Showing posts with label infrastructure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label infrastructure. Show all posts

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Chris Wren:

Frankly, if we can't imagine our civilization having a future without cheap oil, we have a problem, but one that has nothing to do with the cost of gas.

Monday, May 19, 2008

Peter Thiel Makes Down Payment on Libertarian Ocean Colonies

Tired of the United States and the other 190-odd nations on Earth?

If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.

With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organization dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities "with diverse social, political, and legal systems."

Friday, April 11, 2008

Solar Balloons To Power Remote Areas?

"The idea is to take advantage of the height dimension. When you do that, you save a lot of land resources and can get to places otherwise hard to reach," said Pini Gurfil, the concept's developer.

The helium-filled balloons, covered with thin solar panels, hover as high as a few hundred metres in the air, and are connected via a wire cable to an inverter, which converts the electricity into a form households can use.

It will be about a year before the system is ready, Gurfil said. But initial research, both computerised and using a crude prototype, showed a balloon with a three metre (10 ft) diameter could provide about one kilowatt of energy, the same as 25 square metres (269 square feet) of traditional solar panels.

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable

Then when the climate changes or barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil order collapses, aggravated by tightly coupled networks that create the potential for propagating failure across many critical industries.

What emerges is a less complex society, organized on a smaller scale or that has been taken over by another group, and loss of our hard-earned knowledge.

Possible solutions include distributed and decentralized production of vital goods like energy and food and adding redundancy to the electrical grid and other networks.


I've never considered civilization anything more than a passing phase. It seems essential because it's all we know, but when we look at it squarely we find at least as many inherent flaws as benefits. I say it's time to venture out of the womb and look around.

Monday, March 31, 2008





Six Earth Cities That Will Provide Blueprints for Martian Settlers

If humans land on Mars by 2037 as NASA hopes, they'll need cities modeled on ones that already exist in extreme climates on Earth. Here are six high-tech (and a few low-tech) cities that would have a passing shot at survival in the Martian climate. Of course there are the obvious choices, like research stations in Antarctica. But there are other possibilities, like the instant city model developed at Black Rock City, home to arts festival Burning Man, which you can see here nestled in a Martian crater.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Radiation Kitty





Yesterday I visited the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. I spotted this little fellow just outside the 10km exclusion zone, where we stopped for lunch. He looked happy and healthy, and was certainly very friendly (and yes, I know he's not strictly a kitten, but I thought you'd like to see him anyway). Animal life in the area, after originally suffering terribly (all small mammals were dead within a couple of years) has actually flourished since the accident, and the absence of humans for two decades has done more to benefit wildlife than radiation has damaged it.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Make Solar Lamps Not War - Nobel Scientist

One billion people can get electricity for the first time for little more than the cost of one month's war in Iraq, said Rajendra Pachauri, the head of a Nobel peace prize-winning UN panel of climate scientists.


[. . .]

Pachauri compared the $15 billion cost of providing solar-powered lights to a billion people with a reported cost of the US-led military campaign in Iraq of $12 billion a month.

He described that perceived mis-match in resources as "one of the biggest tragedies that the world can be guilty of".

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Masdar: ecotopia or pipe-dream?



(Thanx: Communist Robot.)

Monday, February 25, 2008

I can imagine a future in which everything is pretty much like this: a dreary sprawl of abandoned stripmalls and megaplexes basking under a toxic sky.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Theory Of Evolution Of Cities Links Science, Fractal Geometry

Professor Batty argues that planning's reliance on the imposition of idealised geometric plans upon cities is rooted in the nineteenth century attitude which viewed cities as chaotic, sprawling and dirty. Instead, he reports research that suggests beneath the apparent chaos, there is a strong order: "Cities are the example par excellence of complex systems: emergent, far from equilibrium, requiring enormous energies to maintain themselves, displaying patterns of inequality spawned through agglomeration and intense competition for space, and saturated flow systems that use capacity in what appear to be barely sustainable but paradoxically resilient networks."

Sunday, February 10, 2008

JAXA testing space solar power system

For decades, scientists have explored the possibility of using space-based solar cells to power the Earth. Some see orbiting power stations as a clean and stable energy source that promises to slow global warming, while others dismiss the idea as an expensive and impractical solution to the world's energy problems. While the discussion goes on, researchers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have begun to develop the hardware.

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Cloud City airships to float New Yorkers above post-apocalyptic maelstrom





What if New York City were totally trashed in a disaster? That was the premise for a design competition that spawned this Cloud City idea by Studio Lindfors. It was one the Selected Entries in the "What if New York City . . ." design competition, where designers dreamed up this concept where New Yorkers are lifted above the rubble in blimp houses, staying together as a community while crews clear away the mess below.

(Via The Keyhoe Report.)

Saturday, January 26, 2008

The Ruins of the Unsustainable





I've been thinking about the fate of declining suburbs, bombed out shrinking old industrial cities and the drying up ghost towns of the high plains, when I came across a journal note mentioning something Bruce Sterling said to me this fall in San Francisco:

"The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century's frontier."


About a year ago I was in a deplorably ill-conceived suburban coffee-shop sipping espresso and using one of the complimentary computers (which, remarkably, hadn't been trashed by viruses). I struck up a longish conversation with a girl on the adjacent terminal (mostly about subjects covered by this blog, which I was busily updating).

At one point I casually mentioned that the shop in which we were sitting would probably wind up as a bona-fide archaeological site within the next thirty years. I don't think she liked the sound of that, because the conversation ended shortly thereafter.

But hey, she asked.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Paleovirology

Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), like the more typical retroviruses such as HIV, rewrite the DNA of the cells they infect; the endogenous retroviruses do so not just to the somatic (body) cells, but to the germline (reproductive) cells, becoming part of the DNA we pass down to the next generation. These aren't rare -- more of our DNA comprises these old retroviruses than genes that actually code for proteins. New ERVs generally will quickly lose their potency as viruses, but can come to play critical roles in how our bodies operate.


Makes you wonder if there could be a literal Burroughsian "word virus" lurking in our neurological source code . . .





Chernobyl: Lost world

Scientists have had access to limited data when it comes to assessing the true facts within the 4,000 square kilometres of the "zone of alienation". Photographs of the abandoned city of Pripyat, near Chernobyl, reveal that trees and shrubs have started to sprout through the roads and buildings. Nature has begun to reclaim what was originally lost to urban development and agriculture.


"Zone of alienation" has such a dire existential ring to it, don't you think?

(Both items cribbed from Beyond the Beyond.)

Sunday, December 16, 2007

More delicious retro futurity, from "Metropolis" to Syd Mead.

(Thanks: Gerry Canavan.)

Sunday, November 11, 2007

On some level I find these photos deeply satisfying. They speak to the assumed permanence of artificial banality; the river is a deft wound in a planet gone irrevocably insane.

(Thanx: Reality Carnival.)

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Japan: home of the world's coolest manhole covers.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Egypt Plan to Green Sahara Desert Stirs Controversy

With only five percent of the country habitable, almost all of Egypt's 74 million people live along the Nile River and the Mediterranean Sea. Already crowded living conditions -- Cairo is one of the most densely populated cities on earth -- will likely get worse as Egypt's population is expected to double by 2050.


I once began a short-story in which overpopulation in Cairo was so pronounced that the Egyptians had built a habitable scaffolding around the pyramids themselves. That's probably one I should have seen through to the end.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Electricity from orbiting solar-powered lasers

Relying on plates made from a special ceramic material containing chromium (which absorbs the sunlight) and neodymium (which efficiently converts sunlight to laser light), the newly developed lasers demonstrated an impressive 42% solar-to-laser energy conversion efficiency, outperforming previous technology by a factor of four.
Paul Saffo Predicts End Of U.S. Economic Model

Must-see YouTube video.