quote: Again, this goes back to the current dependence on fossil fuels, from which we make fertilizer. We are only able to grow food at the current rates as long as fossil fuels are available.
Where do you get the idea we're using fossil fuels to make all/most of our fertilizer?
Posts: 7085 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
The Bible says we have too many cars and other moving vehicles:
quote:Isaiah 2:7 Their land also is full of silver and gold, neither is there any end of their treasures; their land is also full of horses, neither is there any end of their chariots:
God's solution to the problem:
quote:Yea, wo be unto the Gentiles except they repent; for it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Father, that I will cut off thy horses out of the midst of thee, and I will destroy thy chariots;
Okay, I cheated; that second one's from the Book of Mormon.
quote: Where do you get the idea we're using fossil fuels to make all/most of our fertilizer
It goes back to the earlier discussion on hydrogen production. Hydrogen is taken from methane and water, and combined with nitrogen to produce ammonia. This is then converted to ammonium nitrate. When you hear people talking about "nitrogen" fertilizers, that's what we're talking about.
In addition to the methane feedstock, there is also a very large energy requirement in order to cause the reaction. All that takes fuel.
I had an incidental relationship with this process by way of my former employer, so I've got some familiarity with it from there. I also took a college course in the economy of energy that gave me a pretty good feel for how much petroleum goes into agricultural production.
To the best of my recollection:
It takes 1 calorie of petroleum energy to make 2 calories of corn.
It takes 1 calorie of petroleum energy to make 1 calorie of wheat.
It takes 2 calories of petroleum energy to make 1 calories of chicken.
It takes 4 calories of petroleum energy to make 1 calorie of pork.
It takes 40 calories of petroleum energy to make 1 calorie of beef.
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Methane is produced all around us every day. By Decomposing plants and animals and by the digestion process. In fact, Methane is a green house gas. People are trying to stop it's production.
We're not running out.
That's like saying we're running out of Manure. We'll never run out of Manure. (In fact, you can use Manure as a substitute for the nitrogen fertilizer you're so worried about.)
Posts: 7085 | Registered: Apr 2001
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The best way to reduce population is to empower women: to educate them, give them basic sex education and birth control, give them choices in life outside the home, and not make them slaves to the hearth whose only option in life is to pop out babies. Sure, you'll still have people that want to have large families, but they are going to be few and far between and won't matter if overall people are having less. You don't have to use the stick when the carrot is sometimes much more effective. Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Bible's solution for dealing with human waste and fertilizing the soil found in Deuteronomy, chapter 23:
quote: 10 If there be among you any man, that is not clean by reason of uncleanness that chanceth him by night, then shall he go abroad out of the camp, he shall not come within the camp:
11 But it shall be, when evening cometh on, he shall wash himself with water: and when the sun is down, he shall come into the camp again.
12 Thou shalt have a place also without the camp, whither thou shalt go forth abroad:
13 And thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee:
And I don't understand why it is such a common situation that women don't have power over their own reproductive freedom. It doesn't make sense to me, for example, that the Catholic Church doesn't encourage the availability of birth control, when they are so vehemently against abortion.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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So we'd have to be able to convert corn to ethanol needing less than 1 calorie per calorie of ethanol created to come out ahead. Did I calculate that right?
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:It doesn't make sense to me, for example, that the Catholic Church doesn't encourage the availability of birth control, when they are so vehemently against abortion.
Because they believe birth control is wrong. You may not understand that particular belief, but their opinion on abortion doesn't enter into it.
quote: Methane is produced all around us every day. By Decomposing plants and animals and by the digestion process. In fact, Methane is a green house gas. People are trying to stop it's production.
Sigh. It's hard to paint an accurate picture of the whole situation in a thread like this. A swamp produces mathane, but it's hard to recover for our use, without destroying the swamp.
I did a lot of work in sewage treatment, and there they use digesters to convert sewage into methane. But the amount of methane produced isn't enough to run the rest of the sewage treatment operation. They still have to buy some. The process I developed might help (to my knowledge no one currently has plans to commercialize it, even though it works).
Apparently someone has calculated how much cow farts figure into the greenhouse gas problem. but you can't go around harvesting cow farts.
The whole scale of the thing is very different. Natural gas wells contain stored methane that was produced by the decomposition of biomass over millions of years. It's a densely packed, available energy source. That makes it worthwhile to exploit it and use it.
Think of it like this: If $10,000 dollars worth of pennies were mixed with topsoil, and distributed in a layer 1 foot deep, over 5 acres, would it be worth it to try to find all of those pennies? The cost of excavation and separation alone would probably cost $10,000, so even though you know exactly where it is, and how to get it, it doesn't make sense to try.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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quote:Think of it like this: If $10,000 dollars worth of pennies were mixed with topsoil, and distributed in a layer 1 foot deep, over 5 acres, would it be worth it to try to find all of those pennies? The cost of excavation and separation alone would probably cost $10,000, so even though you know exactly where it is, and how to get it, it doesn't make sense to try.
That's a very good way to explain it.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:there they use digesters to convert sewage into methane
Yeah, I did some automated controls for a couple of wastewater plants in Orange County, CA. One plant had a methane cogeneration facility; the other just flared it off. Cogeneration makes the green crowd happy, but the equipment and upkeep is probably more expensive than the value of the energy generated.
There's a landfill in the middle of Orange County that is pretty much a mountain. They're extracting methane from that and generating enough power to run the dump: lighting for the offices and power to open and close the automatic entrance gate. A wastewater plant takes a lot more juice than that.
quote: So we'd have to be able to convert corn to ethanol needing less than 1 calorie per calorie of ethanol created to come out ahead. Did I calculate that right?
I think you have the right idea. You'd have to get into counting molecules of hydrogen in methanol, and figure the amount of energy available to convert the methanol back into ammonia.
The sun would be the source of energy for the whole equation, so it's not a perpetual motion cycle, but the margins are going to be awfully close, if it's doable at all.
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Belle asks, "On what are you basing this? How much space do you think one person needs?
*looks outside at her neighborhood where every lot is over 2 acres, and there are acres and acres of empty land surrounding the area*
I don't think we're anywhere close to using up all our land. Have you driven through the state of Mississippi?"
You must also take into consideration that not all of the land is suitable for humans to live on/in, farmland (as has been brought up), AND the idea that we must have some "wild" places that produce our oxygen and control our climate and break down pollution. Mississippi is an area of floodplains. As one who lives on the border of a floodplain, I can tell you that man was not meant to live where the water periodically rises. Floodplains serve crucial natural functions that are drastically hampered when people move into them, build levees, and remove the wetlands. And we could cut down forests in order to make more fields, but they also have their important functions.
I, personally, think we have reached human carrying capacity. We are space and convenience hogs here in the blessed USA, while many folks in other places are packed into areas of poor sanitation and ill nutrition. Distribute things more evenly, and I'm still not sure humanity would be in very good shape.
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quote:The sun would be the source of energy for the whole equation
It all goes back to the sun. Even our radioactive fuels come from heavier atoms that were created by solar fusion in the core of a star in the distant past.
I thought that the closer you could get your energy supply to the source (the sun), the more efficient you'd be. That would mean solar cells and perhaps wind and wave energy. But that all takes up precious Texas Caprock real estate.
Actually, the manufacture of solar cells is a pretty nasty business where the environment is concerned.
Posts: 2655 | Registered: Feb 2004
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Belle how much room do we use before we realize we've industrialized the entire surface of the earth! Yes theirs room left but shouldn't we keep some of it for nature? When do we realize that we've spread to far when the earth looks like cuaracant (incorect spelling) from starwars, where the entire planet is one big city! I love nature and if sending people to mars or making population laws is the way to insure its survival then I say bring em on!
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quote:That would mean solar cells and perhaps wind and wave energy.
Eventually we have to move to these forms of energy, and any others that make immediate use of the solar radiation, because any other source obtained simply from earth will eventually run out.
We can't fuse all our hydrogen into helium if we want to have water to drink. Although I'm betting that's a long way off, it still needs consideration.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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The Bible's policy on population control found in Genesis, Chapter 1:
quote:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Granted, that may not mean to fill up the earth with people, like the command for the fishes to fill the waters:
quote:22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
posted
Ever wonder how many Dyson spheres are out there? We'd have a very hard time detecting one, wouldn't we?
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Yes, it at least means for Adam and Eve to reproduce one man and one woman to replace themselves. There is the implied command to make sure there is always a reproducing pair of humans to inherit the earth. Edit: (and enough to spare in a natural disaster or two)
posted
If my internet hadn't been out for a day, I'd have jumped in earlier and done this in smaller bits...sorry!
Okay, first, I just want to point out that Catholics' views on abortion and birth-control *are* exactly related, as they're both technically forms of birth control, one just a little earlier than the other, that's all.
As well, no one seems to have mentioned (perhaps it's just too obvious) that another reason we have all this wild and agricultural land is not only because it's not arable, but because there's so many people in cities that the fields *have* to remain empty to grow enough food to import to the city-folk. Sure, parts of the USA and heck, nearly all of Canada is vastly underpopulated, but go take a walk in Tokyo.
The world as a whole is without scientific question getting relatively close to carrying capacity. Once that happens, whether things get evened out by people pushing hard enough for population control -- through policy or through a combination of education, promotion of birth control, better third-world health care (lower IMR), change in mental attitudes due to awareness of consequences etc. -- or whether they get evened out by the diseases and natural means of population control which will take effect as cities get more and more crowded and unhealthy, or whether we keep pushing until we cause our own natural disasters, somehow it *WILL* get evened out.
So I do agree with Glenn on the fact that we ought to try to limit incoming population as of about now. We can try to minimize the human deathtoll of this eventual inevitable return to ecological balance (I use the term loosely) by minimizing the amount of people alive to start with, but we have to do it in a way that will continue its effects after Round One. So introducing sudden laws prohibiting children won't work. There are other measures such as education of the public on the state of the earth, working towards instilling a priority of preserving the immortality of the species rather than the immortality of preserving our own genetic line, which could be a tough thing to change. Improving life quality for those already stuck in crowded, unhealthy areas where overpopulation is already killing people is another good way to start. I don't think transplanting some folk to Mars will work. Taking 20 amoebas from that small jar and putting them on Mars won't stop the other 80 left from creating another 20 pretty darn fast to face fatal overpopulation again. But this has been covered above.
And of course, all of this depends on whether we really want humans to survive the overpopulation crisis. Heck, our generations will all be dead, so *do* we actually have a moral obligation to care? Taking religion out of the mix, do we have any other reason besides nostalgia to try and preserve the future of our species? Isn't this how evolution works? Should we try to stop evolution? If we do cause overpopulation to slow, are we only going to face it again in the next era when it wipes us out *after* we've made the world in even worse shape thereby killing the whole she-bang instead of just our species? Do we have an obligation to the rest of nature to *not* try to preserve humans so they can do more damage? These are all fairly controversial questions but something to think about...
And now I actually have to run so I can't stick around for any replies, but I'll be back later...
Posts: 624 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:Okay, first, I just want to point out that Catholics' views on abortion and birth-control *are* exactly related, as they're both technically forms of birth control, one just a little earlier than the other, that's all.
No. The Catholic position on abortion is that it is murder. This position includes birth control that prevents post-conception implantation.
The Catholic position on other birth control is that it it's use is sinful, but that it is not murder.
This has very important implications, especially when deciding what should be banned by governments and what shouldn't.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
It seems to me that the Catholic position on abortion and birth control must be related in some way. Whether they are *Exactly* related is a rather subtle distinction.
As I said earlier, I can only accept someone's stated opinion, even if I don't understand it.
Dag, are you Catholic? I don't know that I've ever heard your particular affiliation before.
My wife is Catholic, but I know that more strict Catholics wouldn't agree, because she's also pro-choice.
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quote:Methane is produced all around us every day. By Decomposing plants and animals and by the digestion process. In fact, Methane is a green house gas. People are trying to stop it's production.
We're not running out.
That's like saying we're running out of Manure. We'll never run out of Manure. (In fact, you can use Manure as a substitute for the nitrogen fertilizer you're so worried about.)
Although methane is produced by bacteria, the methane produced this way nearly always escapes into the atmosphere as rapidly as it is produced. No one has devised an economical way to collect this methane. Biogenic methane (the methane produced by bacteria), is one of the synthetic fuels that is being explored as a future option and there are some small scale facilities at land fills that are producing methane this way.
It should how ever be recognized, that Biogenic methane is currently only a miniscule fraction of the methane that is being used to produce energy and chemical products. It is unclear whether we will ever have technology to produce large amounts of biogenic methane economically. Currently, virtually all the methane used comes from fossil fuel reserves and these are indeed running out.
Although there are natural fertilizers, like manure, there is not enough of these available to replace the nitrogen fertilizers that are currently available. It has been estimated that without the nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides, and pumped water that are made possible by fossil fuels, agricultural production per acre would drop to about 1/4 of its current levels.
Do the research Pixiest.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
The word "replenish" may be taken as a mandate that we not destroy ourselves.
If there isn't a God that cares that we not destroy ourselves, I'd say go ahead people; do your worst. After all, without God, we're just so many amoebas, and this planet is just another rock. Nothing special going on here.
Maybe eating and having sex is such a fantastic experience that we get excited about making sure that future biological entities will also have the opportunity to eat and have sex.
Or are we arrogant enough to think as Mr. Sagan did that humanity is somehow unique and special in all the universe and therefore, worth preserving? Look, the amoeba wrote a book! Now it's learning to add numbers! Holy cow, the little varmint invented religion! Now he's rallying to protect his environment!
Who cares? Our sun will explode, or our universe will collapse in the big crunch; all the books will burn; the crosses will all melt; the amoebas will amount to nothing, having never existed.
Posts: 2655 | Registered: Feb 2004
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quote: Or are we arrogant enough to think as Mr. Sagan did that humanity is somehow unique and special in all the universe and therefore, worth preserving?
I don't quite know how to take this. I guess I fall into the arrogant category, since I don't believe in God, but I think humanity is worth preserving. I also believe in morality and general civility.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Interesting thread. I was too tired to post coherently on it last night.
Belle, you've taken a lot of jabs on that quote where you look out your back window and see empty land.
One problem is extreme inequalities of land, water and other natural resouces. China, for example is farming nearly 100% of it's arable land. While the US has lots of empty land. But I suspect you and your neighbors wouldn't be happy if 10 million Chinese (or anybody else) moved in next door and started farming.
Also, most people would rather live in cities, which are increasingly overcrowded. This might change if the internet and other technologies make rural life more appealing, I guess.
I think water wars will become widespread in the 21st century if cheap desalinization is not available on a massive scale.
quote: The world as a whole is without scientific question getting relatively close to carrying capacity. Once that happens, whether things get evened out by people pushing hard enough for population control -- through policy or through a combination of education, promotion of birth control, better third-world health care (lower IMR), change in mental attitudes due to awareness of consequences etc. -- or whether they get evened out by the diseases and natural means of population control which will take effect as cities get more and more crowded and unhealthy, or whether we keep pushing until we cause our own natural disasters, somehow it *WILL* get evened out
I agree with most of this--but I believe Malthus will have the last laugh, people won't cut the birth rate enough to make a difference, and war and disease will do it for us. Morbo
quote:No. The Catholic position on abortion is that it is murder. This position includes birth control that prevents post-conception implantation.
The Catholic position on other birth control is that it it's use is sinful, but that it is not murder.
Apologies, Dags, and thanks for the correction. That's interesting; I didn't know that distinction. I meant abortion and birth control issues are just obviously related as both causing potential children not to be born (but yes, I should have looked into it more before adding that "Catholics'").
quote:Who cares? Our sun will explode, or our universe will collapse in the big crunch; all the books will burn; the crosses will all melt; the amoebas will amount to nothing, having never existed.
Well, yes. But that may be the most perfectly plausible reason yet to argue *for* trying to save ourselves for as long as we can. Posts: 624 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote: I can tell you that man was not meant to live where the water periodically rises.
Maybe not, Jenny...but that's where the best farmland is. Living on top of it isn't helpful, but you need to be close enough to use it efficiently.
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quote:But there is a big difference between the efficiency of electrolysis and reforming. Reforming is more efficient than electrolysis.
Absolutely, but you'll note that in my inital post I was responding to someone who was going on about the many virtues of electrolysis.
quote:Use of the word "inefficient" without a basis for comparison is problematic. If you noticed my post earlier, I said that the improved efficiency comes from the fuel cell and electric motor, in combination with hydrogen, not by using H2 as a motor fuel. Each combination has a different efficency, and they need to be appropriately compared. Using CH4 as a motor fuel is undoubtedly more efficient than using H2 as a motor fuel, but is it more efficent than the fuel cell?
Even if it isn't, H2 generation processes are so energy-inefficient (and, since reforming processes all use clean-burning hydrocarbon sources like methanol, ethanol and methane, wasteful) that when you consider the whole picture -- that is to say, generation, distribution, and use -- hydrogen isn't worth considering for use in cars, at least not the way we use cars now.
Distribution in particular is a massive problem that fuel cell advocates and apologists usually just don't address. It's easy to wave your hand and say "oh, we'll burn that bridge when we come to it," but the reality is that these things need to be considered before hydrogen can really even be in the running as a useful alternative to gasoline.
quote:I don't have enough actual data to apply numbers to each of these possibilities, and I suspect that those who are actually doing the development work are using speculative data.
I might be able to get this kind of data, but unfortunately I'm moving two thousand kilometres on Sunday and will be without internet for a while. I'll try to remember to look into it further when I'm all set up in my new digs, though.
In my last year of university I helped design a control system for a fuel cell of the type used in automotive applications [Edit: I'm a chemical engineer. Most of my work experience is in polymers and petrochemicals, but I'm about to start working for a synthetic rubber manufacturer.]. With a bit of work I ought to be able to get my hands on energy efficiency data. Because my university actually has a couple of ethanol-powered vehicles as well, we might be able to do a comparison. I can't promise anything, though.
quote: But from what I've heard and read, the hydrogen fuel cell does represent a legitimate step forward. I'm willing to give it that much.
I think fuel cells are all well and good, but what's really needed is a change in how people view transportation. This "one car for everyone" business is going to have to change, regardless of whether those cars are powered by gasoline, batteries, or hydrogen fuel cells.
The solution to the fuel problem won't be purely technological. Developing alternative technologies -- fuel cells, sea wind farms, more efficient and clean solar cells -- is great and we need to do it, but it's important to remember (as you do, obviously, given your most agreeable choice of automobile ) that an attitude adjustment toward energy and fuel has to be the biggest component of any solution.
posted
Nobody outside of the amoeba's frame of reference cares what the amoeba may consider to be worthwhile. For that matter, one amoeba probably doesn't care what is worthwhile to another amoeba, and probably doesn't care whether his neighbor stumbles into a petri dish full of rubbing alcohol.
After the inevitable big crunch or big nova there will be no human frame of reference or human definition of what was worthwhile, and there won't be sentient survivors to care anyway. Nobody left to care about the electrical impulses and chemical reactions that took place within those biological entities.
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So there won't, but, again, so what? At this moment, in this place, people care. And here the amoeba analogy breaks down, for people do care about each other. My grandmother is dead, and I will never see her again; was her love for me not useless, then, because it is ended?
Surely it is childish to believe that a small piece of chocolate is no good, because larger ones can be imagined.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Why do we persist in assigning value and meaning to electrical impulses and chemical reactions? We only do so because the collective experience of the last 10,000 years suggests that embracing these values is the best way to get food and to reproduce.
10,000 years is a drop in the bucket in the cosmic scheme of things.
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To an outside observer, a grandmother's love is only valuable if it somehow benefits your offspring, and then only if it benefits your offspring to the extent that somehow down the road your offspring achieve immortality for their race.
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Yes, yes, but there is no outside observer. There's only us. Why do you insist on arguing in terms of these hypotheticals?
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Yes, it is a drop in the bucket. But that's the whole point you're missing. Values and meanings are an important side effect of our chemical impulses and the things that make us up. You've got them too, you know. They mayn't have much meaning on a cosmic scale but nothing much does. They have immense meaning on a smaller scale, which is the only one we can conceivably work with.
Whether or not human value and meaning have any cosmic meaning, their meaning has to be taken into account in our choices affecting ourselves within our existant time frame. To do otherwise is like a politician saying no god has been proven to exist, so religion needn't be considered when making any decision affecting religious people. (I'm sure there's better examples but I'm tired).
Edit: Incidentally, there's been value and meaning postulated as far as 50-60,000 years ago through some (potentially controversial) evidence of Neandertal burials.
quote: I think fuel cells are all well and good, but what's really needed is a change in how people view transportation. This "one car for everyone" business is going to have to change, regardless of whether those cars are powered by gasoline, batteries, or hydrogen fuel cells.
I love good mass transit. Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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) that an attitude adjustment toward energy and fuel has to be the biggest component of any solution.
