This technology for grid-scale batteries made with liquid metals and molten salts is making me more excited than anything in a while. Very promising. Check out the video by following the link below.
TED Talk: Donald Sadoway on Liquid Metal Batteries
The officia website of Sadoway’s spinoff company can be found here: LMBC Corporation.
A cubic meter of the average crust of the Earth has about 12 grams of Thorium in it, and that would be enough to power your life for about 10 to 15 years. At Western standards of living.
Very intriguing stuff. I highly recommend watching the whole presentation (1 hour and 22 minutes long, so make sure you have the time or save it for later):
How About You?
I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road at the recommendation of my cousin Marie-Eve. The setting is a post-apocalyptic world and the main protagonists – a father and son – basically spend all their time looking for food and shelter, and try to avoid being robbed or killed by other starving survivors.
It very much makes me not want to live in such a world. Everybody would probably agree. Yet few people actually do much to reduce the chances of of such a scenario happening. In fact, it’s worse than that; few people even seriously entertain the possibility that such a scenario could happen.
People don’t think about such things because they are unpleasant and they don’t feel they can do anything about them, but if more people actually did think about them, we could do something. We might never be completely safe, but we could significantly improve our odds over the status quo.
Danger From Two Directions: Ourselves and Nature.
Human technology is becoming more powerful all the time. We already face grave danger from nuclear weapons, and soon molecular manufacturing technologies and artificial general intelligence could pose new existential threats. We are also faced with slower, but serious, threats on the environmental side: Global warming, ocean acidification, deforestation/desertification, ecosystem collapse, etc.
TreeHugger
