Why There is Hope

(Picture from here.)

I spoke last week on the disheartening aspects of the issues we’re facing today. It occurred to me that I couldn’t talk about one side of the problem without talking about the other side.

While I have problems with our cultural moment inhibiting us, there are many, many causes for hope. We can solve the problems in front of us—many of the solutions are either on the table or about to be. We just have to reach out and grab them.

Here are just a few.

Energy

We get enough renewable sources of power to more than cover our needs. Like so many things, the problem is not production. It is distribution and storage.

We have a head start on the storage aspect by virtue of lithium ion batteries. New sources of lithium in South America and other places make using these batteries relatively cheap—the Tesla Power Wall is an example. You can put more power into a “wall” than into a score of lead-acid batteries. While lead batteries are still cheaper, lithium batteries have a much higher density and better charge history.

But lithium ion batteries are just a stopgap. They depend on lithium, for one. Lithium is not such a common material. Lithium ion batteries are and will always likely be a bit on the expensive side. We need something cheap enough it will replace the gas-fired turbine that is in reserve for when the sun don’t shine.

To this end there are a number of interesting alternatives being worked on.

In the periodic table, sodium lies just below lithium. Chemical properties have a tendency to group on the columns in the table and the sodium/lithium relationship is no exception. There has been a lot of work on sodium-ion batteries. This is extremely exciting. There is absolutely no shortage of sodium in the world. In fact, one of the side products of desalination is—you guessed it—sodium. Total tonnage of lithium mined in 2018 was 85k metric tons. There are 35g salt in every litre of saltwater. To get the same amount of sodium would take (if I’ve done the math correctly) 24 billion litres—about 24 million cubic meters. Right now there is, world wide, about 86.55 million cubic meters of water being desailnated every day. Sourcing the sodium won’t be a problem.

But I’m even more excited by iron flow batteries. These are batteries that depend on a fluid flow of ion exchange. It is not as energy dense as lithium batteries but they are very cheap and environmentally responsible. ESS is a startup that intends to act as an energy storage system for business and—most importantly—power plants. Remember that gas turbine on stand by I mentioned? This is where they would be effective.

There are a lot of storage solutions being worked on and when you read the research it looks like we are not far from real solutions.

Which brings us to distribution.

Probably you’ve heard of the Smart Grid—having the grid smart enough to route power more efficiently. This is one of the things that makes having home solar power really a game changer. Right now your solar party goes on the grid to be shipped somewhere else. Probably it transfers to local stations and maybe from there it can be distributed. But that doesn’t make much sense when your neighbors are right down the street. If the grid can pull in your power why can’t it send it down your street?

The Smart Grid does more than that. It can be locally resilient. It can allow you as a producer get the most bang for your buck. If you have solar and local storage, why can’t you sell it back that night when it is most needed?

A Smart Grid might also be poised to take advantage of high temperature superconductors. Right now, the highest temperature super conductor is about -23 C. But it’s under incredible pressure so it certainly isn’t ready for prime time. At normal atmospheric pressure the high temperature is about -135C.

That doesn’t mean we’re out of the power production research. We’re getting better and better at solar, wind and water power. But I’m, frankly, much more excited by new nuclear power approaches.

While renewable power systems are really important and will have to be a major part of the solution, there are incredibly power intensive applications that may exceed them. I’m talking about iron and aluminum production and that order of magnitudes. About half a pound of CO2 is produced for each pound of aluminum produced.

One of the nice things about electricity is, like money, it is fungible. The same thing can be used in many different ways. This means the output of a heavy power production plant can be used for industry just as well as it can be used for cooking ramen.

Here are three new areas of nuclear research that I find interesting:

The first is thorium reactors. Thorium is more abundant than uranium and has much less opportunity to make nuclear weapons. It has better physical and fuel properties and doesn’t have the same scale of nuclear waste problems.

The second is the traveling wave ractor. I’ve heard that Bill Gates is funding this one to some degree. Imagine a sort of pipe packed with material. On one end there is more enriched material. It is “lit” and begins producing heat through fission. That reaction not only heats water to run a steam turbine, it also transmutes adjacent material into a fissionable state. Which, in turn, generates heat, etc. It’s also called a “nuclear candle.”

There are different configurations for this that are not a linear construction like a pipe. But that is the idea. (In September, TerraPower and the China National Nuclear Corporation signed a memorandum to jointly develop this technoligy. This was abandoned in 2019 due to restrictions placed on it by the Trump administration.)

Finally, there is the old standby, fusion power.

This is a hard problem. It’s why people have been saying that no matter when you ask about it, it’s always fifty years in the future.

That said, there have been some very interesting developments that suggest it may actually become doable in the near future. I would not wager a lot of money on it but I would wager some. Certainly, it’s the correct long term solution. The above two technologies, coupled with reneables, would give us the breathing room we need to finish development of fusion. There are some significant major energy requirements in our future and we will need a much larger source of power than we have now. We’re need power for those lasers to send off probes to Alpha Centauri.

Medicine

We are on the cusp of really starting to attack the problems of aging. I’m just going to talk about a few:

A while back there was a length of life study of diabetics. Diabetics generally have a significantly reduced lifespan even when the problem is controlled. They found one population of type 2 diabetics that had an average lifespan that exceeded the control group. When they investigated this they discovered this group was taking metformin. Metformin is a cheap, well tolerated drug.

Subsequent studies have suggested that it has a beneficial effect on many age related conditions. There is now longevity study for it.  

You can always tell when something works: Big Pharma circles around it like sharks after a wounded seal.

Recently, a fish oil derivative has been approved by the FDA as a heart disease.

My own favorite is some research in intracellular antiviral responses. This mechanism is a relatively weak response when compared to the normal immune response. Essentially, if a cell detects it’s been infected it kills itself. The idea is that initially there aren’t very many cells that get infected by the virus so we can afford to lose them. In addition, the infected cell is compromised anyway so it’s a small loss.

Most pathogenic viruses have figured this one out. Which is why they are pathogens.

There’s been some work in attaching virus identification molecules to triggers in the system, enhancing the response. Thus, a mouse cell would be infected and in the normal course of events burst with new viruses and the organism dies. The engineered protien identifies the virus and triggers the cell death.

Environment

Conservation systems are also becoming mainstream—we have all seen how LED lighting can now be competitive with other forms so powering a home takes less energy. We need it. CO2 is going to make our lives miserable.

It’s all well and good if we stop putting CO2 into the air. What do we do with the CO2 that’s already there?

Recent research has suggested that reforestation might well get a huge bang for the buck by something as simple as reforestation. Remember the global warming problem is two fold: 1) We are putting out an enormous amount of fossil carbon into the atmosphere and 2) We’re removing many mechanisms by which that carbon is pulled out of the atmosphere.

Apparently, this has a much bigger impact than was previously considered. It’s cheap and it’s scalable. Consider it geoengineering that we can live with. Or would you like to put up enough hydrogen sulfide to block the sun?

Plastic is another problem. There are two big problems here: 1) plastics that have already degraded into micro plastics and 2) that fact we’re still producing it.

It’s probable we’re not going to get rid of plastics—it has become just too useful. That leaves two other alternatives: better recycling and biodegredation.

We’ve been hearing a lot about the loss of recycling capability in recent years. Let’s be clear. Most plastics can be recycled. It’s not a matter of technology. It’s a matter of labor and energy.

There are a number of communities springing up that demonstrate. The one I like is Precious Plastics. They have developed methods and techniques to take things considered “unrecyclable” and, well, recycle them into building products, textiles and jewelry.

Microplastics are created by us and dumped into waterways and the sea and they are also created by plastics that are ground up by ocean action.

Capturing microplastics before they reach the ocean is an area of ongoing research. Here are a couple of interesting technologies that may be fruitful.

This one is strange: the cora ball. It claims to capture 26% if microfibers before they ever get out of the washing machine. I don’t think any consumer item is going to be that effective. But I could see technology like this introduced into washing machines. This article attacks the problem in a larger scale manner.

There are research efforts in trying to clear the microplastics out of the ocean. Alfa Laval has some pilot projects on doing this.

But we still have to clear the material that is already there. That is a huge problem for which I haven’t seen a solution. Any process that filters out microplastics also filters out plankton and we’d have to put that back uninjured.

Recycling microplastics has a different scale of problem than full sized products. Full sized products can be sorted. Different materials have different recycling techniques. That said, I don’t think this is insurmountable.

Community

I’ve saved the best for last.

One thing the internet has given us is the ability to form communities. Many artistic, technological and scientific endeavors have been enabled by using indie-go-go and kickstarter. The above Precious Plastic is a world wide community.

It’s convenient to rail against the bad communities. The same medium that gave us Precious Plastic also gives us neo-nazies.

That said, we are—as a community of human beings—are at the cusp of amazing things. Human beings have always been a mix of cooperative and antagonistic individuals. We invented religion and government to keep ourselves in harness to one another, to pick cooperation over conflict. That we enabled conflicts between religions and governments should come as no surprise. Gaming the system is always one of our options.

But the tribalisms, conflicts and grudges that got us here will not get us much further. We cannot solve these problems without working together.

All that holds us back is us.

Holding Back All Mankind

(Picture from here.)

I haven't done a lot of blogging in the last couple of years. And I've done almost no science blogging.

There are a lot of reasons for this.

I've been pretty busy. Work has been very busy. I really like what I do-- I'm part of a team building a space craft-- but it's demanding.

I've also been doing a lot of writing. I do have a very active outside-of-work-and-writing life as evidenced by the garden posts. There's a lot of non-writing creative things I'm trying: glass work, wood working, etc.

That's not all of it.

I like to blog about human accomplishments. This is usually about science and technology since that's what I find interesting.

Science is fundamentally hopeful: we hope we can know what we want to know. That's a hope as opposed to a faith. Hope can be wrong and countered by results or observation. Faith persists beyond results and observation.

For example, we have proven to ourselves that there is a portion of the universe that cannot be observed by us because the speed of light limits what can reach us. We can only see the observable universe. Certainly, we had hopes that we would be able to observe the entire universe if we had sufficient technology. That hope has proven to be impossible.

(This might be one of the primary conflicts between science and some religion. Science chooses hope against faith and religion chooses faith against hope. In science, all things must be proven and anything can be disproved by results. Not so true with some religions.)

Therefore, to engage in science even at the reporting level as I've been here in this blog is to engage in hope.

I am truly moved when people do wonderful things. In science. In the arts. In human lives. It speaks to what we are capable of-- and we are truly capable of great things. We stand on the cusp of solving many really hard problems: global warming, distribution of food and technology, eliminating many diseases.

On each of these fronts we are in our own way. We call global warming a hoax. We disable or fail to address distribution infrastructures and toss the best means of preventing disease we have ever created-- vaccination-- out the window.

It is disheartening.

I keep trying to rally this but so far I haven't been as successful as I would like.

I'll keep trying.

I keep remembering this little speech of Stan's in the Biggest Douche in the Universe episode in South Park:

Because the big questions in life are tough: Why are we here? Where are we from? Where are we going? But if people believe in asshole douchey liars like you, we're never gonna find the real answer to those questions. You aren't just lying, you're slowing down the progress of all mankind, you douche! (From here.)

That's what I think about a lot of what is going on today with labeling actual facts as Fake News or declaring important science as hoaxes.

We're not just denying reality. We're holding back all mankind.

State of the Farm, Winter 2019

First, I'd like to point out that my story collection, Simple Things, is now released. You can get that here. In addition, a print version of my novel, Welcome to Witchlandia, is available. You can get that here.

On to the farm.

A year sort of slipped past me. Sorry about that.

I'll do a whirlwind on how we got here.

Winter, 2018-2019: I had a shoulder injury I was trying to accommodate and it had a significant impact on things since snow does not wait. I managed to get through that without surgery-- a good thing. For those with soft tissue injuries, I recommend don't just depend on orthopedists. As was explained to me, orthopedists are surgeons and, like all of us, they bring their expertise forward as a solution. I.e., if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.

Instead, I suggest also consulting a rheumatologist. Rheumatologists are specialists in soft tissue injuries and are trained to avoid surgery. Sometimes, you have to blend the two on your own time.

In my case, I saw someone at Mass. General Hospital and she used ultrasound to actually look at (and show me) the actual injuries in real time. Ultrasound not only let her move around to areas of interest it also had significantly better resolution than an MRI. Her diagnoses were, therefore, drawn from a different data set than the orthopods and her approach similarly changed.

Also, rheumatology approaches take time, as opposed to surgery. It took nearly a year to recover using that approach. A surgical approach might respond more quickly but you've cut into a joint. So the calculus has to be weighing a possible solution (in my case, no orthopod guaranteed anything) with the risk that it might be made worse by the surgery itself against a long term symptomatic life with the realization that there would likely be a point beyond which there would be no further gains.

I had a 90% target. Surgery didn't make sense to me just to get 10% more functionality.

Spring, 2019: By the time spring rolled around I had reached about 70% capability. Wendy had to do the garden tilling.

One change we made last year was to cut over to a Sun Joe electric tiller. We did this first because our old gas tiller died. But also, we have solar panels now and this means that at least some portion of the power applied to tilling can be attributed to our own power generation. It's convoluted logic since we send the power we generated up to the power company and take back power the runs the tiller. Another reason we converted is the electric tiller is just a lot lighter. I had to wrestle the old gas tiller even though it was comparatively small. Wendy had trouble with it-- she's a lot smaller than I am. But she didn't have any trouble with the Sun Joe.

That said, the Sun Joe operates by a different principle. The gas tiller didn't turn fast but it had a lot of torque. The Sun Joe has a lower torque but a higher speed. That requires some difference in technique.

We also started using the Ruth Stout method for handling our potatoes. This meant that we chose where the potatoes would go in the fall of 2018 and piled it up with hay. In the spring we lifted up the hay bales and placed our chosen seed potatoes. The next step would be harvest in the fall: no intervening work.

Summer, 2019: Like previous years, we had a cold, wet spring and early summer. Then, we had a warm July and August. By the end of August it went cool again. September was a long warmish tail.  You can see that here.

July, August and September would have been nice if there had been a warm May and June. As it was, some plants like  peppers, melons and basil never got a good start. Some recovered in July but not things like melons which require a long growth period. It had a direct effect on the harvest.

Fall, 2019: We uncovered the potato bed in September and, low and behold! We had a lot of potatoes. We only used a couple of 4x8 beds but we got about a 50 lb harvest. This is very good for us especially considering the weather. We did get rodent damage. The potato beds were down on the south side of the property near the road. We discourage the cat from hunting down there. So, one lesson might be to move the potatoes up near the house where we can give the cat full access. But I have to say the Stout method was a success.

The spring was bad enough that we had no good apple pollination. Only a few crabs ended up bearing. The peaches did well. The Cornelian cherries did very well. The Marechal-Foch grape did okay. The Concord grapes, curiously, didn't do that great. There was a lot of fungus. Part of this might be the weather. However, I hadn't trimmed back the Concords for some time and I think it got a bit thick. I think that closeness never allowed enough light into the grape clusters. We'll see if trimming helps next year.

We have had a problem with black knot on the plums for some time. We took out two trees summer of 2018, hoping that would take care of the problem. In addition, we planted resistant replacement plums on the opposite side of the property. 

However, come summer 2019 we found it had spread to a nearby apricot as well as the plums we had not removed. Fortunately, we have no evidence of black knot on the new plums. We've decided to remove the remaining infected plums and the apricot this winter. We also decided to remove two non-productive cherry trees as well. There is currently a lively discussion what to do with any usable but potentially infected wood.

Fruit production this year was, therefore, mainly peaches, grapes, persimmons and Cornelian cherries. We have some young trees such as the additional plums and nectarines but they haven't come on line yet.

We made Cornelian cherry jam-- which was very interesting. It had a slight astringent tang that made it quite good. We also had a lot more persimmons than we knew what to do with and not as much in the way of Concord grapes. Given that, we decided to do a persimmon/Concord wine. It's gone through primary fermentation and tasted good but like it requires a couple of years. It's holding down the basement floor aging until spring. We had a good M/F grape harvest so that's also aging downstairs. We still have persimmons left over in the freezer so now that Thanksgiving is over, I'll start up a persimmon wine. There is also left over Cornelian cherry pulp that we canned. We may make Cornelian cherry wine as well.

Winter, 2019: The first snow was on the first day of December.

The main garden has been cleared and we dropped the fence so when we do a spring burn the garden gets the benefit. Last year we had some difficulty due to weather, scheduling and my shoulder. Instead, when we had an ash tree taken down we persuaded the tree company to chip our brush pile instead. However, we would not want that done with the black knot wood. That has to be burned.

We're running a little late on things. We still have to put down the straw bales for next years potatoes. We've gotten some seeds and made some decisions.

I'd like to grow corn this year. I skipped last year but it's a thing I like to do. I just enjoy it. I've been reading about glass gem corn so I'd like to try that.

My should has recovered as much as it's probably going to. I consider it at 90%-- it handles snow blowing well.

I'm looking forward to 2019.

Simple Things Released

Today my story collection, Simple Things, is released. You can get it BVC, Amazon, Barnes & Noble ebook, and Barnes & Noble print book.

I've been writing SF and Fantasy since the mid-1980's and it's nice to see some of those stories get some air time.

A few of the stories (notably Jackie's Boy) have been collected before but the majority have not. The title story, Simple Things, was well received by editors but deemed to not have sufficient fantastic content for publication.

Now it sees the light of day.

I have been mostly working on novels over the last few years. People change over time and each of these stories is a snapshot of who I was at the time I wrote them. So it was interesting to see how I've changed over the years and how I haven't.

This is the second book I've done most of the publishing work on my own. The first, Welcome to Witchlandia, came out as an ebook in 2016 and as a print book this year. (See BVC, Amazon and B&N ebook and B&N pbook.) With Simple Things I'm trying to bring out the print and electronic versions at the same time.

There are more coming.

Watch this space.