Golden Rain

Mankind's military forces have grown better and better at delivering objects to distant destinations with extreme force. Ever since the first stone age man figured out how to make a sling, we have been trying to find better ways of throwing stuff with greater speed, precision, and range. However while we moved from bows to guns to rockets, there has only been one significant change in the payload which we deliver, and that is we switched from sharp/heavy objects to explosives. One could argue that a warhead could be engineered to perform just about any task, but I would counter by saying that once it is engineered, its purpose does not change. An armor piercing tank shell will do little agianst a squad of infantry, while an incendiary antipersonnel bomb will do little against a tank. Explosive weapons are inherently inflexible, and I would like to propose a possible solution.

A warhead is created composed mainly of individual rods of thermite, each with an individual fuse and spaced out by a thin layer of explosives. Depending on the target, this warhead will behave in very different manners.

If one hard target is to be struck, then the missile delivering the payload will follow its normal path. The thermite primer goes off seconds before impact, and the explosive spacers are not detonated. The result is one dense glob of burning metal boring a hole straight through a ship or a bunker.

If multiple soft targets are chosen, then the missile will follow a slightly altered course taking it over the target, at which point part of the explosive spacer is detonated, and then the thermite is lit, resulting in several smaller meteors of pseudo-plasma material, each of which will heavily damage vehicles and kill infantry.

Finally for area denial against infantry/light vehicles, the same high course is chosen, and all of the explosive spacers detonate before primer ignition. This will seed the air in the area with thermite fuel, and act much like a fuel-air explosive when the primers ignite the cloud of volatile powder, cooking all caught in the blast radius.

Barometric energy generator

This is just a crazy concept for renewable energy that i came across, I'm not saying that it will work, I'm saying it could work.

Basically, this is a scheme of sorts to generate energy by abusing the pressure differences on this planet. What we need is a decently deep body of water and a gas medium preferably denser than water. A flexible "bag" of gas is dropped from a factory down a pipeline into the depths, where the gas becomes pressurized. A simple mechanism at the bottom of the lake transfers the gas from the flexible container to a rigid one. The rigid container is large and takes several bags to fill, once it becomes filled to capacity with pressurized air, it is brought up to a surface generation plant where the pressurized gas is either packaged and sold or used to power gas turbines for power.

High Efficiency Launch Unit

There has been a lot of recent talk in regards to the development of space beyond earth's mesosphere, several plans have been proposed by the scientific community and the most popular, or rather, the most debated plans are the deployment of a system of space based solar power plants, a plan to send mining missions to the moon for Helium-3 ore, and the time tested space based ballistic missile defense plan.

As absurd as some of these plans sound, there is merit, or the public believes there to be merit in all of them. We've all seen the James Bond movie where the bad guy puts a giant mirror into space and beams down the suns energy by reflecting and concentrating it. NASA has recently smashed a probe into the moon to create a cloud of lunar dust for analysts, a stunt which revealed that the moon does indeed have deposits of potentially valuable Helium 3 ore, and the United States have been dreaming of a "Star Wars" orbital missile defense system since the cold war.

The reason that these plans are not already becoming reality is not that they will bring no benefit, but the sheer economical cost alone to implement them far outweighs the results. All 3 plans call for large amounts of material to be launched into space, and the most efficent launch rockets we have right now costs about $5,000 per POUND of payload. This means that a mining probe, a solar panel, or a laser would cost millions to launch apiece, and even if we get a significant amount of these things into orbit, we still need to send stuff up, most likely human astronauts (which are very prone to dying), to repair and resupply them.

The scientific community has some good stuff going with the whole development of space thing, but what it needs to do is to take a step back and realize that before we can build castles in the sky, we have to get our feet off the ground. The absurd amounts of funding going towards prototype defense satellites and mining probes are much better used to develop new launch vehicles, some of which I hope to propose in later articles.

The Lost Oil

Oil, the most precious energy resource since the advent of the internal combustion engine, the lifeblood of nearly all of mankind's creations. Prospectors have searched for the last century for this black gold, and after having turned over every last inch of land on this planet in search of it. Now, after every rock has been turned, we fail to find new reserves and this limit has caused a wave of terror in the commodities market since the last decade. Prices of oil are rising, and with it, the price of nearly every other commodity, but is this planet really running out of oil?

To realize the full implications of that statement, one has to realize that only 30% of the earth's surface is land, the other 70% water, meaning that if the concentration of resources is the same on land as under water, there lies more than twice our current assessable reserves of oil and metals under the ocean.

We have only recently developed the technology to develop and extract resourcess from the ocean floor, and by recently I mean think back about 2 years, Gulf of Mexico, BP oil spill. Sure, the whole event was an embarrassment, but the fact that one poorly laid out oil well could leak enough oil to cloud up the entire gulf of Mexico literally speaks volumes about how much oil is out there, under the waves. For those who like hard statics over comparative imagery, a very gloomy estimate puts the worlds oceanic oil reserves at at least 30 trillion barrels, 800 billions of which are within the shores of America, compare that to the 1.4 billion barrels tucked away in Siberia.

The good news dont even end there, there are far more frequent and violent seismic activity occurring under the waves than on land, and while this is a good thing for us humans who live on land, its a great thing for underwater mineral reserves. In the Pacific "Ring of Fire" alone, where several tectonic plates come together to grind under each other, millions of tonnes of iron, nickel, copper, and even gold are being brought near the surface and deposited on the ocean-floor. There are already companies such as Nautilus who are expressing interest in these reserves which could very well hold enough metals to run the world for another century.

As mush as prices are rising, this planet is not going to run out of the black stuff any time soon. There wont be wars over petroleum or any other resource, just a lot of red tape about who gets to develop what, and speaking of red tape, my next post is going to cover one UN treaty that just so happens to get in the way of the development

Reasoning, Path to Truth or Verbal Weapon?

Reasoning, the ability of the human mind to apply logical thoughts and this thing called "common sense" to experiences and information accumulated, all with the intention of coming to a truth or conclusion. For centuries this ability to reason has been viewed as a path to truth and self-enlightenment, but recently, people credit the development of this skill to be based on the human desire for victory, be it physical contest, or in the case of reason, verbal contest.

Two people disagree on something, and when the facts alone are not enough to prove one side wrong and another side right, reason is used by both sides to try to see which idea is more right. But instead of both ideas coming together into one new idea, both sides usually hold firm to their own ideals, and will often bend the facts in an attempt to sway the public opinion. This phenomenon occurs daily on CCTV (I know, who watches that right?) and politicians trying to protect their own positions and benefits. They are the people who cant compromise because if they do they lose support, and so they must defend their starting positions to the last thought, usually with reason.

But at the end of the debate, reasoning is still used for other purposes, mathematics, theoretical science just to name a few, but then remains the most important question, was reasoning created just so we can "win", or is it really meant as a tool for finding the truth?

Automated Stock Trading

As I hope that you are aware of, the US stock market recently led the world in another panicked selling frenzy, crashing over 500% from what it was only weeks ago. Despite the fact that it is beginning to recover, I think it is safe to say that us ordinary citizens without the massive amount of capital needed to have a say on the market are getting tired of some multimillionaire who decided to make even more money that hes not gonna be able to spend by crashing an important stock. This bring up the question of why the heck are human beings still allowed to interact directly in the stock market?
When you get down to it, all stocks is is a numbers game, when the numbers bottom out and starts to grow, you buy, when it tops off and starts to fall, you sell. Its a simple game played by humans only for the thrill or profit and personal gain, and it is because of those human emotions of greed and panic that the market is so unstable. Why cant we have an exchange which is fully automated and managed only by computers, who sells and buys stocks on a programmed bias and will emotionless evaluate numbers?

Solar Farming

Ever since the use of fossil fuels raised enough worries to begin a quest for a renewable energy source, sunlight has been one of the most sought after methods of power generation. From this quest to harness the sun mankind has created inefficient, but workable solar cells that convert light into electricity, along with monterous fusion reactors in an attempt to make our own "sun in a bottle". Despite these inventions, I'd say that without a significant breakthrough in either of these alternatives, we wont be able to power anything other than individual households even if they are implicated into our power grids en mass.

Fusion reactors are promising, so I wont shoot that idea down, but why did we go through all the hassle of creating chemical substances that react with light to give off electrical energy when a much more complex but very well engineered natural substance does pretty much the same?

Chlorophyll in plants convert sunlight into ATP and then from that, glucose. Its been around since the dawn of life on the planet, and, creation or evolution, it works at an efficiency much higher than machines. The only reason that we haven't been able to use it for fuel purposes is that the plant does not see the need to excrete fuel, only to grow and reproduce. Of the energy generated by a plant, a massive amount goes into growing its supporting structures, extracting nutrients from the soil and manufacturing chemicals used to reproduce, only a small amount by comparison is turned into stored sugar, which is of interest to us. What should be done is to engineer a simple plant cell that will at first take nutrients from its surrounding and divide for a set amount of cycles, then begin to grow massive amounts of chlorophyll and store large amounts of sugar, at a chemical que, the stored sugar is released into its surroundings, which would later be collected.

An outdoor pool given sufficient nutrients and a sterile environment could easily house millions of such cells. Given if one cell could produce but one gram of sugar per day, the energy yield of such a pool will be much larger than if it was covered with conventional solar cells, artificially engineered enzymes and chemical cycles could be implanted onto the cells and speed up production, the whole process is very skin to a nuclear one in the sense that the energy created by one reaction is very little, but the number of reactions make the total substantial.