GeneTraylor

>>> Also, putting your first number in scientific notation helps put this in perspective: 2.2 x 10^12 . Seven orders of magnitude. Close to 15 000 0000 times as much. <<<

Hm, I made a big mistake in that comment. I should have added that we have access to this much, but the real catch is energy and how we are currently limited to tapping into it and the total resource we can access is X.

Thank you so much for pointing this out.

>>> it mostly just requires more energy <<<

Yeah as I argued in another comment, that really is the unmentioned catch over here. I should have elaborated upon that in the parent. Sorry.

Even if most of humanity doesn't reach that level of consumption, we will need to start unlocking some of this resource sooner or later. What really worries me is the amount of energy we need to unlock all of this water locked away in glaciers, ice caps and so on and then actually manage to process and distribute it for final use.

That's a really interesting but hard engineering problem.

>>> Technology which is clearly within our reach would allow the earth to support trillions of humans -- admittedly at a more crowded level than I would prefer. :) <<<

Can you please elaborate more?

Hm. I don't think that's going to be a problem, it might take me a while to read his work, but that's okay. That said, I'm used to such books and a world rife with war, famine, disease and horrible death.

I've actually thought about this a bit, and I think that a really interesting design for a launch gun would be to encase the payload in a cover composed of diamagnetic material and then pump liquid nitrogen through channels made inside the material. The material would become perfectly diamagnetic and it will repel all fields, so you can easily levitate it and use it's tendency to go from a stronger to a weaker field to accelerate it.

I don't know for sure, but I think that the main advantage of doing something like this versus just putting a magnet over there, would be the fact that an accelerating magnet in such an assembly would generate huge amounts of back-emf and you would have to a) sink that and b) compensate for that.

However I don't know much about what other people's designs are, but I would like to change that. Do you know any resource where I can learn more from the scratch on how to build something like this?

Also where can I read more in detail about launch loops, laser launching, and space elevators?

>>> Why? We have a whole solar system right on on our front porch <<<

This is an honest question, not a rebuttal. How would you get those resources here, or us over there?

>>> Water doesn't just get used once and then disappear forever. Now, one could certainly make an argument against (say) sucking water out of the Oglalla Aquifer faster than it gets replenished, but that's a localized problem. We aren't going to "run out of water". Really. <<<

Well it would have been labored to add that although it would take a large amount of energy to purify water, or perhaps desalinate our oceans, the loop can be closed. The problem really is that it takes resources to keep that loop closed.

I think that all of our issues today boil down to how we convert energy to extract work, if we do manage to make something like fusion work then all of these concerns could be undermined with technology, but how do we get from here to there?

Yeah, I'm thinking about buying the book as soon as I have the spare cash.

Now I certainly plan to. Thank you.

Sorry I have dyslexia, I tend to get muddled up like that sometimes.

Whenever I see an easter island head, I can't help but draw parallels between our global civilization and theirs.

The eastern islanders consisted of around a dozen tribes, each competing for resources with others. It's thought that all of these statues were put up in a race by chieftains, competing with one another to put up the biggest, most refined and the best statue.

I wouldn't be surprised if they competed in their standards of life too. ("I eat X for breakfast, lunch and dinner!") I certainly wouldn't be surprised by the fact that they might have had political factions, special interests and a life rife with complicated political maneuvering. (it was certainly in the short term interests of statue makers to be against conservation and egg chieftains on)

After all we're the same species and they were just like us.

However what they failed to realize was the inescapable fact that they were living on a small piece of land in the middle of a vast ocean. Their seemingly inexhaustible resources were pitiful by any standards.

As time wore on and their population boomed, a point came when all of these factors came together. Their squandering of resources combined with their unsustainable way of life for a large population faced off with their limited resources, and the result was ugly. Their entire civilization collapsed.

Most of the population was lost to famine. Their civilization descended to cannibalism to survive. This degraded civilization became the perfect breeding ground for disease and even more people died. This cycle went on and on until their entire civilization was wiped out and the entire population nearly eradicated.

I shudder to think what it must have been like to live in this world. It must have been a nightmare.

Today like the eastern islanders with their statues, we keep on building taller and taller structures, better and more lethal weapons, and crazier systems. We compete with one another for status symbols at personal, regional and national levels.

Today we are just as isolated on this tiny blue ball, with a finite amount of resources, a booming population, combined with special interests and huge egos.

Like the eastern islanders we have nowhere to go...

The problem lies in how will you define the other parameters over here.

First up is the question of defining that 1 KG itself and the configuration; how will we define the parameters of the copper wire? (edit: to clarify after reemrevnivek's excellent comment the configuration of the solenoid is important because the strength of the magnetic field generated is directly related to the configuration of the coil) We can't use the radius, length of the copper wire accurately because as it gets heated up it will expand not only longitudinally but radially as well.

Second, how will the magnetic field be measured to the precision needed? If you use induction of current in another coil then according to lenz law that will create a downward force on our coil leading to inaccurate measurements (I'm assuming that it will be constantly measured) , this means that the coil needs to be strictly constrained, by how do you constrain it without adding/rubbing material on to the surface of the copper wire?

They keep pounding the same misconceptions again and again in endless repetition, and I can't help but wonder, who hired these guns? (that's not to say that some of their arguments don't hold water, but they are going to incredible lengths to cast Google as a monopoly, why?)

The cynic in me doubts that the cause is a lack of understanding.