 A while back I tried to figure out whether we can keep running things the way we're running them: do we need to transition off of fossil fuels, how fast, and would we be able to provide today's level of energy supply using alternatives? I didn't include many of the details in that post, so I'd like to consider a few additional questions and look at this topic in greater depth. Specifically: - How fast do we need to transition off of fossil fuels?
- What industrial capacity is available today for different alternative energy technologies and what is likely to be available in the future?
- What might we do if we can't replace fossil fuels with alternatives fast enough, and what might the consequences be?
I finally got around to re-doing these calculations (so I could present them in a talk last week), and wanted to go through the numbers. How fast do we need to transition?In his excellent talk on climate change and energy, Saul Griffith analyzes how fast climate change might require a transition off of fossil fuels. While there is good reason to think that 350 ppm of CO2 should be our global target, we passed that point in the late 1980s and have shown no signs of turning back. Ultimately the goal is to avoid exceeding 2C of warming, as it marks the rough threshold at which many climate feedbacks are likely to kick in, including permafrost melt and loss of the Amazon.
 This July saw the last mission of the space shuttle, and marked an end to the first era of space exploration. But what's next? NASA has no replacement for the shuttle and will have to rely on Russia and the European Space Agency to bring crews and supplies to the International Space Station. The U.S. has lost its leadership in space exploration. Or has it?
For over 70 years, our military has been working on top secret projects in the field of electrogravitics, In the mid-1920s, an American scientist, Townsend Brown, discovered that electric charge and gravitational mass are coupled, and if he charged a metallic disc to a high voltage it had a tendency to move toward its positive pole, now known as the Biefield-Brown effect. Around 1953, Brown conducted a demonstration for the military where he flew a pair of 3-foot-diameter discs, energized with 150,000 volts and tethered to a 50-foot pole, and attained speeds of several hundred miles per hour.
The U.S. military soon had major contractors, which included Lockheed, Convair, Sperry Rand, General Electric, and many others, working on electrogravitics. In 1968, Northrop conducted wind tunnel tests where they charged the leading wing with a high voltage, with the idea that this would soften the sonic boom of an aircraft. This technology was applied by Northrop in the B-2 “Spirit” stealth bomber, which uses electrogravitic propulsion once airborne, by positively charging the leading wing and negatively charging its exhaust.
 There has been a revived energy revolution movement going on around the world over the past 20 years and strongest in the past year, that has not been covered or reported by mainstream press, established scientific journals or university research publications. Most of the discoveries have been made by curious, ingenious minds, who on many occasions have observed experimental results in cold fusion, superconductivity, and magnetic motors which appear to violate present laws of physics, chemistry and electrodynamics. A term has been used to describe such phenomena, is called over-unity energy or free energy, which in many cases means getting more energy out of a system or reaction (magnetic motor or cold fusion reaction) than appears to be put into it.
A better explanation is that excess energy is being accessed from as yet not completely explained source. (Note: An atom bomb is an over-unity device which gets a tremendous amount of dirty energy out, in the form of harmful radiation, than is needed to trigger the reaction.)
The first question that usually pops into a skeptic's mind is that if the technology is for real and discoveries have been made, such as Pons & Flieschman's cold fusion cell or Rory Johnson's fusion magnetic motor, why has it not been reported or mass produced for use by our energy-hungry world? The answer is suppression. What do we mean by suppression? Suppression can be an active type -- where a corporation or oil company or OPEC, who does not want the invention marketed, will blow up or destroy the lab and the invention and threaten to kill the inventor if he again attempts to market the revolutionary device. The other type of suppression is the passive type where a competing company, who has big bucks, such as some of the major oil companies, will come in and buy out a patent with no intention of bringing it to market until the demand for oil greatly exceeds the supply and gas prices soar, then they will start marketing a 100 mpg carburetor for ICE (Internal Combustion Engines).
Other types of passive suppression include universities which are receiving big funding from oil or nuclear establishment sources, refusing to do research, or muzzling bright professors (by withholding tenure) from publishing theories and results as to the what, how's, and whys of these over-unity motors and cold fusion reactions. Or the example where a Patent office refuses to grant patents in revolutionary technology, claiming perpetual motion machines, s they see them, aren't patentable, or if they are patentable, that they can place a secrecy order or gag order on the patent, which prohibits the inventor from disclosing any information to anyone for such disclosure might be detrimental to national security.
 ( NPR) The early Earth had two moons instead of just one — our familiar moon, as well as a smaller companion moon that also rose and set in the sky for tens of millions of years. That's according to a new theory that says this smaller moon eventually went careening into our moon and is still there, in the form of mountains on its far side. (Image: An artist's illustration shows a collision between the moon and a companion moon. Scientists say the collision could be responsible for the moon's asymmetric shape) Scientists have long puzzled over those mountains, and the fact that the two sides of our moon are very different. The near side has flat lowlands, while the far side is high and mountainous. Erik Asphaug, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says he was at a talk about this asymmetry when he got an idea. "I thought, 'Well, you know, what about just something colliding with the moon, in such a manner that it didn't form a crater, but it just made a big splat?'" he recalls. Researchers believe that our moon was created when a giant object the size of Mars hit the early Earth, sending out a disc of debris orbiting our planet. That debris coalesced to form the moon, says Asphaug, but companion moons could have formed at the same time. He and a colleague, Martin Jutzi, did computer simulations to see what might happen if a small companion moon did a slow-motion collision with our moon.
 Living in Hawaii, I found it interesting that a new dwarf planet was found in our solar system and named after the Hawaiian Earth Mother Goddess, Haumea. With so many new objects being 'discovered' or 'disclosed' (Comet ELEnin, Haumea, etc) it's hard to keep track of them all, but this one stood out because of the name. Enjoy this small article about our solar system's most recently discovered dwarf planet, Haumea.
Space.com:
Radioactivity and gravity may be why the strange football-shaped dwarf planet known as Haumea and its moons are unexpectedly sheathed in crystalline ice, shining in space, researchers suggest.
Haumea, named after the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth, orbits the sun beyond the path of Neptune, with two moons in orbit around it named Hi'iaka and Namaka, two of the deity's daughters.
 A new Californian startup, Solaren, claims to have committed to deliver 200 MW power from the Space, beamed down to the Earth by 2016. In the interview CEO of Solaren Gary Spirnak revealed : "This will be the world's first SSP plant. While a system of this scale and exact configuration has not been built, the underlying technology is very mature and is based on communications satellite technology. " For over 45 years, satellites have collected solar energy in earth orbit via solar cells, and converted it to radio frequency (RF) energy for transmissions to earth receive stations. This is the same energy conversion process Solaren uses for its SSP plant. Interestingly enough that the Solaren website remains very scarce on the information about the company. Except for the flashing logo and contact email address there is nothing to see. I would think this page belongs to geocities free websites rather than leading to the brightest rocket science entrepreneurs.
 The Summer Solstice 2011, the longest day of the year and also the official beginning of the summer season, will officially arrive on Tuesday, June 21.
Typically the summer solstice is the day of the year with the longest daylight hours except in the polar regions, where daylight is continuous for many months during the spring and summer.
Summer in the Northern Hemisphere will officially arrive on Tuesday at 1:16 p.m. EDT, while the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere occurs on the same day.
The Summer solstice, also referred as “Midsummer”, occurs exactly when Earth’s axial tilt is most inclined towards the Sun at its maximum of 23° 26'. This is the time when the Sun is at its highest, or most northerly, point in the sky in the Northern Hemisphere.
Depending on the shift of the calendar, the summer solstice occurs between December 21 and December 22 each year in the Southern Hemisphere, and between June 20 and June 21 in the Northern Hemisphere.
 They’re evidence of extraterrestrial visitations, time travelers or lost civilizations like Atlantis – or perhaps they’re here to show us that some ancient peoples were far more advanced than we think. It’s hard not to get caught up in the mystery and intrigue of these puzzling and often bizarre ancient objects, most of which simply can’t be explained by modern science.
 Visitors look at a model of the Tiangong-1 space station. Less than a decade ago, it fired its first human being into orbit. Now, Beijing is working on a multi-capsule outpost in space. But what is the political message of the Tiangong 'heavenly palace'?
China laid out plans for its future in space yesterday, unveiling details of an ambitious new space station to be built in orbit within a decade.
The project, which one NASA adviser describes as a "potent political symbol", is the latest phase in China's rapidly developing space program. It is less than a decade since China put a human into orbit for the first time, and three years since its first spacewalk.
 Have you ever wondered what it's like to sit atop a volcanic peak in the Canary Islands, gazing up at the brilliant stars of the Milky Way as a Saharan sandstorm billows all around you?
Well, wonder no more. Norwegian landscape photographer Terje Sorgjerd captured this stunning scene — and many others — in his new three-minute video, "The Mountain," which he posted to the website Vimeo on April 15.
Earlier this month, Sorgjerd spent a week on Mount Teide, a huge volcanic peak on Tenerife, which is the largest of the seven Canary Islands off the coast of northwest Africa. At 12,198 feet (3,718 meters), Teide is the highest point in Spain, which owns the Canaries.
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