There are countless more recent examples I could have written about. However, Hypatia is in my opinion more relevant. Before 400AD or so, Roman and Greek society was based around classical foundations of rationalism and philosophy. Yes they worshipped gods, but there was tolerance for the worship of many different gods, and by extension tolerance for fundamentally different world-views. Classical civilization created great art, great philosophy, great mathematics, great architecture. We owe our systems of laws, of money, of art/drama to classical Greco-Roman civilization. And the fact that Greco-Roman civilization had flaws (e.g. slavery) does not change the greatness of what they accomplished.

In the early-mid 300AD's Constantine came to power as emperor of the Roman empire. He made Christianity the state religion of the empire. Christianity spread like wildfire, snuffing out anything that opposed it. The instance I referred to earlier, Hypatia's murder, is commonly thought of as the end of the Classical Era. In Hypatia's school, it is possible that astronomers theorized that Earth travelled around the Sun. If an astronomer had thought this, the idea would have been discussed and possibly accepted. In the new christian world, to suggest an such an idea would be blasphemy and would result in the suggester being executed in some gruesome manner.

The adoption of Christianity in as the state religion in Europe led to what is commonly known as the Dark Ages, a period of about 1000 years in which European civilization stagnated. Progress in the arts, in knowledge of the world (what we would call science), in philosophy largely came to a halt. Europeans largely forgot how to build great buildings. This era is thought to have begun to come to an end when European intellectuals began re-discovering Greco-Roman rationalism during the Renaissance, and is exemplified in Florence, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi re-discovered Roman dome building techniques in order to build il Duomo.

When I see these stone-age islamic fanatics trying to hack away at the edifice of modernity, I cannot help but thinking about what christianity did to European civilization during the Dark Ages. I also cannot help thinking of those in America who so resemble these stone-age fanatics, the christian dominionists and those who can best be described as the American taliban. If you think it is only muslims who are capable of fanaticism, you are fooling your self.

"Hypatia (born c. AD 350 – 370; died 415[1][3]) was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher in Egypt, then a part of the Byzantine Empire. She was the head of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and astronomy."

"One day on the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, in the year 415 or 416, a mob of Christian zealots led by Peter the Lector accosted a woman’s carriage and dragged her from it and into a church, where they stripped her and beat her to death with roofing tiles. They then tore her body apart and burned it. Who was this woman and what was her crime? Hypatia was one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria and one of the first women to study and teach mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Though she is remembered more for her violent death, her dramatic life is a fascinating lens through which we may view the plight of science in an era of religious and sectarian conflict."

I hate these islamic extremists at least as much as anyone here. But it isn't just islam that is capable of such things.

I'm talking about states like Arizona, which has enacted a $50/month fee if you want to feed solar electricity back into the grid. If you install a solar panel and a battery system that has absolutely no interaction with the grid, you can they justify charging a fee for your system. They might as well charge you for installing high efficiency appliances, bulbs, or for simply using less energy.

Actually, I think one of the biggest results of this will be to allow homes with solar energy to store ALL the energy they capture with their panels, instead of feeding that energy back into the grid. This will effectively neuter the arguments of power companies who say that grid feed-in is making the grid unstable, thus reducing the impetus for putting punitive fees on houses with solar panels.

I suspect the movie's real "sin" was to make bank a banker like "old man Potter" the greedy villain. Today, the greedy banker/financier is the hero, acting valiantly in the "public interest".

Frank Capra's classic "It's a Wonderful Life" was largely forgotten in its time. In 1974, possibly due to an error, its copyright lapsed. TV networks, eager for low cost holiday fare, basically had this film running on a loop during certain times of the year. Then, Paramount managed to pull the movie back into copyright. And low and behold, the showings of this great movie slowed to a trickle once again. Public interest indeed. These media industry slime-balls are evil. Literally evil.

Best post I've seen here and its score is zero. It gives actual arguments. The moderators are being rather jingoistic I think.

Parachutes are too heavy for a nine engine rocket, and would either land in corrosive seawater or on land with a hard damaging landing. To be truthful, they have already accomplished the most difficult part, namely bringing a rocket from 140km altitude to a tiny location in the middle of the ocean. They have also already demonstrated the landing part several times. If you notice, those landings come down at pretty much the exact location they began at.

I believe global warming and ocean acidification is a serious threat. I also believe that solar energy has great potential as an energy source. However, I think the question being framed here creates a false dichotomy. Is it not possible that we might have a world where we have renewable, nuclear, and fossil fuels? Just because we reduce the use of something doesn't mean we have to eliminate it. The fact is that modern civilization needs plastics, mechanical lubrication, and other fossil fuel bi-products. Even if we reduce fossil fuel use by 80%, we can still have these things.

Exhibit A: A freshly minted climate denier talking point. It was likely created by a "PR" company and focus group tested. It sounds like it comes from an expert...someone who has studied the climate history of California. However, no references are given. It merely relies on the confident tone to reach its target audience...the sector of society that has little scientific expertise and that doesn't want to believe that the truck in their garage is likely to make the lives of their grandchildren quite difficult.

Really, this all reminds me of Grima Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings. Seriously, watch Petropolis, and tell me you can't see Mordor in the Canadian tar sands.

The car is almost always plugged it at night. It has a computer. It is trivial to program it to warm up before leaving.

It is hostility based on its physics, based on the simple fact that it will be a dead end. No technological breakthrough, no engineering project, no amount of effort or creative thought will change the fundamental lack of efficiency in this method of energy storage. It is wasteful of energy and will lengthen the time for our society to move to electric transportation. Governments will dump large amounts of money into it. Corporations will use it as their way of satisfying governmental requirements for green technology. But you will still in the end be left with a choice. If you want to move your electric car, do you want to lose 20% of input energy by using grid electricity to charge a battery or 70+% of your energy by using hydrogen. It is simple, unchangeable physics.

Really? Hydrogen? Ok. First off, hydrogen is an energy carrier, not a source. Most hydrogen for transportation these days comes as a bi-product of fossil fuels. So that's not really so clean.

So what if we make the hydrogen from H2O using electrolysis...that means we split 2 H2O molecules into 1 O2 and 2 H2 molecules. There is going always going to be some heat generated in this process, which is by definition waste.

The real and fundamental flaw in this process comes next. In order to transport and use the hydrogen, you have to compress it. This takes energy. Extra energy. And when you compress a gas, it gets warmer. This is a fundamental law of physics. So we have compressed hot gas. What happens to that heat energy? It will certainly not be used to power the car. It will likely be wasted.

Next, you have to transport the compressed hydrogen gas. This also takes energy. Energy that will be lost.

Another large problem with hydrogen gas is that the molecules are small. Why is that a problem? Because it will be difficult to contain the gas. It will tend to escape. The gas will be lost in compression, in transport, and in storage. It is likely that if you fuel your hydrogen car up and park it, you will lose most of your fuel to the air in several days.

Finally, we have to change the energy in the hydrogen back into electrical energy to power the electric motors. The efficiency of fuel cells is an engineering problem, but I suspect there is some intractable physics in there that will cap the efficiency. Let's assume a best case scenario of perhaps 50% efficiency for the cells. That is still a lot of waste. However if you factor in the losses from electrolysis, compression, storage as well, you will have an overall efficiency less than 50%. Probably quite a bit less. So let's say for the sake of argument that the entire process is 30% efficient, which I suspect is generous.

It is well known that the electricity transmission system is highly efficient. Some easy research should tell you that the transmission system is more than 90% efficient. When we charge a battery, there are come losses. But they aren't that high. Let's assume the charging system is 80% efficient. Overall then, that process would be 72% efficient (I think it is higher than that actually).

So, if you have 100J of energy that you wish to use to drive the electric motors in a car, you can use hydrogen, and get less than 30J to the motors, or you can use the electrical grid, and get 70J to the motors. Honestly, why would you use hydrogen? Especially since the fuel cells would be complicated, expensive, and of unknown reliability. Hydrogen as a fuel is flawed at the level of fundamental physics. These problems cannot be engineered away.

Here is a blog about someone's trip in a Tesla across the US in winter. I think that pretty much takes care of all of your points. But you might also be interested in the fact that Norway is one of Tesla's best customers. Here is a video of a Tesla P85D beating a snowmobile in a drag race on ice. And for your convenience, here is a google search with the query "Tesla cross country road trips".

I'm not sure why you have been marked "interesting" when your post is counter-factual or at least deceptive.