Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Wormhole Pickup

I'm sorry Neil deGrasse Tyson.  In your science accounting of the film Interstellar - embracing a wormhole as good science, while bemoaning driving a pickup truck with a flat tire in a corn field is daft.  That said, bravo for making time dilation more palatable to the public. 

I still hold great respect for the original Planet of the Apes movie based on La Planète des singes.  While that film franchise clearly leveraged time dilation as back story, albeit with a rather incoherent timeline, it didn't stoop to junk science time travel tricks to propel the plot.

Monday, January 20, 2014

Dry air, make water, slowly.

The Earth's atmosphere is about 20% oxygen, with only trace amounts of elemental hydrogen.  However, hydrogen is a plentiful byproduct of many terrestrial chemical reactions.  Interesting would be devising more active ways to capture hydrogen and combine it with oxygen to make water (H2O) out of thin air near points of generation before its lightness carries it into the upper atmosphere.

Green house gas methane (CH4) is a bit more abundant than hydrogen in the Earth's atmosphere.  Similar mechanisms to oxidize it near generation points would similarly allow water generation out of thin air.

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