THING —> HAPPEN

Here are some things we know (or at least think we do):

Our universe of space and time is something like 13.8 billion years old, and getting older every day.

 

By contrast, average human lifespan is ~70 years.

 

Humanity, our species, is only ~200,000 years old.

 

Life itself, beginning with single celled organisms, is approximately 4 billion years old.

 

In other words, it took over 9 billion years for life on earth to emerge, and another ~3.8 billion years for our species to evolve.

 

Though we have good, albeit circumstantial, evidence of the beginnings of life and the universe, we have no clear idea when—or even if—our universe and even life itself will end, how many more billions of years it will continue to exist.

 

The difference between billions and tens or hundreds or thousands of years is difficult for us to grasp. It's easy to foreshorten these time frames.

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 Our planet, a rocky space object, orbits around a single star.

 

There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy.

 

There are likewise estimated to be two trillion galaxies in the universe, each filled with hundreds of billions of stars, many like our own with multiple planets orbiting them.

The universe itself is thought to be some 93 billion light years in diameter.

 

These numbers are so vast, our minds can hardly calculate them.

 

Yet, somehow we are capable of making reasonably accurate estimates of the age and size of the universe and its number of heavenly bodies.

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 At the other end of the scale, atoms and particles inside of atoms—such as electrons, neutrons, and protons—are unfathomably small. The number of them is incalculable. For example, there are billions and billions of atoms in a single grain of sand.

 

Particles are nebulous, cloud-like, that is, until they are observed.

Through our instrumentation and experimentation, we can make some reasonable observations of their probable locations or velocities.

Yet, they exist in the smallest conceivable unit of physical space, something called a Planck length. One way to visualize how small this might be is the following: Imagine "a particle or dot about 0.1 mm in size (the diameter of human hair, which is at or near the smallest the unaided human eye can see) were magnified in size to be as large as the observable universe [i.e., 93 billion light years in diameter], then inside that universe-sized 'dot', the Planck length would be roughly the size of an actual 0.1 mm dot."

 

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The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second; or ~186,282 miles per second. We've managed to approximate this as well. A light year, of course, is the distance a beam of light, or a photon, would travel in a year at this rate of acceleration.

 

Our planet is about 25,000 miles around the equator. A photon of light could circle the earth more than 7 times in a second.

 

A photon will travel at this constant rate in a straight line forever until it interacts with another particle, though its path may be diverted by gravitational pull.

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At absolute zero, or zero kelvins, or -273.15 degrees Celsius, or -459.67 Fahrenheit, matter reaches it foundational state.

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The scale of human perspective exists in a state in-between all these phenomena: the instantaneous and the near-eternal, the very, very large and the very, very small, energy and matter, the speed of light and absolute zero.

 

How is it that we are privileged to have this vantage on all these phenomena? How is it that we can make some reasonable guesses about the nature of these things? This is a philosophical question.

 

The human scale is characterized by brevity, uncertainty, relativity, and incompleteness.

 

We have, of course, and have to rely on the evidence of our senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste.

 

But we also have extensions of many of these—prostheses, if you will—such as: mathematics and logic, atomic microscopes and particle accelerators, x-ray and infrared telescopes and arrays of radio antennas, gravitational wave observatories and electromagnetic spectroscopes, among many others.

 

These provide access, but they also limit us. It is important to understand these limitations.

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Imagine if we were creatures who could at once perceive things that were ~93 billion light years large all the way down to the Planck length.

 

Imagine if we were creatures who experienced the lifespan of a galaxy the same way we humans experienced a single burst of fireworks.

 

Imagine if we were creatures who experienced the entire universe of space and time the way we now experience a wave on the shore, or even as a single bubble of spindrift in the foam of a breaking wave.

 

Imagine if we were creatures who could code a virtual computer program to run on its own in four dimensions according to certain preset logical conditions.

 

Or, imagine if we were creatures made up of pure, unbounded energy (or, alternatively, information) who never experienced entropy or succumbed to the dimensions of space and time, at once both greater than and somehow beneath physical reality.

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Are such imaginary beings or creatures or things possible? Could they exist? Who knows?

And, if so, would it even be correct to call them beings (or creatures or things) or say that they exist?

We may never be able to say, not least because we suffer from the structural limitations of our language (and thus the human mind) which, ultimately, breaks down to following formula: THING —> HAPPEN.

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I suspect the Ancient Greek philosopher/sophist Protagoras was righter than he ever could have imagined when he said: "Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not."

 

It is at once a statement of great hubris (or vanity) and profound humility.

Sun, Sun, Sun: Here It Comes

I've been tracking this for years here @ WoW: the cost of photovoltaic solar energy is nearly on par with that of mainstream utilities. Here's why. First, the price of solar panels has plummeted.

"Since 2009, the cost has dropped 70 percent," says Pearce. But more than that, the assumptions used in previous studies have not given solar an even break.

"Historically, when comparing the economics of solar and conventional energy, people have been very conservative," says Pearce. To figure out the true cost of photovoltaic energy, analysts need to consider several variables, including the cost to install and maintain the system, finance charges, how long it lasts, and how much electricity it generates.

Pearce and his colleagues performed an exhaustive review of the previous studies and concluded that the values given those variables were out of whack. For example, most analyses assume that the productivity of solar panels will drop at an annual rate of 1 percent or more, a huge overestimation, according to Pearce.

"If you buy a top-of-the-line solar panel, it's much less, between 0.1 and 0.2 percent." In addition, "The price of solar equipment has been dropping, so you'd think that the older papers would have higher cost estimates," Pearce says. "That's not necessarily the case."

Stated another way, we're not talking about any abstract "price discovery" here, even though a truly free market economics would demand it:

The price of solar energy-generated electricity, calculated by a legitimate levelized cost of energy (LCOE) method, is now competitive in many regions with the price of electricity generated by conventional sources.

To be clear, this review of solar photovoltaic LCOE is not one of those “if coal and nuclear paid for the real harm they do” analyses. It is a hard look at the actual numbers.

And what's more, apparently the financial data are bearing this out:

Renewable energy is surpassing fossil fuels for the first time in new power-plant investments, shaking off setbacks from the financial crisis….

Electricity from the wind, sun, waves and biomass drew $187 billion last year compared with $157 billion for natural gas, oil and coal, according to calculations by Bloomberg New Energy Finance using the latest data. Accelerating installations of solar- and wind-power plants led to lower equipment prices, making clean energy more competitive with coal.

This from those DFHs over at the Bloomberg.

This is important. Lower priced energy correlates with higher productivity and, often, a higher standard of living—especially if the energy is not monopolized and Corporate is not skimming the profits created by increasingly higher productivity the way they have been over the last twenty years (h/t Occupy!). Think, for example, of cheap, portable desalination of water. Such a technology could stave off at least one future resource war, not to mention save the lives of peoples everywhere. And solar is not the only natural, renewable, abundant source of energy.



Though I do my level best to avoid them, metaphors abound. (h/t blogbud BDR, from whom I'm always stealing turns of phrase.)



Big Picture: Occupy! is not just about the U.S. middle class.

Big (down-the-road) Problem: How do we handle the additional heat thrown off by all this increased energy without cooking the planet?

 

J'Accuse: How Denial Might Just Cost a River in Egypt

Though you won't find it in the headlines, the Fukushima catastrophe keeps getting worse (h/t to Crow).

One day we may wake up to find that it was a turning point in the quest/battle for clean, renewable, planetary energy use. Germany is planning to scrap nuke use altogether, with positive repercussions elsewhere. In the market system, it's always been a question of true price discovery, a game that's been crooked from the outset because the resource controllers and refinery processors have had their thumbs on the scales.

"A recent analysis conducted by Carbon Brief investigated no less than 900 published papers, all of which cast doubts on climate change, or even speak against it. After concluding this investigation, they found that 9 out of 10 of the most prolific ones had some sort of connection with Exxon Mobil. You can find a link to these papers at the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The results showed that out of the 938 papers cited, 186 of them were written by only ten men, and foremost among them was Dr Sherwood B Idso, who personally authored 67 of them. Idso is the president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, an ExxonMobil funded think tank. The second most prolific was Dr Patrick J Michaels, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, who receives roughly 40% of his funding from the oil industry.

This goes in parallel with the ‘work’ of the Koch industries; even though you probably haven’t heard of them, Koch industries is the second largest privately held company in the US, and in the past 50 years, they have invested more than 50.000.000 dollars in spreading doubts about climate change, according to Greenpeace."

Read more: http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate-change-papers-exxon-mobil/#ixzz1QP3WPAJm

More on true price discovery of energy, or "energy return on investment" [EROI] here. How does society price in the costs of "circulatory/respiratory, central nervous system, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal, urogenital, and ‘other’ types of defects" in children born under the shadow of mountain top removal into a ton of coal? Or the costs of "elevated rates of mortality, lung cancer, and chronic heart, lung and kidney disease in coal producing communities."

Indeed, there appears to be some evidence that the value of solar power far exceeds its actual costs "thanks to its ability to reduce peak demand on the transmission and distribution system, hedge against fuel price increases, and enhance grid and environmental security."

Where the costs of nuclear, coal, fossil fuel, natural gas, etc. are being wildly underestimated while the beneficial value of, e.g., solar is being shortchanged we do not have an efficient market. Necessary information is being squelched and distorted to prevent the emergence of a truly efficient market via proper price discovery.

As the facts emerge, we are seeing some inroads against the propaganda machine, though.

How many Cassandras is it going to take to get us to wake up to the facts? Will a mass sea life extinction event be our canary in the coal mine? (Welcome home, mate! Thanks for the pix.)

Progress—let's call it—is taking place, however slowly. Hell, even the royal Saudi oil barons are thinking ahead—to the tune of $100 billion. Maybe they recognize we're running out of their principal asset—oil. And we all know that the only thing they have more of than oil is sunlight. Or maybe sand.

Who would've thought to rent out the otherwise unusable sunny rooftop of your massive factory or big box store to become an efficient energy producer?

So, yeah, some solutions are emerging. Still, we must hold the paid deniers, the propagandists, the shills in the media and politics who are doing the 'dirty' business of trying to keep the scales—market, justice, moral, information—imbalanced, to account. It's the individuals I'm talking about here, not the corporations—with one exception.

J'accuse:

• Sammy Wilson, Environment Minister, Northern Ireland
• Vaclav Klaus, President, Czech Republic
• Steve Milloy, Columnist, FoxNews
• Pat Michaels, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute
• Christopher Monckton, Former Adviser to Margaret Thatcher
• Sarah Palin, Celebrity, Former R-Governor, Alaska
• James Inhofe, Senator, R-Oklahoma
• Melanie Phillips, Columnist, Daily Mail
• Christopher Booker, Columnist Daily Telegraph
• David Bellamy, TV Presenter
• Glenn Beck, Radio Talk Show Host, FoxNews
• Steve Doocy, Anchor, FoxNews
• Michael Steele (now Reince Preibus), Chair, Republican National Committee
• George Will, Columnist, Washington Post
• Blaine Leutkemeyer, Representative, R-Missouri
• U.S. Chamber of Commerce
• Phelim MacAleer, Film Director & Producer
• Stephen Moore, Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
• Fred Barnes, Co-Founder, Weekly Standard
• Roy Spencer, Former NASA Scientist
• John Shimkus, Representative, R-Illinois
• John Coleman, Founder The Weather Channel
• David Koch
• Charles Koch
• Jim DeMint, Senator, R-South Carolina
• Sherwood B. Idso, President, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
• Rick Santorum, Presidential Candidate, R-FMFL
• Rush Limbaugh, Talk Radio Host

[In another post, I'll address the corporate and lobbying issues.]
[UPDATED to fix links. Again to add FMFL and Solar Cost link.]