Geohydrolysis and the hydrogen fuel economy: A completesolution to the energy crisis and global warming

Using geothermal energy to hydrolyze water, providing inexpensive and practically limitless pure hydrogen to power energy systems through fuel cells or hydrogen combustion is technically and economically feasible, extremely reliable, has zero carbon emissions, minimal environmental impact, and zero potential for unmitigatable disaster.

So, engineering students, get on it!  Save the world and become a billionaire!  I'm too old and lazy for this sort of thing, so you get the outline for free.

The system would begin by using sea floor vents on the Midatlantic Ridge to generate electricity on floating platforms.  The abundance of geothermal energy in this zone is readily observable in the high levels of geothermal energy production enjoyed by Iceland,an island that is essentially a portion of the Midatlantic Ridge that has broken the surface of the Atlantic.  The ridge extends North-South across the entire Atlantic basin, and is a zone of sea-floor spreading that drives the movement of the American, European, and African continents away from each other.  The energy of earth-crust convection is released ubiquitously along this ridge in the form of sea-floor vents, which are undersea “hot springs,”or “geysers” of a volcanic nature. Because of the high water pressure, the boiling point of water is greatly elevated, and sea-floor vents produce liquid water in the vicinity of 700 degrees Fahrenheit.



To capture this energy, floating platforms, such as are currently used for deep sea oil drilling, instead of dropping thousands of feet of drill shafts, would drop thousands of feet of steel tubing capable of withstanding the high pressures and temperatures of the water.  The tube would form a closed loop.  Water (or another liquid) circulated through the loop would be heated by the sea-floor vents, or even in hot plumes nearby to the vents.  The heated fluid is used to drive turbines on the platform that generate electricity.



Icelandic energy experts have noted that Iceland could become a major exporter of energy if only a way could be found to transport energy across the Atlantic to consumers on the continents.  The transport of energy remains the only obstacle to the production of energy from sea-floor vents, as well.  A solution to this problem is found in the abundance of seawater surrounding both Iceland and the generating platforms.  Seawater is easily hydrolyzed (separated into pure hydrogen and oxygen by passing an electrical current through the water), but hydrolysis is generally energy-cost-prohibitive, since much electricity is needed.  But the geothermal generators will produce unlimited electricity, so hydrolysis becomes a viable way to produce abundant hydrogen.  Hydrogen can then be transported to consumers by various means. Hydrogen arriving at consumer use-points could be converted back to electricity through fuel cells or combustion to power a diversity of applications:  vehicles, buildings, cities, industry, etc.



Among the means to transport the hydrogen to consumers would be pipelines and shipping. But an attractive and flexible way to do this would be through remote-piloted dirigibles.  Of course, the specter of a Hindenberg-like disaster is raised, but if the dirigibles are remotely piloted and flown at safe altitudes, then such disasters,when they occur, would engender no injury or loss of life, and little loss of property.  Furthermore, the only byproduct of any accidental explosion would be water, and the falling debris of the vehicle, which would be minimal.



The environmental impact of hydrolyzing water at the platforms can be minimized by pumping water to be hydrolyzed into electrically insulated tanks, so that stray charges and voltages do not affect the surrounding ecologies.  Hydrolyzed water will leave a saline residue, and disposing of the residue will increase local salinity.  Average global salinity will be unaffected though, since all water hydrolyzed will eventually be replaced by pure water produced at the consumer end.  As water is hydrolyzed and the hydrogen captured, the local atmosphere may experience enriched oxygen levels.  This is not trivial, as the impact of any increase of atmospheric oxygen levels is unknown.  However, any excess oxygen produced at the platforms will be balanced, molecule for molecule, by oxygen consumed at the consumer end.  Total atmospheric oxygen will remain constant.



The transport of hydrogen may involve occasional leakage or explosions, but hydrogen is not toxic, and is lighter than air, so any spilled hydrogen will float harmlessly into the upper atmosphere.  Indeed, hydrogen is so light that the Earth’s gravitational field cannot retain it -- which is why there is little hydrogen in Earth’s atmosphere.  Any hydrogen lost accidentally will escape into space.



 At the consumer-use end of the process, fuel cells react hydrogen and oxygen, with only water as a product.  There is no harmful byproduct of reaction.  The construction of millions of fuel cells may require extensive initial investments in minerals for use as catalysts and electroplates. The energy and environmental costs of building fuel cells may be extensive.  A simple way to solve this problem is to simply combust the hydrogen in standard steam or internal combustion generators, instead of using fuel cells.



The costs of the system lie mostly in initial investments:  constructing the platforms and transport network.  These costs would be quickly recouped in supplying all of the world’s energy needs.  The actual production of energy has zero cost, since the sea-floor vents will continue to produce energy as long as the continents continue to move, which is to say, long beyond the foreseeable future.  The longevity of individual sea-floor vents is not known.  It may be necessary to occasionally relocate the platforms from dormant or less productive vents to active or more productive ones.  In the event that the vents are short-lived,remotely piloted or robotic submersible vessels could be deployed to continually seek out active vents.  There will always be some active vents as long as sea-floor spreading continues.  While this time frame is not predictable,sea-floor spreading has been steady for the last 200 million years.  In the time frame of human history, it may be necessary to relocate platforms over active vents, and relocating may be an additional cost of energy production, along with maintenance of the platforms and delivery system.



This overall system can yield a low-cost, minimum-impact,highly reliable, disaster-resistant means to produce nearly limitless low-cost energy to every place on earth.  All of the technical knowledge necessary to implement the system already exist.   So let's do it, kids, and don't forget your old math teacher when you're rich and famous, and enjoying the benefits of a sustainable techno-social system.

The Dream-Author

I have come to know that my dreams have an author.  This author is not me – at least not the me who is writing this now.  But it also is me.  Just a different me, a different person who is me.  I think it is right to think of the dream-author as a person.

I am not comfortable saying, with Freud, that the dream-author is the unconscious, because the dream-author shows that he is quite conscious (I project, linguistically, my own gender upon the dream-author, but the dream-author has no gender, or possesses qualities of all genders).  I say the dream-author is conscious, because he is very aware of my waking activities, possesses logic, intelligence, intent, language, and a desire to communicate.  The dream-author is aware of things that I am not aware of, and tries to communicate them to me using a hybrid of his and my own language.  I can identify numerous specific insights that my dreams have presented to me at various times, but which I did not understand because I myself lacked that insight.  When I achieved the insight at a much later time, It became clear what the dream had been trying to say.  This is evidence that the dream-author is aware of things in my waking life, that I am not aware of, and that the dream-author considers it important to attempt to communicate these things to me, as a friend would try to tell me something important that I do not know or understand.  These things tend to center around relationships to persons, and depth of connections to the world and the diverse disaggregated aspects of myself.  The intent of the dream-author seems to be for me to have a more fully integrated personality and to have healthier and more honest relationships, as well as to see the value of the most important things in life, and to see past my illusions of daily life to perceive things for what they are.  With its insight, intelligence, and caring, the dream-author seems more to me like a conscious personality than an amorphous unconscious substrate.

Yet I also cannot agree with Jung that the dream-author is the anima, the Atman or fully realized personality, robustly connected to the collective unconscious and its archetypes, an all-wise guide on the journey to individuation.  For although it is more astute than I am with regard to interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships, it is terrible at certain other types of operations.  Mathematics, spoken language, and spatial orientation are notably suppressed.  We could say that the dream-author is not interested in these things, but I have evidence that it is.  It tries to understand the significance of numbers, tries to remember words in various languages, tries to relate to a geographic landscape, it finds these concepts useful, but is simply bad at them.  It is also neurotically anxious, often wasting my time with interminable, emotionally laden narratives about how worried it is that I will be unable to handle mundane situations like my job.  Some of these weaknesses are complementary to my own strengths, but a poor sense of spatial orientation is a weakness that I share with the dream author.  Again, the dream-author does not seem like the mystically omniscient anima, but more like some guy I met at school and became friends with, complementing my orientation to the world in some ways, and reinforcing it in others.

I think of the dream-author as a writer because he uses a language to construct an idea-complex.  On waking, the idea-complex becomes a narrative, but I am fairly certain that it is my conscious, waking self that imposes narrative structure on the idea-complex, since in its raw form the idea-complex is not understandable to the conscious waking mind.  I suspect this because in some moments I am able to retain the idea-complex in mind,briefly, before imposing the narrative.  I am sometimes able to be consciously aware of the process of imposing the narrative, which seems neither conscious nor unconscious, but somehow an inevitable product of the interface of the two worlds and their incompatible logics.  The dream-author draws images and feelings from my waking activities and uses them as symbols in its language of dream-logic.  Thus, objects in my quotidian experience can become words and phrases in my dream, but they are not the meaning of the dream.  I have learned that it is important not to be distracted by the connections of the symbols to waking life.  So, for example, I might dream of a fish “because I had fish for dinner.”  But while having had fish for dinner supplied the image of the fish, it is not the meaning of the fish.  If I wish to understand the meaning of the dream of fish, I must ask what the fish represents for me, how I feel about seeing the fish, and what is the relationship of the fish to other symbols in the dream.  I must not be distracted by the superficial image of the fish.

Dream work, for me, involves deepening my relationship with the dream-author.  I wish to better understand not only his language and his messages for me, but I wish to better understand him as a person.  I wish to know how I can be of help to the dream-author, so that our relationship is not a one-way affair.  I wish to see the dream-author, within myself as I dream, and in the mirror when I wake.  I do not wish to become one with the dream-author, to realize that he is nothing other than my own self, any more than I wish to become the same person as my friend or spouse.  I want to appreciate the dream-author as a person who is striving to become fully realized alongside me, a person who is taking this journey with me, who is insightful, honest, possessed of universal wisdom, bad at math, disoriented in the towns and buildings, and has trouble remembering simple words and phrases.  I want us to grow together.

Ghosts

Our ghosts that rest upon our frighted frame
That speak in ciphers crafted from our culted names
And hold within their fingers nighted mummeries
That spoken would consume our breath and memories

What now pale husks?
Search the skies at dusk
Of thee nor toe nor tusk.

The Last Day of Florida

Tonight we eat, drink, pray, sleep, on this, the last day of Florida.  Tomorrow it will be gone, Fort Meyers, the town where my grandfather died.  My grandfather took us fishing on the gulf.  We caught blowfish and threw them back.  My grandfather was as cold and absent as those fish.  He gave my brother and I turns to pilot the boat.  When it was my turn, my brother deliberately told me the wrong way to push the throttle, so that I almost capsized the boat.  I never got another chance.  My brother did that for spite and envy.  We were children.  He was a broken child.  Now he is a broken man, and my grandfather is dead.  I was not invited to the funeral.  I have never been to a funeral.

We went to Disneyworld once.  It was supposed to be amazing.  But I had lived in the Leblon region of Rio De Janeiro, I had been to Carnaval in Rio when I was five years old, so why would I think Disneyworld is amazing?

Tomorrow the storm comes and obliterates it all.  Disneyworld and my grandfather's grave that I have never seen will merge with coral reefs in a shallow sea.  But what I lost in Florida, I lost a long time ago.

Reflections on July 4, 2017

In the years and months leading up to July 4, 1776, a bunch of rich white men decided they were sick of paying taxes to England. They had no problem at all with slavery, genocide, and treating women as property, but they really didn't like paying taxes to England. So they started a war.
Now these rich white lawyers, bankers, and business owners did not actually want to risk injury, death, or mild discomfort in a war. So they did what all national leaders do in such cases: They hired a bunch of their well-educated peers to write copious persuasive propaganda for them, and flooded the streets with it in an effort to get poor farmers to fight and die to rid the rich business owners of their tax obligations to England. This propaganda campaign was so enormously successful that it is still believed, and even revered, to this very day. Indeed, the Fourth of July is the day of the public proclamation of the centerpiece of that propaganda campaign, T. Jefferson's "Declaration of Independence."
Like any good propaganda campaign, the documents cleverly replaced the real motivation for the war -- the rich peoples' desire to avoid taxes -- with a noble-sounding abstraction. Here, the abstraction used to cover the genuine motive was "liberty." Also like any good propaganda tool, the abstraction was on its face an absurdity. In a world of slavery, rigid and crushing class distinctions, and the total absence of women's right to self-determination, "liberty" was the absolute antithesis of the reality that the society was actually manifesting.
Today, we still live in a world where rich business owners, bankers, and lawyers enact policy that removes their own tax burden, while promoting extreme inequality and poverty and maintaining a school-to-prison pipeline and immigrant exploitation -- both modern forms of slavery -- and recruiting military "volunteers" from the most disenfranchised sectors of the populace to fight and die in wars that the ruling class have declared and manage to their own financial benefit. And astoundingly, after over two hundred years, the same propaganda campaign, using the same language, is still their tool to justify it all.
Well played, gentlemen. Well played.

The Persistence of Slavery in the United States of America

It is tempting to think of slavery as an anachronism in the United States. However, the modern slavery system in the US has three major branches, without any one of which the US economy cannot operate in its current form.
The first branch is mass incarceration and unaccountable police shootings. Prisoners in federal prisons, many privately managed, are forced to work without compensation, and under constant threat of physical violence. The majority of these prisoners have been arrested for marijuana crimes, for which black citizens are far more likely to serve jail time than white citizens arrested for the same offense. The threat of police killings keeps the arrested black citizen in a state of terrified compliance that is part of the discriminating nature of this system.
The second branch is the undocumented worker system. Although some elements loudly call for the expulsion and exclusion of undocumented workers, the fact is that these workers are needed so completely that without them, the entire US agricultural system would collapse overnight. There are already several documented cases where excessive crackdowns on undocumented workers have resulted in massive loss of crops, which cannot be picked without labor. Because the workers are so desperately needed, efforts to exclude them are not genuine. This is why such efforts always have limited effectiveness. It is also why workers in this condition are prosecuted, but the agents and institutions who employ them never are. The Kafkaesque immigration system understands that it really wants the workers, and its only function is to keep the workers in a constant state of fear and disenfranchisement. In other words, the US immigration system serves no other purpose than to guarantee a limitless supply of workers who are completely devoid of legal and human rights, and can therefore be ill-treated, cheated, and subjected to deadly working conditions, with impunity. They receive compensation, and are technically free to leave, but that compensation is very far below minimum wage, carries no fair labor guarantees, and is often arbitrarily withheld in pervasive acts of wage theft. The supposed freedom of the workers to leave is also complicated by the third branch of the modern slavery system, which is the systematic destabilization of governments abroad that serve as sources of immigrant and exported labor.
The third branch of the modern slavery system is the exportation of slavery that began in earnest shortly after the end of slavery in the US. Under presidents T. Roosevelt and W. McKinley, the US began military incursions into the Caribbean, South America, and the Philippines, where it supported the most ruthless dictators and opposed all populist movements. The justification generally offered for these incursions was "to protect US interests." These interests were largely agricultural ventures in fruit and sugar, which required vast labor forces in slavery or near-slavery conditions. This type of foreign policy continues to this day in the form of covert military and economic operations that maintain despotic governments in countries where the US has manufacturing and mining concerns. Among the most egregious examples is the 1973 coup conducted against Chile's Salvador Allende, and more recent examples include US support of the military coup in Honduras, and the effective kidnapping of Haiti's Jean Bertrand Aristide. These actions occur with consistency through both Democratic and Republican administrations. Their effect is that labor in foreign countries is kept from organizing, and maintained in effective slavery conditions, and these conditions also serve as a strong deterrent to the return of immigrant labor, thus reinforcing the second branch of modern slavery. "Free trade" agreements such as NAFTA and the TPP are crucial elements in this system, and should really be thought of as "free exploitation" agreements.
With these three branches of slavery firmly entrenched -- mass incarceration, undocumented labor, and anti-labor interventions abroad -- the US cannot pretend that its economic system has ever subsisted without a massive substrate of slavery to support it. We need to return to first principles to discover and propagate a system of social organization that truly embodies fairness for all, and we cannot deceive ourselves that we have yet achieved that. We cannot pretend that slavery is an artifact of the past. It is an existential reality of the present, and, unless we act, of the future.

Science and Witchcraft

Witchcraft is science, too.

No, wait!  Really!  Listen.

The pre-Christian indigenous peoples of Europe were committed to understanding the relationships among the elements of the world:  Plants, animals, stars, and stones, all were the subjects of their inquiry.  Their understanding was good, as it had to be for them to endure the trials of the millennia.  They learned about disease and medicine, nutrition and the body, reproduction, and the health of their ecosystems.  Their knowledge tended to favor qualitative study over quantitative, but many of the understandings they achieved, in harmony with nearly every indigenous culture on every continent, are the same as those only now being understood by modern science:  That everything is connected (quantum theory), that healthy ecosystems require cooperation among species (biodiversity), that forests communicate and adapt together with fungi in the soil (symbiosis), that good design standards are already found in nature (biomimetics), that reality can subsist in seemingly contradictory states (quantum theory), that living systems are spontaneous and unpredictable, within regimes of predictable behavior (chaos theory).  The pagans of Europe developed a sophisticated astronomy that is reflected in the architecture of Stonehenge and myriad other stone circles scattered across the countryside of the United Kingdom.  The science of the time was known as wicce, an Anglo-Saxon word that is cognate with the English words “wit” and “wisdom,” as well as with the Sanskrit “veda.”

It was only after the forced Christianization of Europe, and especially under the bloody reign of the Inquisition, that the word wicce was changed to “witch,” and given dozens of negative associations, including associations of evil intent and service to demonic forces.  The craft of the wicce was painted as grotesque and abominable, and the knowledge and insight of folk women, the craft of wisdom, was largely lost.  This propagandizing was part of a larger project of demonizing indigenous beliefs, and overthrowing the largely (but by no means exclusively) matriarchal society of pagan Europe, and supplanting it with a patriarchal system of dominating empire and religion.

Certainly, the pagan science of nature included teachings that were metaphorical and mythological in character;  But then, so does modern science.  Is not entropy largely a metaphorical concept?  And witchcraft adopts a mystical current in its conceptualization of the world, but so have many of the well-known Western scientists:  Pythagoras the occultist, Gregor Mendel the contemplative monk, Sir Isaac Newton the devoted alchemist.  Indeed, a level of spiritual mysticism is something Western science could use more of.  For the mind without the heart, science without conscience, is the paradigm that brought us the nuclear bomb, drone warfare, runaway climate change, and global ocean death.  Ironically, the science we are counting on to resolve these problems is the same science that created them.  To resolve the problems does not require new science or technology as much as it requires new conscious orientations to the way we use the science and technology that we have now, and that we continually innovate.

It is not a time to look only backward, but neither is it a time to look only forward.  Seeking our roots in our own indigenous culture, from whichever continent it originated for each of us, can offer us the wisdom that we need to guide our application of the knowledge that we always seek.  To live sustainably and responsibly in the post-post-modern world will require a lot of science, and quite a bit of witchcraft.