Recent content by Ken Fabian

Given all the equipment needed to address the known dangers to human life on Mars - I think it will be a struggle to ever bring enough - adding more equipment to address imaginary dangers seems especially wasteful. If people are willing to endure the real and extreme risks of going to Mars, they...

It isn't an alternative. We aren't going to stop building solar and wind and upgrading transmission links, adding storage, taking advantage of plugged in EV's, getting innovative around better matching heavy demand to supply availability. We aren't putting decarbonization efforts on hold until...

I don't think it is realistic. I think they are unreasonably optimistic around near future space launch capabilities and costs (to 1/15th of current costs... seriously?) and unreasonably pessimistic about capabilities for managing variability within RE heavy grids. Sounds like they haven't...

HobartStinsonian - The sedimentary geology of oil and gas deposits on Earth support their formation out of biological materials that came from the surface, by observable processes. The existence of non-biological methane on Mars doesn't mean methane on Earth must be abiotic - nor does the...

They aren't really fixing emissions. Some recovery of previously lost biomass by allowing beavers to exist and make dams again is a good thing but it is not an emissions and climate solution. And the fossil fuel sector appropriating these (modest) overall emissions reductions from the land...

Thanks Motie - I think the machines do it better too. Go much further, places no human can go, carrying instruments as good as any astronaut could carry and operate. A human can only do it at all when encased in machines, which will have to be of far greater sophistication, capability and...

Radiant heat, conduction and convection are the ways energy transfers and there is no conduction or convection between the ground and the thermometer in the example. Temperature is dependent on how fast the molecules are moving, which is not the same as how much heat (energy) is present. Not...

Jan, I'm talking about it because I haven't heard anyone else. We are getting enormous amounts of solar on the ground way, way cheaper than any we install in space. A way to send it to distant locations - say, up from a sunny afternoon in one place and back down to somewhere hitting evening peak...

I think they are saying they can sustain accurate aim on one spot from a rotating space installation. Yes, the geosync orbit is a long way compared to low orbit. And there will be operational satellites crossing between. I don't expect anything to come of it but the question that always comes...

@Classical Motion - your China coal plant construction is way overstated - by about 350X. Maybe you read GW as TW. China approved 106 GW of new coal plants last year - which is, of course, too many. But China hasn't broken it's climate pledges yet - global agreements granting China a 2060...

We'll have clean energy or else fail on climate and face climate induced economic disasters that may make space solar even harder to achieve, long before anyone can attempt it. The ability to aim beamed power better has not changed how difficult and expensive such an option would be. Solar...

That was not what I was pointing out - the sea level fall around where ice mass is lost is due to reduced local gravity from the reduced mass. It is a rapid response to change in local gravity. Isostatic rebound - land rising - from less mass is a lot slower and is a different phenomena.

Ice melt will move mass from nearer the poles to nearer the equator; I would expect that to slow Earth's rotation. Observation (and theory) shows that ice sheet mass loss causes sea levels nearby to fall due to local gravity effects; it is furthest away from them that gets the most sea level...

It will be important to continue to study and monitor atmospheric and ocean impacts of space launches, failures, returns, end of life burn up in atmosphere, especially if there are going to be a lot more of them. Like every other industry rocket manufacturers/operators need to become zero...

No, tardigrades cannot colonize the moon. That shouldn't even be a question. Surviving vacuum for a time and reviving afterwards when returned to an environment with air, water and food is not the same as living in vacuum without air, water and food.