Actually ANWR would produce the equivalent of 13.5% of our daily oil imports. And that number is increasing as our oil usage decreases - one of the affects of $3.50 a gallon gasoline.

I agree that turning coal into oil is not a long term viable solution. It is however, now economically feasible and one method we could use to virtually eliminate our current dependence upon foreign oil.

In the long term only nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal and hydro make sense for electrical production. For automobiles we need modern biofuels (not bio-diesel) and gasification to begin providing fuels, or a breakthrough battery technology backed by the above mentioned generation technologies. Hydrogen, while cool, is jut too **** difficult to produce, transport and store.

Martin

 

That doesn't necessarily mean those issues can't be overcome, however.

Hydrogen IS the only viable future solution that solves both mobile energy needs and will help to mitigate our impending environmental emergency.

 

Hydrogen isn't gonna give me a combustible muscle car sound though is it?
Will be great for an every day car though, i would buy one but my I want my Mustang to stay a Mustang.

 

Interesting technology. Unfortunately, it only increases the efficiency at which Hydrogen can be produced from water. That process still requires electricity, most of which the US still generates by burning coal or oil.

Also, most industrial hydrogen is manufactured from hydrocarbons - i.e., fossil fuels.

Currently hydrogen fuel cannot help reduce our carbon dioxide production.

Martin

 

Not to mention the simple fact that hydrogen gas is the single most combustible substance on the planet. I'm not too sure I would want to be anywhere near a car accident between a couple of cars with tanks of hydrogen gas on board. Does anyone else remember just how quickly the Challenger went up?

 

Me too. But we have to face reality. In the long run (10-20 years) the Mustang won't stay a Mustang - not as we know it.

 

Currently. And in 1939 space travel to the moon was science fiction, too.

It's amazing what a difference 30 years can make if government and industry work together to solve problems.

I'm not being Panglossian, the fact is that by 2019 a $1k computing device will be approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain. Humankind is at the threshold of an epoch that will see the merging of our biology with staggering achievements of "GNR" (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) to create a species of unrecognizably high intelligence, durability, comprehension, memory and so on.

Similar advancements are predicted in all the other disciplines, including energy sciences. Hydrogen energy will come, in time.

Of course, we have serious problems to overcome, too, chiefly those related to over-population and resource depletion.

 

Plant more trees (vast deforestation has occurred in just MY lifetime), and, the Mustang has stayed a Mustang for 40+ years, whats gonna make it change in the future? Ford tried in the '80's with the Probe, WE kept that from happening. Yes, I would buy a hybrid Mustang, or one with a very efficient ICE motor, but would never, ever buy a totally electric, non-rumbly sounding Mustang!!!

 

It won't matter. The hardware might be straight from Heaven, but the software that runs it will still be straight from Hell. Not to mention the simple fact that the brain isn't a "computational" machine. It doesn't matter how fast you can flip bits, it still isn't analog. Plus, they keep revising upwards the estimated computing power of the brain.

So I take your "fact" and elect to wait another 11 years to see where we end up. Because I CAN look back on the last 20 years of computers and see that while todays computers are WORLDS faster and more sophisticated than in the past, fundamentally, they are still the exact same machine.

There is nothing revolutionary in the OS, nothing revolutionary in the programming, nothing revolutionary in the IO, nothing revolutionary in the software. We still don't have a computer that can understand the spoken language as well as a child does. That was supposed to be one of those little things that just needed a bit more computer power. They have large handful of extra zeros added on to the computing power, but my computer still doesn't understand when I tell it to fire up the web browser and see what is new at TMS.

We might get that revolutionary change that will allow computers to be thought of as "intelligent", but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for them. That is the sort of thing that will happen in it's own time. It might be tomorrow, or it might be next century.