China: Underloved, Underappreciated

With election year rolling in to the dockets of politicians nationwide, international issues that fall short of wars roll right out of those same dockets. The Obama Administration has handled the Iran/Iraq situation for now, and steered the nations economy somewhat through troubled times, but the issue of international trade has been in the backstage for quite a while now, and a major player is getting a little riled.

Ever since the Bush administration, the United States has been pressuring China to raise the value of its currency, the Chinese Yuan. Because of the very biased conversion rate of aproximately 8 yuan to one dollar at the start of the century, China's manufacturing industry has been booming due to low relative cost of manufacturing. In a Chinese sweatshop, workers are paid a few yuan a week, and the same goods they make by the thousands sell for a few dollars worth of profit each. Just assuming that one happy meal toy equivalent takes 1 yuan to make and makes a profit of 1 dollar, the profit margin is a huge 800%.

The policy of high conversion rate, however, has its downsides. Because the currency is so weak, the Chinese businessmen who make their profit in Yuans are at a disadvantage when purchasing American goods, a meal in New York can easily cost a week of a Chinese tradesman's salary. This leaves the average Chinese household and businesses with a tiny amount of purchasing power for the amount of labor they produce. And to further worsen the issue, the sensitive goods that China want to import, like high end manufacturing know-how and weapons/space development technology is being marked as banned goods by the international community, so even though the Chinese in general have a large amount of relative buying power, no one will sell them what they want.

These factors lead to the situation we saw a few years back, with every cheap thing in Wal-Mart being made in China. The import-export surplus equaled to almost 10% of China's GDP at its peak, and that is a very large number thought to be unsustainable by many economists. Manufacturing jobs flowed out of the US and into China where better markets and cheaper labor and materials can be had, which is why the US was hit a lot harder than China by the global recession.

The Bush administration thought it could solve the economic turmoil in America by forcing China to raise the value of its currency. Done through some one-sided and brutal diplomacy, the Chinese agreed to the request. The conversion rate is now 6 yuan to one dollar and dropping, but the United States is hardly very appreciative...

Thanks to Bush's antics in office, most of what he has done for the country has been smeared in bias. Public opinion polls today reveal that more than 50% of Americans still blame China in some way for the current recession despite the recent change. Instead of congratulating China for their remarkable progress to our request, the people of the United States would love to see harsher China policies. Obama is being a little indecisive, but several republican candidates would like to see even more economic demands on China to ultimately make China the economic servant of the "developed" world.

Already the change in conversion rate is hurting the Chinese economy. China, which holds some trillions of US debt, is rapidly losing relative debt value thanks to the conversion change that was almost forced upon them. 1 trillion dollars of debt used to be bought by 8 trillion Yuan, but now the effective value of that same debt is only 6 trillion. Over the course of 4 years, China has lost 2 trillion Yuans of debt value per trillion dollars of debt held, to a market being manipulated by the US. Instead of even a pat on the back or plain indifference, China is being faced with even more pressure for lower conversion rates and more open markets.

You can only extort so much money out of a country, and when you go too far, the country getting pushed blows a really big gasket. When Germany was being pushed over the brink, it embraced Hitler and started WWII, and should China, who is the only country showing steady signs of growth at a time of global economic strife so much as looks down the path of blood and iron, the rest of the world should be very scared indeed. Even if the "free world" can rein in the dragon, the world will lose the largest producer and exporter it has ever seen, and this little recession we are getting right now will then seem like "the good old days".

Orbital Power Grid

Ever since the advent of communications and navigation via satellite, there was always a demand for more and higher quality satellites to service the new systems. Thanks to the large bulk of most commercial satellites and the high cost of launching payload into orbit, currently around 3,000 USD per pound for a small rocket, the satellite industry in general has barely grown since its inception. In an economy plagued by speculation and lack of consumer demand, there are always telecommunications companies, oil and mineral companies, military organizations, and even third-world countries seeking a chance to put their own platform into space, and the industry of making that task easier could be quite a lucrative one indeed.

If we take a closer look at today's satellite systems, every continuously functioning satellite in orbit uses large solar power cells that can sometimes account for up to half of the mass and/or volume of the satellite which they power, if only there was a readily available power source out there in orbit, then future launches will only have to send up the core components absolutely critical to a satellites function, reducing the bulk and weight of the launch payload and making the process a simple matter of designing the most compact and efficient transmitter/receivers, taking the concern of power generation and management off the list of engineering worries.

Although setting up a commercially viable power grid in space seems a daunting task of astronomical proportions, I believe it is quite possible given that the earth acts like a giant magnet in space. Given this fact, our orbital power grid does not even need generators, all it really needs is a large web of conducting cables connected by transformer pylons. Cables of a strong and conductive metal alloy stretched over a long distance and quickly rotating around a magnet that is our earth effectively acts as a huge DC current generator, and the resulting power is then converted and redirected to functioning satellites at key pylon satellites which by their paths of orbit keep the cables taunt.

An advantage of this system is that all an incoming satellite needs to do is to reach very low earth orbit, connect itself to a pylon via cable, and then drag itself along the cable to a higher orbit. With this in mind, not only now would we need to send up less material, we also don't have to send it up as high. These factors working together should make it possible for even small companies to send up their own private communications satellites.

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

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?

U238 (depleted uranium) reactor

Depleted Uranium, its heavy, its hard to dispose of, it makes good armor piercing shells, and we have piles of it sitting around from nuclear reactors and mines waiting to be processed. Despite us having so much of the stuff, the fact that it is unsuitable for use as weapons grade fissile material resultes in research into its potential limited to it being incorperated into anti-tank rounds, and the fact that this stuff has the potential to power a reactor seems to have slipped the scientific community until now.
A reactor burning depleted uranium cannot produce any weapons grade material, we can just build one and shove it over to Iran and say "look, this stuff burns cheaper fuel, gives more power, has almost no risk of a catastropic meltdown no matter how incompetent your operators are, and is way better in every respect except that you cant make a bomb with it. If your nuclear intentions are peaceful, replace your reactors with this."
As for the reactor design itself, there is already one being looked into called a traveling wave reactor which will use enriched uranium to start a self sustaining reaction in a field of depleted uranium using neutrons released from the enriched reaction to enrich/destabalize the surrounding depleted uranium in order to keep the reaction going. Once fueled, such a reactor could run for decades before the entire field of depleted uranium is brunt, and its output will only increase unless checked for the "burning front" will increase in legnth as the reaction spreads. Despite the increased output, the fuel starts out unsutable for weapons and never actually gets close to a critical mass except when the reaction is first started, so although the risks of a meltdown are there if some idiot turned off the cooling system, the chances of the reactor turning into a bomb are slight.
Another design I was going to propose was slightly more complex and involves a series of faceleted and interconnected chamebers lined with depleted uranium, one central chanber will have a small neutron fuse like the ones used in bombs, but neutrons from the fuse will not be focused onto one point like in bombs but released to bounce along the chamber whose geometrical design allows the escape of neutrons into a similar neighboring chamber. The neutrons arnt actually "bouncing", rather, they are exciting and causing fissile reactions whenever they hit the sides of a chamber, causing more neutrons to be released.

Nanoscale Mold

Killing people and blowing stuff up has been losing appeal recently, and I suppose that that would be a sign of a sort of maturity. But other than weapons and means of war, there is still plenty to be contributed to the world, and the topic today is nanoscale materials.

Arranging all the atoms in a mass of material yields materials with properties nothing short of magical. A thread of light alkali metals linked together in a series of organized ionic bonds held in a precise triangular lattice strung across a road has the potential to cut a car in half. But the potential of such materials aside, how do we efficiently organize atoms on a large enough scale so that we can actually produce enough material to b of use?

The aforementioned NME (nano material engineered) thread/car cutter would consists of trillions of individual atoms per centimeters of thread, how can we then, rapidly arrange so many atoms? Well, isn't this a question asked by the earliest of industrialists? So much material has to be shaped to make a chunk of iron into a usable knife or pan, having individual blacksmiths pound away at the ingot is definitely not the way to go, instead, we make a mold that produces one shape over and over again.

When we feel or push something, like my fingers feeling and pushing the keys on my keyboard, the atoms in my finger are not actually touching the atoms in the plastic keyboards. I feel the keys under my fingers when the electron clouds of the two collide, the actual atomic nuclei never comes into contact. Even now, between your buttocks and your seat, there lies a few angstrom units of space dominated by the electron clouds of whatever you are wearing on your butt (I hope you are wearing something there) and whatever the materials of your seat.

The distance between atoms I mentioned is a nice little nonstick coating of you will, for the mold I now propose. To make the mold we use conventional means to aline a grid of nanoscale electrodes, each with its own electrical field. To shape the mold, we provide ore power to some electrodes while giving less to others, creating an uneven electron surface in order to acquire a desired shape, such as a nanoscale triangular lattice. Once the desired shape is set, the material that needs to be shaped is ground down to a fine nanoscale powder and heavily ionized negatively to maximize the distance between it and the mold, and to also prevent clumping of the substrate material before it takes the shape of the mold.

A few seconds later after the mold is filled, the substrate material is de-ionized and normal ionic and covalent bonding takes over, "solidifying" the material into its desired shape, and the mold is reset for another shape, another batch of material, and produces another NMEed batch of material.

Project Skymine

I have tons of ideas floating around my head, but this one in particular I wanted to share because it actually does good and makes really big explosions, what more can you possibly ask for?

So we earthlings are always under the constant threat of doom by ICBMs, which we really haven't done anything about. Its like having a sword over your throat, but you don't move away from it. Well, here is my proposed solution.

ICBMs, before they hit their targets, have to go into low earth orbit to efficiently cover ground. if a country had the money, you could create a low orbit geostationary satellite, made of nothing but a small computer, battery, and a giant fuel tank surrounded by a shrapnel coat. Place said device into geostationary orbit between you and the country that is most likely to nuke you, and repeat said process a couple hundred more times in different orbits and possible trajectories. When some crazy North Korean kid decides to launch his excuse of a nuke at you, you find one of your mines in orbit closest to the nukes trajectory, maneuver it into the path of said nuke, and detonate it.

ICBMs are NOT meant to take a beating, a little scratch on the fuel tank, and the entire missile harmlessly explodes in orbit.

Apocalypse Now

Human beings gained the ability to extinguish life on this planet a long time ago when we entered the atomic age, and yet why has no one built a shelter which would be safe from the world should the world decide to end itself?
Nuclear warheads are in a sense rather overrated, they can level any and all man made structures, but they are still nothing compared to nature's hard shell. To build a self sustaining sanctuary would be a simple although burdensome task, one simply has to find a stable and deep mine such as a depleted gold vein some miles underground, reinforce the cavern to keep it from collapsing and to keep moisture from entering, install a small nuclear reactor, which will run for centuries on only a few tonnes of fuel, and bring in a small population.
Water needed to sustain life can quickly be farmed by digging a cavern below the water table and not insulating it against moisture, water found by this method would already have been filtered by the earth and would at least not be salt water. In the case of a nuclear war contaminating all the water with nuclear radiation, simply use electricity from the aforementioned nuclear reactor to break down the water into component hydrogen and oxygen, redirect the gas to a sterile chamber, and allow water to re-condense free of most radiation.
Food could easily be farmed with artificially generated light and water from the above method, such a sanctuary would be virtually invulnerable to any disaster on the surface.

Containment

A few days ago I found myself looking at the mess which Japan has created for the world to clean up, and I approached the broken containment vessels and runaway fission reactions just like any other problem. But after a few days of thought and moderate research I will now say with reasonable confidence that at this point, all we can do is cut our losses.

There is no way that any uranium or plutonium (the latter of the two is not even supposed to be in the reactors in the first place) that was released into the environment can be cleaned up, and there is also no way of stopping the leakage of additional radiation.

Why? What you are trying to do in cleaning up radiation is to find every individual granule of uranium out in the environment, a task which at best is comparable to sorting out a handful of sugar spread out in a beach full of sand. Stopping the leakage is also impossible due to the same issue, there is no way to stop something as small as individual molecules from escaping such a large area.

So what should we do? Well, nothing is certainly not the answer, and nothing is what the Japanese seems to be doing.

If we want to be humane, I would say to open a chute into the now broken containment vessels, and dump tons and tons of sand mixed with cadmium and graphite shavings. Not only do you provide a heat sink, you also absorb neutron radiation from decaying fuel, slowing down the rate of decay and preventing the reactor from turning into a nuke.

But if we want to be practical, find some patriot ready to die for country and ask the poor chap to go in, grab the fuel rods, encase the molten pile of radioactive shit in concrete and dump the mess into the ocean.