good morning gentleman.
yes hemp can replace over 50,000 products, and a wheel could replace alot of things too..free energy?
what is free energy
If energy were truly free, it wouldn't do anything at all except exist. Energy doesn't want to do "useful" work, we want it to. What is useful, anyway? Depends who's asked.
Energy is, by definition, a collection of some form of force or capacity to exert such force in a reltive concentration. Energy doesn't like to be confined, but complete freedom is impossible- whay would quarks or phonons remain in existence if they were "free" to do as they pleased? They'd dissipate uniformly rather than remain scrunched up in little packets.
The closest we humans can get to free energy is a blissfully unaware person. They have no autosuppression toward any motivation, and thus feel no resistence to acting out their desires. Eventually though, they try something that conflicts with something else, and they suddenly find their freedom is not ubiquitous. Simultaneously their awareness increases fundamentally: neural pathways which were adequate for life must be revised, reorganised.
having less brain mass, animals spend less time cogitating whether or not to do something than humans do. They are, in this respect, more free to persue their interests, are they not?
Without some kind of thing to push against, no energy is useful.
if we were able to somehow educate ourselves enough to appreciate the freedom afforded to energy by being at the disposal of intelligent, self-aware life is as free as energy is likely to get (until we collectively evolve into some higher order macroscopic intelligence, presumably with more choices and more freedom) then we are at the door to self-liberation. The freedom to get up and go outside and look at the sky or bees or other people is good deal of freedom. If we could educate ourselves to appreciate the freedom we have, make the most of it, and realise that in doing so one creates freedom from freedom, without being overwhelmed by such realisation or distracted by the genuine profundity such realisation can involve, then we are as free as we are likely to ever bee.
What we want is not free energy, but a greater appreciation of the energy we already have. Sure, there are plenty of good reasons to apply that freedom to development of clean power solutions, including those which incorporate the effect of our use of energy.
We need our brains to find more motivation in excersing the freedom we have to make something appealing with it. We need to work at learning to appreciate things more.
The number of crazy ideas I've entertained and even explored is large: it is a good thing that I did not have at my disposal an infinite source of energy, as I no doubt would have made a mistake somewhere and totalled the place by now.... aside from the obvious detriment our appalling lack of discipline in general whenever power gets cheaper often results in.
I'd say that it's not too far off in the future that we will have developed a combination of layered metal oxide/metal composites that catalytically dissociates H2O at STP. I wouldn't be surprised that the information for this has already been ascertained but lies strewn about the world in journals and the like. If electricity were cheaper we could make Aluminum and Lithium and Magnesium lots cheaper and things lighter and stronger and charge NaBH4 batteries for less and so on and so forth....
It would be cool.
This is often how our appreciation of freedom manifests: coolness.
But energy would not be any freer than it is now.... the increasing ease with which humans perpetuate their existence is perhaps the greatest threat to human freedom that ever existed- the less opportunity the environment has to prod us into thinking differntly, the less reason and motivation (and money) we have to consider improvements.
hemp is a great source
I am all for it, it is indeed a great source of many materials and energy - it could indeed work
The main problem is the scale of the human population - all life forms produce waste that is potentially toxic. Its all a matter of scale, not largely what toxins are produced since there always seems to be an organism which can deal with or process the poisons we produce on one time scale or another. Anything we do will have a negative impact on the enviroment and its because of its scale that it will be bad. The main problem is that we have the advantage of being able to continue relatively as normal through science when the natural circumstances change. Our population does not go through the natural fluctations an animal population would which regulates its size the 'natural' way
bio mass for all the worlds power though?..
of the envelope calculation
I did one a while ago and it came out that if the entire US landmass were devoted to producing canola it would replace 75% of the world's annual oil demands.
Of course petroleum oils are used for far more than fuel, but pretty much anything can be synthetised from plant oils now.
On the hempseed thing:
Hemp can probably be harvested more frequently than canola, and if grown alternately with other crops increases their yields; quite the opposite to cotton, which wrecks the soil unless particular attention is paid to it's maintennance.
but there are many other sources for energy...some not yet understood..which i am studying at the moment...
is the notion of agriculture beeing able to replace fossil fuels is absurd, especially to run deisal engines.
Well, bitchs I have to disagree.
World Primary Energy Production Trends
Between 1992 and 2001, the world's total output of primary energy -- petroleum, natural gas, coal, and electric power (hydro, nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind, and wood and waste)-- increased at an average annual rate of 1.6 percent - see : Table (
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/iea/table29.html). World production increased from 351 quadrillion Btu in 1992 to 403 quadrillion Btu in 2001.
Working with:
403 quadrillion Btu in 2001.
[1Btu = 1054.35 J]
~=424.90305 quadrillion kJ (424.905305 X10^12 kJ)
biodiesel contains about 130,000 BTU/gal, or
137065.5 kJ/ 3.785L = 36212.81 kJ/L
To supply the entire world's energy requirements as biodiesel, made, for example from canola, one needs:
425 x10^12 kJ / 36213 kJ/L = 1.17361 x10^11L
AT 1190 L canola oil per hectare, the area required to produce 1.17361 x10^11 L is
1.17361 x10^11L / 1190L per hectare =was 98,622,89... added missing "6" 98,622,689.0756 hectares required to furnish the world's energy requirements. Almost 100 million hectares.
How much land is that?
Total Area of the world 510,072,000 sq km
of that, 148,940,000 sq km - 29.2% is land.
United States
Land area: 9,158,960 sq. km 3,536,357 sq. miles
1 square kilometer = 100 hectares, so the US landmass has
9,158,960 sq. km X 100 hectares per square kilometer = 915,896,000 hectares, or 9 times the area required to produce the world's entire energy requirements.
might have got it wrong
If I'm out by a factor of 10 it is still favourable to an agricultural solution. If it's out by a factor of 50 then with the help of Russia, Canada, China,Brazil and Australia's hard working dirt we add another 52-odd million square kilometers and it's still covered. But I don't think I'm out, but I actively encourage anyone to check this themselves.
On another note:
http://www.bebioenergy.com/alternative_oil_sources.htm
Rapeseed is commonly grown in Europe as a non-food crop on set-aside land.
In 1992 under the Common Agriculture Policy, an obligation was introduced to take 15% of the arable land out of food production. It was this legislation that grew the bio-fuel industry in Europe as farmers under the scheme were allowed to produce "non-food" crops and receive income. Between 4 and 7.5 million hectares are set-aside annually for the production of non food crops and the majority of this is rapeseed and Sunflower for bio-diesel and oleo-chemicals, and a smaller portion for the production of bio-ethanol from cereals and sugar-beet.
If these guys had their head screwed on a bit better they'd be extracting the linoleic acids and value-adding their process economy. Room for improvement.
The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.
The human question is, not, how many can survive, but, what kind of existence is possible for those that do survive.....
