vision for a lunar hotel has yet to come to pass, but the idea hasn’t gone away. In the late 1990s, British architect Peter Inston actually drew up a plan for a 5,000-room domed, solar-powered lunar structure, reportedly at the hotel chain’s request. (Some of the conceptual drawings are reproduced in this report for a 2002 conference on space architecture.) A few years later, in 2001, Dutch architect Hans-Jurgen Rombaut designed a twin-towered lunar hotel that could accommodate 200 guests. New Scientist reported some of the more exotic flourishes:

Rombaut's hotel is a far cry from your average establishment—in fact, he prefers to call it a "sensation engine". The hotel's two slanting towers, each 160 metres high, will provide tourists space to indulge in "low-gravity games" such as indoor mountaineering, abseiling and "flying" using special suits with bat-like wings.Suspended from the Moon-rock backbones of the towers will be teardrop-shaped "habitation capsules" designed to look like small spaceships, so that guests will feel as if they're still travelling, says Rombaut. Each capsule will have its own supply of fresh water and a rubbish and sewage disposal unit that will be changed every day by the hotel staff.

You’d think that building a lunar hotel might have trouble attracting business, considering that the locale hasn’t had any visitors in the past 37 years. But with NASA now planning to return to the moon in 2019 and establish a permanent human presence there, I suspect that private-sector commercial activity won’t be that far behind. The moon could well turn into the Saudi Arabia of the 21st-century energy industry. Lunar soil is a potentially rich source of helium-3, a substance found abundantly in lunar soil that someday could fuel fusion reactors to provide most of the Earth’s energy needs; moon-based plants that would collect solar energy and transmit it to Earth might turn into another lucrative venture. And if private space travel becomes a viable industry, historic sites on the moon might turn into a major draw for tourists.

On the downside, it’s hard to come up with a meaningful estimate of just how much it might cost to build a lunar hotel, but the expense is likely to be astronomical. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) On the other hand, there don’t seem to be any shortage of software moguls clamoring to pay $20 million for rides on Russian spaceflights, so no matter how pricey the accommodations would be, my guess is that there would be plenty of takers. Obtaining a steady supply of clean towels and sheets, and keeping the minibars stocked with tiny bottles of Bombay gin, might be a bit more of a challenge.

So what do you think? Do we need a hotel on the moon? Express your opinion below.

Is This A Good Idea? Should the Government Help Finance Electric Car Makers?

October 12, 2009

A conservative friend of mine on Facebook recently sent me a teasing “debunk this!” message linking to this blog from the American Issues Project. In it, blogger Duane Lester attacks the Obama Administration’s providing financing to nascent electric car manufacturers. In particular, he’s irked by a $529 million loan to Irvine, CA-based Fisker Automotive, to help it bring two electric plug-in hybrid models to market in the next few years.

Recently, the government gave over half a billion dollars to a small California-based car company backed by former vice president Al Gore. The company, Fisker Automotive Inc., received $529 million to build a hybrid sports car in Finland. That's right. The United States government, not content with owning General Motors, is now invested in car production in Finland.

So okay, debunk I shall. Before we proceed, I should correct few details. The Department of Energy gave Fisker a loan, not a gift, as part of its $25 billion initiative to help finance electric car development. They eventually have to pay back the money, plus interest. Gore is one of the thirty-odd partners in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture capital firm that has invested over $10 million in Fisker, but it actually was another partner, former Oracle COO Ray Lane, who was the mover behind the deal. (As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2008, Gore didn’t play a significant role, though he does want to buy one of Fisker’s cars.) Additionally, only a portion of that money—$169 million—is allocated to producing the Karma, a limited-edition $88,000 high-end “sports sedan” that will be assembled by a Finnish subcontractor, but from mostly U.S. made parts. (The lithium-ion batteries, for example, will be made by EnerDel, an Indiana company that’s traded on Nasdaq.) The bulk of the loan, $360 million, will help develop Fisker’s Project NINA, a less-expensive ($39,500,once federal tax credits are factored in) mass-market vehicle which the company plans to manufacture entirely in the U.S.

Lester’s larger point, though is that electric cars are a wasted government investment, as far as limiting carbon emissions are concerned. He argues that even if at some point in the future, half of cars on U.S. roads were electric or hybrid vehicles:

According to the Government Accounting Office, there isn't enough electricity produced in America to support those numbers. More power plants would have to be built and unless they are all nuclear, more hybrid cars on the road won't change the level of carbon dioxide produced in America.

His source on this is a CNS.com article, but I would encourage you to look at the actual June 2009 Government Accountability Office report upon which it is somewhat loosely based. What GAO concludes that for plug-in vehicles to achieve their “full potential” in reducing emissions, they would need to use electricity from non-carbon generating sources, such as nuclear plants or renewables (solar, wind, etc.). GAO did reference a Duke University study that found that an increase in plug-in hybrids might lead to more coal-fired plants, unless a carbon tax was imposed. But GAO also cited 2006 research by the government’s own Pacific Northwest National Laboratory which came to the opposite conclusion, finding that as long as people charged their plug-ins during off hours, we could replace 84 percent of our cars with plug-ins and not have to build any new plants.

As for Lester’s other argument, that powering cars with electricity from coal-fired plants rather than gasoline doesn’t reduce carbon emissions, government scientists disagree. As a 2007 PNL publication notes that

The extra electricity needed to power PHEVs (plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) would come from coal-fired and natural gas-fired plants. Even though these power plants emit greenhouse gases, overall levels would be reduced because it is more efficient to move a car one mile using electricity than producing gasoline and burning it in the car’s engine.

Instead of federal loans for electric car development, Lester argues that “perhaps we should simply get out of the way of progress,” and advocates the building of more nuclear power plants. Now, as I wrote in this blog a while back, I’m not necessarily against building more nukes, as part of a broad strategy to combat climate change. But if your big issue is government intervention in the marketplace, you couldn’t find a worse cause to champion than nuclear power, which was developed by government scientists and has been heavily subsidized since the get-go. Doug Koplow, a Boston-based energy consultant quoted in this Christian Science Monitor article estimates that between 1947 and 1999, the industry received $178 billion in public subsidies. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-TN’s proposal to build 100 new nuclear power plants would require the federal government to guarantee Wall Street’s loans to utility companies for “the first dozen or so” reactors. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that would make taxpayers liable to pay up to $56 billion if the utilities fall behind on construction and default.

Okay, so here’s my point. In a perfect world, maybe Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand theory would lead to companies acting out of self interest to solve the problem of climate change. But we don’t live in that world. We live in one where the government often has intervened in the marketplace and acted as an impetus to transformational technologies, when private enterprise can’t or won’t. And climate change is too big of a menace to the planet for the government not to step in and do something. Plug-in electric cars would help reduce carbon emissions, and in the process help reduce our expensive and dangerous dependence upon foreign oil. And it makes sense for the government to spread that $25 billion in chips around and put a few on small, agile players such as Fisker, in hopes that they’ll develop innovations that ultimately will benefit everybody.

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.

Is This A Good Idea? De-orbiting the International Space Station?

September 28, 2009

Most of the time, this blog strives to make a case for some grand, if outlandish, notion, such as building a space elevator, terraforming Mars or developing warp drives for spacecraft. This week, however, we’re going to change-up a bit, and instead look at something that I think is a totally dumb idea: NASA’s intention to junk its $100 billion investment in the International Space Station,just a few years after it is finished.

Huh? (Or as my ten-year-old son would say, “What the freak?”) But I kid you not. According to this recent Washington Post article, the U.S. space agency plans to get rid of the ISS, the football-field-sized satellite that is the largest and most costly spacecraft ever built.

"In the first quarter of 2016, we'll prep and de-orbit the spacecraft," says NASA's space station program manager, Michael T. Suffredini.
That's a polite way of saying that NASA will make the space station fall back into the atmosphere, where it will turn into a fireball and then crash into the Pacific Ocean. It'll be a controlled reentry, to ensure that it doesn't take out a major city. But it'll be destroyed as surely as a Lego palace obliterated by the sweeping arm of a suddenly bored kid.
This, at least, is NASA's plan, pending a change in policy. There's no long-term funding on the books for international space station operations beyond 2015.

Apparently, the big issue is cost. As this report by the advisory U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee lays out in a sobering chart, the approximately $20 billion a year that we’re presently budgeting for NASA simply isn’t enough to support the ISS—which costs the U.S. around $2 billion a year to maintain—and also build the Ares V heavy launch vehicle and the Orion spacecraft that NASA would use to send astronauts first back to the Moon and then eventually to Mars.

You may be thinking: So what? Indeed, to some of you with libertarian, anti-internationalist leanings, the ISS is probably the primo example of what’s wrong with both the space program and the U.S. government itself. When the U.S. and the Russian Federation launched the project in 1993, it was supposed to be completed by the mid-1990s and cost in the low tens of billions. Not only has it cost vastly more and taken more than a decade longer than envisioned. That’s so long that the project arguably has outlived what cynics would say were its real reasons for existence—to give the Space Shuttle program (which is due to be phased out in 2011) a destination, and to provide a steady gig for former Soviet space scientists who might otherwise go to work building missiles for third-world dictators or terrorists. Add to that the fact that, according to the web site What It Costs, the U.S. so far has shelled out $100 billion, which seems to be the lion’s share of the tab for the ISS. (Curiously, nobody seems to be able to say precisely how much the Russians contributed, though according to the news site RussianSpaceWeb.com, circa 2008 they had budgeted about a modest $3.9 billion toward the completion of their section of the ISS.)

Beyond that, some critics find the amount of science accomplished for that price on the ISS to be pretty underwhelming. In 2008 NASA compiled this report listing its experimental accomplishments, but good luck downloading it from the agency’s molasses-like server. (Try this more succinct “Uses of the ISS” article from HowStuffWorks.com instead. Indeed, as Houston Chronicle science blogger Eric Berger reports, Norman Augustine, chair of the committee that’s considering the space program’s future, has openly questioned the value of the ISS.

If one accepts that much of the scientific community believes there's no scientific value in the international space station, and setting aside international relations, I understand that its value is as a testbed for living in space and eventually going to Mars. But we've already said that the moon is our testbed for going to Mars. So why do we need the station as a testbed?

Okay. So the ISS has been incredibly expensive and so far it hasn’t accomplished all that much. But trashing it is even dumber. Some perspective here: Even at $100 billion, the ISS cost us a little more than half what taxpayers have had to spend so far to bail out American International Group, after the latter made bets on derivatives contracts that it couldn’t cover. When we’ve already spent that humongous sum, what’s a couple of billion more each year to keep it up and running for a few more years? And if the research accomplished so far hasn’t been so earthshaking, why don’t we just push the scientific community to come up with better experiments that have more of an upside, in terms of both space exploration and industrial applications on Earth? I mean, it’s a space station, for Jiminy Cricket’s sake. There’s got to be some cool stuff that we can still use it for.

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.

Is This A Good Idea? Preparedness for Zombie Attacks?

September 14, 2009

Some of my critics have noted that I’ve been writing a lot lately about the pros and cons of developments that so far exist only in science fiction, such as warp drives for spacecraft and head transplantation. Why don’t you write about something that actually might happen?, they chide me. My response: Let’s see if you like this week’s topic better. Should we be better prepared for a flesh-eating zombie attack?

OK, roll your eyes back into your head. That seemingly far-fetched menace is the subject of an actual scientific study, “When Zombies Attack! Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection." In the paper, which is included in the just-released book Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress, University of Ottawa assistant professor of mathematics Robert Smith? (that’s not a typo—his surname ends with a question mark) and several of his students mathematically model the impact of a pandemic of reanimated corpses who’ve turned into cannibals—a scenario similar to the one depicted in director George Romero’s 1968 classic horror flick, Night of the Living Dead, and multiple sequels. Their predicted outcome is, well, horrific:

An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead. While aggressive quarantine may eradicate the infection, this is unlikely to happen in practice. A cure would only result in some humans surviving the outbreak, although they will still coexist with zombies. Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time.

Furthermore, these results assumed that the timescale of the outbreak was short, so that the natural birth and death rates could be ignored. If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is the doomsday scenario: an outbreak of zombies will result in the collapse of civilization, with every human infected, or dead. This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert. Thus, if zombies arrive, we must act quickly and decisively to eradicate them before they eradicate us.

Now, I know what you skeptics out there are thinking. Why prepare for a zombie attack when the chances of this actually happening are nil, since zombies don’t actually exist? Well, let me point out that the supposed death panel provision in proposed health-care reform legislation doesn’t actually exist either, and that’s not stopping people from shouldering their AR-15s and marching outside town hall meetings in outrage. So why not arm and organize ourselves against the prospect of an onslaught of imaginary rampaging ghouls as well?

Beyond that, however, I would argue that unlike many of the things we fear, there actually is at least a possible, albeit tenuous, basis in reality for concern about zombies. As the excellent HowStuffWorks.com article on zombies details, the idea of zombies originated in Haiti, where folklore contains tales of corpses reanimated by sorcerers and turned into mindless slaves. Occasionally, people actually will show up in Haiti who claim to have been resurrected and turned into zombies. Back in 1993, for example, Cox news service correspondent Anne-Marie O’Connor actually interviewed a purported zombie named Andre Ville Jean-Paul over lunch at a Port-au-Prince bistro. Jean-Paul explained that voodoo cultists had unearthed his coffin and handed him over to a houngan—a voodoo priest.

The houngan put him to work in the rice fields with 18 other zombies, he said. Calling themselves "beef in the garden," they slaved in the nude, supervised by a dwarf zombie whose attire consisted of a belt of bells around his waist that tinkled when he danced.

They were fueled by a steady diet of moonshine, rice, biscuits, bananas, charcoal and meat they were told was human flesh, he said.

After an undetermined number of years, one of the zombies could take no more and he beat their master to death, breaking the spell of their servitude, Jean-Paul said. Disoriented, they wandered out of their compound, clutching their farming implements. "We were wandering like cows in the streets," Jean-Paul said. "We didn't know where to go."

Harvard-trained ethnobotanist and explorer Wade Davis, who investigated the zombie phenomenon in the 1980s and wrote the best-selling 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow based upon his experiences, came up with a science-based possible explanation. Davis obtained samples of the voodoo sorcerers’ zombie powder and found that they contained, among other ingredients, puffer fish, whose skin and organs contain tetrodotoxin, a potent poison that binds to nerve cell membranes and blocks transmissions in anyone who ingests it. As this Biology Online article explains, Tetrodotoxin poisoning is often fatal, but in sub-lethal doses it can induce complete paralysis and slow heartbeat and respiration to imperceptible levels, mimicking death so convincingly that tetrodotoxin-poisoning victims have been pronounced dead by medical rescuers, only to later awaken. Those would be the fortunate ones; the less fortunate find themselves sealed into caskets and buried alive — or perhaps exhumed and revived by cultists. The latter then force-feed the undead a paste made of sweet potatoes, cane syrup and Datura, a genus of plant also known as the “zombie cucumber,” which contains the hallucinogens atropine and scopolamine, and induces symptoms that include confusion, delirium, psychosis and amnesia. To complete the zombification, victims are fed a salt-free diet, which keeps them listless and lethargic in Haiti’s sweltering climate.

Granted, that’s a slightly different explanation than the one given for the contagious flesh-eating zombies in Night of the Living Dead, who apparently have been reanimated by radiation from a returning space probe; in the sequels, the phenomenon is left unexplained, and the zombie outbreak morphs into a purely existential dilemma, like the fine print in our health insurance plans.

But whether real or imagined, a zombie attack is a potent metaphor. Think of the undead not as klutzy cannibals but as the X factor, the Rumsfeldian “unknown unknown," the totally unexpected menace that suddenly confronts us. (The Canadian researchers’ mathematical modeling of zombie attacks maybe seem like an elaborate joke, but in actuality it was led by a mathematician whose expertise is in studying the spread of actual epidemics such as malaria and West Nile Virus, and its underlying purpose was to demonstrate the progression of a rapidly spreading, unfamiliar public health threat.) In recent experience we’ve been confronted increasingly with such X factors, ranging from AIDS to terrorism to climate change. And time and again, we’ve been exposed as dangerously unprepared to deal with such paradigm-shattering threats. I’m not talking about stocking up on bottled water and Spam, having a battery-powered radio, a shotgun and the ingredients for Molotov cocktails. I’m talking about our societal tendency to do exactly what most of the characters in the Romero movies do when confronted with a zombie attack — i.e., to become hysterical and fight among themselves for control of the group, which ultimately leads to them squandering resources and opportunities for survival, and undermining each others’ efforts. I think we need to find a way to tone down the cable TV news-induced histrionics and learn to cooperate towards a common objective, before some real menace arrives to do us in.

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.

Is This A Good Idea? A 2-Mile High Building?

September 09, 2009

Back in the early 1990s, the Taisei Corporation, a Japanese architectural and construction firm, came up with a startling plan for a building that would stand more than 2 miles tall. The X-Seed 4000 would stand 13,123 feet in height. That would be would be five times the stature of what is currently the world’s tallest building, the 2,600-foot Burj Dubai tower in Dubai. In fact, the X-Seed 4000 would be more than 700 feet taller than Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest point.

But the X-Seed 4000 wouldn’t just be tall. At the base, the tepee-like structure would be an astonishing 3.7 miles across, and its 800 floors would have enough room for between 500,000 and 1 million people to live and/or work. It would not so much be a building as a self-contained, man-made ecosystem. According to the Design Hotels Futureblog, it would be specially designed to protect its inhabitants from barometric and weather fluctuations along its massive elevation.

The biggest structure ever constructed would have some outsized advantages. If built in downtown Tokyo, it would maximize the value of some of the planet’s priciest real estate. The X-Seed 4000 would be solar-powered and self-sustainable energy-wise, so by my back-of-the-napkin estimate, it could reduce the city’s [energy?] consumption by as much as 8 percent. (That’s presuming that it replaces other housing, rather than adding to Tokyo’s population of 12 million.) People who lived and/or worked in X-Seed 4000 would be protected from Tokyo’s urban heat island and suffocating air pollution. And by reducing the number of automobiles in Tokyo, it might even help improve air quality for everyone else.

The downsides? The published estimated cost of building the X-Seed 4000 is from $300 billion to $900 billion, which would make it by far the single costliest construction project ever. (By comparison, China’s massive 50-year project to divert the waters of the Yangtze River to parched northern China will cost a mere $62 billion.) That’s assuming that something this size could be built from the sort of materials that we have available today. (More likely, it would have to be built out of incredibly strong and resilient carbon nanotubes or some other yet-to-be-invented material.) I haven’t seen any estimates for the X-Seed 4000’s weight, but it might be too heavy for Tokyo’s soil. (Some accounts have it being built on huge caissons sunk deep into Tokyo Bay.) There’s also the question of how such a massive structure would fare in an earthquake, since Tokyo has one of the world’s most unstable geologies.

Humans have been fascinated with erecting bigger and bigger structures since ancient times. The Babylonians probably thought they were living large by putting up Etemenanki, the seven-story ziggurat that some think was the inspiration for the Tower of Babel described in Genesis 11:1-9. Medieval Europeans erected Gothic cathedrals. Masonry construction generally limited builders to less than 10 stories until the late 1800s, when the advent of steel-and-concrete construction made possible the architectural behemoths of the 20th and early 21st centuries. (For more on that, check out “How Skyscrapers Work” from our sister site HowStuffWorks.com, and the Google preview of George Binder’s 2007 book, 101 of the World’s Tallest Buildings.)

In recent years, the never-ending contest to build the world’s biggest skyscraper has shifted from North America to Asia and the Middle East. As I mentioned previously, the current record-holder is Dubai’s Burj Dubai. A few years ago, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud announced plans to build a mile-high skyscraper in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which would have matched the stature of legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s never-built 1956 design for the Mile High Illinois. But the Saudi skyscraper subsequently was scaled back to 3,600 feet in height after soil tests at the site, and recently the entire project, renamed the Kingdom Tower, was put on hold due to the shaky economy.

As for the X-Seed 4000, the project has been on hold for nearly two decades, waiting for the right visionary to make it happen. Architectural Record reported in 2007 that, contrary to an Internet rumor, Taisei had no plans to begin construction any time soon. “(X-Seed) is on the shelf now,” Shohei Ogawa, a manager in the planning department of Taisei’s international division, told the publication. “It was our dream proposal for the technological advances we thought could happen in the future.”

But maybe the future is now. Should the Japanese build the 2-mile-high skyscraper? Or does the idea of it give you a nosebleed? Express your opinion below.

Is This A Good Idea? Warp Drives For Spacecraft?

August 26, 2009

What if we were able to equip spacecraft with faster-than-light warp drive engines, like the Enterprise has in Star Trek? Imagine that instead of being limited to the 25,000 miles per hour that the Apollo spacecraft achieved on the way to the moon and back, astronauts could travel at the speed of the Enterprise and other Constitution-class starships in the 23th Century Federation fleet — roughly 5.4 billion miles per hour?

At that speed, the immense distances of space would suddenly shrink to human scale, making it possible for us to discover, explore and even colonize distant worlds. It would be possible to reach the dwarf planet Pluto, on the edge of our solar system 2.66 billion miles from Earth, in a little more than a half hour, instead of the more than 12 years it would take at Apollo speed. More importantly, it would be possible to travel 62 trillion miles to the solar system of Epsilon Eridani, the home of Spock’s fictional planet Vulcan and the nearest star that may possibly have an Earth-like extrasolar planet in the so-called habitable zone, in about 15 months. Gliese 581c, a possibly habitable world about five times the size of Earth, would be a roughly three-year trip away. Pretty cool, huh?

If you’re a space travel enthusiast like I am, it’s hard to conceive of a downside to warp drive — provided, of course, that it wouldn’t incinerate spaceship passengers and cause the Earth to be sucked into a black hole, as naysayer physicist Stefano Finazzi has theorized. One big problem might be fuel efficiency, since bending space itself, as a warp drive would do, would require an almost unfathomably enormous energy expenditure. As Lawrence Krauss calculates in his book The Physics of Star Trek, reaching the nearest star to our sun, the Alpha Centauri system, would require the equivalent of 100,000 years’ worth of current total U.S. consumption. If a hydrogen fusion reactor powered the warp drive, a starship would consume thousands of times its weight in hydrogen on a long trip. In Star Trek, of course, script writers ingeniously get around this problem by utilizing the fictional crystalline element dilithium to regulate a matter-antimatter reaction that generates the needed power. But as we’ll discuss, scientists actually are trying to develop such an energy source for space travel.

Now, some of you may be wondering: “So why are you now blogging about warp drive for spacecraft? The Star Trek movie came out back in May, and the DVD isn’t being released until November. Can’t you at least write about a gadget from a current blockbuster?” OK, well, I suppose it would have been more newsworthy to write about the speculative technology in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. But G.I. Joe’s gadgetry—as befitting to a movie based on a line of action figures—looks like a cheesy, scaled-up version of the accessories you would find on the shelf at FAO Schwarz. (See Popular Mechanics’ “Five Extremely Dumb Military Designs From G.I. Joe.”). And just as importantly, I haven’t been into G.I. Joe since my parents got me the dorky beret-and-turtleneck-clad French Resistance Fighter version of the action figure for Christmas when I was a kid, instead of the cool Mercury Astronaut version that I coveted.

Besides that, warp drive has an enduring appeal. Like the hand-held flip communicator from the seminal 1960s TV series that presaged today’s cell phones, warp drive is another of those once-outlandish sci-fi innovations that scientists now realize may someday actually be possible.

The oldest reference that I can find to “warp drive” is in a 1953 collection of short stories by science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, who later wrote for the Star Trek TV series (he’s the one who dreamed up the Vulcan salute). But while sci-fi writers commonly employed warp drives in novels and stories, they usually danced vaguely around the subject of how they would actually work, since the common interpretation of Albert Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity dictated that faster-than-light travel was impossible. Some envisioned instead that travel to distant space might be possible by flying spacecraft through a network of wormholes—essentially, tunnels in space-time, first envisioned by German mathematician Herman Weyl in the 1920s. But that solution had a flaw also, after 1960s physicists demonstrated that such wormholes, if they existed, would be inherently unstable.

It wasn’t until 1994 that theoretical physicist and Star Trek fan Miguel Alcubierre published “The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity,” a paper that offered a way for a faster-than-light warp drive to work without changing the rules of Einsteinian physics or discovering a passageway through space-time. Alcubierre noticed that general relativity didn’t actually say that faster-than-light travel was impossible, but only specified that objects couldn’t move faster locally than light. He envisioned a spacecraft sitting motionless inside a bubble, while it caused time-space to expand behind it and to contract in the direction that it wanted to go. Alcubierre figured that the time-space distortion process would be powered by some sort of “exotic matter,” which sounds a lot like the matter-antimatter engine dreamed up by Star Trek writers.

Alcubierre’s blueprint for faster-than-light travel may sound even more bizarre than wormholes. But other physicists find it intriguing. In 2008, Baylor University physics associate professor Gerald Cleaver and graduate student Richard Obousy published a paper describing a way to create and propel an Alcubierrean bubble, by manipulating one of the additional dimensions envisioned in string theory. http://www.superstringtheory.com/. And theoretical physics researchers at NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, who are searching for a way to make interstellar travel feasible, think the concept has promise as well.

As Space.com recently reported, they’re encouraged by theoretical models that suggest that space-time expanded at a rate faster than light speed [the speed of light?] shortly after the universe’s inception, and by laboratory experiments in which ultra-cold rings cause gyroscopes above them to spin, suggesting that they are detecting the effect of the rings moving space-time.

But we’re still a long way from developing a working warp drive. Finding an energy source remains a huge obstacle. The Baylor researchers, for example, estimate that the amount of energy needed to manipulate that extra dimension to move a 10-meter-long ship would be the equivalent of the entire mass of the planet Jupiter, converted into pure energy.

So what do you think? Is the warp drive an idea worth pursuing? Or would we be better off crawling into a wormhole? Express your opinion below.

Is This A Good Idea? Living Off The Grid?

August 17, 2009

This past Sunday not only was my birthday, but also the anniversary of moment that Elvis left the building, metaphysically speaking, back in 1977. In the King’s honor, I spent much of the afternoon enjoying his favorite grilled peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, washed down with Dr. Pepper—while repeatedly watching this YouTube video of Elvis practicing karate.

It may have been that harmonic convergence of prodigious amounts of lipids and macho energy that induced me suddenly to experience a transcendent, ecstatic vision. I glimpsed an alternate reality in which a still-living, septuagenarian Elvis was holed up somewhere in the desert outside of Vegas, taking care of business as ever, but now in an environmentally pious, non-industrialized, totally self-sustainable lifestyle. He’d traded in the opulent excess of Graceland for a sustainable mud-and-straw house, where there was nary a power line, utility meter or flush toilet in sight. Instead, the Green Elvis powered his guitar amp with electricity generated by an array of wind turbines and solar panels, drank and bathed in water from wells and cisterns, ate only locally-grown barbequed pulled pork, and wore jumpsuits resplendent with recycled sequins, woven from hemp grown in his personal indoor hydroponic gardening cabinet. He still avidly re-read Frank Adams’ The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus, the book he reportedly was still clutching, in our dimension, when they found him lifeless in the bathroom. But now he did so while perched on a water-conserving composting toilet. Elvis had not only left the building. He’d gone totally off-the-grid.

Okay, so I made all that up. But if alternate-universe Elvis did opt for off-the-grid living, he’d be joining in what might be a nascent trend. While precise numbers are tough to come by, Home Power magazine estimated back in 2006 that 180,000 American families were living off the grid. Becoming totally self-sufficient, and utilizing only sustainable resources that are carbon-neutral and don’t damage the environment, has some definite advantages. When you’re off-the-grid, you don’t have to pay electric, gas, water and sewage bills any more. You don’t have to feel guilty about leaving lights on because the juice comes from a coal-fired power plant that spews greenhouse gas emissions, and because the coal comes from mountaintop removal in Appalachia. You don’t have to fret that you’re squandering significant quantities of the world’s supply of fresh water to dispose of your poo-poo. And if you take the idea a step further and start cultivating your own food, well, homegrown tomatoes are a lot juicier and tastier than the pale-looking, rock-hard variety that you find in supermarkets.

The downsides? The equipment to generate your own energy isn’t cheap—a state-of-the-art rooftop wind turbine, for example, costs about $12,000, and a system of solar panels can cost $20,000 or more. And you’ll probably have to reduce your energy consumption. As this article in Mother Earth News explains, off-the-grid generating systems produce less energy than similar-sized ones tied into the electrical grid, because off-the-grid systems have to convert electricity from DC to AC current, and that exacts a stiff penalty in efficiency. Worse yet, if it’s cloudy or a windless day and your system’s batteries run down, you have no choice but to go dark. As a result, you better get used to canning your home-grown vegetables, since you never know when the freezer is going to stop running. If you like alternative-universe Elvis’s sewage composting toilet, be prepared to shell out $2,000 for a complete system. (Also be prepared for it to work very slowly in cold, damp weather, proponents caution.)

Like most ideas, this isn’t a totally new one. In the early part of the 20th Century, wide swaths of the U.S. were without electrical lines, because power companies thought it was unprofitable to wire them. As Paul Gipe notes in his book Wind Power: Renewable Energy for Home, Farm and Business, in the 1920s and early 1930s, farmers on the Great Plains installed hundreds of thousands of small wind turbines on the Great Plains to light their houses and charge the batteries on the energy-hungry vacuum tube radios that provided them with a link to the outside world. After the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Act of 1936 provided federal funds to wire remote areas, energy self-sufficiency was no longer necessary, and the old turbines and battery-chargers mostly were left to rust.

When the idea of living off the grid resurfaced in the 1990s and 2000s, it was driven less by the need for self-sufficiency. Some of the new off-the-gridders seem more intent on doing their part to slow global warming, which is largely caused by the burning of carbon-based fuels to generate electricity. Others, such as John Twelve Hawks, the reclusive author of dystopic anti-technological sci-fi novels such as The Traveler, perhaps are more interested in making a statement about the inherent evil of our postmodern culture. Some off-the-gridders go it alone, but increasingly, others are banding together and starting off-the-grid settlements such as Dancing Rabbit Village, a community in northwest Missouri whose 40 residents live in “natural” buildings made from straw, clay, adobe and recycled lumber, grow their own food, use electricity generated by solar panels, and drive biodiesel-powered "veggie vans."

So what do you think? Are you ready to spurn the utility companies and live a total DIY lifestyle? Or would you prefer to remain plugged in? Express your opinion below.