Yes. It really is a moral duty to tell the Wright brothers that their pie in the sky visions have a track history of failure -- to remind them that there are good reasons flight isn't already a commonplace thing.

I talked with Chat-GPT to understand its argument, and the gist was: the critique about low thermal conductivity was absolutely correct for the geothermal attempts between ~1970 and 2010. But modern “superhot rock” geothermal is operating in a very different regime.

First, they can now induce vastly more fractures in the rock. Heat transfer in geothermal isn’t about the raw conductivity of solid rock - it’s about surface area. More fractures = more exposed hot rock = more efficient heat sweep. The fracture networks used today are orders of magnitude larger than the old HDR trials.

Second, the water isn’t just hot water or steam anymore. At these temperatures and pressures it becomes a supercritical fluid. That matters because it convects heat through the fracture network instead of relying on slow conduction. So you don’t get the old “hot spot next to the well / cold depleted zone” behavior - the fluid actively evens out temperature gradients.

Third, the sites they’re using now (like Newberry Volcano) have massively higher heat flux from below. Many of the early HDR projects were drilled into generic crustal hot rock with weak replenishment. Near a volcano, the heat flow is orders of magnitude higher.

Add to that the modern toolkit - horizontal drilling (mid-2000s onward), high-temperature drilling materials, computer-modeled fracture design, etc. None of this existed during the early HDR experiments that gave geothermal a bad reputation.

Chat-GPT summed it with a metaphor: the old Hot Dry Rock systems were like trying to heat your house using a candle in the corner. Tiny fracture zones, minimal surface area, conduction-limited, fast local cooling and slow reheating.

The new approach is more like engineering a large underground heat exchanger connected to a huge volcanic heat source.

And yes, you can overdraw heat - just like you can over-pump groundwater. But operators don’t have to push it that hard, and modern models tell them exactly how much heat they can sustainably take each year.

I don't understand these topics deeply? I'm hoping that you do, and that this will mean something to you.

I'm not an engineer, but here's what Chat-GPT thinks, when I shared your comment with it:

---

Not quite. This criticism is valid for old-school “hot dry rock” geothermal (1970-2010), but it doesn’t apply to the new superhot-rock designs.

It’s true that rock has low thermal conductivity and that conduction-limited systems cool locally if you withdraw heat faster than it flows back. That’s exactly why the early HDR [Lion: -- this means "Hot Dry Rock"] experiments never scaled.

But superhot-rock geothermal isn’t using the old model.

Three things have changed:

Supercritical water (>374C, high pressure).
At these temperatures you’re no longer circulating liquid water or steam. Supercritical fluid behaves like a gas in viscosity but carries heat like a liquid, and has dramatically higher enthalpy. It transfers heat through fractured rock convectively, not purely by conduction. That’s a completely different thermodynamic regime than the classic HDR studies.

Engineered fracture networks (modern EGS).
Today’s EGS looks much more like a controlled, high-permeability heat exchanger than a single injection well in a monolithic rock mass. You’re creating a huge surface area and letting supercritical fluid sweep heat through it. The limiting factor becomes the fracture network, not the bulk conductivity of a single block of granite.

Volcanic settings with very high heat flux.
The Newberry system is only a few miles from an active magma body. The heat inflow from depth is orders of magnitude higher than at the old HDR field sites. You still have to manage production rates, but you’re no longer relying on conduction through kilometers of cold crust.

The “if it were workable we’d already be using it” argument also doesn’t hold. We didn’t have:

* horizontal drilling at scale until the mid-2000s,

* the ability to design fracture networks with modern HPC,

* high-temperature drilling materials,

* or any commercial attempts at supercritical geothermal

until the last decade.

The physics hasn’t changed, but the engineering finally can reach the temperatures where supercritical convection dominates and where the geothermal resource is effectively thousands of times denser.

Superhot geothermal still has plenty of open questions (scaling, economics, long-term well integrity), but the “thermal conductivity of rock makes it impossible” critique is describing the previous generation of geothermal, not the current one.

... I of course mean other citations than that quasi-fraudulent British lawsuit that started this nonsense myth back in the early 90ies or so.

... with a metric ton of salt, but on the demographics of China and their impact he seems spot on. And let's be honest, there's not that much you can get wrong here. It's quite simple math.

... within this decade. And he's been doing that for a while. And his reasoning sounds plausible.

The blender crew effing rocks, that's for sure. I sure hope Ton Roosendahl is enjoying his (part-time?) retirement!

I'm listed as a donator because I'm actually one of those rare few who bought a commercial license back when Blender still was closed source and was being sold as a commercial product by NaN. They went commercial for a year or so after blender was available as freeware. I paid 250 Euros and still have the color-printed receipt. I might frame it and hang it on the wall some day. :-)

The infrastructure required to perpetually get decent to good quality petrol to where it's needed is insane. For electric you just need a battery, some solar cells and you're good to go. Petrol throughout south America is notoriously bad, often mixed with (bad) (m)ethanol and often a gable to fill in your tank. Its not uncommon for adventure bike riders to bring an extra spare piston and cylinder along in case you frag yours beyond repair and need to replace it somewhere in the ass-end of Patagonia.

That doorstep countries around the world are moving to solar and electric vehicles faster than developed countries makes perfect sense.

This is a detail many PC fanbois tend to overlook. And it's the reason consoles are so successful.

Point in case: I ditched hardcore PC gaming 25 years ago because it was becoming ridiculous with the constant hardware upgrades, fiddling with drivers and the mess that is M$ W1ndows. And I at one time had the most performant gaming PC available that costed roughly 5000$. I'm a computer expert but when even AMD went from one socket type to something like 5 different (Intel was already at roughly 10 different socket types back then) I got tired of keeping track, said f*ck it and left PC gaming alltogether. I just stopped the hardware upgrades, installed Linux for programming and the occasional Linux-native Unreal Tournament and Tribes 2 session and left it at that. This was in the late 90ies. I don't have the kind of space, time and attention anymore that PC gaming needs.

Roughly 15 years later I had some cash left and was curious about the new games such as the Deus Ex reboot and some discounted FarCry title and got an XBox 360, the last iteration just at the end of that generation that could run on a regular monitor without hassle. With all kinks fixed and a large cheap library of budget-priced games as GOTY premium editions and an affordable box that I knew would run those games with zero config fuss I was all set.

I've been with XBox ever since, always lagging 1-2 generations for price and stability reasons. I'm still using a Xbox One X as my main gaming rigg and it's totally fine. Yeah, I do miss mouse and keyboard occasionally, but I also enjoy being prolific with the controller by now and just leaning back on the sofa doing Open World Looter-Shooters, (A)RPGs or the occasional Spaceflight game. Every once in a while I ponder getting back into PC gaming but when I l then look at the prices, the science involded and remember the hassle of dealing with shitty operating systems, drivers, flaky software, etc. I quickly drop that notion again.

I might look into that new Steam Box thing, but I still have 82 games for XBox One alone, not counting my 360 titles. Most of these games I haven't played yet, so I'm not too much in a hurry. I also love the fact that the XBox is backwards compatible, which is a huge plus, Kudos to M$ for doing this. M$ W1ndows sucks, but with XBox they're still the global underdog and behave accordingly. And have me, a prime-time Linux user for 25+ years, as a paying customer, believe it or not.

I think pupils should learn to hand-write. It's a useful skill to have. What I think should be done away with is torturing children with dictations and other non-sense that are basically speed-writing contests _without_ teaching them to type and giving them the option to chose typing over hand-writing.

I completely agree.

Too much safety. Too much regulation.

Not enough creativity. Not enough dealing with the imperfect.

We really need to amp up freedom.

I know you're trying to be sarcastic, but the truth is, we Europeans are only going to get through these times of de-globalization, demographic decline and power-shifts together. The UK would've been far better off throwing their weight behind EU issues that need solving rather than using the EU as a cheap scapegoat for the elites grabbing a paycheck and lining their pockets.

[disclaimer: continental European here] ... but I think it's safe to say that even proud EU citizens are surprised at how the UK seems totally and irreversibly shafted at this point. No gloating here, it's really painful to watch.

Here's a perfect expert analysis of Brexit and it's outsomes in 90 seconds.

The cascading effects have already kicked in. Which means that the more "pessimistic" scientists were right. Or at least more right than others. Those target numbers always seemed a little lenient to me anyway.