6 ms·

This reminds me of the discussions some years ago whether one should invest in an SSD when buying a new laptop or stay with a spinning disk. Nowadays, barely a

by mg 3y ago

This reminds me of the discussions some years ago whether one should invest in an SSD when buying a new laptop or stay with a spinning disk. Nowadays, barely any new laptops are released without an SSD. When it comes to electric versus petrol, I often think about the fact that the sun sends more energy to earth in an hour than all of mankind uses in a year. I guess that in theory, all that energy could be captured with parts that need no service at all and do not degrade? Of course, we will not practically reach that efficiency. But we will continue to improve towards this limit. When I think of what it takes to dig for oil and all the steps needed to turn that into a moving car, the way we are heading seems clear.

kiba 3y ago
Does that mean mankind has to grow its energy usage 24 times to match the energy absorbed by the Earth?
- eternauta3k 3y ago
  More like 24 * 365 times.
- defrost 3y ago
  Assuming the quoted figures are correct ... it'd be more like 24 x 365 (and a bit) to match the per hour input to per year usage.
- smellf 3y ago
  24 * 365 times
- mg 3y ago
  Thinking about energy usage always puzzles me. I'm not even sure if driving a car from one city to another really uses energy. For example, let's look at it this way: The energy from the sun is heating earth. When we use some of it to drive a solar-powered electric car from one city to another, does that lower the temperature of planet earth? I would think it does not. So why did we get the energy to drive the car for free? I would think that the surprising answer is: Moving something from A to B does not use energy at all. But I'm not sure.
  - baq 3y ago
    Um. There’s this little detail of efficiency. Much less than 100% of energy used for acceleration and overcoming friction is actually spent on those. Most ends up heating up random stuff like engines, brakes, roads and tires. I’m confused why do you think anything could be moved from A to B for free? You have to charge the car, or fuel it up, after all?
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    It can be more instructive to consider entropy rather than energy usage. The energy coming from the sun has low entropy and that makes it easy to capture and convert into electricity/plants etc. When you use some of that energy to move a car, you're converting the useful low entropy of the electricity/fuel into high entropy "waste" heat that can no longer be easily captured and used.
    - mg 3y ago
      Isn't that "waste" heat still warming the planet? Isn't turning a cold planet into a warm planet a good thing and therefore the "waste" heat is still "used" for something useful?
      - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
        No not really. There's a known problem with the atmosphere starting to retain too much heat (as opposed to radiating it out into space) due to the amount of CO2 (and other gasses) that people are dumping into the atmosphere. Far from being useful, it's likely to collapse our current civilisation.
        FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
        Global warming is not caused by waste heat. It is not caused by energy use per-se (indeed, energy is never used, but always conserved). It is caused by a shift in the equilibrium temperature, at which the amount of energy radiated by the Earth equals the amount of incident sunlight. The surface of the Earth gets hotter to radiate the same amount of energy (picture an incandescent light bulb), because greenhouse gasses form an insulative barrier. Burning fossil fuels releases CO2, which increases the amount of insulation. It does also release heat, but that hardly matters; if that were all it did, the heat would ultimately be radiated into space as infrared. The problem isn't "energy use". Nuclear, for example, wouldn't appreciably increase planetary temperatures (I say this not to be a booster for nuclear power, but just because it adds heat that does not come from the sun without creating greenhouse gasses, so it works as an example.). The problem is greenhouse gasses. Toy ODE model: dx/dt = -k x + a + b. Here, x is temperature, a is solar heat input, and b is heat input from human sources. I'm dropping some coefficients that would make the units strictly work. We have a >>> b. The coefficient k says how easily the Earth radiates heat. Adding greenhouse gasses makes k closer to zero. At equilibrium, dx/dt = 0. Solving, x = (a + b) / k ~= a / k Again, b is tiny relative to a. So almost the only thing that matters is k.
- ls612 3y ago
  No, about 100,000 times.
whatevaa 3y ago
SSD only became mainstream after 3D TLC was invented, bringing costs down. Planar MLC was okay but was still somewhat expensive, tech enthusiast thingy. So for petrol, sure, if we just had as energy dense batterry as fossile fuels. No, current tech is not there yet. The big range vechiles are stupidly expensive, and the inexpensive ones are daily commuters only, mostly. They also charge slowly. Most people don't own multiple vechiles for different purposes, the primary purpose of personal vechile is utility and mobility. People get stuck in their personal bubbles and forget that for most people cars are actually a tool. For batteries, big range drops in winter, no solution for people living in apartments with no capability to "charge at home", high electricity prices at not "charge at home" places. Please don't bring in hydrogen here :) it's Toyota's pipe dream, not reallity. We really need 3D NAND flash of SSD moment for batteries, that would revolutionize a lot of industries, not just personal vechiles.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Even with SSDs, it's only laptops specifically that made a wholesale shift to SSDs. Why? Because laptops get jostled around, and SSDs are impervious to rough handling. Over in the land of desktops, servers, and other stationary computing installations, HDDs are still superior if you do not explicitly require (or want) the fast access speeds and latencies of SSDs which are oftentimes overkill for most use cases.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  SSDs also had an inflection point when floods hit Thailand knocking out plants where a good chunk of spinning rust HD motors were made. Spinning drives exploded in price pushing people to accept a smaller but faster SSD and deal with it. > We observed the first uptick at the end of October, reaching its peak in the first week of November with price increases in the 80-190% range for desktop drives and 80-150% for mobile units. Although we're beginning to see price reductions across the board, on average drives are still about 60-90% more expensive than they were before the flooding. https://www.techspot.com/guides/494-hard-drive-pricewatch-thai-floods/ https://www.techspot.com/guides/494-hard-drive-pricewatch-th...
- Nextgrid 3y ago
tweedledot 3y ago
> what it takes to dig for oil and all the steps needed to turn that into a moving car Indeed. Petrochemicals form a fundamental physical part of all cars. And everything else. I look forward to the innovations that need to replace them.
badpun 3y ago
The amount of digging and extremely polluting chemical processing required to manufacture an electric car is massive. After that, you need to power it, which means expanding the electric grid and power facilities (which means even more destruction of environment). And, at the end of the day, the power used to charge these cars is still more likely than not gonna come from fossil fuels. I feel we’re pushing the electric cars too early on people. The grid is far from being green yet, and the batteries are not that great in terms of efficiency, safety (spontaneous combustion anyone?) and the toll on natural environment. And yet governments are not doing any deeper analysis, and are just ramming those things down people’s throats.

by mg 3y ago

kiba 3y ago

Does that mean mankind has to grow its energy usage 24 times to match the energy absorbed by the Earth?

eternauta3k 3y ago
More like 24 * 365 times.
defrost 3y ago
Assuming the quoted figures are correct ... it'd be more like 24 x 365 (and a bit) to match the per hour input to per year usage.
smellf 3y ago
24 * 365 times
mg 3y ago
Thinking about energy usage always puzzles me. I'm not even sure if driving a car from one city to another really uses energy. For example, let's look at it this way: The energy from the sun is heating earth. When we use some of it to drive a solar-powered electric car from one city to another, does that lower the temperature of planet earth? I would think it does not. So why did we get the energy to drive the car for free? I would think that the surprising answer is: Moving something from A to B does not use energy at all. But I'm not sure.
- baq 3y ago
  Um. There’s this little detail of efficiency. Much less than 100% of energy used for acceleration and overcoming friction is actually spent on those. Most ends up heating up random stuff like engines, brakes, roads and tires. I’m confused why do you think anything could be moved from A to B for free? You have to charge the car, or fuel it up, after all?
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  It can be more instructive to consider entropy rather than energy usage. The energy coming from the sun has low entropy and that makes it easy to capture and convert into electricity/plants etc. When you use some of that energy to move a car, you're converting the useful low entropy of the electricity/fuel into high entropy "waste" heat that can no longer be easily captured and used.
  - mg 3y ago
    Isn't that "waste" heat still warming the planet? Isn't turning a cold planet into a warm planet a good thing and therefore the "waste" heat is still "used" for something useful?
    - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      No not really. There's a known problem with the atmosphere starting to retain too much heat (as opposed to radiating it out into space) due to the amount of CO2 (and other gasses) that people are dumping into the atmosphere. Far from being useful, it's likely to collapse our current civilisation.
      - FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
        Global warming is not caused by waste heat. It is not caused by energy use per-se (indeed, energy is never used, but always conserved). It is caused by a shift in the equilibrium temperature, at which the amount of energy radiated by the Earth equals the amount of incident sunlight. The surface of the Earth gets hotter to radiate the same amount of energy (picture an incandescent light bulb), because greenhouse gasses form an insulative barrier. Burning fossil fuels releases CO2, which increases the amount of insulation. It does also release heat, but that hardly matters; if that were all it did, the heat would ultimately be radiated into space as infrared. The problem isn't "energy use". Nuclear, for example, wouldn't appreciably increase planetary temperatures (I say this not to be a booster for nuclear power, but just because it adds heat that does not come from the sun without creating greenhouse gasses, so it works as an example.). The problem is greenhouse gasses. Toy ODE model: dx/dt = -k x + a + b. Here, x is temperature, a is solar heat input, and b is heat input from human sources. I'm dropping some coefficients that would make the units strictly work. We have a >>> b. The coefficient k says how easily the Earth radiates heat. Adding greenhouse gasses makes k closer to zero. At equilibrium, dx/dt = 0. Solving, x = (a + b) / k ~= a / k Again, b is tiny relative to a. So almost the only thing that matters is k.
ls612 3y ago
No, about 100,000 times.

whatevaa 3y ago

SSD only became mainstream after 3D TLC was invented, bringing costs down. Planar MLC was okay but was still somewhat expensive, tech enthusiast thingy. So for petrol, sure, if we just had as energy dense batterry as fossile fuels. No, current tech is not there yet. The big range vechiles are stupidly expensive, and the inexpensive ones are daily commuters only, mostly. They also charge slowly. Most people don't own multiple vechiles for different purposes, the primary purpose of personal vechile is utility and mobility. People get stuck in their personal bubbles and forget that for most people cars are actually a tool. For batteries, big range drops in winter, no solution for people living in apartments with no capability to "charge at home", high electricity prices at not "charge at home" places. Please don't bring in hydrogen here :) it's Toyota's pipe dream, not reallity. We really need 3D NAND flash of SSD moment for batteries, that would revolutionize a lot of industries, not just personal vechiles.

Dalewyn 3y ago
Even with SSDs, it's only laptops specifically that made a wholesale shift to SSDs. Why? Because laptops get jostled around, and SSDs are impervious to rough handling. Over in the land of desktops, servers, and other stationary computing installations, HDDs are still superior if you do not explicitly require (or want) the fast access speeds and latencies of SSDs which are oftentimes overkill for most use cases.
Scoundreller 3y ago
SSDs also had an inflection point when floods hit Thailand knocking out plants where a good chunk of spinning rust HD motors were made. Spinning drives exploded in price pushing people to accept a smaller but faster SSD and deal with it. > We observed the first uptick at the end of October, reaching its peak in the first week of November with price increases in the 80-190% range for desktop drives and 80-150% for mobile units. Although we're beginning to see price reductions across the board, on average drives are still about 60-90% more expensive than they were before the flooding. https://www.techspot.com/guides/494-hard-drive-pricewatch-thai-floods/ https://www.techspot.com/guides/494-hard-drive-pricewatch-th...
Nextgrid 3y ago

tweedledot 3y ago

> what it takes to dig for oil and all the steps needed to turn that into a moving car Indeed. Petrochemicals form a fundamental physical part of all cars. And everything else. I look forward to the innovations that need to replace them.

badpun 3y ago

The amount of digging and extremely polluting chemical processing required to manufacture an electric car is massive. After that, you need to power it, which means expanding the electric grid and power facilities (which means even more destruction of environment). And, at the end of the day, the power used to charge these cars is still more likely than not gonna come from fossil fuels. I feel we’re pushing the electric cars too early on people. The grid is far from being green yet, and the batteries are not that great in terms of efficiency, safety (spontaneous combustion anyone?) and the toll on natural environment. And yet governments are not doing any deeper analysis, and are just ramming those things down people’s throats.