"...the unforeseeable again and again proved to be the terrible. A madman killed a nobleman, and Earth plunged into a hundred years of war and the cruelest tyrannies. The internal combustion engine prevailed over the steam engine, and Earth came close to strangling and did suffer a hundred years of dreadful weather." (p. 149)
Anderson's characters look back on that period. We, within it, wonder whether we will win out of it.
"...precisely because so many factors were tangled together, as they always are, a small change could have enormous consequences." (ibid.)
As the Time Patrol knows. Whatever the solution, it is not to control and foresee everything.
Fenn finds another perspective on the past in London where stones, smoke, flower vendors, Hyde Park and pubs with beer and darts are preserved by an archaist subculture.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
No one, no single person or regime, or a centralizing ideology, can foresee or control everything. That is why I advocate for free enterprise economics and the limited state, in whatever forms, because they increase our OPTIONS. And if Elon Musk manages to found his colony on Mars, that too increases our options.
And I still wonder what kind of world might have come about if some alert, quick witted bystander had tackled that EXPLETIVE DELETED Gavrilo Princip just as he was about to shoot Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife?
Ad astra! Sean
Incidentally, ICE engines generate less CO2 per unit of output than steam engines, though also more complex pollutants -- nitric oxides and so forth.
So as far as climate change is concerned, steam engines would be worse.
(Because they have lower thermal efficiency by a considerable margin.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Considering how often the internal combustion engine has been demonized of late, that is a very piquant point, that ICE emits less CO2 than steam engines. And are more efficient than steam powered engines.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the one means the other.
Heat engines derive their energy from the heat differential across their input/output systems.
ICE engines operate at much, much higher temperatures.
Of course, there are other considerations -- basically, how much of the heat energy involved is wasted and how much is turned into mechanical (or electrical) output. Central power stations are highly efficient because they use dual-cycle mechanisms to squeeze out a very high proportion of the energy of combustion.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I think some of that waste heat is reused, in colder parts of the world or during winters, as heat for warming up one's car.
And that second point you raised, about central power stations, explains why we need MASSIVE amounts of energy for a high tech culture. Which means we have to use EITHER fossil fuels or nuclear energy for the foreseeable future.
Ad astra! Sean
If it is EITHER fossils or nuclear, then it has to be nuclear. Fossils are warming the planet and have to be stopped.
Sean: it also depends on whether you can "bulk" diffuse sources and store the energy.
Wind and solar power systems are now highly efficient at "bulking" energy from diffuse sources into concentrated form via electrical grids. The sources are small at any one point, but massive when combined.
The problem is that they're intermittent.
But there are solutions to that; continental-sized grids (the wind is always blowing -somewhere-) and of course through storing electrical energy.
The latter has made very rapid progress. Tesla is now selling units that can store multiple hundreds of megawatts quite easily, and the price is falling like a rock -- by more than 84% in the past 8 years, IIRC, and over 12% in the past -two- years.
If energy storage becomes easy and cheap, intermittent sources are no longer a problem, because you can average out the input-output cycle. Eg., for solar you only need to be able to average over 24 hours, usually.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: For the foreseeable future, I can only see either fossils or nuclear as providing the massive amounts of energy we need. And I favor the latter. But see Stirling's comments re power storage.
Mr. Stirling: Very interesting, as your comments so often are! The problem I see with continental sized solar power grids is that I don't see such things, whether wind or solar, as being POPULAR. How many will want to see nothing but solar panels or windmills? Also, won't such vast grids interfere with other uses for land, such as farming or ranching? Aside from that, your comments about the progress made by Tesla is encouraging.
And I can see how such energy collecting and storing technology will be useful on Mars!
Ad astra! Sean
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