This week's edition of NOVA recounts the story of the solar powered flight around the world of the Solar Impulse aircraft. There's no question it was an impressive technical feat that had to successfully exploit the bare ragged bleeding edge of technological possibility. What it was not was a significant milestone in solar powered vehicles.
It was a stunt, pure and simple. A stunt which has no bearing on the world of either general or commercial aviation. There has been some progress in electrifying small general aviation aircraft, but it will be limited to just that category, in tiny numbers. What we will never ever see is solar powered aircraft, small or large, dotting the skies. We will see fusion powered airliners before we see solar powered versions of those workhorses. That is we won't unless engineers can contrive to build airliners with a square mile of wing that can travel at 500 miles per hour.
It is conceivable, barely, that electrical energy storage technology could advance to the level of powering airliners, but simple physics prevent this from being achieved with solar power, period, not going to happen. The founder of the Solar Impulse project has stated that it was not "necessarily about aviation" but rather about promoting the use of sustainable energy. A publicity stunt in other words, that cost donors tens of millions of dollars.
It did have a high techno-geeky cool factor, but that's what the crowds that showed up to gawk at the huge craft were interested in, not the sustainability boilerplate offered by the founder and pilots. It would have been a heck of a lot more meaningful if the project had not fixated on an area in which direct solar power has no future whatsoever.
Neither will it have an impact on ground transportation. Sure gigantic state sized solar installations might be able to provide electrical power for a large fleet, but direct mobile solar power will not. No amount of technological wizardry will be able to extract more solar energy per square inch than that provided naturally by the Sun.
The Solar Impulse required two thousand square feet of advanced solar panels to provide enough energy to fly no faster than about 40 m.p.h. and charge its onboard batteries for use at night. The top of an automobile covered with solar cells might provide enough power for a short drive once a week, and even if the efficiency of current cells increases dramatically that will not change. Electric cars--already done, electric small planes--in development but will largely remain novelties, electric airliners--not bloody likely unless battery capacities increase by three orders of magnitude, and doubtful even then. Directly solar powered transportation? If you invest in it you will have chosen poorly.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Monday, January 22, 2018
Mariachi The Vote
I see where California has dropped the last pretense that unrestricted immigration is not a Democratic voter importation project. They will apparently issue voter registration cards along with driver's licenses to, well, whoever the hell shows up at the DMV. The registrant must avow that they are a legal immigrant, but no proof of such will be required. That would be racist, somehow. It seems that any advantage in actually being a citizen or legal immigrant in California is rapidly disappearing in the rear view.
Before scoffing that there is no importation project, consider for a moment that if it was generally known that immigrants from south of our borders were more likely than not to vote for conservative or Republican candidates, I am 100% certain that California would be one of the most immigrant hostile states in the nation. The same would go for Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, and sundry other right coast urban enclaves.
However, the aforementioned polities know doggone good and well that immigrants are far more likely to vote Blue than Red. The need for this may seem a bit odd since those states could scarcely be any bluer than they are already. Leftists are almost certainly playing the long con, er, game because encouraging unlimited immigration in southern border states may well pay off by shifting some reds to blue in due course.
The reddish states are currently much less likely to roll over to get their tum-tums scritched by leftist activists so it may take a good while for them to cave in to relentless pressure. We should acknowledge that a flanking move is underway with the push for a country-wide amnesty in order to convert as many immigrants as possible into Democratic voters in an attempt to swing the electoral college more firmly in the blue direction. We hear continuous carping about how unfair the electoral college is. Odd, we heard no such kvetching when Obama buried his opponents in electoral votes.
Whatever the actual details of this process may be, most conservative voters are convinced the electoral motivation is the driving force behind amnesties because all of the egregious immigrant criminal coddling, open borders lunacy, and sanctuary city virtue signalling makes absolutely no sense otherwise. The "humanitarian" hustle in the sanctuary states applies nowhere other than on the leaky southern border. One sees no demonstrations loudly calling for unrestricted Canadian, Dutch, or French immigration. I don't know why really. Those immigrants would be even more inclined toward leftist programmatics than poor hispanics from old Mehico and points south. Despite the current strong push-back against those factors, I figure there's about an even chance the con will pay off in time.
If progressives manage to turn the whole country blue, the relevancy of being an actual legal citizen will melt away like ice cream on a Tijuana sidewalk in August. This conclusion might be dismissed as excessively conspiratorial, but California has now rather baldly given the real game away. You can be sure that plans are afoot to encourage illegals to obtain voter cards and then pursue grassroots efforts to get out the ersatz vote. As a result California is likely to have increasingly leftist chief executives and legislators until the last major employer, except the state government, decamps for less punitive environs.
Before scoffing that there is no importation project, consider for a moment that if it was generally known that immigrants from south of our borders were more likely than not to vote for conservative or Republican candidates, I am 100% certain that California would be one of the most immigrant hostile states in the nation. The same would go for Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, and sundry other right coast urban enclaves.
However, the aforementioned polities know doggone good and well that immigrants are far more likely to vote Blue than Red. The need for this may seem a bit odd since those states could scarcely be any bluer than they are already. Leftists are almost certainly playing the long con, er, game because encouraging unlimited immigration in southern border states may well pay off by shifting some reds to blue in due course.
The reddish states are currently much less likely to roll over to get their tum-tums scritched by leftist activists so it may take a good while for them to cave in to relentless pressure. We should acknowledge that a flanking move is underway with the push for a country-wide amnesty in order to convert as many immigrants as possible into Democratic voters in an attempt to swing the electoral college more firmly in the blue direction. We hear continuous carping about how unfair the electoral college is. Odd, we heard no such kvetching when Obama buried his opponents in electoral votes.
Whatever the actual details of this process may be, most conservative voters are convinced the electoral motivation is the driving force behind amnesties because all of the egregious immigrant criminal coddling, open borders lunacy, and sanctuary city virtue signalling makes absolutely no sense otherwise. The "humanitarian" hustle in the sanctuary states applies nowhere other than on the leaky southern border. One sees no demonstrations loudly calling for unrestricted Canadian, Dutch, or French immigration. I don't know why really. Those immigrants would be even more inclined toward leftist programmatics than poor hispanics from old Mehico and points south. Despite the current strong push-back against those factors, I figure there's about an even chance the con will pay off in time.
If progressives manage to turn the whole country blue, the relevancy of being an actual legal citizen will melt away like ice cream on a Tijuana sidewalk in August. This conclusion might be dismissed as excessively conspiratorial, but California has now rather baldly given the real game away. You can be sure that plans are afoot to encourage illegals to obtain voter cards and then pursue grassroots efforts to get out the ersatz vote. As a result California is likely to have increasingly leftist chief executives and legislators until the last major employer, except the state government, decamps for less punitive environs.
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