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The world is trying to move to a less carbon intensive way to power itself. CO2 emissions, methane leaks, NOx emissions are all undesirable, unhealthy and above all in the process of pushing us into a hothouse climate scenario. The proper response to this is to find ways to generate (mainly) electricity that ideally does not produce CO2. One of them is nuclear energy, and because of that the nuclear lobby gets a lot of support from citizen that try to think along the lines of emissions minimization.

But the problem in the short term is not really CO2 or Methane, although a serious cut in Methane emissions will cool the planet. The problem is the heat, the temperature maxima, the effect on soil moisture. We need to fight the heat as we reduce CO2. It may become so dramatic that the heat prevents us from growing food or biomass because we don’t focus on managing it directly, but spend energy on transitioning to low emission technology. Nature always laughs last though, so a serious famine will reduce emissions, while preventing one won’t.

If you consider Earth like a steel drum that is out in the sun, heating up inside, then you can consider a heat generating power plant as a heat source inside the drum, that will raise temperatures even more. Considering that its already too hot inside the drum this is not what we want. How do energy sources compare in this respect?

Coal/Gas powered powerplants

These power plants exploit chemical energy stored in carbon or hydrocarbons. The oxygen in our atmosphere wants to combine with the hydrogen and carbon, from which it was split by photosynthesis millions of years ago, ending up stored deep underground. The flame of your stove, the engine of your car, the powerplant all heat up air eventually. This adds to heat ‘inside the drum’. Not good.

Nuclear power

Nuclear power is derived from splitting atoms of Uranium. They do decay naturally, but in a nuclear plant they are bombarded with slow neutrons which speeds up this process. The heat is used to heat steam and drive turbines much like in coal and gas plants. The heat comes from inside the drum. If you decide to power the planet with nuclear you do cut CO2, but the existing CO2 is not reduced fast enough to have a temperature effect. You are however adding a lot of heat ‘inside the drum’. Not good.

Wind Energy

Wind turbines use air pressure differentials in our atmosphere, that cause wind, the wind pushes the blades. Some of that friction is turned into energy, some of it into heat. But the air was already moving ‘inside the drum’. It is not adding to the heat inside, even if the electricity from the turbine is used in a stove. It does not add heat. Good.

Solar Energy

Solar energy can be solar thermal (heat collected from the sun) or electricty (photovoltaics). You could imagine this as a patch on the outside of the drum. The sun shines on it. A photovoltaic or solar thermal panel gets hot because the conversion into electricity is not very efficient, and a thermal panel is supposed to get hot. In fact you can make a solar thermal panel that reaches 500 Celsius if you just prevent convection losses. There is no heat added from any other source than the Sun though, so this is good.

But there’s another aspect to these panels, and that is they radiate heat. A photovoltaic panel heats up until it can radiate and convect (heat up the air which then rises) all the heat it receives. It should be quite a termal column above a solar power plant of rising hot air. A lot of heat is also radiated in the infrared spectrum, which is good, because light in the mid IR can reach space (doesn’t heat up the atmosphere). So someone has to do the exact math to determine if a solar (thermal or PV) power plant doesn’t actually cool Earth because it prevents heat from lingering in our atmosphere. We associate Albedo with white surfaces, but black surfaces are better radiators, especially when we don’t allow them to heat the surrounding air.

I think we may want to revisit the design of solar panels, to perhaps add copper film to the front of the panel, so that it reflects a lot of heat radiation (which it doesn’t convert into electricity anyway) directly back to space. Its a simple improvement that (if practical) can help cool Earth.

Geothermal

Geothermal heat is from inside the drum. It normally doesn’t heat the atmosphere, but because we drill for it and get it to the surface now it does.

Wave/Tidal

Wave and tidal energy derive from movement of water due the wind or the orbit of our Moon. Water has huge mass, it lends itself to conversion into electricity well, but it has such power that the installations to harvest it can be expensive (although if you consider the tidal dam in St. Malo, France has been operational since 1963, it can be very cost effective). It does not add heat inside the drum, the energy was already there as kinetic/potential energy of water.

Best options

To keep it cool wind, tidal and solar energy seem the best options, and solar PV can even be optimized to shed as much heat as it can because its not used anyway (but one has to see what the efficiency is without interventions). Nuclear, coal, gas, geothermal are adding heat, heat we don’t need!

Nederland wordt geplaagd door boeren met trekkers en andere voertuigen. Rechts zoekt naarstig naar een manier om de ontevredenheid op te blazen tot een democratie verwoestende volksopstand, maar eigenlijk is er niet zo veel aan de hand. Van rijkswege is er bepaald dat de totale stikstof depositie (een onhandige verzamelterm) een maximum heeft en boeren zijn voornamelijk door banken ertoe gebracht hun stikstof uitstoot te vergroten. Nu moet een aantal hun activiteiten staken, en in plaats van een mea culpa van oa de Rabobank wordt Nederland getrakteerd op ongekende boosheid en onbegrip.

Het is misschien niet gek dat je als je een groot deel van je leven in de fijnstof, nitraten en pesticiden doorbrengt je lontje wat korter wordt. Hersen \ontstekingen hebben dat effect, en het is aangetoond dat boeren die veel tijd in pesticide rijke omgevingen doorbrengen een grotere kans op Alzheimer hebben, dwz de hersens lijden er onder.

Neem je die laag van extra irritabiliteit even weg dan merk je dat er iig een groep is die NIET zal lijden onder welke maatregel dan ook : De banken. De Rabobank protesteert hevig tegen de stikstof plannen. Alle boeren moeten worden ‘uitgekocht’. Denk maar niet dat ze hier dan rijk van worden want een groot deel van dat geld gaat zitten in het aflossen van investeringen, dwz is bedoelt om de banken te vrijwaren.

Met Covid zijn veel ondernemers geholpen en dit maakte een belangrijk principe zichtbaar waar ik al jaren over schrijf, nl dat schulden geen betekenis hebben, maar alleen de beschikbaarheid van productiemiddel (met name fossiele energie) van het moment. Is dat productiemiddel er dan kunnen we geld aan mensen toewijzen, is dat er niet dan komt alles tot stilstand (zoals nu door de reductie van russische olie en gas op de markt). Het rijk kon dus geld uitdelen, de ondernemers konden kopen wat ze nodig hadden met dat geld en die dingen konden gemaakt worden met de fossiele energie die met dat geld gekocht kon worden.

Wat het bovenstaande illustreert is dat als een bank jou geld leent en jij geeft dat uit die schuld de bank niks kost. Je kunt die in principe vergeten. Dat gebeurt niet omdat de bank zijn macht wil houden over de geldhoeveelheid. Door terugbetaling te eisen zorgt de bank dat de geldhoeveelheid afneemt. Zolang de bank het lukt om de geldhoeveelheid in omloop schaars te houden moeten we steeds weer door een hoepel springen om geld van de bank lost te peuteren. De Rabobank laat dit principe niet los, ook al drijft het de boeren tot wanhoop en woede die wordt gericht op de politici die niet met de banken willen meewerken! We zien dus geen boeren terreur maar bank terreur.

Eigenlijk zie je dat rechts een soort Stalinistische tegenstelling wil creeren tussen de boeren en de stedelingen. Het FvD doet zijn oprui ding er nog eens overheen, die partij is er uitsluitend om onrust te stoken. De Telegraaf geeft het weer als een maatschappelijke omwenteling. Dit is allemaal angstzaaierij van een niveau waar de gemiddelde boer in zijn eentje nooit op zou komen.

“Een gouden toekomst voor extensieve boeren!”
(John Arink)

Natuurlijk zijn er aan de oplossingkant alleen opties waar banken blij van worden. Louise Vet stelt op NPO1 voor dat boeren gewassen gaan verbouwen met grotere economische waarde (meer cashflow voor banken) terwijl Louise Fresco haar lobbybaan voor de intensieve landbouw verlaat met de ongeveer boodschap “Wordt eten duurder wees blij, dan waardeer je het meer” (bordeline sadistisch, ze zegt in feite ‘arme mensen, krepeert!’). Kortom we hebben in onze kenniseconomie een aantal egogestreelde bank lakei hoogleraren waar we zo snel mogelijk van af moeten. Vrouwen die door het glazen plafond breken hebben er vaak een deel van hun ziel voor moeten inleveren.

Maar wat is dan de oplossing? Frido Kraanen die ook in gesprek is op NPO1 laat intussen een deel van de vaak door mij beschreven Roboeconomie in wording zien. Dat kan kennelijk op Texel. Texel is kennelijk relatief oninteressant als het om bancaire cashflow gaat, of te eigenzinnig (verstandig). De boeren daar zijn wat meer op zichzelf teruggeworpen en misschien mentaal gezonder aangezien ze niet tussen de megastallen en industrieele gebieden leven? Kraanen werkt aan samenwerking met ziekenhuizen, zodat deze hun voedsel van boeren op Texel betrekken, biologische ook nog, zodat de patienten die de groenten eten wat van het leven in de grond meekrijgen, iets wat om verschillende redenen erg goed voor ons is. Afgezien van de afgelopen 150 jaar in het westen waren mensen immers in vrijwel constant contact met de aarde.

Zo’n samenwerking tussen boer en ziekenhuis noem ik een ‘extraeconomische’ activiteit. Het staat namelijk buiten de economie, er hoeft in principe geen geld rond te gaan. Dat doet het wel natuurlijk maar in principe zou het ziekehuis ‘zorg vouchers’ kunnen betalen aan de boer, en de boer zou deze weer kunnen uitdelen om zijn kosten te betalen. De boer kan schulden vrij werken, als hij eigenaar is van zijn land. Daardoor kan hij de kosten zo berekenen dat iedereen er tevreden mee is. De kosten hoeven niet maximaal te zijn zoals een boer met flinke schulden zal willen. Natuurlijk is mijn voorstelling van zaken idealistisch, dat komt omdat ik zoek naar tekenen van de ideale situatie, niet de situatie waar bankiers van in extase raken. Ik pleit er al een tijd voor dat essentieele diensten zoals gezondheidszorg zich losmaken van de economie, en een extraeconomisch gaan functioneren. De economische matrix kan namelijk schadelijk zijn voor veel sociale diensten, omdat het goedkoper is deze niet uit te voeren dan wel!

De boze boeren met hun stikstof uitstoot en schulden zijn niet zo vrij als de boeren op Texel. Dat is het uiteindelijke probleem wat al deze ellende veroorzaakt. Deze boeren zitten in een economische matrix waarin ze hun dromen eigenlijk alleen kunnen waarmaken als ze allerlei dingen doen waar banken blij van worden, simpel gezegd de cashflow in het systeem helpen maximaliseren. Wat zou zo’n ‘trekkerterrorist’ doen als hij niet in een financieel spinneweb vastzat? Exact hetzelfde? Dat is onwaarschijnlijk.

Het zal nooit in ons rechts kabinet opkomen maar de oplossing is simpel : Laat de boeren failliet gaan. Stel persoonlijk vermogen vrij van de schuldbetalingen en/of geef ze een herstrart vergoeding. Laat ze een plan schrijven voor het biologisch bewerken van hun land, en als ze zo’n plan hebben geef ze dan het land voor een laag bedrag in gebruik. Dan heb je in een klap gezondere boeren, een bron van goedkoop voedsel voor Nederland en een reductie in stikstofdepositie. Het kan zeker zo zijn dat de boeren in kwestie niet geschikt zijn, aangezien ze zo goed functioneerde in in finacieele stalen maagd die voor hen was ontworpen. Misschien is er een andere boer die het land dan wil gebruiken volgens de nieuwe schuld en stikstof minimaliserende principes.

Nederland kan zich voeden zonder de hele chemische kermis er omheen. Met minder kunstmest kan het zeker volgens de Guardian. We gebruiken ook niet alle hulpbronnen die we hebben, wederom door de banken. Een goed voorbeeld is de ammoniak. Ik heb hier al vaak geschreven over ammoniak als brandstof, als waterstof drager. Over dat je het van de stallucht kunt filteren met speciale membranen en dan in brandstofcellen gebruiken. Maar je voelt hem al : Dat reduceert de cashflow van banken. Dat en ammoniak is een waterstof drager waar al een infrastructuur voor bestaat, dus het botst met de waterstof economie, waar banken de opmars van laag cashflow hernieuwbare energie mee willen vertragen. Ammoniak gebruiken in plaats van als afval zien maakt boeren zelfstandiger. Je kunt het bijvoorbeeld direct als brandstof in je tractor gebruiken!

Nu met door de oorlog in Oekraine veroorzaakte kunstmest tekorten komen boeren weer tot het besef dat je prima zelf kunstmest kunt maken van lucht en water en bv. wind energie. Maar vooralsnog verspillen we deze bron en injecteren we digistaat braaf in de grond alsof we er niks aan zouden kunnen hebben. Vroeger scheten de boeren op de eigen mestvaalt, want elk onsje mest was meegenomen!

We moeten naar een “use it or lose it” economie, met duurzaamheid als basis principe

Geef boeren hun land, zonder verstorende economische krachten die hen tot slaven van de agro-industrie maken. Stuur ze in de duurzame richting waar ze hun oorsprong vonden. Help ze de obstructie van banken tegen werkelijke kosten reductie en innovatie te overwinnen. Laat de banken het eigen risico dragen. Er komen nog genoeg uitdagingen, dus het motto moet zijn : In één keer goed!

If you have a good source for albedo simulations in urban settings or agricultural settings please let me know at info@climatebabes.com

The basic theory behind Albedo’s cooling effect is about Watt per square meter, W/m2. At the equator the sun delivers 1000 W/m2 of solar energy. This energy gets converted into heat or electricity or organic activity (chlorophyl and plant growth) and can even result in water splitting by rust when or other photon absorbing materials.

But if the surface the energy hits is reflective the photons get send back into space. Every surface has an absorption spectrum. If the surface has an albedo of 50% 50% of the solar energy gets send back, and for a surface of 1 m2 at the equator that means 500 Watt cooling for example. This also means 500Watt is absorbed and this raises the temperature of the surface.

All materials radiate photons, heat, infra red usually. The hotter a material gets the more it radiates. If the temperature of a material increases it will radiate more until all the energy that hits it will be either reflected or radiated. This can be at high temperatures, so if you make metal black and put it in the sun in high vacuum, it will start to glow after a while as hit has no way to shed its energy other than reflect or radiate (it can’t heat the ambient air).

Out atmosphere can absorb radiation of certain frequencies and not of others. As you can see in the picture above visible light is not absorbed much at all bt CO2. CO2 also does not absorb ‘terrestrial radiation’, heat radiating from the ground during the day or at night. This is considered a ‘window’ through our atmosphere by which we can cool our Earth at any time. If your surface radiates in that range (red bar above) it can actually remove heat from the equation altogether. It also seems that the ideal IR frequency range in dry regions (low humidity) is different than in wet ones.

Google Earth Engine

Google Earth Engine is a cloud computation facility that allows you to process satellite data on cloud servers. It has a nr of Albedo maps which will be explored. All have 500 meter resolution which may not be ideal for urban analysis of Albedo contributions.

in 2018 a paper came out with the title “A New Radiative Model Derived from Solar Insolation,Albedo, and Bulk Atmospheric Emissivity: Applicationto Earth and Other Planets” which should provide a good source for accurate calculations. The role of bulk atmospheric emissivity is important. What does it mean if there’s a haze, the water vapour may radiate heat, but this gets absorbed by other water right away. Also what do sandstorms do? Do they absorb heat which is then concentrated as the sand falls to the ground?

The most celebrated scientists, quantum mechanics experts, astro physicist are asked this question. What happened before the Big Bang, was there a Big Bang? Can the universe spawn itself through some time warping? Are we in one of multiple universes? These questions can really fascinate, and drive people to spend decades to find an answer. I have thought about this and other aspects of physics, quantum mechanics for decades now, so maybe my answer is interesting..

At one time I believed the vacuum was empty. But then I read about quantum fluctuations in the vacuum, so it was not empty, but rather a seething medium from which particles could pop out, to quickly disappear. The Cazimir effect proved this was true. Puzzling reality.

I skip the part where I become aware of the gluon storm in every neutron and proton, although it made me think about mass, and how it may stem from redirecting many particles that travel at light speed (which gluons do afaik). That takes time.

Then the gravitational wave detector (LIGO) showed space was like a chrystal, or a piece of steel with regular structure, because you could send a vibration through it over vast distances. This send me on a search for scientists that looked at it that way. Many asked is space-time a lattice. If spacetime is some kind of lattice then everything is a perturbation of that lattice, so particles are waves propagating in it, photons are a special case of propagation of deformations.

The problem with the lattice view is that you can’t assume some rigid structure, even though it is obviously there to transmit gravitationaly waves. Quantum dynamics exists, its very effective in prediction outcomes. So where to go from there? Thad Roberts who I learned about in my lattice phase does no longer seem interested in the underlying structure or nature of what he calles a quantum liquid, but his quantum liquid does help him explain all of the constants of nature. All of them. This is quite a thing. He can’t at this point explain how his findings help do stuff, he just found a way to link all the constants of nature and one of his assumptions to do it is that reality is in its fundament a ‘quantum liquid’.

The idea that particles are whirls in some quantum liquid explains the wide range of them, and how it is possible so many new types of whirls show up when you smash two known whirls together at tremendous speed

I think Thad found indeed a minimal shape (hyperbolic figure eight knot) that shows how this quantum liquid can bring about all the constants of nature, but that this shape, like a torus is never seen in its pure form, but is part of flow patterns of the quantum liquid. For his purposes you can assume the liquid consists of balls with the diameter of 1 Planck length that flow along each other without any friction. Flow of the liquid can thus separate space, because in order to flow without fiction they have to repulse each other quite strongly. This repulsion is one of the basic theories I have about the fundamental makeup of the universe. I proposed to him to make a universe computer, by building a box with styrofoam balls that have been charged statically to see if his flow patterns emerge. I may do it on my own just to intrigue myself.

The problem with balls with a Planck length diameter is that they will have a surface and inside, and have to repluse somehow in what way etc. etc. Its just another Matryoshka doll layer and it solves nothing, while it does seem we landed on a level that should pretty much explain everything. Its also clearly 3 dimensional, which is unlikely to be true. So how to solve this?

One thing to consider is : We don’t know about continuity on this level, which is quite a way lower than the world of quantum mechanics, in which continuity is also impossible to prove (its all statistics). We would not know if time stopped and restarted, we don’t know if parts of space away from us are moving slower or faster (as the light passes true it always at the same speed). There’s many things we can measure because the measurement is itself a quantum phenomenon. So we do not need to envision pure Planck spheres at the basis of our reality even if they seem to exist.

So the behaviour of stacked spheres or spheres occupying a space can be achieved in other ways than using spheres. It can be a result of vertexes and edges self organizing (a vertex can be where two edges meet, so technically you only need edges). Say you have a point (vertex) with one edge, and the edges repulse each other, or try to occupy as much space as they can, then one edge will move around the vertex and the other end of it, will cover a surface of a sphere. If it where two it would be easier, and both can cover the same sphere, but always opposite so with half the period (although the sphere surface is technically infinite). This introduces the Vertex and Edge view of the quantum liquid Planck Sphere.

Now if you say that edges repulse each other, that they can stack if forced to, that they are always trying to unstack and take the maximum amount of ‘space’ by twisting and turning around the vertexes, you can imagine some interesting things. First stacked spheres are a graph of vertexes and edges where the edges maximally repulse each other under the existing ‘pressure’.

Beware we are not in a space of any dimensions. This is because there is never any reliable extention of anything as all there can be is a series of edges (all of 1/2 Planck Length) which can bypass vertexes that are occupied and extend quite a distance. The graph that forms is like a huge mess of tense wires, but most of them are very short. There is enormous ‘energy’ in this non-dimensional static cobweb because the edges are constantly moving to places where they can be unstacked and farthest away from other edges. The way these edges move when linked must be interesting too. You migth as well assume that the end points repulse less so they end up connecting.

Now Thad Roberts believes that the quantum balls move along each other in such a way that they create a barrier, a boundary, but there is no explanation why that would be. But if the balls are vertexes and edges, then the connectivity between vertexes and edges determines whether it can be a ‘ball’ or its just a surface connection. And if the edges are oriented in the same direction in parallel, they will repulse each other and not seek to connect to each others vertexes. Thus the graph can develop boundaries and the graph dynamics on either side of those boundaries may never connect with an edge.

You may think “When is he going to answer the why is there something instead of nothing” question, but I already did. The volume of a vertex is zero, the volume of an edge is zero. If reality is made up out of vertexes and edges then if you stack up all the edges the volume would technically (and really) still be zero. So a stack of infinite nr. of half Planck length edges occupies -no- space. So even on the most fundamental level, without the behavior of these edges, their repulsion, there would be nothing.

As soon as you say “any edge wants to ‘unfold’ around or ‘slide out over’ its end point to occupy more space” and “any edge will repulse any other edge” the game begins. That moment is the Big Bang. Within picoseconds a graph develops that looks like an ocean of Planck Spheres, but as their makeup is one level down and the degress of freedom are infinite the dynamics of the spheres or the graph will never rest. On top of that it must be that edges are tremendously stacked to begin with. There is enormous ‘pressure’ for new Planck Spheres to form, new space from nothing. This never stop, it has not stopped.

At a certain point boundaries show up, become possible, this is when particles and the laws of nature start to assert themselves within the quantum liquid. But this is only the beginning. There should be a relationship between the un stacking or stacking of edges and time and space, I don’t have my thoughts on that ready atm. But the above may have been entertaining enough for now 😉

The meat industry is a major cause of climate change. We can’t afford any more emissions, but are stuck with corrupt governments and banks that only think of their own survival. Its a real connundrum of epic proportions. How to cut down intensive animal farming in spite of what banks want, in spite of the large cashflow security it represents for them. The fight is on in Holland right now, which has been a corrupt dumping ground for pesticides mega farms, toxic steel plants and other nonsense so much the country is almost as polluted as baltic states once where..

My proposal : Cap and trade farm animals. I make an exception for the highly efficient chicken, the animal that per calorie plant protein etc. supplied makes quite a lot of calories of meat protein. Eventually intensive chicken farms which are a notorious ammonia pollution source will also have to go.

So a cap and trade on the nr. of cows, sheep, pigs per country, where the nr. is gradually reduced to reach 20% of current nrs. in 2028 or so. Its a drop in the bucket, but this may be a way.

If a farmer cuts his animal count its not at a loss, he/she sells the meat or whatever. Then he’she has a choice, to own a credit or grow a new animal. This is not as simple as mathematics of course. There’s cost and risk involved, so either he/she does that or sells his credit to another farmer that is growing new animals. At the same time credits expire, so the new generation of animals has to be smaller anyway.

The farmer will not lose in this proces (but the bank will seel less profit, which is the main reason we continue this madness, for those people in suits that do absolutely nothing). A farmer can chose to sell out completely, in that case the government can buy his credits (over a couple of years) and thus cut emissions right there. Hasn’t this worked with Ammonia already. Isn’t this exactly the problem we are trying to solve?

Start making them!

Perovskite solar cells have been a promise like nuclear fusion for decades. Like cancer cures worked on in many research labs it feels like the stasis mechanism of academia is in full swing (this is the effect that a university can milk a concept or reinvent a thing many times, getting funds every time, because non-experts don’t know the state of the art). But as I have witnessed many times, even if a good product comes out of academic circles it can languish for decades and then fail to be burried under debt. The only thing that counts in innovation really is 1. Do banks like it and 2. Do banks like it. If they don’t they have many ways to kill it.

If a product disrupts bank cashflow it is killed, this is how banks remain dominant

Banks don’t like Perovskites because it requires little energy to make, uses an abundant raw material and can reduce demand for fossil fuels on its own power (meaning a prerovskite solar factory may produce perovskite panels without needing financing, leading to an explosion in production). This is my theory at least. So academics are closing every patentable loophole with great gratitude to their fianciers, to then NOT make any panels, which should be relatively easy, light weight, cheap. Academics don’t care, they move on to the next topic!

“The scientists showed the uncapped and capped solar cells as they are tested over periods up to 4,000 hours under different temperatures. The capped solar cell tested at 35 C showed zero efficiency losses after 3,551 hours.” (source)

“Tin-lead perovskite solar cell achieves 25.5% efficiency. The new NREL tin-lead tandem cell retained 80% of its maximum efficiency after 1,500 hours of continuous operation. “ (source)

“Ultralight flexible perovskite solar cells with 20.2% efficiency” (source)

If we watch the news today we see an enormous amount of suffering, usually elsewhere. We see soldiers risking their lives in Ukraine, we see Gazans being harassed by Israel, maybe we se riots in Bangladesh or France or farmer protests in Holland. It all seems very chaotic and sometimes it breaks our heart to learn about it.

This is all quite unnecessary, but a result of the general immaturity of people in the western world. Not only that but you could say that to keep people in their jobs and preoccupied with their mundaine lives, a spectre of uncontrollable suffering out there is a good backdrop, a reminder that your life is not so bad. Dutch kids are not being drafted to support Ukraine, they are at home, safe, and for sure dutch parents want to keep it that way.

So why the question “do we need an ego?”? Well, if we did not have some incredible challenges to mankind as a whole (climate change) the lives of people today would not be too different from that of a couple of generations onwards. Of course there are serious changes ongoing, mostly driven by a desire to be more efficient, which is driven by the finite supply of fossil fuels. With an infinite supply of renewables, or before with a finite supply of people, efficiency was important but did not change things that much.

Where am I going with this? Well, if you where born in 1500 and you wheren’t one of the now famous scientists or inventors, your life was pretty much standard. You would in the best case aquire skills from a master and then use them and teach them until you died. The skills where from a standard set, be it farming, shoe making, smith, baker. Quite a variety but still a finite and of course depending on your location, social circumstances etc.

A live lived that way would not be extraordinary. Most lives in those days would be odinary, quite normal. You’d have a family, kids, grow old and die. Your fights would be to be good at your job, maybe to get and keep your wife, to protect your children. You would usually not set yourself apart from the community of other people, except when you saw some advantage. Working class people are always the first to tell themselves their ideas are shit, and you should not try to be special, this is what industrialists taught them to keep them in check. But usually people are just people. being mediocre is quite safe and healthy.

There have been ages in human evolution where a life never really mattered, and you could spend it or sacrifice it without much consequence

Just to continue with characterizing this flow of generations of mediocre people, you can say that if they where religious, it would all work perfectly. You go to church, you pray, you try to be good to others and not sin, and your death is not a disaster, you just fade away and disappear, and believing you will be in heaven until then might as well be your choice. Society is not dislocated when you die. You might also have sacrificed your life in a war, no matter how senseless that would be. Your life and that of another could be indeed interchangeable, society none the worse for your demise.

All the above may be true, but humans can make a difference some times. It was often the well to do or those with special talents that would develop their own identity, high self esteem, a unique method to stay alive, and those where the people who’s name we can still remember. Kepler, da Vinci but also Caligula the Borgia’s people who we all learned at some time made a difference to our lives (even if that difference was being bombarded with their works by art teachers). These people had ego’s and it was a good thing. Stalin was of course very ego driven. Steve Jobs as well..

So what is that Ego? It is the awareness of your own abilities to secure your life and that of others, and the feeling your life therefore matters more than that of others, so that what you want becomes more important (to you) than what anyone else wants. You become self dependend, self obsessed, and feel terrible when your freedom is somehow restricted. Of course we all have some ego, but in most cases we don’t really need to assert it. In a rural community where you go out to sow the fields, or fix the cart or churn butter in what way is your freedom obstructed? You don’t want to do anything exceptional. Your ego will be there just to fight off muggers or someone that tries to seduce your husband (to weaken the illusion this text is only talking from a male perspective).

Today you have many people with a massive ego that don’t really contribute to society. Being a Tik Tok celebrity is not contributing to soceity. Entertainment is in fact a cost to society, in several ways one could argue. First of all people’s thoughts become similar, second their attention to their own lives suffers and third they may give up developing their talents. So being world famous say for example Beyonce is great but a bit over the top. What happened was that Beyonce and her sisters had a love for singing, and really specialized in it, until they where way ahead of most people in ability. This was picked up as a product and commercialized (she did it herself mostly, the distributors just take a lot of money), she believed she was important, protected “that thing”, was assisted and shaped the dreams and behaviour of many millions of little girls around the world. You could maintain for no real reason at al.

But say you are born in a situation that is quite harsh, and you may be a bit autistic, and be loving reality more than people’s soothing voices. You may feel you can solve problems that are just part of lives drudgery for other people. Your ego tells you “that’s not acceptable, I don’t want that”. It may be that you are actually too weak so you start to think of ways to avoid a quite normal thing. Or you just get fed up with women dying in child birth due to infections, even though nobody has ever seen a bacterium yet. You develop a unique perspective not shared by others, which allows you to imagine actions not thought of by others to reduce suffering or increase wealth. Your ego will tell you to work on it, to make room for it at the cost of the room given to others. Often if you share your insights you will be given room, a lab, a workshop, money, instruments by people that understand you’re one of the talented people.

If you ask “do I need an ego?” today this is about your ability to drive changes all of humanity needs. Of course if you’re a struggling artist you are not alone and you need ego, and society will tell you where that ought to stop (they will not support you), which is also related to what you may believe art should be, a different topic. If you want to be safe by getting rich you are not alone in showing a looot of ego. It all has to be about you and what you take from the world. To be honest you can be a big distortion and do aboslutly nothing that is usefull to anyone that way (except keeing them bussy), we all know who is an example of that atm.

But if you live in a world that looks a bit different from that in which others seem to live, and they don’t see what you see, or understand what you find obvious, then you may need to protect that perspective. It may be a first shadow of a route to a better world for everyone. You propose something which has obvious benefits to everyone and there’s no real counter argument that can be identified. You get negativity and flack and are maybe even insulted. This is where you need that ego. You’re not water under the bride, you may be a new stream, you may know about a way to educate better or secure the world against the ravages of climate change or reduce accidents in your factory or be able to create compelling visualizations of new ideas, or for example Thad Roberts, think of a way in which all constants of nature are connected.

Today talented lives matter, and we should be assertive if we have usefull talents, maybe not remain subservient to an academic world that never solves real problems

I think we live in a time where we should not try to blend in, go with the flow, relax and be automatic, accept our fate and lay down our lives for the greater good, as the dominant thinkers (those in government) are still only marginally aware of the challenge climate change is becoming. A challenge to the survival of humanity. Once this sinks in to a person that is not taught to always put himself secondary to the community or other interests, it may drive a conviction of self importance, of being essential. Of ego. And this is exactly what we need right now.

The fossil industry has kept the world in a bind for nearly 50 years now, since it realized it was destorying the ecosystem. It adopted a ‘spread doubt’ strategy and worked hard to only get is lakeys elected, for which it had the perfect fully dependend partners : The banks. The bank/fossil alliance is what is destroying life on Earth.

Now instead of thinking we are lost, which the bank/oil alliance (the Carboncredit system I call it) wants you to, we are not. The Carboncredit system is fatalistic, it does not care about the future, the future is not in its bubble. It has worked to eliminate inventions and ideas from the market so you don’t abandon using fossil fuels, for decades now. I have seen man inventions be ‘deleted’ from public awareness, buried under confusing names or panted and invested into oblivion.

Recent example is Ampex Power for which there was a 5 kW demo 10 years ago, and no product today! Rivian is also a money sink that does not turn that cash into EVs with any efficiency. Aptera might be in a similar stasis (also already 10 years). Dutch Rainmaker is still OTC stock, not happening, Freeze desalination is not happening, and there are many more. There is a concentration camp of good ideas we are not applying because they have been caught in the legal matrix created by the carboncredit system.

Airco Systems/Cooling

1. Shade your airco if it is outside. If you can run it at night to cool water in a reservoir underground. That way you’re not fighting the sun during the day
2. Shade your street or building block because the higher the sunlight is relfected, the less it can heat the buildings. In the future all city streets will have white sails over them. Make those sails and set examples.
3. Paint your roof white, your street, your walls, or use metal foil if you can, make sure it stays intact. Reflected light does not warm the planet. You can achieve up to 1 kw of cooling per m2! See AlbedoEnhancement.com
4. Get a white car, get better reflectors for your car screen. We need spray on IR reflecting compounds, so cars don’t get hot inside in the sun.
5. Replace fluor based coolants with CO2/methan/ammonia, this is better for the environment.
6. If you can create a shaded water basin you can actually cool against space day and night, which means your water cools down even though the air above it is hot. Water is a good radiator of heat.
7. Super high albedo paints (95%+) not containing metals have been invented but the ownere of the license is not known. The airco industry will want to burry this invention.

Water

1. Fresh water can be made by freezing salt water and filtering the slush, this is energetically more efficient than RO and common techniques.
2. You can also use ionic filters and even use brine water and solar power to use electric current to pull salts out of water creating drinkable water. The ion membrands should not be expensive, they are hard to get but certainly not unique.
3. You can also use wind power to mechanically drive a comperessor and cool the air so that water in it condenses, this is less costly than going electric and using RO. A version of a wind turbin driving a hydraulic pump was demonstrated as well, using RO, but you really don’t want to use high pressure systems.

Heating

1. Solar panels turn about 80% of the sunlight into heat, so if you catch that heat from the back they become usefull sources of hot water in a heat pump system. Companies like Triple Solar have existed for more than a decade doing very few installs. We need simple adaptatons of solar panels to utilize this energy source, which by the way can also be used to cool.
2. You can insulate your house by covering the outside walls. I though straw mats hung on hooks could look nice, but this is way to far from the consumerist bubble the economy wants you to live in. Good, make expensive choices then. Make sure any metal foil does not touch the hot side, because it will simply transmit the heat and radiate, so use it as reflector at a distance. Plant trees to keep your house out of the wind. You can even add small walls or obstructions to keep your house warmer in the winter.
3. We want to see IR reflective film, because they will keep heat inside in winter and outside in summer.. See this article.

Agriculture

1. Farming can be as productive without fertilizer and pesticides, according to an italian study. The main factor is weather. The risk of disrutpion of a high input farming habit is high, and the consequences are famine, sometimes for multiple years because the soil is depleted. Better change now!
2. Shading farms with solar panels or white panels can cool the soil, making it more productive, while reducing evaporation, increasing rainfall. This should be a new farming method , the main vulnerabilities are wind and rain.
3. Trenches to catch rain water have increased ground water which increases the period during which plants can evaporation cool themselves. They also reduce floods, its low tech. Earth does not become optimal for plant growth on its own, humans can help.

Considering the complexity of space travel and the current development of increasingly aware AI systems (its no longer Sci Fi) our thinking of the possible should shift when we consider deep space travel. Even considering the near future of Earth which is undergoing rapid warming and destruction of its ecosystems.

Space travel to Mars is already a super risky undertaking. The route is straightforward, and in theory every challenge can be met with sufficient engineering once all the real factors are known, but landing and keeping all the essential materials available for the human crew will still make any tiny colony highly vulnerable.

Moving deeper in space this gets to the point where the ship must provide everything without fail and do so for many years. Speeding up and slowing down the ship will take many years, and the scary part is that if there’s even a small space rock floating in the way on the billion mile journey it will go through the ship like a bullet through a melon.

Where journeys through space make for a narrative which grabs our imagination for the essential love and mutual support among the crew necessary, they are not too realistic if you consider AI systems could do it with much more survivability. An electronic AI system can be shot at any destination and shut down for centuries to wake up at the destination. There it could observe or seek contact with possible life.

AI probes can be lost to accidents, many can be launched to the same destination to ensure some arrive

We could at least say that humanity will -also- shoot AI probes at distant galaxies. If we think about that for a minute, a new Voyager mission but now with AI (Voyager-AI), a bunch of Telsa Optimus descendants with a mission, to sleep through the trip to Alpha Centauri (just to choose a cool star name) and then what? Of course SpaceX/NASA will make it a peace offering, a helping hand from the sky, because what can the AI do? Observe, maybe report (it takes 4,37 years for any signal to get back to Earth), maybe the mission is to scout for habitable planets, then the AIs could start preparing to spread biological awareness. Maybe it gets discovered and then it has to know whether to share the existence of Earth or pretend to come from another direction.

The funny thing is that we on Earth are as likely to be visited by AIs from alien origin. It is also likely that the nature of such AI will be similar to what we would send. The reason is that intelligence is tested against reality, in our case our intelligence was tested against reality competitively for millions of years, and there’s only one reality (per observer). At the same time you could argue there’s many ways to electronics, but when build by an AIs for deep space missions (cause why should you hurt the biobrains with such a challenge if you have AI) the result is likely to be similar. They might also be next level, as our civilization can’t yet fathom the effects of understanding the discoveries of Thad Roberts (who is definitely on to something next level). It might be that we look back on current technology as we do now at bakelite telephones, even though we’re close to building aware walking robots.

So following this reasoning most civilizations will send similar AI probes through space, if they let AI determine the optimal design. If there’s some alpha creature or team to think of the best idea the result may vary. It is at least not unreasonable to expect alien visitors to come in the form of a team of AI agents that will initially try to remain invisible, both to not disturb and to not become targeted or lead us to their home planet.

What do you think?