Tectonics and the continents

https://www.universetoday.com/147154/what-cracked-the-earths-outer-shell-and-started-its-plate-tectonics/

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craton

Reference

Recent Pentagon announcement concerning UAVs speculations

Seeing the video of footage release from Pentagon sources regarding UAV s led me to wonder speculatively about the type of technology employed.  Having taken so many years ago a course through EdX regarding scram and ramjets would add to my wonder on the ability needed to move vehicles in lower atmospheric flight at say hypersonic velocities.  Namely, as atmospheric pressure increases not only drag but temperature increases as an onslaught to a vehicle.  This type of problem is catastrophic to a vessels as it threatens to burn it up.  

Here is a possibility:

Low pressure and temperature envelopes

Localized ionization and electromagnetic fields creating localized low pressure atmospheric envelope fields.  The idea here is in creating field envelopes which lower both atmsopheric pressure and temperature inside the envelope.  This could be thought of as a mechanism which creates a low pressure pocket in atmospheric space, the integrity of this space is maintained by an ionization field which maintains the integrity of the spatial envelope.  The boundary layer of the field provides a repulsive force cancelling pressure collapse from outside the field envelope while lowering pressure to the interior field.  Ionization and an electric field prevent collapsing of the boundary layer.

What else?  I couldn't say.

All speculation anyways...

New Technology and a changing energy economy

It will be interesting in the next decade to see an new energy tech sector evolves.  

For starters, it not hard to imagine with increasing energy density of battery storage, that electric vehicles will increasingly push forward.  I'd offer part of this coming from many paper cuts in R&D in terms of new technologies both in solar and battery related products.  Increasing efficiency of power generation by solar technologies appear assured, and likewise, similarly energy storage appears similarly on track.  What remains is the scale conversion of industries and greater widespread adoption of technology.  Increasingly, the cost of electric cars declining will pressure markets further.  Energy density and rapid charging solutions are presently available, providing a distinction that makes consumer resistance less likely.   

The good news is that increasingly energy markets are looking forward not only to lower cost but declining carbon footprints that represent in time a scale transformation in our country's use of energy.  The implications are increasingly positive either for those looking for energy solutions either in grid or off grid networks.  That leads increasingly beyond our borders to a world more likely providing energy to those neither having access to energy infrastructure in networks, and closing further gaps between haves and have nots while simultaneously addressing some issues around climate change with increasing energy demands.

Here are some added thoughts with respect to energy production as it relates to solar energy in a US national context:

One can find total energy use at EIA.gov publication

In the US in April 2020, there was a total net energy production of 274,876 Gigawatt hours produced.  Note 1000 Megawatt hours equals 1 Gigawatt hours.  Publication table uses 1000 Megawatt hours so interchangeable is Gigawatt hours and unit described.  I'll stick with 1 Gigawatt hours to keep the scale units as related to publication numbers. 

Per acreage to solar energy production relates (ideally and on average) at 2.9 acre /Gigawatt hours/yr or .02873563218 Gigawatt hour / (acre  month).  That is inverting the unit  dividing this by 12 months for unit conversion.

How many acres would be necessary, at present, to meet the energy production in April 2020?

274,876 Gigawatt hours  = x (acres) * .02873563218 Gigawatt / (acre month)

Solving yields 

9,565,684.8 acres

Fortunately the US has 2.43 billion acres of land in total, so the acreage requirement appears modest. Mostly difficulties in allocating land for solar energy usage likely resides between public and private lands.  

  

 

New battery tech

Currently reading about Grabat Battery tech 

Quotes of interest:

"In the case of the automobile, he emphasized that the technology they use cannot be compared with the current lithium, since although the latter has an energy density of 180 Wh / kg “it is not real”.
Grabat batteries, which are going to be made in Yecla (Murcia) from March, have a density of 1,000 Wh / kg, a voltage of 2.3v and when they have been analyzed by the independent organisms TÜV and Dekra, haven’t exploded, as can happen with a lithium battery. In addition, after being short-circuited, they returned to work with 60% of the load, according to Martinez. According to the president, it has “a huge potential, since the loading and unloading speed is 100 C, while the one of a lithium is 3C, and it has no memory effect”. This means that, if the power grid allows it, a vehicle could be loaded in 5 minutes, with which you can drive – in the case of a sub-compact car – for 800 kilometers, compared to the 400 kilometers that – he said – offers Tesla cars or the 250 kilometers of a Nissan Leaf or a Renault Zoe."

The average kwh capacity of an electric car is around 59.8 kwh (see EV data sheet) 

Or if you computing from energy density average battery mass with Grabat battery tech, we have

a battery 59.8 kg.  This is around 132 pounds (imperial weight) incidentally.  Could be a game changer tech with scale and lower cost manufacturing.

The Obvious...

   The US is in the early first year of its infectious COVID-19 epidemic.  Given a history of infectious diseases in the absence of vaccines or effective treatments, likely I anticipate, at least it is another year if not more before our country is able to fully recover.  In the meantime, there is a president that despite incompetent and dysfunctional leadership hadn't a scale crisis up until the start of this year, and now there is the obvious. 

Partisan divisions show clearly in the way of an infectious heat map at present.  The hardest hit states at present are southern and aligned more closely to Trump.  If the crisis couldn't be worse, there is all along the more obvious kindling of racial division which up to now generally dismissed by the mainstream public, despite the monstrosity of ICE detentions and human rights violations exemplifying Trump was more than an exercise in political incorrectness which the man attempted to shield himself by in his pre first term election campaign.

It wasn't hard to see that Trump was going to be a highly dysfunctional president as much as akin to a banana republic style dictator if not in speech in actions similarly.   However, Trump differing in that he neither would fully have institutional cohesion that could be coerced easily or replaced, if not outright suspending congress and subsequently arresting members of an opposing political party, something that were likely more commonplace in supplanting opposition party systems where authoritarianism is strongly vested.  As Biden offered not so long ago, it is quite possible given the aftermath of an election, if Trump loses a second term for office,  a military escort from the White House could be in order.  This isn't without saying that Trump has been a tepid leader at that, he has decimated American diplomacy, the EPA, and crippled the ability of CDC.  Trump declared emergency authority in subsidization to venerable power generation infrastructure that would be better suited to modernization through update and likely to cleaner sources.  This type of policy making merely parallels dictatorships throughout the world having artificially propped up venerable luddite government run industries that refuse change only in maintaining their own political viability, and lag in serving their populace industry modernizations and having served  increasing inefficiencies and costs that are passed onto a broader populace.  In attempts to prop up coal industries and the mythos of older industrial forms of human labor, the subsidies are no wonder.  In certain coal mining regions, the rate of black lung disease has increased all this likely given to competition between mechanization/automation and human labor.  Human labor in these traditional energy sources has not been sustainable relatively speaking, and the sacrifice is human health in maintaining competitive productivity.  Trump's anachronistic turning of the clock to older industry is, of course, a ploy as much as other states outside the region of coal industries are turning to newer technology, that are far cheaper, and cleaner.  Trump certainly fits to mold of authoritarianism given self enrichment, and merely serving to reward purely those by political loyalty alone.  Corruption and Kleptocracy seem at times synonymous to such regimes only given lack of accountability to political power.  If authoritarian inclinations are furthered, it isn't to broad popularity, that force is required in doing so in bending people to favor such administration, or undermining the ability of voting (via mail).  That is given by overtures of force and power, and by demonstrations of such.

In the meantime, we have an epidemic raging, all manner of distraction and suffering played to worse ends in respect to all the disaster of policy making leading up to now.   A projection of over two hundred thousand plus dead by early October by IMHE accounts which at times have been conservatively underestimating future events to unfold.  Fortunately as more data, and hopefully is publicly yielded, there is a sense that Trump's habitual and repeated lying follows a similar course as long as more and more Americans are touched by the tragedy that could have been dealt with in a far better way.  Public health experts have generally been much ignored, and a delusional Trump believes that if having swept under the rug such tragedy, we'd all go about our merry lives...the problem is that if a tragedy scales to every corner of a country, who remains untouched?  Who remains, as in the case of 1918 epidemic not knowing even if political leaders then tried to pull the wool over a populace's eyes?  Trump repeatedly believes in his version of outcomes despite successive contradictions and errors made up to now.  Trump simultaneously offers up the enemy without and within.  The virus's origins are Chinese alone if not suggested to the conspiracy of lab origins despite findings by numerous independent laboratories indicating otherwise.  While it is simultaneously a hoax, a fabrication given by democrats.  Again Trump's repeated downplaying and lying speaks volumes.  Whether division supposedly given by wearing masks to repeated declarations that American children must all attend school in the fall, irrespective of non authority in such matters and using underhanded tactics such as supposedly working to federally defund public education locally for those non compliant of his demands.  Recently Trump back peddled on an ill conceived attempt at deporting foreign students attending online classes, this after a MIT/Harvard lawsuit.  We see similarly Trump's adhoc posturing to undermine public health as a whole.  There any clear reason why Trump desires to do this?  Does he really believe that public education is truly better served, or is it for another reason?  The cynical response all along is Trump's posturing, if not outright serving the infectious utility of a pandemic.  He well knows the truth, and the greater likelihood that increasing the infectious capacity of a virus leads to an outcome of greater illness and subsequent mortality.

A recent op-ed publications in the Atlantic regarding the psychology and likely sociological motivations of past authoritarian regimes offered something compelling in a given analysis.  Namely, often times the motivations of these regimes are to tell lies and knowingly tell them because they have the power to do so. That a populace may normalize condition of acceptance of lies and believing them because in the end, it doesn't really matter.  Simpler words: might makes right comes to mind.  Trump has the power to lie because he is in office and has the power to do so.  Trump likely knows who is most effected in outcomes by population density, by access to health care, by socio economic class, by race.  Enough have said so, and this underscores the narrative of his coming to power in the first place.  If it weren't self evident at the early outset of the pandemic, seizure of stockpiles of PPE by the federal government of state ordered supplies in democratic states only with suggested conspiracy of rewarding another GOP governor lead state that appears to recklessly engage in allowing the spread of a pandemic, it seems clearer Trump's pattern of actions.

What remains in all this?  Trump isn't clearly listening to the broader population of the people in the US as a whole.  That is clear.  His polls have been demonstrably unpopular on average throughout his term.  Trump also appears to be historically low in ratings nearer to George HW Bush which indicates that in all likelihood he will lose an upcoming election if things don't change, and it is hard to see anything significantly changing from here to November.  The last remaining thread of the authoritarian goes a step beyond.  Certainly it is concerning seeing Trump assemble a form of federal secret police in Oregon (allegedly a special operations division of Federal Marshals), that all this reflects merely a trend that in order for Trump to survive literally is given by demonstration of power, that isn't constitutional.  Historically most dictators in this survival mode declare states of emergency (security), suspend constitution and then proceed.  Of course, this provided military backing.  The trouble for Trump here is that vast elite military leadership has been outspoken neither in so much support of Trump, and that the military is sworn to uphold the constitution.

I think, and I hope I think reasonably that most in this country not only see Trump as anathema to our country being a better country.  Our country can run fine without the likes of Trump.  It doesn't need Trump to be successful economically.  It doesn't need Trump to have security.  It doesn't need Trump certainly telling lies, eroding public trust, and setting  policy in motion to erode public health to have better public health.  That being said, the polls appear to reflect that a lot of people aren't happy with Trump's job handling.  Abusing power and attempting to provoke fear does little to change our minds in knowing how things were versus how they are now versus how bad they could be if Trump continues leading.