In order to drill the Bakken formation, where gigatons of carbon deposits are entombed beneath the wheat fields of North Dakota, Montana, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, they are going to have to go very deep, into very hard and hot rock.Įven tougher challenges await Chevron's mega-well, Jack 2 in the Gulf of Mexico, or Petrobras' Saudi-scale Tupi or Carioca fields in the equatorial Atlantic off Brazil. It is interesting to see the major oil companies take on a really tough challenge, like drilling deep continental or deep ocean sites. Apply today's dielectric alloys instead of steam and you can imagine live current from the temperature differential without cooling the EarthĪnd, meanwhile, the climate just goes to Hell. It sets up a depletion curve - years to decades -īecause it cools the magma. In Iceland we can see steam and hydrogen being generated by geothermal heat,īut the Teslovian technology being applied - pumped water and steam - is inefficient and Not wanting to see such gems disappear into the akashic records without at least a few more reads, we're republishing in this summer re-run series.īear in mind that Nicola Tesla was a steampunk. In the eight years since the post below was originally published in the summer of 2008, it has received a grand total of 68 page views, many of which were doubtless our own. Who needs dilithium crystals? We travel through space aboard a dynamo. Consider the spin of the Earth, or the latent heat within its slowly cooling core. Consider the gravitational pull of the moon that raises oceans. So now we are burning down the house.Īll around us there are much more abundant forms of energy than fire. Get over it! Being stupid apes, we have become completely obsessed with fire. There is no shortage of energy and there never has been. But oddly enough, it might not be the energy shortfall that pitches all that Teslarati into the ditch. Limits will be in the driver's seat again. We've opined in many posts here that we thought a rubber-road interface would soon be upon this kind of techonarcissism.
Eternal frontier gems upgrade#
Perpetually upgrade just to stay in the game. We will becomeĬyber-centaurs - co-dependent humans and AIs.
In Kelly's view we will soon be tapping into artificial, alien intellect like we do electricity or wifi. The insularity of Silicon Valley leads to confirmation bias, to the point where someone like Kevin Kelly, in a recent Long Now talk, can describe the diversification of Artificial Smartness as "alien intelligences" without grasping that we have, right now living amongst us, vastly diverse typologies of intelligence in the biological world, but that our overconsuming, polluting technosphere is killing them off in the Sixth Mass Extinction before we even grok their quantum entanglement. We know all too well that each Google search uses enough energy to boil a cup of water, and that the average cellphone adds one ton of carbon to the atmosphere each year - roughly 3 jet passenger trips back and forth between New York and Cancun. Like many in the Peak Everything/Age of Limits psychographic, we find ourselves rolling our eyes whenever we hear techno-utopians describing AI implants, self-driving Teslas and longevity DNA-splices.