The Way the Future Blogs

 

A simple high-school electrochemistry question for you smart ones: how do you make that excellent, but tricky, fuel for your car, hydrogen?

Simple. You start with plain old water; you dip two terminals from a battery at the ends of the tank and turn on the current. Something starts bubbling at the terminals, hydrogen at one, oxygen at the other. You can use the hydrogen to make your car go, sell the oxygen, perhaps, to the nearest hospital. It’s a great little system, the only problem being that it takes at least 1.23 volts to split the water molecule and electricity costs money.

Okay, forget the water. Let’s electrolyze a different chemical liquid, say urine.

Human urine takes only 0.37 volts to electrolyze. This cuts your power consumption down to not much more than a quarter, and the process is now economical. What makes the difference is that urine contains urea, and a molecule of urea contains four of the hydrogen atoms that constitute your electric current — twice as many as a molecule of water — and the bonds that hold the molecule together are weaker.

So, supposing you want to start building your plant for peepee power right now, where do you get your urine? You might think that that’s a silly question — nearly 7 billion humans alive on the Earth, and every one of them generating your new motor fuel for you every day — but you may have to go to some trouble to get what you need. No, you can’t just pipe your sewage into a tank and run a current through it. Sewage is contaminated with many other materials, and the worst of them for this purpose is plain old water. Any flush toilet dilutes the urine drastically, and thus also seriously dilutes the urea it contains, so much so that you might as well use plain water to begin .with.

There are various solutions to the problem of the urine collection. One was invented for us by the ancient Romans. They liked to wear white woolen garments, but those garments got dirty and couldn’t be laundered in water because they would shrink. Plain urine was fine to wash them in, though, so to provide their cleaning liquid, those old Roman dry cleaners put barrels out at street intersections, with ingratiating little signs urging those who had to go to use the barrels.

Of course, some neighborhoods might not care for that sort of public display. Fortunately, there are other options. The urine doesn’t have to come from human beings. Any large mammal will do. The particularly placid cow would be close to ideal. And how do you persuade your herd of cattle to pee in a barrel? You don’t.

There is a useful bit of minor surgery widely in use for elderly male humans whose prostate has grown so big it interferes with their urination. One end of a catheter is inserted directly through the skin into the gentleman’s bladder, the other end leads to a collection vessel of some sort. From then on the man never has to dash for a public urinal, and his own urine arrives at the electrolysis plant in a nearly pristine condition. (You save a bundle on water bills, too, since from then you never have to flush for pee.)

See how easy it is to solve some pretty big problems if you want to make the effort?

* * *

If you wonder why I know so much about Roman urination, my new novel — All the Lives He Led — is set partly in Pompeii, and I’ve done a lot of writing about those Romans at other times as well.

 

Everybody loves flowers, right? But some people are more in love with them than others. For instance, consider the Dutch. They grow them by the metric ton every year, and they go to a lot of trouble to make them grow faster than they normally would so as to persuade the blooms to grow an extra crop every year, because every month is a good month for selling flowers to the Dutch, since they sell them all around the year.

So how do they make them grow faster? One way is to sort of force-feed them by providing them with more of the chemical their photosynthetic metabolisms turn into plants and thus flowers. And what is this chemical that the plants gobble up so voraciously? Why, it’s nothing more or less than our old friend — or enemy — carbon dioxide. So one of their Dutch tricks of the trade is to burn a slim stream of natural gas in their hothouses.

Burned gas at one end of their little stoves is released as carbon dioxide at the other “Yum!” say the plants, growing faster than ever. “Ka-ching!” say the Dutch cash registers as their plants go all over the world. And everybody’s happy.

But they can get happier still, as we will reveal in Part Two of this sequence, coming up in a week or so.

Robert C.W. Ettinger

My friend Bob Ettinger deanimated on Saturday, 23 July, after a prolonged period in hospice care. A tub of crushed ice was by his bedside, and the certificate of death and perfusion of his blood vessels with a chilling solution were expedited. Since then he has been in the “cooling box,” to lower his whole-body temperature to liquid-gas cold.

I first encountered Bob half a century ago, when I was editor of the Galaxy group of magazines and he submitted his paper The Prospect of Immortality to me for publication. He had done his homework, and I had to admit that his proposal of freezing on death, and then being kept in ultra-cold conditions, did seem capable of keeping a corpse from deteriorating for long periods.

Moreover, it seem probable that medical science, which had made such great gains in the century just past, would continue to develop, perhaps to the point of defrosting and repairing the damages caused both by the original cause of death and the act of freezing itself. Put them altogether and his idea seemed to offer not a guarantee, but at least a reasonable gambling bet that the idea might possibly work.

So I published Bob’s essay in one of my magazines, then began publicizing it. I was a regular on Long John Nebel’s radio talk show, and he was glad to schedule several shows about Ettinger’s idea. I was doing occasional writing for Playboy, and when I queried them about an article, they loved the idea, which in turn led to a prolonged interview on the then-dominant Johnny Carson show.

Bob was appreciative of that. So were the action groups that began springing up to put Ettinger’s ideas into practice, and as a reward for my activities, one of them offered me a free freeze, which I declined with thanks.

By then Bob no longer needed me to carry the torch for his idea, and further publicity pieces, including a lead article in Esquire entitled “New Hope for the Dead,” Bob wrote himself. We remained friends, and when Bob came to New York or I visited the Detroit area we usually managed to share a meal, once with his uncle, Pee Wee Russell, one of the most famous clarinetists of the Jazz Age.

I should say that one of the major reasons why we remained good friends was his personality. Bob had a great sense of humor. When I told him what Long John called the people in the deep freeze — “corpsicles” — he got a good laugh out of it and began using the term himself. And once, when I’d asked how many people had signed up, he grinned and paraphrased the Bible: “Many are cold, but few are frozen.”

He was always regretful that I wouldn’t sign up, not for the sake of another scalp to hang but because he believed I was giving up on a tangibly real hope. A few months ago, I got a long, friendly letter from him, doing his best to change my mind. I wrote back at once to say that I hadn’t decided the plan wouldn’t work. I agreed that it had at least a non-zero chance of doing as he hoped. But, I said, although I would give almost anything to stay alive and in good physical condition indefinitely, I wasn’t attracted to the idea of being reborn into a society where I had no role and all the things I cared about had disappeared.

He wrote me one more letter, good-naturedly urging me to change my mind. That was the end.

I still think it’s a reasonable gambling bet. If it turns out it works, I hope Bob will be among the first to demonstrate its success, and I wish him well in that future.

 
Related post:
Inventing Cryonics

100 miles north of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, two large ocean currents — the Kuroshio and the Oyashio — converge. (NASA satellite photo.)

“20 Chernobyls happening at once.”

That’s how Arnold Gundersen, a licensed core operator and former nuclear industry senior vice president, described the situation at Japan’s wrecked Fukushima atomic power plant — not when the Force 9 earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11 but in late June. As he described in an interview for Al Jazeera, reported on in the New York Times:

“Chernobyl had one core that melted down to a blob at the bottom of the reactor. TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, announced that Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed. They are all now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor. The molten core has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn’t exist. Nobody knows how to pick up that molten core material from the floor. There is no solution available now.”

Nor, Gundersen stressed, can you walk away and let it cool down by itself. “You probably have the equivalent of 20 Chernobyls happening at once. They are all in desperate need of being cooled.”

The present attempts to cool them down involve flooding the molten core with sea water. But much of the sea water flashes at once into steam, and much of that mass remains in the atmosphere as water vapor. Some of the rest of it falls as rain. The mass fraction that was not immediately transformed into steam stays in the ground or the underlying aquifer as liquid water — and water vapor, rain, steam and aquifer are all intensely radioactive.

We are already seeing strontium at 250 times the allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So I think we will have a contaminated aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come.

Six months or so back a local outfit asked me to make some predictions about the future. That’s not my regular line of work, of course. Sf writers do not predict the future, they just speculate about what sorts of futures might come our way, but I was feeling lucky so I took a shot. “By 2050 A.D.,” I said, “the whole stretch of southwestern states from Texas through Southern California will be officially designated a desert.”

And what do you know? This Sunday’s New York Times had an interview with Richard Seagar, head analyst of Southwest weather studies at Columbus University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Asked how long he thought the Southwest drought might persist, he said, “You can’t really call it a drought. . . . You don’t say, ‘The Sahara is in drought.’ It’s a desert. If the models are right, then the Southwest will face a permanent drying out.”

Not the only place, either. The same models that show Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix at risk of becoming “ghost cities,” show the same for more distant urban places like Perth, Australia, whose city planners warn that it may be the first to go.

Want another prediction while I’m hot?

All right. By 2050 the tornado belt, which has slowly relocated closer to my own area in Northern Illinois, will inhabit Canada’s southern provinces, and you can bet on that! (Of course, you might lose.)

Campi Flegrei (Photo by Donar Reiskoffer).

The whole of Yellowstone National Park is basically the gigantic caldera of a super-volcano, the kind that can mess up the whole world’s climate when it blows. The Yellowstone one is pretty regular about how often it does blow, too, and at the moment it’s about 6,000 years overdue for its next ka-boom. One of the postulates — the “big lies” that an author is permitted to tell to set up his story — in my latest novel, All the Lives He Led is that sometime before the story gets going Yellowstone did blow sky-high, covering much of the country with volcanic ash and dust and thus converting the U.S.A. from the richest country in the world to something with approximately the Gross National Product of Liechtenstein.

This means our hero can’t make a decent living in America. Therefore he goes to Italy, where he gets a job in the theme park the Italians have made out of the 2,000-year-old ruins of Pompeii.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, as it happens, during World War II I was stationed in Italy for a time with the U. S. Army Air Force, first with a B24 group on the Adriatic side of the peninsula, then with AAF/MTO (translation: Army Air Force, Mediterranean Theater of Operations headquarters) in Caserta, near Naples. What I am getting at, in my perhaps unfortunately highly discursive way, is that for a long time I have been interested in (a) supervolcanos like Yellowstone and (b) the region of the Italian coast around Naples.

And I have — alarmingly — recently discovered that those two areas of interest have become one.

 
You see, the whole territory around Naples is what the old Romans called the Campi Flegrei (meaning “the burning fields”), and Lake Avernus was described by Virgil, in his Aeneid, as the entrance to Hell. Modern observers have not confirmed that identification, but what they have established is that the lake is actually the water-filled crater of a dormant, but not necessarily dead, volcano.

Like Yellowstone, the area is marked by fumaroles (vents of steam), pots of boiling mud and, most disconcertingly, irregular raising and lowering of ground level in some places by as much as eleven feet, which has not been good for some of the constructions on those sites; a hospital and many, many homes have been destroyed. There is a big difference between the Yellowstone caldera and the one for the Phlegrean Fields, though. Most of the Phlegrean territory is underwater, stretching from the famous Isle of Capri to the less celebrated island of Ischia and including much of my dear unkempt city of Naples. (Another difference is population. In winter, at least, Yellowstone is inhabited largely by bears, while the Phlegrean Fields area is home to four million human beings,)

So how dangerous is the situation? Well, no one exactly knows. It would take quite a lot of drilling down into the worrisome ground to get the evidence to predict just what is going to happen there.

That drilling seemed about to start a while ago, because Giuseppe De Natale, the search director for Italy’s National Observatory for Geophysics and Volcanology, was prepared to get it started with a $14 million course of drilling. That didn’t happen, though Critics reminded Naples Mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino of what happened in Indonesia in 2006 when a mud volcano erupted after similar drilling was done, killing a few people and rendering tens of thousands homeless. Mayor Iervolino took no chances. She stopped all drilling until somebody could prove to her that it was safe.

(By the way, people who have been to Naples and seen Mt. Vesuvius puffing its ominous little trail of steam on the horizon may wonder what part this other volcano plays in the Phlegrean Fields scenario. The answer is none at all. Vesuvius, which destroyed three little cities in one 48-hour rampage back in 79 A.D., is just too trivial to worry about when considering the threat posed by the Phlegrean Fields.)