There has never been a more important time to invest in green technologies, yet many of us believe these efforts are doomed to failure. What nonsense, writes Chris Goodall
Myth 1: solar power is too expensive to be of much use
In reality, today’s bulky and expensive solar panels capture only 10% or so of the sun’s energy, but rapid innovation in the US means that the next generation of panels will be much thinner, capture far more of the energy in the sun’s light and cost a fraction of what they do today. They may not even be made of silicon. First Solar, the largest manufacturer of thin panels, claims that its products will generate electricity in sunny countries as cheaply as large power stations by 2012.
“It sends a cold shiver down my spine. I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination is terrifying.” ___________________________________________________________________________
The American military is planning to build robot soldiers that will not be able to commit war crimes like their human comrades in arms.
The Pentagon aims to develop ‘ethical’ robot soldiers, unlike the indiscriminate T-800 killers from the Terminator films
The US Army and Navy have both hired experts in the ethics of building machines to prevent the creation of an amoral Terminator-style killing machine that murders indiscriminately.
By 2010 the US will have invested $4 billion in a research programme into “autonomous systems”, the military jargon for robots, on the basis that they would not succumb to fear or the desire for vengeance that afflicts frontline soldiers.
A British robotics expert has been recruited by the US Navy to advise them on building robots that do not violate the Geneva Conventions.
Colin Allen, a scientific philosopher at Indiana University’s has just published a book summarising his views entitled Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong.
He told The Daily Telegraph: “The question they want answered is whether we can build automated weapons that would conform to the laws of war. Can we use ethical theory to help design these machines?”
Pentagon chiefs are concerned by studies of combat stress in Iraq that show high proportions of frontline troops supporting torture and retribution against enemy combatants.
A revolutionary device that can harness energy from slow-moving rivers and ocean currents could provide enough power for the entire world, scientists claim.
Existing technologies require an average current of five or six knots to operate efficiently, while most of the earth’s currents are slower than three knots Photo: AP
The technology can generate electricity in water flowing at a rate of less than one knot - about one mile an hour - meaning it could operate on most waterways and sea beds around the globe.
The evidence summarized below proves conclusively that 3 World Trade Center buildings collapsed on 9/11/2001 as the result of controlled demolitions. It makes no attempt to determine why, or to imply by whom. From a scientific standpoint, it is inadvisable to leap to conclusions because there are always scenarios we may not be prepared to imagine. In science, as in life, an open mind is a good thing. It is conceivable that there was a bio-threat airborne in the CIA undercover New York station in Building 7 capable of wiping out 20 million people if it wasn’t immediately neutralized by the use of Thermate. Although that is unlikely, it remains possible and therefore, scientifically, it stands as an unknown, as do many other unknowns.
However, we do know via established empirical evidence that a series of observable events took place that can be analyzed. If we learn the temperatures at which steel melts and at which jet fuel burns we can then determine whether burning jet fuel can melt steel. Proof of evidence can and should preclude personal opinions and lead us to logically necessary conclusions. A fair examination of the evidence establishes unequivocally that 3 skyscrapers collapsed as the direct and proximate result of planned demolition and that the official explanation is literally physically impossible and a blatant contradiction of established laws of science and nature.
1. The architects of the World Trade Center designed the buildings to absorb the impact of a crashing jetliner because that was an obvious structural design imperative in Manhattan. The designers of the buildings always confidently maintained that they would remain structurally secure from collapse under those circumstances.
FRANK A. DeMARTINI, MANAGER, WTC CONSTRUCTION & PROJECT MANAGEMENT has testified to the fact that the buildings at the World Trade Center should have been able to sustain multiple jumbo jet impacts without threatening the structural integrity of the buildings’ steel-reinforced frames:
“I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like mosquito-netting on your screen door-this intense grid. And the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.”
Detailed structural analysis of the Twin Towers determined that:
“The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner [Boeing 707-DC 8] traveling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact.”
As noted by John Skilling, the engineer responsible for designing the World Trade Center, the buildings would withstand a major crash and the ensuing fires:
“Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the jet fuel would dump into the building. (But) the building structure would still be there.”
See 9/11 - A Closer Look by scientist Kevin Ryan:
911 Mysteries Part 1 - Demolition:
Each tower contained:
Over 90,000 tons of concrete;
47 Massive Steel Core Columns and
• 240 Steel Perimeter Columns welded together and connected by hundreds of steel joints, perpendicular cross trusses, thousands of large steel bolts and concrete-filled steel floor decking at each floor level;
100,000 Ton Heat Sink to absorb excess heat;
• Updated fireproofing and a fire control system designed to prevent “chimney effect” and suffocate fires by depriving them of oxygen.To convey the extent of the structural integrity of the World Trade Center, the Engineering News Record reported that:
One “could cut away all the first story columns on one side of the building, and partway from the corners of the perpendicular sides, and the building could still withstand design live loads and a 100 mph wind from any direction.”
2. No large steel-reinforced building anywhere in the world, at any time before or since 9/11, ever experienced full building collapse due to fire:
“Never before in the history of the world has a steel building collapsed due to fire.”
The unique exception is 9/11 when 3 steel-reinforced skyscrapers with state-of-the-art fire-proofing at the World Trade Center allegedly collapsed due to fires, although the fires clearly never seriously threatened the structural integrity of the buildings.
In 1945 a U.S. Air Force B-25 bomber struck the Empire State Building, killing 14 people. However, neither the impact nor the ensuing fires caused significant damage to the building’s steel-reinforced frame and never threatened the structural integrity of the building.
3. Structural analysis conducted by MIT Engineer/Scientist Dr. Jeff King concludes:
The U.S. Army plans to spend some $50 million over five years on combat video games to train soldiers, according to a report in Stars and Stripes.
To oversee this investment, the Army created a game-training unit named, as military units often are, with an acronym, PEO-STRI, for “Project Executive Office - Simulation Training and Instrumentation.” This unit will track developments in the video game industry and choose promising products that could be used or modified to train soldiers.
The report said the Army unit also “has an undisclosed additional budget” to spend on a commercial game system to be used by February.
There’s already one game - DARWARS Ambush - in use for teaching soldiers. It was set up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA to focus mainly on the difficult problem of roadside ambushes that use explosives to hit at convoy vehicles. But that game, based on old technology, has limits, and the Army wants to upgrade to new systems.
A missile is launched from the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ship Chokai in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii November 20, 2008. (Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force/Handout/Reuters)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Japanese warship failed to shoot down a ballistic missile target in a joint test with U.S. forces Wednesday because of a glitch in the final stage of an interceptor made by Raytheon Co, a U.S. military official said.
The kinetic warhead’s infrared “seeker” lost track in the last few seconds of the $55 million test, about 100 miles above Hawaiian waters, said U.S. Rear Admiral Brad Hicks, program director of the Aegis sea-based leg of an emerging U.S. anti-missile shield.
“This was a failure,” he said in a teleconference with reporters. It brought the tally of Aegis intercepts to 16 in 20 tries.
The problem “hopefully was related just to a single interceptor,” not to a systemic issue with the Standard Missile-3 Block 1A, the same missile used in February to blow apart a crippled U.S. spy satellite, Hicks said.
The Bush administration on Thursday urged a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a group of Amish farmers in Michigan claiming RFID chips required on cattle “are a mark of the beast.”
The Amish farmers claim (.pdf) Michigan regulations requiring them to use radio frequency identification devices on their cattle “constitutes some form of a ‘mark of the beast‘ and/or represents an infringement of their ‘dominion over cattle and all living things’ in violation of their fundamental religious beliefs,” according to the farmers’ lawsuit filed in September in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
CHINA: Clampdown on activists who expose surveillance through new technology
“WE HAVEN’T seen you before. Which media are you from?” a middle-aged woman asked a tall man operating a video camera outside a Beijing court.
“I’m from an independent newspaper,” the videographer replied with a slight smile on his face. The woman and her friend, who were queueing to take documents into the court, chuckled after hearing a statement that they all knew was false. “He’s police,” one of the women said a few minutes later.
The exchange outside the Beijing No.1 Intermediate People’s Court was a rare moment of levity in the normally serious, sometimes violent business of monitoring and controlling rights activists, dissidents, independent religious leaders, separatists and others deemed a threat to China’s state security.
The plain-clothes police officer was taking footage of petitioners, journalists, lawyers and supporters of dissident Hu Jia, who was sentenced that day in April to three and a half years in prison for subversion. “Surveillance is both overt and insidious,” said Phelim Kine, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch. Overt surveillance in China is used “both to intimidate, and as a lesson to the neighbours”, Kine said.
Hu won the EU’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought last month. He and fellow activist Gao Zhisheng were also nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Hu, 35, is the most prominent of a growing number of activists who have tried to reflect the intense glare of state surveillance back at those trying to monitor and control them.
The activists’ photographs, video, transcripts and diaries, usually distributed via the internet, have given outsiders rare glimpses into surveillance and abuses of power by China’s vast public security network. China tolerates some local activism but it confronts those who begin to operate at a national or international level. The relatively few national-level activists who have mastered the use of the internet and digital technology like Hu and his wife, Zeng Jinyan, are “desperately outnumbered” by the people watching them, Kine said.
“It tells you that those people like Hu Jia, who do master the technology and get the message out, are prey to retribution,” Kine. “What you see in China is that anyone who reaches a certain level of prominence, those people face serious consequences,” he said.
