Interamnia

LIDL

Fri, 09 May 2008 08:18:00 GMT

I have to say (and I have said it elsewhere) that I quite like this store. Apart from the fun of working out the contents of things from the endless euro-names, LIDLs has big central bins of "stuff" that change on a frequent basis. It's where my laser-level (£8.99) and thread-cutting tools (£4.99) came from, for example.

But this week is classy, in the extreme.

Just beyond the ridiculously cheap imported canned carrots (which are way too salty) were a heaped stack of ...

...flippers. Swim fins.

I live in a Scottish town that is about as far from the sea (or any water you'd want to swim in) as you can get. I suspect the percentage of people who can swim, in my town, is much lower than the national and euro-average. And there I am - surrounded by flippers (from £9.99 to £18.99).

Clearly the central LIDL computer has made a mistake. Possibly, in a LIDL somewhere near Bodensee, is a large stack of unsold tartan umbrellas and frozen haggises, causing equally raised eyebrows.

Thu, 08 May 2008 14:58:52 GMT

Oil is ~$120 per barrel, and possibly rising to $200 by the end of the year. So it's just about doubled in price in one year, and likely to do the same the next...

We can assume - with a finite resource, and one sold into a clearly rapidly growing market - that there has to be a peak oil moment, though it's difficult to place this instant until it's a few years behind us. Estimates from the Hirsch Report put this peak around about 2010 - though it might have already occurred. No matter whether it's a few years one way or another, this decade is the defining turning point of the Oil Age.

The likely outcome from finite resources and a growing market? The price will continue to rise.

Now that obviously affects car-owners directly. My daily commute is 20 kilometres, each way. My car burns 7.5 litres of petrol (currently at £1.08 per litre) every 100 km. With parking charges, my daily cost for the "privilege" of commuting to work is just about £5.00.

I can currently commute by train for a lesser amount - it's £4.70 - but that entails a total of five miles of walking in any and all weathers.

At what point do I ditch the car and take the train? I suspect it's going to be once the car trip costs around two to three times the rail trip - and that could be in just a couple of years' time...

The impact of the end of oil could be a lot closer to the ordinary Joe than people have perhaps considered, notwithstanding rising food, heating and manufacturing costs...

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:02:24 GMT

Having borrowed it from the library, I've just finished Robert Zubrin's 1996 book: The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must.

It's an interesting read.

Zubrin, rightly appalled by the likely 450G$ pricetag of any Mars' mission which followed NASA's 1989 90-day study, realised that there had to be a cheaper way to get footprints on the regolith. He came up with some neat ideas for this way, called it Mars Direct, estimates a mere 20-40G$ cost, and this book is the easily-digested manual of how to do it.

The problem (and I'm writing this as a pro-Mars fanatic who, I suspect, would have lapped up this sort of talk thirty years' ago) is in the title - he makes no Case for Mars.

He quietly proposes long-duration stays (as part of three-year missions and in a formidably hostile environment) by a crew of four, a good year away from any physical support and aid. Psychological issues? Medical emergencies? No problem, says Zubrin.

He lightly glosses over some tremendously difficult engineering problems. In particular, how to aerobrake-for-orbit multiple-tonne modules in an atmosphere which changes density and scale height depending on the local weather. He doesn't mention that it's never been done. Might, indeed, be forever undoable in such a tenuous atmosphere.

But far worse than any of the practical pitfalls, while Zubrin clearly and passionately wants Mars exploration as a precursor to settlement and colonisation, he sadly can't sell us why this should be. The book details building methods that might be useful on the surface of Mars, how to extract resources from the atmosphere of Mars, but the fundamental economic arguments raised in the book simply make no sense.

"Mars has metals" Zubrin states. Well, of course it does. And so do any number of Lunar rocks, Earth-crossing asteroids and, hell, I suspect even my local dump could be satisfactorily mined for copper. Not only do we not need to go to Mars to export metals, it would be madness to do so.

Zubrin argues "Mars has deuterium, essential for the nuclear industry." Any fusion processes that might be developed that might need deuterium might well find their deuterium needs met almost indefinitely by sticking a hose in any nearby ocean. Now the last time I looked, Earth's got 'em, Mars hasn't.

Finally, it appears, Zubrin flips - perhaps his Case for Mars is his apparent desire for terraforming. There's a swathe of terraforming info in the book. Now I'd've thought the first explorers would be keen to Stay Alive and Get Back Safely - but terraforming is, clearly, The Thing. And this seems to be the nub of the issue. I'm paraphrasing, but Zubrin apparently believes that since the end of the Old West and the closing of the US frontiers, in 1890, the US has lost its way. In Zubrin's mind, the only method to regain some semblance of this golden age of US history (a time including, I note, a hideous Civil War, segregation & slavery, few rights for women, etc...) is To Build A New US on Mars.

It might take centuries, will certainly never pay you back and will, no doubt, declare independence sooner rather than later, but this is his case.

Frankly it's not good enough.

I'd have taken a different approach to a book like this. Detail the technologies required, for sure, explain the benefits that ISRU can bring you. But why not cut out the padding, the false economic and morally dubious arguments and declare - simply, and honestly - that travelling to Mars would just be a cool thing for our species to do?

(And I'll trade you one War in Iraq for twenty Mars Direct flights).

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:44:03 GMT

Quote from today's Guardian, on the back of Paris and London's anti-Chinese demonstrations:

"May the Olympic flame never expire." Adolf Hitler

(The procession of the torch was introduced during the Berlin Olympics of '36.)