On Sun, Dec 27, 2020 at 12:28 PM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.com> wrote:
On 12/27/20 21:56, Keith Medcalf wrote:
Me too. On top of that, diesel and gasoline are pretty reliable. Though some people may argue about "renewables" the fact is that it is all a matter of time-frame. Solar power, for example, is not renewable. Once it is all used up, it will not "renew" itself -- and this "using up" process is quite independent of our usage of it, as it happens. The time to depletion may be somewhat long, but it still has a time to depletion. Oil and Gas, however, is a "renewable" resource and as a mere physical and chemical process it is occurring at this very moment.
Well, the sun can't be "used up". You just have to wait 12hrs - 15hrs before you can see it again :-).
Mark, I think you may have misunderstood Keith's comment about it being "all a matter of time-frame." He's right--when the sun consumes all the hydrogen in the hydrogen-to-helium fusion process and begins to expand into a red dwarf, that's it; there's no going backwards, no putting the genie back into the bottle, no "renewing" the sun. It's purely a one-way trip. Now, as far as humans go, we're far more likely to be extinct due to other reasons before we come anywhere near to that point. But as far as the physics goes, the conversion of biomatter into petrochemicals in the ground is more "renewable" than the conversion of hydrogen into helium in the sun. It's just that we're far more likely to hit the near-term shortage crunch of petrochemicals in the ground than we are the longer-term exhaustion of hydrogen in the core of the sun. ;) Matt