The Evangelical Ecologist points to some interesting material on the possibility of getting fuel for energy from the moon. It seems to me that space exploration will really take off when we find an economic reason to go there. Spin-off technology is just not that likely to light up people’s life, and fundamental research is not sexy enough. A bit of helium-3 just might do it. 🙂
I missed wishing readers of this blog a Merry Christmas because I was out of town and left fairly quickly. At the last minute my wife and I were able to go to Ft. Worth, TX to see our daughter, son-in-law, and two granddaughters. A good time was had by all of us! I will…
I have posted a number of YouTube videos recently before I noticed they made a change in how they share. You can now share as a playlist starting with the current video or embed the particular video. Since I’m including my study on the gospel of John in a playlist as well as embedding individual…
Since the Foley scandal broke I’ve read and heard a number of commentators talk about the danger of evangelical Christians staying home on election day. The suggestion is that especially the conservative “family values” voters will be so put off by the Foley scandal and the apparent lack of action by the leadership to deal…
I’ve been using Akismet for months now, and I have been nothing but happy until last night, when I found that some perfectly good comments were never posted. On reviewing my last 15 days spam, I found all four of the missing comments and “de-spammed” them, but unless the user had e-mailed me, I might…
… always consider the sampling error when you report the difference between successive polls. News organizations have been getting some better, in my subjective view, in noting when a result is within the sampling error in a particular poll, but they still report increases or decreases in a lead without that note. If a candidate…
James McGrath has proposed a meme, and it even got past my prejudice against memes. He asks for a phrase that makes your blog #1 in the Google search results. I found “she-bears homily” which finds my post which is a proposed a homily given the scripture on Elisha and the She Bears. I don’t…
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If two square kilometres of the moon’s surface power a 1 gigawatt power station for a year, and since the average total power consumption of the human world (in 2001, and growing fast) is 13,500 gigawatts, how many years would it take to for us humans to completely destroy the surface of the moon? Well, the surface area of the moon is about 38 million square kilometres, so the answer is a bit more than a thousand years at 2001 consumption rates. So this power source may outlast fossil fuels on earth, but it won’t last for ever. Anyway, is it really appropriate for humanity to destroy a whole heavenly body in this way, or even to start to do so? After all, there is a lot more energy available which is truly renewable, such as the 174 million gigawatts received by the earth from the sun. So there is a lot more going for finding more economical ways of using this huge flux of solar energy, which will never run out, at least not for billions of years.
Well, I agree on the solar energy, and also on conservation. But I still like to see ideas that are way out of the box batted around.