More News 12/8/17 There is a lot to talk about today, so this will be one of those columns that covers more than one subject. Let me start by talking about Net Neutrality. When you talk to the people who understand what this is, that is not allowing internet providers to decide if some sites should be slowed down and others given a priority among other things, those people I talked to are against repealing net neutrality. Now there is a charge against the FCC which states millions of comments and emails were made which seem to be using false identities. These emails and comments are for the repeal. An organization known as Guardians of the Future, along with 28 senators wants to delay the vote on net neutrality by the FCC until the charges of corruption can be looked into and who can blame them. Net neutrality is a very important question for most of us, even if some do not realize this yet. An electrically powered freighter has just been built by China. The Chinese say this is the first one. It is a ship which can haul 2,000 metric tons of cargo. It is 230 feet long and uses a 2,400 kWh battery pack. It is said it can carry the maximum weight for 50 miles at a top speed of 8 miles per hour. The ship will be used to shuttle goods along the inland section of the Pearl River. When the ship reaches port, it will take about 2 hours to recharge, but this won’t be a problem because it will take about 2 hours to unload the cargo. At first blush it looks like this ship will be very good for the environment, but actually it will hurt the environment. You are probably wondering how I can say this about an electric ship, but the problem is not with the ship, it is with the cargo it was built to haul. This is a coal carrying ship. MIT scientists have created a new method of turning C02 into a fuel. This means all those emissions coming from power plants and factories may become useful instead of polluting our atmosphere. This could also end the system of credits used to avoid paying fines for polluting. The scientists at MIT developed a new membrane-based system which allows oxygen to pass through it and leaves carbon monoxide on the other side. The carbon monoxide which is left can be used as a fuel or combined with hydrogen or other chemicals. The system requires a lot of heat to work. I have to wonder if we start pouring a lot of heat into the atmosphere will this be detrimental to the atmosphere even though we are not sending CO2 into it. When many of us think of the International Space Station we tend to think just because it is in space it must be a really clean space. The truth is even though we try and sterilize everything we send into space the International Space Station or ISS is nothing more than a house in space and we all know how dirty houses can get. The care of a house depends on the people who occupy it. I am not saying all the astronauts and cosmonauts are dirty, but I am saying different people have different degrees of neatness and there have been quite a few people living in the ISS over the years. The ISS has been occupied since the year 2000 and is getting a little long in the tooth. The Russians have said the ISS is scheduled to be crashed into the ocean in 2020, but this date may have changed. NASA has said it welcomes Russian commitment to continue operations of the ISS beyond 2020 and said there were no plans to work together with Russia on a successor space station. There has been a lot of talk lately about computer brain interfaces. This is where a human brain can control a computer, but some scientists think we are taking a risk doing this, because they believe artificial intelligence could hijack a human brain. What would this mean to the human? It would mean all his thoughts and movements could be controlled by the artificial intelligence and he could do nothing about it and might not even remember this happened if it stopped. This has long been the dream of covert agencies who were looking for the perfect assassin. If they could use ordinary people as assassins and then be able to stop controlling their brains it is said the assassin would have no memory of the event and therefore could not implicate the true perpetrators of the crime. We are getting very close to this brain control as current experiments have indicated. All this talk of exoplanets has made me give this some thought. When we discover a much larger planet than the earth could this mean that planet would have the same effect on its inhabitants as moving some tropical fish to a larger tank? What I am talking about is some fish grow in accordance to the size of the tank they are in. Would this mean if there were beings on a planet let’s say 3 times the size of earth, many of the creatures and beings might be 3 times the size of our animals and even us? If this turns out to be true it could also mean life on much smaller planets could be much smaller than life on earth. The same is true for the amount of gravity. If a planet had twice the gravity of earth and we put a life form from it on the earth would it have twice the strength it would have had if it were an earth creature? Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon and he is said to be the richest man in the world currently and like some of his counterparts he is very interested in space travel and colonization of new planets. He owns the company Blue Origin. He too wants to develop reusable rockets much like Elon Musk’s SpaceX has already accomplished. He has developed a rocket which is bigger than any rocket in use today. It is called the New Glenn 3 stage rocket. He has said it will be in use by the end of the decade. Bezos said he sees humans spreading out across the solar system and thinks we will need nuclear energy in space. One thing he doesn’t believe is the colonization of a planet will happen any time soon. |
