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Mars Trilogy: Festival Night
- PaulHoule 4y agoAnother post from one of my favorite bloggers. So far as synthetic hydrocarbons go for the last two years I've been thinking about making a sunshade from plastic films using material from an asteroid which got me interested in C1 chemistry. There is a lot of interest in C1 chemistry now to make jet fuel out of renewable hydrogen and CO₂ from the atmosphere but it seems "when things change they stay the same" because it still centers around the same Fischer-Trospch chemistry that the Nazis tried to use to make motor fuel at Auschwitz which has a terrible time being competitive if oil is available at all. Casey describes it as a technology which might be "perfected" in the next ten years but it has the look of a mature technology which just isn't attractive unless you've got no other choice. People aren't interested in using it for ground transportation because you've got batteries, you can use single entity fuels such as 1-butanol or dimethyl ether, hydrogen, methane, etc. It is only aviation where people are so adverse to trying anything new such as designing a new airplane (take a domestic flight and you have a choice between the 1967 737 and the 1982 A320) that people will even think of synthesizing hydrocarbons.
- shadowofneptune 4y agoCommenting on all of the Trilogy will be quite a task. By the end of Blue Mars it wasn't just the characters who needed a memory refresh, it was me too. The books do have quite a bit to say, especially in the later sections when they become more overtly about how to best run a society. I'll have to keep checking on this site.