OH SO THEY GET IT NOW! IT HAS TO BE RENEWABLE…WELL THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN GOOD ENOUGH 30 years ago. If it SMOKES it’s bad now…renewable won’t do it’s got to be smoke free.

Mali’s farmers discover weed’s potential power

By LYDIA POLGREEN
N.Y. TIMES NEWS SERVICE
KOULJKORO, Mali – When Suleiman Diarra Banani’s brother said the poisonous black seeds dropping from the seemingly worthless weed that had grown around his family farm for decades could be used to run a generator, or even a car, Banani did not believe him.
When he suggested that they intersperse the plant, until now used as a natural fence between rows of their regular crops — edible millet, peanuts, corn and beans — he thought his older brother, Dadjo, was crazy.
“I thought it was a plant for old ladies to make soap,” he said.
But now that a plant called jat-ropha is being hailed by scientists and policy makers as a potentially ideal source of biofuel, a plant that can grow in marginal soil or beside food crops, that does not require a lot of fertilizer and yields many times as much biofuel per acre planted as corn and many other potential biofuels.
By planting a row of jatropha for every seven rows of regular crops, Banani could double his income on the field in the first year and lose none of his usual yield

from his field.
Poor farmers living on a wide band of land on both sides of the equator are planting it on millions of acres, hoping to turn their rockiest, most unproductive fields into a biofuel boom. They are spurred on by big oil companies like BP and the British biofuel giant Dl Oils, which are investing millions of dollars in jatropha cultivation.
Countries like India, China, the Philippines and Malaysia are starting huge plantations, betting that jatropha will help them to become more energy independent and even export biofuel. It is too soon to say whether jatropha will be viable as a commercial biofuel, scientists say, and farmers in India are already expressing frustration that after being encouraged to plant huge swaths of the bush they have found no buyers for the seeds.
But here in Mali, one of the poorest nations on earth, a number of small-scale projects aimed at solving local problems — the lack of electricity and rural poverty — are blossoming across the country to use the existing supply of jatropha to fuel specially modified generators in villages far off the electrical grid.

Well maybe that is an over reaction but I sent them the following Letter to the Editor, and the conservative twirps did not even acknowledge that they received it. Since the new owners took over they have started running op eds by Walter “the madman” Williams from George Mason (alleged) University, that is about as right wing as you can get.

Editor

State Journal Register

One Copley Plaza

Springfield, IL 62701

Emailed – 9/17/07

Dear Editor:

Your Stanford Levin op-ed piece was incredibly deceptive and disingenuous. He says, “Let the Markets decide” about whether we burn ethanol or foreign produced oil as gasoline. Those self same markets are killing us and killing our country. The reason for this is that the markets are wedded to the internal combustion engine that simply BURNS up resources. We have done just about all the burning that we can do in this country.

How nice it would have been, if during his tenure on the ICC from 1984-86, he had advocated a move away from burning coal in power plants and increased efficiency trucks. Instead he continued the passive dependence on coal and gasoline, which has led us to global warming. If he had shown courage 23 years ago and demanded stringent efficiencies in the coal fired power plants that he regulated and a shift to power plants that burn natural gas he may have done some good. If he insisted that those utility companies invest in wind and solar portfolios then Illinois would lead the United States in those power sources but instead we have broken down, and leaking Nuclear power plants.

Yet Dr. Levin wants to trot out the old Ronald Reagan saw one more time and say, “Let the markets decide”. Deregulation has been nothing short of an economic disaster for the middle and lower classes. But, that is nothing compared to the environmental disaster that this country has been exposed to as a result. The North Pole is melting and Dr. Levin wants to make some telling point about which fuel source we should burn, biodiesal or gasoline. BAAAA (wrong answer) The answer is we should not be burning either and the MARKET will never give us that answer. Are we to wait another 23 years, while the captains of industry are driving huge ocean going vessels through their “Northwest Passage” and Russia is drilling on the artic floor before we blow the whistle and end the play?

Sorry Dr. Levin, but as you should have realized in 1984 the markets require hard regulation before they ever respond. The internal combustion engine is obsolete and you could have helped us move away from it. You did not. Join us at www.censys.org or call 629-7031. Community Energy Systems plans on helping Illinois move to a non-Burning future.

Doug Nicodemus

948 e. adams st.

riverton, IL  62561

629-7031

dougnic55@yahoo.com

In “The Relativety of Wrong” he argues in one essay that it’s easy to see that there are DEGREES of being wrong. He uses a very simple example to make his point. There are two historical views of the Earth. One is that it is flat, and one is that it is round. Neither is right. The Earth is a spheroid. Kinda bulgey in the middle and tapered at the top. But which one is less wrong? Obviously, that the Earth is round is, “pretty nearly true”.

Apparently, in the same volume of essays he had pretty much come to the same conclusion about space travel as depicted in much of science fiction, that faster than light travel was as wrong as the flat Earth explanation of the shape of the planet. In other words there are people who say we should not be messing around with manned space travel because it produces no useful results. They argue that we should be using sophisticated and cheap probes to explore the solar system and beyond. That we as a people should be concentrating on making life better on this planet instead.

The science fiction oriented people argue that we must continued with manned exploration. Moving us further out in the colonization of the solar system, while developing ever new and new space craft. In the process many believe we will find away around the “Speed of Light” problem and launch for the stars. Their first goal is to replace the Space Shuttle, set up building operations on the moon and get ready for a try at Mars.

Asimov flatly asserts in an article in 1987 that we must spend 100 years developing a space infrastructure and space travelers who are aclimated to zero G’s on the moon.

Their most ambitious project? A manned mission to Mars with a two-nation crew, a collaboratively built ship, and the goal of planting both the Stars and Stripes and the Hammer and Sickle on the surface of the Red Planet.

Understandably, the idea had imme­diate appeal. Who could argue with an undertaking that would double the talent pool of both nations’ space programs, halve the costs, and, not incidentally, speed the recent thaw between Moscow and Washington?

But hold on. The proposal does have a flaw. It’s possible that the first people on Mars should be neither Americans nor Soviets. Indeed, it’s possible they shouldn’t be people from Earth at all. Rather they should be moon people. Let me explain.

HE GOES ON TO SAY THAT ON THE MOON WE WOULD BUILD AS SOLAR SYSTEM VEHICLE THAT WOULD BE REUSABLE, AND TECHNOLGY AND THE PHYSIQUE FOR LIVING IN SPACE.

What is needed instead is not a one­time sprint to a nearby planet, but a slow, patient expansion away from Earth; a long-term program—perhaps taking a century to complete—that would equip us not just for a single interplanetaryjoyride but for the coordinated explore-‘ tion of the deep solar system.

The first thing a long-term Soviet-American space program would need, of course, would be a base from which to launch its vessels. We have any number of sites on Earth, but our planet is nol truly satisfactory. Escape velocity from Earth is 7 miles per second; that makes lift-off difficult. There are only foui bodies in the solar system—the sun. Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune—with a tighter gravitational grip and a highei escape velocity. Then, too, Earth has an atmosphere and weather. Storms in­hibit launches, and even clear air offers resistance.

What we need is a place that is alto­gether otherworldly, a celestial bodi that,  though sizable,  is  lighter thai Earth, with a lower escape velocity, ll would also be convenient if that bod\ had no atmosphere. As a kindly fate has it, our closest astronomical neighbor ii ideally suited for this. It is the moon which has a diameter of 2,160 miles, at escape velocity of but 1.5 miles pa second, and barely a wisp of atmo sphere.   Less  than a quarter-milliot miles away, it can be reached

with pres ent rockets in just three days. It’s asi we’d spent decades launching our ship from some stormy, rock-strewn pon only to discover that all along there: been a smooth-as-glass harbor just a fev miles down the cosmic coast.

Fine. So let’s dust off the old moot ships, fly our engineers to the Sea t Tranquility, and build ourselves a luw Canaveral.

HE BELIEVES  THAT  THE FOLLOWING PROCESS WOULD LEAVE US PREPARED TO EXPLORE AND COLONIZE THE SOLAR SYSTEM OVER THE NEXT 1000 YEARS. REPEAT OVER 1000 YEARS!

Once we reached the moon, there would be no limit to the ways in which we could use its resources. The moon is a world with a surface area equal to that of North and South America put together. From its raw materials we can get a large variety of metals, concrete, glass, and oxygen. In fact, a moon base that in­cluded mining stations would supply everything we would need for construc­tion except water and the light elements: carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen. These would come from Earth.

Using the moon as our source of raw materials and Earth as a reservoir of talent and technology, the space be­tween Earth and the moon could be filled with any number of support structures —solar energy stations, nuclear energy stations, observatories, and laborato­ries. Even some of Earth’s industrial plants could be put into orbit, to take advantage of the unusual properties of space (vacuum, microgravity, extreme temperatures) that facilitate manufac-

20     DISCOVER • JANUARY • 1988

 turing. What’s more, the waste products the factories put out could be much better disposed of in the vastness of space than in Earth’s fragile and finite biosphere. To service and populate all these facilities, space settlements— each holding thousands of people— could be built, designed to mirror Earth’s environment as closely as possible.

Ideally this extension of the human range should be global, operated not just by the United States and the Soviet Union but by the world at large. In fact, as the moon and the space settlements became more populous, international control could be loosened, and the new worlds could become regional self-gov­erning units of an Earth-Space Union.

It may take five generations or more to flesh out such a system, but only then would we be ready to make the most of the next major step: a trip to Mars.

When that project finally did get un­der way, the best thing for the Earth people to do would be to step back and leave it to the space people to make the journey. Space settlers would be much more accustomed to the idea of space flight, much more accustomed to low and varying gravity, much more accus­tomed to living inside a world rather then on it.

The moon couldbecome o new Canaveral, a spring board to the planets.

They would be much more aware of the need for resource control and tight recycling of such necessities as air and water. When the colonists reached Mars, they would find it rich in the light ele­ments. Using these along with the re­sources available from the moon, the Mars settlers, moon settlers, and space settlers could soon become independent of Earth for raw materials. Such economic independence would help speed the next phase of expansion —out to the asteroid belt where hun­dreds of thousands of small worlds exist, many of which could be carved into settlements or used for further mining operations. And these asteroid settle­ments—once equipped with advanced propulsive mechanisms operating like giant outboard motors—might them­selves be steered into the vast expanses of the outer solar system or beyond the solar system altogether. No one making these long trips would be conscious of. having left home, for they would be taking home along with them. The process of migration and settlement could stretch out over millennia, but what’s the rush? Rather than racing into a symbolic, onetime visit to Mars! We should perhaps contemplate this  slow exploration of the galaxy, by a process very much like the dispersal of  dandelion seeds by a helpful wind.

So he is basically saying that both the stay-at-homers and the go-far-and-fast crowds are both wrong. But in that telling essay that I can not find he believes the far-and-fast crowd are wrong and fraudulant as well. In other words really really wrong. More on that in the last blog on the subject I hope.

Demolisher of myths / Review of ‘The Relativity of Wrong’ By Isaac Asimov

• 08 April 1989
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• JOHN EMSLEY

Asimov also disposes of another popular myth – that one day we will journey to the stars. Here he is tampering with something that might have been better left alone. He quietly knifes the idea in the back, and thereby murders much popular culture on which today’s young people are raised. Space travel is possible between the planets of the Solar System, but that is all. Whatever probe we launch from planet Earth into the cosmos will get nowhere. It will slowly come to rest between here and the next star. A manned spacecraft would suffer the same fate.

Only if we use antimatter as a fuel can we make a return trip to the nearest star, and that form of energy is likely to remain forever beyond our grasp. In any case, the effort would never justify the visit; our intrepid voyagers, or their descendants, would not arrive back before AD 50 000.

Because we can never visit another star, so we can never be visited by aliens from another Solar System. Another chunk of popular science folklore bites the dust. Space travel is a meaningless phrase. Star Wars, Star Trek, and a lot of science fiction suddenly seems merely silly. Asimov you’re a spoilsport!

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12216594.200.html

The above is not the actual essay where Asimov accuses certain science fiction writers like Roddenberry and George Lucas to only pick on some of the best writers of thousands who have used the device of “suspension of expectations” to peddle their tales involving rapid travel through space. Though the writers vary in their ease of such travel. Many argued that such travel will come with travail, like spice addiction in the Navigators in Dune, or being frozen in Aliens, or even having everyone you know die because it takes so long. BUT still you could DO it. In others all you had to say was, “Make it so” or “Engage” and off you went to distant worlds filled with interesting, sometimes intellegent, sometimes hostile Life Forms

Why is this interesting?

Well one the original essay is in a book where Asimov argues that there are different degrees of being wrong.

Two he is pointing out that the space travel idiom was not just wrong but really really wrong.

Three that myth of space travel has an immense impact on our culture.

BUT, most important for me, it speaks to why the “environmental movement” still struggles to try to save the planet when it is pretty much on the way out of existence right now. Amazingly enough just 10 years earlier Asimov was actually expousing the opposite view. He said then:

Faster than Light 

One other impossibility that equals it  (time travel..note added) as a science fiction essential is “superluminal” (“faster than light”) travel. Without superluminal travel, sci­ence fiction writers are confined to the Solar system. It is only routine superluminality that makes galactic empires, and such things as interstellar warfare, really practical.

There is this difference between time travel and superluminal travel, however. I imagine that most people are willing to think of time travel as essentially fantasy, but to consider superluminal travel as fantasy seems to annoy, and even enrage, a large fraction of the s.f. readership. Why isn’t superluminal travel possible? What is so magic about the speed of light? Surely, if you keep accelerating long enough and hard enough, you are bound to “break the light barrier.”

AND WHAT FOLLOWS IS AN ELIGANT MATHMATICAL PROOF THAT YOU CAN NOT GO FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT. AND HE CONCLUDES THE MATHMATICAL DISCUSSION BY SAYING:

Please note, however, that the mass has been increasing at a faster and faster rate as the speed increases.

The more mass an object has, the less it can be made to accelerate in response to a given force. A force applied to an object moving at 260,000 kilometers per second (and therefore with twice its rest mass) will produce only half the acceleration that that force would have produced if it had been applied to the same object when it was at rest. As an object speeds up under a constant force, its mass increases ever more rapidly and its speed increases ever more slowly. The mass increase predominates, so that momentum and kinetic energy continue to increase more rapidly even though speed increases more slowly.

By the time we reach a speed of 290,000 kilometers per second (97 percent of the speed of light), the mass of the moving body is 3.892 kilograms, almost four times the original mass. At 295,000 kilometers per second (98.3 percent of the speed of light—if that is taken at the slightly incorrect 300,000 kilometers per second figure), 5.52 kilograms; at 299,000 kilometers per second (99.7 percent of the speed of light), 12.22 kilograms; at 299,999 kilometers per second (99.9997 percent of the speed of light) 383.5 kilograms.

At the speed of light itself, if that could be reached, the mass would be infinite—as would be the momentum and the kinetic energy.

A faster speed is impossible because neither mass, momentum, nor ki­netic energy can be more than infinite. Besides, at infinite mass, no force, however great, can produce any acceleration, however small, so the speed cannot increase. —So the speed of light is the limit that cannot be passed.

AND YET HE CONCLUDES THE PIECE BY SAYING:

Ways of evading that limit (tachyons, black holes, hyper-space) have been suggested, but all involve phenomena concerning which we 

can only speculate, and in favor of which there is no observational evidence whatever. Nevertheless, superluminal travel cannot and will not be abandoned in science fiction. Certainly, I will never abandon it.

SORT OF ENDING WITH A TEHEE TEHEE AS HE DID MANY OF HIS ESSAYS.

In 1989, or there abouts, I read an essay in Discover Magazine by Isaac Asimov titled Science Fiction has Created False Expectations. Or something like that. I am embarrassed that I cannot find it but I have tried and (to recreate Dave Barry I swear I am not making this up) I couldn’t find it. If I had the damn essay I could just (copy) BLATT! it up here or (cut) BAMM! a paragraph here and move on like Batman. But I don’t so I am going to have to paraphrase it here – really Asimov was a better writer – and keep looking.

Paraphrase begins{: He said that the older science fiction writers were deeply tied to emerging technology and the laws of physics (Clark, Heinlen, etc.) He argued that many of the modern science fiction writers were using a plot device, “the suspension of expectations”; to promise things in print that science would never be able to produce. His big complaint was space travel over large areas in short time periods with relative ease. (Star Trek, you name it, etc.) He argued that faster than the speed of light wasn’t possible. That just getting to Mars was going to be dangerous, expensive and slow. He concluded that such “science fiction” writing was fraud and had raised expectations so high in what we call the boomer generation that it would damage real space exploration for generations. :} Paraphrase ends

When I first read that, and I will find it, I thought well this is just an old guy fulminating about the younger generation of writers embellishing on themes that he himself had laid down. But the essay stuck with me. When we struggled to build a space station, I revisited the essay in my mind a 2nd time and thought well, in a way he was right but FRAUD? And as the years passed I thought well this is getting “righter”. We are after all still not comfortable settling the Moon and Mars is not even an option. As one chunk of science fiction morphed into cowboy movies like Star Wars and another chuck of science fiction took a bent towards desperate fantasy like Deep Space 9 where wormholes are actually posited as a means of travel I began to get his drift. But it was not until I thought (a 3rd reconsideration) about what his essay meant for the environment that I began to understand his harsh criticism. I mean the charge FRAUD is usually reserved for those who make things while claiming to be telling the truth. Like if you claim you have performed cold fusion in a test tube. That seemed to me way over the top at the time but now I think I understand

.

I always understood why people from the 30’s to the 50’s had a hard time accepting the idea of stewardship for the Earth as mandatory. There were so few of them and they were raised to burn just about everything they could get their hands on. One could just move on to another unpolluted space, there were no real immediate consequences. Towards the end of their lives many of them told me it was up to there children and grandchildren to “solves these problems” through new technology undreamed of in their day. But I never understood why so many people born in the 60’s through the 90’s did not understand that stewardship of the Earth was our Number One Job. I understand that a lot of the green house gasses are odorless and tasteless but when the Rhine caught on fire and Los Angeles’ air turned orange you don’t have to be an “environmentalist” to think that something is wrong.

Why hadn’t people got the idea that this little planet all alone in a solar system on the outer edge of a minor galaxy far from the center of the universe was to be cherished and enriched? It was because the sad truth that Earth is all we got was too threatening to our current economic systems. If this truth was ever realized by the people here now all that manufacturing and assembly of stuff would become irrelevant. But also the idea that we would “be out of here” to other planets fit right in to the tribal expectations that lead to us burning things in the first place.

As I have said ealier Burning Behavior (BB) really took off in the 17th century:

As a means of recording the passage of time, the 17th century was that century which lasted from 1601–1700 in the Gregorian calendar.

The 17th century falls into the Early Modern period of Europe and was characterized by the Baroque cultural movement and the beginning of modern science and philosophy, including the contributions of Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton; Europe was torn by warfare throughout the century, by the Thirty Years’ War, the Great Turkish War and the English Civil War among others, while European colonization of the Americas began in earnest.

Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu is the founder of Japan’s last shogunate, which lasted well into the 19th century.In the east, the 17th century saw the flowering of the Ottoman and Mughal empires, the beginning of the Edo period in feudal Japan, and the violent transition from the Ming to the Qing Dynasty in China.

As did the population: 

BB has made this Population possible. It seems that one feeds off the other and vice versa. Many combustibles have been burned over the last several hundred years including, peat, sticks, charcoal, wood, dried manure, coal (of several types), agricultural, redidential, industrial, medical and commercial waste, oil (in several forms), ethanol and other alcohol derivatives, nitroglycerin, various rocket fuels including hydrogen and oxygen, and finally the heavy metals (i.e., uranium, e.g.). The point here is not to create a catalog of combustibles because lets face it, if you get anything hot enough it will burn.

While I have to admit that writing an essay on the history of BB and manure might be fun in part because people are still doing it.

 www.energyunlimitedinc.com/manure.html. 

It would be fun because of all the poopoo and crap jokes I could tell. However, this is a Blog not a term paper or an exhaustive Dissertation. I just want people to see through all the “global warming isn’t happening” nonsense and “humans didn’t cause it, even if it is” Bart Simpsonisms and think about why we must stop most BB and soon.

Lets take a short look at coal  BB to act as a standard for all the BB we do. I know a lot of eco types would pick oil as the standard. It is radically inefficient. Find it, drill it, pump it, transport it, refine it, transport it again and then burn it. Still, we have been burning coal for at least several thousand years, much longer than oil, and the trail of evidence is much simpler. Dig it up, transport it and burn it. Though those crafty mine owners are now getting ready to build their electric power plants next to their mines to cut out the cost of the railroads.

For an excellent history of coal mining, child labor, explosions and just the continuing nastyness of coal mining look here http://www.pitwork.net/history1.htm.

 It contains an interesting report by the great author Charles Dickens. Remember that at the same time last week that 9 coal miners died in Utah in August 07, 129 miners died in China. Anyway records show that we burned “exposed” coal and “near the surface” coal seams from 100-200 B.C to today. Like I said, it was not before the realization that the more you burned the more Work you could do culminated in the discovery of steel. The discovery of steel led to the building of ever-larger machines. Bigger machines led to burning for (steam) transportation. Transportation led to migration. Migrations led to rapid population growth (and wars) as a result. More burning led to the internal combustible engine. This increased our population through migration and increased our food production has pretty much led us to where we are today. But to think about the sheer magnitude of coal lets think about

 Total Deaths in Coal Mining

From 1880 to 1910, mine explosions and other accidents claimed thousands of victims. The deadliest year in U.S. coal mining history was 1907, when 3,242 deaths occurred. That year, America’s worst mine explosion ever killed 358 people near Monongah, WV.

 http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2006/01/us_coal_mining_.html

In the last 16 years coal mine deaths per year have hovered at 35 per year in the US. While this is a huge improvement still nearly 500 Americans died to get us our coal in that time period.The Chinese are following in our footsteps:

2000: 5,300 deaths.
2001: 5,670 deaths.
2002: 5,791 deaths.
2003: 7,200 deaths.
2004: 6,027 deaths.
2005: 5,986 deaths.
2006: 4,746 deaths.

In just the last 6 years nearly 40,000 people have died in China. They have the same “give a shit” attitude that we had 50 years ago. www.asianresearch.org/articles/2997.html

According  to the FAR research group this has been going on in China since 1977 or there abouts so you could add another 120, 000 deaths.

http://www.perryopolis.com/coal.shtml

In every year from 1900 to 1945 more than 1,000 coal miners were killed in mining accidents in the US. In many years there were more than 2,000 deaths, and, as noted above, in just the month of December 1907, there were more than 3,000 coal-mining deaths. In 1961 there were 293 deaths; in 1981 there were 153, and in 2001 there were 42. When you do the math just in on these little snippets of data, neearly 400,000 coal miners just in the US and China. That is all the people in Springfield 4 times over!

And that does not factor in highly destructive mining practices like Mountain Top Removal where any related deaths are consider EXTERNALITIES by the mining companies.

blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/08/bush-administra.html

 International statistics are really hard to come by. You would have go to every countries’ mining statistics sites and do a total, but India who is not too far behind China in lax standards manage to reduce  their mine deaths to 99 in 2004.  http://coal.nic.in/point18.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_coal_producing_regions  

So doing some very simple math, considering that there  are 10 major coal producing areas in the world, its pretty easy to see that nearly 10,000 coal miners die world wide every year in this modern era, and if you project that back 100 years it is possible estimate that at least  1,000,000 miners have died from direct mine fatalities. This does not include all the other causes that coal miners can die from. These are not pretty deaths either.

I am not going to project that back 3-400 years because it is just too gross and too disgusting. So what does the total tonnage look like?

 Total Amount Mined.

Please see graph:

 Briefly put, you can not possible conceive of how much coal the above graph represents. It is something on the order of PIKES PEAK. We have been burning this much coal for the last 10 years! That is 10 Pikes Peaks gone up in smoke since 1997. Whish. And its the smoke part that is killing us.

I want to make a very serious point after I finish with Burning Behavior – Part 3 that involves Isaac Asimov.

After commenting on John Martin’s blog where he was excoriating fired  Professor Ward Churchill I felt compelled to check my facts. I cautioned John that “getting” one obnoxious Professors tenure could bring on a witch hunt for other wacky Professors that for one reason or another had been given tenure. Coming from a long line of educators I am extremely sensitive to tenure issues. Since his firing several wacky Professors have been denied tenure or had their academics challenged including Glen Poshard at Southern Illinios and Finkelstein at Depaul. Lets face it, the University is not about TRUTH, its about learning how to judge both what is truthful and more importantly what is useful. Wackyness and Hillarity abound at the University (no matter which one you attend). I believe this adds to the undergrad and graduate experience.

Nonetheless, having not been able to find the essay of Asomov’s that I wanted to use for the Why We Continue To Burn piece (coming soon). I thought it behooved me to go to UIS’ library here and try to find it. I failed miserably! I spent the whole day looking for this damn essay. It wasn’t in the magazine I thought it was – Discover, Omni, Scientific American. I went through all the stuff I could in the stacks and periodicals. I found an article in Discover where Asmov seemed to be moving towards the position he left us with and an essay that posited Exactly the opposite position! Finally I came home at 6:00 pm in the misery of failure and googled – Asmov 1989- and found what I was looking for…Man. You never know where you will find the truth.

I am writing this simply as an excuse for having no exciting new blog for today.

The Second Phase of burning behavior or fire usage was literally an amazing passage from a period of unintended discovery to purposeful discovery. Think about it. Above and beyond keeping you warm, producing light at night and cooking, fire, at first glance appears to have no other useful purposes! I know from a modern humans viewpoint that is a ludicrous statement, but in the eyes of early humans that was miracle enough. The idea that fire could do WORK for them surely did not immediately occur to them.

It is not hard to image that someone tossed a used clay dish in the fire thinking to burn it up or at least to sanitize the campsite. It is not hard to imagine the amazement of whomever retrieved that dish that not only was it intact but it was much harder, and somewhat water proof. So modern pottery was born. It is not hard to imagine that someone noticed after many days of burning fires in a cave campsite that soot (pollution) was building up on the wall and that if you ran your finger through it your finger would turn black. More intriguing though was the fact that whatever you touched also turned black. This discovery provided the basis for both modern art and modern writing. But it also showed that there many things that a human can do with fire. By at least 7,000 years ago the last Human competitor, Neanderthal, had gone extinct, and the other Hominids had evolved into various species of monkeys to join us in the primate family. Early Humans could do most of the things that we do today. They were capable of  sailing flawlessly over the seas, building big buildings when they wanted to, forging metals, communicating over long distances, and early work in china had begun on explosives. They could leisure travel, rapidly travel on the ground and they had advanced forms of government.

But wait you say. OK, here is where the pitch for lifestyle change comes in? NOPE don’t want to change your lifestyle. Or, aren’t you idealizing these folks? Nope just using broad general language to describe what the Persians, the Chinese, The Egyptians and the Greeks, the Russians, the Aztecs, and the British were capable of up until about 400 years ago. Would I like the world to go back to being “like then”? Absolutely not, though I confess that I would love to go back for a day or two just to see them in all their glory. But they did not have 2 things I absolutely must have, the scientific method, and steel. I could never live in a world that could only advance knowledge through observation and comparison. That’s way too frustrating and most of the governments were religious in nature. Who needs that?

And let me quickly add this is no Ph.D. thesis or even a term paper that a high school teacher would accept. No footnotes, no sources sited, no Authority added, and plagiarism abounds but the fact of the matter is that all of the civilizations up to roughly the European Renaissance in the 16-1700’s by most western calendars were low burn or no burn societies. Plus there were not a lot of people around doing the burning. World population estimates for 1,000 A.D. are 275 million people with probably about 15 million people in America. 500 years later there were only 200,000 million more people at 450 million. By the heart of the era that I am talking about there are estimates that in 1650 there were only 500 million souls. That would be the current combined population of the U.S. and Canada. And had birth rates stayed the same in 1800 there would have been 550 million people, in 1950 there would have been 600 million people, and in 2100 there would have been 650 million people. That is nearly 600 million less people than exist in China right now.

So what happened? The answer is simple from 1700 we burned stuff up to support more people. And frankly with out all that burning there would not be 2/3 rds of the people that are alive today. But in addition to that, in the process, we have broken down a lot of the earth’s defense mechanisms as we have grown and multiplied. More on that in the next blog.

To hear the song goto: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5PoIrcyd34

I would like to go over the history of burning behavior so that everyone can see why it’s so primitive and why much of it is so unnecessary. Also to make a point that burning behavior has changed in many ways over the years to become better behavior sometimes and worse at others.

We Humans evolved from Hominids in and around the Rift Valley in Africa. Their precursors were little hamster like creatures. The hominids were all little upright primates about 4 feet tall. And even then we were engaged in BB because we eat. Eating involves oxidation, that is we inhale air, and eat food. Our Bodies convert that oxygen and food to energy and heat, so we have been little burners since the beginning. Fire is nothing but the rapid oxidation of combustible materials. So we literally burn calaroies. The hominids had several advantages over their domain that eventually led them to evolve into us, modern humans. They were smart, they could see over the savanna grasses. Only birds, really large mammals, and tree dwellers could really “see far”. They used simple wooden tools principally bowels, flat boards and sharp sticks. This was roughly 2-4 million years ago. They were also extremely agile and hunted in groups, behaviors held over from their days living in trees.

(photo removed)

(Today all Light Houses in the U.S. are solar powered)

http://www.californiasolarcenter.org/history_pv.html

I imagine that early on Hominids were real dangerous because nothing would have been afraid of them. I mean they would not have presented a profile that any beast would associate with danger. By hunting I must add, not what is conjured as a hunter today. Hunting for fruits and nuts and roots. What we now call gathering. But also hunting for grubs, ants, small fish, and whatever else they put in their mouths and seemed OK. I am sure they daily watched other animals eat each other as well. With their sharp sticks I am sure they thought about that and tried it. But uncooked meat is very difficult to digest and contains massive amounts of pathogens. So I am sure that those experiments ended in death. For those that lived in a fish infested environment, I am sure that they experimented with drying the fish (using the sun to “cook”) and eventually they tried that on animal parts. Still drying only gets you so far as does salting things to preserve them.

(photo removed)

(During the 1970’s and 80’s Father Verspieren preached the Solar Gospel to pump water in the Third World)

The Hominids and the early Humans would have seen fire too. Fires in the Savanna are real common. Lightening strikes and spontaneous combustion would have burned large area of grasslands every year. Animals would have been burned in those fires and the early folks would have tried to eat them. Cooked meat tastes real good because of the caramelized fats. That probably motivated them to try to “capture” fire by putting rocks around something left burning on the edge of a fire (the first fire circles). Once the fire was “trapped” they feed that fire with combustibles from around the area. NOW those lucky hominids had something REAL valuable. I am sure the word spread (dare I say) like wild fire throughout the tribes. The first controlled tribal fires are thought to have occurred around 1,400.000 years ago. Unfortunately fire and nomadic lifestyles lie in conflict. Unless you know how to independently start one they can be hard to transport. While farming is usually attributed to the Settling of the Human family into villages. My bet is that the first villages actually resulted from tribal people not wanting to abandon the fires that they had tended and used for many wonderful things.

(photo removed)

(Solar Panels cover an apartment building in Bremensm Germany)

Also, I’ll bet the quest for fire starting devices was that era’s technology race. What we do know is that by the time of the Neanderthals they were brilliant firestarters. They used flint and rock strikers or wood bow starters or water soaked grass chaf (in the hotter climates) to start fires and they transported fire with them in portable ember chambers. Surely by the time “modern humans” populated the North and South Americas 20,000 year ago from what is now France and Russia fire or Burning Behavior was an intricate part of human life. But all ready they were doing bad things with it. Tribes used purposely-set fires to attack other tribes and they used fire to clear forests for farming areas. Even more ominously for us today they used fire to burn people alive as sacrifices to their gods and as punishment for their rivals. Still there were only 50 or 60 million people on the planet at that point. How much harm could they do?

(for those of you who are wondering where I am going with this? Patience. I cover like 4 million years in basically 2 pages! I hope to cover 20,000 more years in 2 more posts and then talk about what I really wanted to talk about which Isaac Asimov and Captain Kirk on Star Trek – really…)