From Worldometer (new COVID-19 deaths yesterday):
DAY USA WORLD Brazil India South Africa
June 9 1093 4732 1185 246 82
July 22 1205 7128 1293 1120 572
Aug 12 1504 6556 1242 835 130
Sept 9 1208 6222 1136 1168 82
Oct 21 1225 6849 571 703 85
Nov 25 2304 12025 620 518 118
Dec 30 3880 14748 1224 299 465
Jan 14 4142 15512 1151 189 712
Feb 3 4005 14265 1209 107 398
10 3432 14043 1357 119 276
16 1787 9799 1088 109 219
Summary: Not yet ready to say that the pandemic is over, but much of the world is showing declines in new cases and new deaths.
That was a tweet last year from Tony Bennett, five years after he was so diagnosed. At the age of 94, today, he apparently is still recording and touring, something he has been doing for 75 years. He is currently married to Susan Crow Benedetto, which is his real last name. First dated her in 1987, and finally got married in 2007. She is 40 years younger.
- The price of solar modules has declined by 99.6 percent since 1976.
- If you were born in 1900 and died in 1970, you lived from the age of the horse-drawn carriage to the era of a man on the moon. You saw the widespread use of electricity, air-conditioning, aviation, the automobile, penicillin, and so much else.
- But if you were born in 1960 and lived until today, the driving and flying experience would be safer, but otherwise the same, and your kitchen, aside from the microwave, is basically unchanged.
- We have been in the era of The Great Stagnation, a term coined by Tyler Cowen in 2011.
- But the lull, according to Brooks, is over.
- COVID-19 vaccines
- lab-grown meat
- better EVs with 310 mile range after a ten minute re-charge
- driverless vehicles
- fusion
- development of hot dry rock technology to access the 10,000 F molten core of Earth
In the 1970's I worked on laser fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.- I left the field because my thought was that commercialization was at least 30 years away.
- A decade ago I published in The Huffington Post, Star Power for Humanity. To quote:
- Solar power from space, hot dry rock, marine methane hydrates and any of the more exotic options is 50 or more years away from commercialization. The ITER fusion project will take a generation or two to commercialize, if ever.
However, progress is being made at ITER near Provence in France.- China reports that it has reached 270 million F (ten times hotter than the Sun) in their HL-2M Tokamak apparatus (right).
- Notwithstanding, fusion remains 30 years away, if you're optimistic.
David Roberts of Vox indicated that hot dry rock geothermal is poised for a big breakout.- Here are some promising sites in the USA to the right.
- A half century ago I proposed testing this potential by drilling into the pool of lava left by the Kilauea Iki eruption. Reviewers laughed. I still have the proposal with a BC cartoon on the cover page suggesting this effort.
The temperature in the core of our planet is hotter than the surface of the sun.- Some of this magma reaches the surface, when volcanoes erupt:
In these locations, I thought there was potential for controlled power.- I remember traveling to New Mexico to meet with researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory doing experiments at their Fenton Hill HDR test site in the Jemez Mountains, where they drilled down to 8000 feet and reached temperatures of 356 F. If they had encountered hotter temperatures, the thought was to create a reservoir by cracking the rock (using safe nuclear explosions might work, but that was determined to be controversial, so hydro-fracturing was instead suggested), adding water and extracting the steam
Jefferson Tester of MIT chaired a group which produced The Future of Geothermal Energy. I recall that he also was a biochemical engineer. He has since moved to Cornell and hasn't said much about his hopes.- However, if Roberts has information I don't, apparently there has been more recent progress in this field.
Frankly, like fusion, I suspect commercial power from magma is far in the future.
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