The problem with nuclear fission isn’t the technology, it’s greed and lust for power.

It’s possible to build safe, efficient nuclear reactors that generate very little waste which has a much shorter lifetime and is infinitely more manageable than the waste created by todays generation of reactors.

What gets in the way of that is greed. Safe efficient nuclear power is more costly. Safe efficient nuclear power doesn’t produce weapons grade plutonium.

Safe efficient nuclear power would involve a combination of actinide burning breeder reactors and on-site pyrolytic recycling facilities placed at locations that are well underground but well above any water table providing environmental isolation in the event of an accident. The probabilities of an accident would be greatly reduced by using inherently self-limiting designs, designs which will not melt down even in the complete absence of coolant or controls.

Such designs use things like fast flux reactors in which Doppler thermal spectral broadening to reduce reaction rates, liquid fuels in which heat induced expansion reduces fuel density and results in lower reaction rates, etc.

Such designs exist today. Industry isn’t excited about building them because of the costs involved. The military isn’t excited about not having more plutonium available to make bombs.

Between those two interests we continue to operate one-pass pressurized or boiling water reactors. These reactors extract only approximately .7% of uraniums energy potential while leaving radioactive waste that has to be kept isolated from the environment for 50,000 years, an impossible task. That radioactive waste contains a high percentage of plutonium 239 which is used in nuclear weapons.

In an actinide burning reactor, a much higher percentage of other actinides and other isotopes of plutonium are generated which ruins the weapons potential of plutonium. It does this either by producing high background levels of neutrons causing a premature chain reaction ruining a weapons yield or by producing a large amount of penetrating gamma rays making it difficult for people to handle. This is not a bad thing at all, because the on-site pyrolytic processing will recycle these elements into new fuel without weapons potential.

The pyrolytic recycling / actinide burning reactor complex can extract as much as 96% of the uraniums energy potential, and because the actinides are consumed, only relatively short-lived fission products remain. The waste disposal problem is turned from a 50,000 year problem to a 300-year problem and the waste volume is reduced by a factor of a one hundred or so.

The waste from a conventional one-pass boiling water or pressurized water reactor is problematic specifically because it does retain so much energy potential. The short-lived fission products could even be used to provide industrial process heat or residential space heating. I’m not suggesting that fission products be kept in peoples homes, but they could be placed in a central location where the heat is extracted and then steam or hot-water piped to peoples homes.

Because this fuel cycle is so efficient, even uranium derived from seawater is cost-effective and there is sufficient uranium in seawater to provide energy via this fuel cycle for tens of millions of years.

Greed will result in industry being driven to do things as cheaply as possible. Lust for power will continue to pressure for the production of plutonium. On another planet that hosts an intelligent species this might be a safe, reliable energy source for tens of millions of years. On Earth with it’s primitive, greedy, power hungry human species, it is not possible.

Most of the oil we import goes to moving us about in personal vehicles, cars, trucks, and urban assault vehicles. Recently, we’ve seen the introduction of hybrid gas-electric vehicles that get significantly better fuel economy than their non-hybrid equivalents.

Still, I think there is a tremendous amount of room for improvement. A hybrid vehicle costs several thousand dollars more than it’s simpler non-hybrid equal and gets perhaps 50% again as many miles from a gallon of gasoline.

There is a technology, it doesn’t get much public attention, that can get about as much improvement in efficiency at about one-tenth the cost. That technology is water injection. I put this on a 1968 Rambler, and with some other tweaks that it made possible, improved mileage from 16/22 to 22-25/30 city/highway. The variability in city driving being a function of how I drove. I could stretch it to 25 in the city but averaged around 23 under “normal” driving.

To get this type of mileage you have some things you need to do besides just adding the water injection, specifically you need to advance timing and and lean out the fuel. Additionally, I believe that even more efficiency could have been obtained by also raising the compression ratio.

The kits that you can buy assume about a 10:1 fuel:water ratio but I found best results were obtainable with 1:1. The kit I had also had no filter, which caused the injector to get clogged frequently. To be successful commercially, water injection will need to have a water tank as large as the fuel tank. Because it’s possible to increase fuel economy to such a large degree, an increase in total tank volume will be minimal because more than half of the necessary water volume will simply displace an equivalent amount of fuel tank volume.

Water injection does a number of positive things, some of them are easily understood, some area not. Water injection reduces peak cylinder temperatures to a large degree. This allows more advanced timing, leaner mixtures, and higher compression ratios.

Water injection turns into steam during combustion increasing the gas volume and pressure on the piston while at the same time holding temperatures down. Less heat escapes through cylinder walls, more heat is transformed into mechanical energy.

Another thing water injection did is drastically reduce emissions, hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide was almost unmeasurable. The mechanism behind that is not known to me. I suspect nitrous oxides were also down since peak cylinder temperatures were down but I had no means of measuring these.

Why not combine water injection with a hybrid technology? Hybrids improve efficiency by recovering breaking energy, providing torque at low RPM ranges where a gasoline engine can not do so efficiently, provide a method of peaking power so that the engine can be sized smaller, and by allowing the engine to operate at optimal power and RPM ranges when it must operate. Combine that with a power plant that is considerably more efficient to start with and you’ve got some major fuel savings potential.

Then why not add plug-in hybrid technology to that? And maybe some solar panels to top off the batteries while the car sits in a parking lot all day?

When I was four years old the World Fair came to Seattle. There were many things that fascinated me about the science center. The circular moving sidewalk carpet, the steam rocket that periodically launched, the colored pictures on the wall that changed, all fascinating. We had a television at home of coarse, black-n-white, but these pictures were full color, and right in the wall, not in a box on the floor.

What really stuck in my mind though is that we had the potential for a really bright future. And what really bothers me is that we’ve done just about everything wrong and managed to avoid realizing that bright future thus far.

The development of scientific understanding and of technology since that time has been nothing short of incredible, but what the human race has done with science and technology has been nothing short of tragic.

Food shortages, water shortages, energy shortages, environmental crises, pollution, rapid species extinction, war, most diseases, not having the time to spend with friends and family, these things are the collective result of our choices. And that’s not to say I absolve myself, I’ve made plenty of bad choices in my life that had I not made, I could have been happier and much better off today and most importantly, in a position to do much more to help others be happier and better off.

We come into this world without the benefit of a lifetime of experience here, and so it’s not intellectually knowable how the choices we make will affect others or they will affect our own future, and even with decades of living experience, it is still not obvious to most people how interconnected we all are, how are decisions affect us not just individually but collectively.

I think I’ve learned something though over the years, one thing that I’ve learned is that my heart makes better decisions than my head, if I listen to it, but I’ll admit, to this day I have a hard time doing this. I’ve also learned that asking God for guidance on a regular basis is a good idea, at least I seem to make better decisions when I do so, but I admit I don’t do it often enough and I’ll also admit I often don’t listen for the answers after I’ve asked the questions. But I’m working on it.

Moreover though, I see signs that this is true for many people. I interacted with Bill Gates before he was rich and famous on an early room message system, the very first actually, ICS (Island Communications System) BBS, the very first Citadel, written in C by Jeff Prothero. In the early 80’s, before he was rich and famous, though he was certainly well on his way, Bill Gates used to call that system and so did I.

I ran a BBS running on a TRS-80 model III, with TRS-80 Level II BASIC, a derivative of Microsoft BASIC. TRS-80 level II BASIC had a bug, specifically, the VAL(A$) function which returns a numerical value from a a numerical string, would explode if you had a ‘%’ percent sign in the string. That is, ‘123%456’ as a string, passed to VAL(), would cause the computer to crash. If you ran a BBS and used VAL() this was a bad thing.

I disassembled TRS-80 Level II BASIC and studied it. Later, I bought a commented listing of a disassembly done by another party and that really helped me understand it’s operation. After studying that, I came up with a fix that not only corrected the ‘%’ bug so it wouldn’t crash your computer anymore, but also increased the execution speed of the interpreter by about 40% by reducing the amount of CPU time wasted in the keyboard scan routine.

I offered this modification to Bill, free with no conditions. I just wanted to see the bug fixed and people with this platform to be able to get the most possible out of it. I never received a response at all, not a “I’m not interested”, not a “Go to Hell”, not a, “you’ll have to sign a contract releasing all interest”, nothing. To the best of my knowledge that bug was never fixed and remained part of TRS-80 Level II BASIC as long as it was offered as a product.

The total lack of any response really got me to not liking Bill Gates very much. It was like, not only are you so unimportant that I am not even going to take the time to reply, (though he had always interacted cordially up to the point where I pointed out the existence of this bug), but neither are all the people who use this software important enough to get a fix to this bug.

That was only the beginning. IBM introduced the “Personal Computer” with a whopping 4.7 Mhz 8086 CPU and 256K of RAM, (640K on later versions). Microsoft released DOS 1.0, made it sound like it was a innovative revolution in computing. Other than the fact that it ran on an 8086 instead of a Z-80 or 8080, I couldn’t tell it from CP/M. All the commands were the same, the layout on disk seemed to be the same. To me it seemed like a complete rip-off.

Later, a hierarchical directory structure was introduced, Unix had a hierarchical directory structure, not exactly the same; in Unix devices were mounted on the root directory, under DOS each device had it’s own directory tree, and you used backslash as a directory separator instead of the forward slash under Unix, and to look at files in the directory, you still used CP/M’s DIR instead of ‘ls’. Still, suggesting that hierarchical directory structures were somehow innovative when Unix had had them for about a decade was a stretch.

Windows came out, another innovation, save for the fact that Xerox had a windowing graphical interface years earlier. And then long filenames, after Apple’s MacOS had had them for years. While all this is happening, I keep hearing Bill say in the media how innovative Microsoft is.

Well, now it’s 2007, Bill Gates is a billionaire many times over; he’s done some things that seemed frankly pretty questionable, the mansion on Lake Washington, what really is that all about? Now, he’s spending hundreds of millions or billions to address disease and poverty around the world, and me; I’m just trying to not get kicked out of my home long enough for my two kids that haven’t moved out yet to finish school and be ready to enter the world on their own.

His focus on business, making money, marketing, was a good decision, and my decisions to focus on infrastructure, product quality, was not; because he’s not only got the resources now to do genuinely novel things while I don’t, but also to influence the world in positive ways elsewhere, and he is choosing to do so. There are still things I don’t like about Bill, but I have to admit, when it comes to the influence he is having on the world; he’s made much better choices than I have.

I think around the world; there are many people like me who are looking at the choices they’ve made, stepping back, and deciding there has to be a better way. I am hopeful that one aspect of longer lifespans is that we all, collectively will have more years to live in which we’ve got enough experience behind us to live them more wisely. And this isn’t to say that just making money is a good thing, there is a question of what one does with it. Clearly, the international banking industry, the oil companies, the military industries, they are not doing good things with their wealth for the most part.

Bill Gates is attacking disease, and by extension poverty in Africa in particular, but also elsewhere, and I am glad to see this happening because they go hand in hand, between AIDS and malaria take a huge toll on people in Africa, limiting productivity and making escape from poverty impossible. Controlling AIDS and malaria (and there are others but these two are major) is a necessary step towards the elimination of poverty in the region. So now I have to believe, as much that I don’t want to, that Bill Gates is in fact not 100% evil.

There are many problems though besides disease in Africa which require human attention. I don’t have the personal resources to directly address these. I regret this because I do believe that, if I’d made better choices earlier in my life, I would have. But what I can do now is offer ideas on how these problems could be solved and hope people who do have resources but hadn’t thought of them might throw some of their resources at these problems and in that way perhaps I can at least indirectly make the world a little better.

I’m hoping there are a lot of people out there now starting to realize that like myself, perhaps their decisions haven’t been the past, and that collectively we all can turn things around and realize our human potential which I believe is enormous. God gave us an opposable thumb for a reason and it wasn’t for pushing missile launch buttons. It’s time we collectively start making better use of our opposable thumbs.

So here I am, I don’t have money to share, I’m just barely able to stay in my home, but I do have knowledge, ideas, so I share those, hoping that someone else who has resources but perhaps hasn’t thought some of these things through might act upon them, or that by getting the idea out there maybe we can collectively act upon them.

I have had an interest in scientific subjects and technology all my life and I know enough now to know that a much better existence for all of us, all the people on this planet, and other species, could all be collectively living much better than we are. We could all enjoy adequate supplies of healthy food, clean water, adequate housing, and good health. We could have enough time to spend with friends and family. Maybe we can never eliminate suffering altogether; our bodies are still mortal; and even if we scientifically crack the secrets of aging and the decline that goes with it, there would still be accidents and natural events beyond our control. But suffering could be greatly reduced, not only that which is directly self inflicted, but also many diseases could be eliminated if we chose to do so, our environment could be much better, our lives could be much more meaningful.

The optimal development and application of science and technology and not all that is involved, it’s not even a major part of what is involved. The biggest element is to realize how interconnected we are with every living things, and starting to think in terms of what is best for life collectively, instead of each of us individually, because in reality we are not so individual, we are all part of the same whole, and that collective whole will either be happy and healthy and loving, or unhappy, unhealthy, and hateful. Science and technology area areas that I am knowledgeable in and areas where I have a lot of ideas, and they are areas where many people who do have resources are not all that knowledgeable, so I’m going to share what I know, kick out my ideas, and hope they will find application and in some way contribute to a better world.

I’ve brought this up before but it didn’t seem to garner much interest. I am hopeful that with oil at $100/barrel and gasoline well over $3/gallon that this idea might now take hold because it has the potential to significantly improve fuel economy, power, and reduce emissions. This is something I feel fairly passionate about because I’ve done it! It’s not a hypothetical for me, I’ve modified a vehicle and put quite a few miles on it.

Let me start by stating my practical experience. I put a water injection system on a 1968 Rambler American with 199 cubic inch V6 engine. This car was a mid-sized passenger car weighing approximately 3200 lbs.

Without water injection, the engine really did not have adequate torque for how the car was geared (2.7:1 rear end and three speed manual transmission). It was picky with respect to fuel and knocked under heavy load. The fuel mileage without water injection was approximately 16 MPG city, and 22-23 highway. Tuneups were necessary every 10,000 miles or so and the spark plugs would be significantly dirty by that time.

I added the Edelbrock water injection system. The Edelbrock is flawed in major ways. The only really good aspect of the Edelbrock is the adjustable controller that can adjust water volume according to both vacuum and RPM. The problems with the Edelbrock are that the tank is far too small and the pump is integral to the tank making it impossible to just replace the tank, and, there is no filtration system so the injector rapidly becomes clogged.

The literature recommended about 1/10th the amount of water to fuel; however, I found optimal performance with city driving happened with approximately as much water as fuel, which made the 1 gallon tank useless. On the freeway when the engine was not so loaded, 1:10 ratio was closer to, but not quite, adequate.

The mileage improvements were not realized with just the addition of the water injection system, but with adjustments made possible by it’s addition. Stock, the engine would ping under load with the factory specified 6 degrees before top dead center initial advance and with the factory carburetor jets. The water injection totally eliminated this ping.

I found it possible to increase the initial advance to 14 degrees with no pinging and a great improvement in power across the entire RPM range. Particularly, the lack of pinging improved the usable low end torque significantly making the car a lot more pleasant to drive.

The 14 degrees initial advance and water injection both had the net result of significantly increasing the idle speed, so I was able to cut down on the idle settings quite a lot and save fuel. Also, no longer relying on fuel to cool the peak cylinder temperature, I was able to jet the carburetor a couple of jets leaner, as well as lean out the idle mixture, without pinging, and still obtain significantly more horsepower than stock.

The limit to how lean I could idle it was where it would start to miss. I added an MSD multistrike ignition system and that extended how lean I could set the idle without missing.

With these modifications, I now got 30 MPG on the highway, around 23 MPG around the city (I could stretch that to 25 if I really grannied it). What’s more, this car had no catalytic converter, but I had some tests done on it to see how clean the engine was and it came well within current smog requirements, far cleaner in fact than a brand new catalytic converter equipped GMC van we compared it to. An additional benefit is that it almost totally eliminated the need for tune-ups. Still had points but since they switched no current with the MSD ignition, they lasted; and after ten thousand miles I’d pull the plugs out and they’d look like I just pulled them out of the box.

Since much of what wears an engine is acids that are formed when incomplete combustion products react with water vapor, the almost total elimination of those products also had to be good for engine wear. Unfortunately, there were other aspects of the car that were mechanically bad, in particular the three speed no synchronizing gear in first transmission and completely inadequate brakes (at least for the way I drive), that ultimately lead me to sell it before the engine could approach true old age.

I’m convinced that even greater fuel economy and power could have been obtained by raising the compression ratio since there was absolutely no sign of pinging even on the worst obtainable gasoline.

These modifications approximately doubled freeway economy and improved city driving economy by more than 50%, while at the same time improving the power and response of the vehicle and cutting pollution at a cost far less than hybrid modifications. However, I see absolutely no reason this technology could not be combined with hybrid technology to gain the additional benefits provided by hybrid technology and such a combination might easily yield full sized drivable vehicles with fuel economies exceeding most motorcycles.

A factory equipped car would have two similarly sized tanks, one for water and one for fuel, and since the economy would be much higher, the fuel tank could be approximately half the present size so really no additional space would be required in total for the water storage, it would simply displace some of the fuel storage.

In a conventional engine, much of the heat energy is absorbed by the cylinder walls and thus not available to provide propulsion. In addition, the higher cylinder wall temperature reduces the overall temperature difference from fully compressed to fully expanded, and thus engine efficiency.

Water injection provides droplets of water vapor that are vaporized into steam by the flame. This simultaneously cools the flame while turning into steam and increasing in volume providing greater push to the piston. Less heat is lost to the cylinder walls.

Water injection allows a leaner mixture which would otherwise result in excessive cylinder temperatures, pinging, and engine damage. This in turn provides better economy as well, and reduced in carbon monoxide emissions. I also found the hydrocarbon emissions to be greatly reduced, in fact both hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide were almost unmeasurable. Nitrous oxides were reduced enormously as well, and the need for EGR eliminated as the water vapor provided all the positive benefits of EGR with none of the negatives side effects (reduction of power, etc).

If American car manufacturers weren’t such dolts they’d catch on to the fact that this is an inexpensive technology that would allow them to produce a car that could compete with the Japanese hybrids for economy, efficiency, and pollution specifications, while at the same time being much less expensive and having no battery pack to wear out.

Alternatively, they could combine this with hybrid technology and produce vehicles that were more efficient, more powerful, and lower in emissions than the Japanese hybrids at a similar cost.

Other possibilities also occur to me; for example, there is a class of carburetors referred to as “supercarbs” that various experimenters have built that use engine vacuum to vaporize fuel and provide replacement heat from radiator water, etc.

These carburetors can provide extreme improvements in efficiency because instead of feeding gasoline as droplets which then take energy from the flame to fully vaporize as they combust, feed it as a vapor. This results in slightly better combustion but the main efficiency gain comes from the fact that energy to vaporize the fuel is drawn from radiator waste heat not from the flame.

These super carburetors have not been practical for the most part because such a totally vaporized mixture is prone to pinging, and so far the inventors have been largely unsuccessful at working out metering and mixture issues over the full RPM and power range of the engines. None the less, I’ve seen some incredible mileage result from these. Water injection would at least eliminate the pinging issue and while it might be a stretch for the home experimenter, a modern closed fuel cycle approach applied to supercarb technology, combined with water injection, might yield efficiencies greater than fuel injection.

American car manufacturers are dolts, or at least run by them, so I’m sure they’ll continue to try to produce and sell inefficient SUVs while gas is $3+ a gallon and wonder why their losing billions of dollars a quarter.

Edelbrock no longer makes the water injection unit but there are other companies that do, such as “FJO” and AquaThrust. They tend to be more pricey than Edelbrock was (Edelbrock unit cost under $300 while the AquaThrust is almost $800). If you do decide to do this pick a unit with a separate pump, add a filter inline before the injector, and use a tank approximating your gas tanks capacity.

FJO Water Injection:

Aquamist Water Injection System:

AquaTune Water Injection Systems:

This is in response to a comment left by a poster regarding the Bussard reactor. This video of a presentation given at Google provides a very good overview of the operation and development of this reactor.

There is hype coming from some chemist at Penn State University that claims a serendipitous discovery that salt water; when irradiated with radio waves; burns.

This is dumb people; it’s not going to power your cars or your homes. All that has been discovered is that salt in water is conductive; and radio waves induce radio frequency currents in conductors, thus causing electrolysis, the emission of hydrogen and oxygen; and that hydrogen when burned in a stoichiometric mixture with pure oxygen burns damn hot, about 1700 °C hot; but it doesn’t generate more energy burning than the energy put into breaking the water down in the first place.

There are real energy solutions out there; this isn’t one of them. If you want to make energy from water; the way to do it is first to separate the water containing deuterium molecules from the rest of the water. This can be done through repeated distillation because the water with deuterium molecules has a higher boiling point.

Next electrolyze the water to get hydrogen, deuterium, and oxygen. Separate the hydrogen from the deuterium, any number of possible ways that this can be done; since the mass to charge ratio for deuterium is twice that of ordinary hydrogen, it’s not real difficult.

Now, take the deuterium and put it in a spherical tokamak with a lithium blanket; add a strong confining magnetic field; some heating current; and in a some D-D reactions will take place; you’ll get some protons, some tritium nuclei (proton+two neutrons), and some neutrons. Some of those neutrons will collide with the lithium and create more tritium nuclei.

After about a day there will be enough tritium generated for D-T reactions to predominate and at this point the reactor becomes a net producer of energy and continues to breed tritium from lithium.

The Tokamak science is understood well enough now that we could build such reactors if the people really in power didn’t oppose their construction. But the banks and oil companies have a lot to lose. The oil companies built platforms costing billions of dollars that take decades to recoup the costs; almost free environmentally friendly and unlimited energy would undo that. And the banks that loaned money to build these things don’t want that to happen either.

An alternative; build a Bussard reactor and use boron and hydrogen as the fuel; much cheaper (about 100x) in terms of capital expense; much more efficient as the energy can be drawn directly as electricity; and much cleaner; no neutrons means no neutron activation; no neutron embrittlement. The Bussard reactor requires no superconductors magnets, no exotic rare earth materials, and no extensive shielding, it can’t explode, melt down, and it neither produces radioactive waste nor requires radioactive fuel.

The Bussard reactor is much smaller than a Tokamak but still too large for cars; probably too large for trucks, but possibly could be fit in a large airplane, and definitely in in ships and trains.

These are some ways we can get large amounts of energy from water; we can get much smaller but still substantial energy from water by taping it’s latent heat or motion. We can build devices that generate energy based on the temperature differences between deep and shallow water, or between water and the air above it. We can tap energy of it’s motion by using undersea turbines, or tidal energy by damming inlets; or by taping wave motion by using a float and a anchored objects relative motion to generate electricity.

But we won’t get any net energy gain from bombarding saltwater with radio waves and burning the gas that results; always we will get less energy than we put in this way. Perhaps if we all throw some salt over our left shoulder the Penn-state chemist will go away.

I am writing more in the forums and less in the blog because the forum is interactive; affords the opportunity to categorize thoughts; and in general has more tools available.

Tonight I wrote an article about Human Potential; how we can achieve it; ad why I do what I do. Please take a look at this article.

Representative Jay Inslee sent me a letter regarding The New Apollo Energy Program. Given that I suggested to him that we needed to embark on an Apollo scale national program of energy independence and sustainability, I am happy that a bill was drafted utilizing the concept in the name, unfortunately it didn’t utilize the concept in the content.

Apollo was a national program that took us from barely achieving manned space flight to landing on the moon and returning in eight years.

The New Apollo Energy Program does essentially nothing over the next 13 years. This is not acceptable.

See the letter and my point to point response to it in our Future Forum here:

http://www.eskimo.com/~nanook/future/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=17

Gingersnap13 said,

I was impressed with the Zero Energy Home you wrote about. Quite spendy, though. Thought you’d be interested in hearing about this brand new green and sustainable living concept on the market that was invented in Oregon. It’s called the NW Modern from ideabox and the man who created this home was also the brains behind the e-rated appliances, the predecessor to the Department of Energy’s Energy Star Program.

It is is sustainable and green in both building materials and construction. For the environmentally responsible consumer this cabin is cool and sleek. I mean we’re talking living large here in 400 sq. feet of luxury in a clever high end pre-fab home with a very intelligent design. It’s definitely on the affordable side, too, with homes starting at $74,500.

The research I’ve done shows that ideabox uses environmentally friendly products and construction with wireless technologies. I’ve heard that you can live large in a small space, so ideabox must’ve worked off of that concept! We’re considering it for my mother-in-law who wants to live on our property.

Here is some more information I found on how environmentally friendly ideabox is…

• Wireless technology because power lines are SO last year.
• Standing seam metal roofing – sustainable and fire retardant.
• Fiber-cement siding for low maintenance.
• Galvalume corrugated metal siding for an industrial look and efficient construction.
• Bamboo flooring because it’s sleek and renewable.
• Energy Star appliances and lighting for the best in energy efficiency.
• Marmoleum countertops, made from renewable resources.
• Fully insulated walls for maximum energy efficiency.
• Energy-efficient ENERGY STAR labeled windows to regulate temperature.
• Less than 2% construction waste because materials are ordered to size.
• Low volatile organic compound paints for better, healthier indoor air.
• Duo-flush toilets for water efficiency.
• Day lighting; windows in all exterior walls and interior re-lite strategies.
• Tankless water heaters to reduce electricity use.

Check it out at http://www.ideabox.us. Pretty neat concept.

Perhaps not a solution for everyone but might well be a viable solution for some. I’ve added IdeaBox to the sidebar resources. Thank you.

The human creature differs from the rest of the animal kingdom in the degree to which our behavior is learned rather than genetically predetermined.

Depending upon who you ask, chimps and humans diverged from a common ancestor 5-6 million years ago, or in another version, diverged 10 million years ago, then interbreeding and hybridization occurred, and they diverged for a second time 5-6 million years ago. A chimp-human ancestor baby with a birth defect was born. A retarded baby which had a slowly developing brain. The mother of that baby nursed it along in spite of it’s slow development, and while it was slower to mature, when it did, it was mentally far more capable than it’s peers. By delaying development, the brain remained in a plastic state much longer, and so could learn readily and be influenced by and adapt to the environment to a much greater degree.

Although there were numerous failed attempts along the way, eventually a descendant of this retarded human-chimp ancestor became modern humans. The slow developing brain eventually enabled it to out-compete it’s fellow fast developing chimps and other primates.

For many millions of years people lived in small groups competing with other groups for resources and our social skills evolved to aid our survival in that environment. Females chose to mate with males who seemed to have the ability to protect and provide for them and their off spring.

For males, it was easier to acquire substantial resources by taking them from other males than through more effective or intense hunting or foraging efforts. In addition, stealing resources from other males made their victims less reproductively competitive. Females mated with males with more resources sexually selecting for aggression. For men, greater aggression meant more reproductive opportunities.

Deception was also selected for since another way for males to acquire resources was through deception of his peers. In addition, it wasn’t actually necessary to have resources, only to convince a potential mate that he had them. Thus deception was doubly advantageous and thus genetically selected for.

The invention of agriculture and the civilizations that resulted changed our living environment from one in which we lived in very small groups to one in which we formed large cities and lived together in much larger groups. Our population grew and we developed better transportation technologies, we came to a point where we now live in large interdependent groups of cities, states, and nations.

This current state of affairs, living in groups of millions in nation-states is relatively recent event and our genetics have not yet adapted to the new reality. Women still seek men that they believe will be good providers and defenders and unfortunately deception and aggression are still seen indicators of these qualities. In a nut shell this is why women are attracted to jerks and not “nice guys”.

These things largely happen on a subconscious level. They happen on a deeply ingrained instinctual level. Women will sleep with military men who will impregnate them, go off to war, and get themselves killed providing nothing. Or they’ll sleep with bad boys, people who will obtain resources by stealing, bullying, or through the use of deception. On a conscious level they know the likely outcome is not favorable in todays environment, but on a subconscious level they see these traits as indicative of a good provider.

Men in positions of wealth and power, start wars, take great risks, and they know that what they are doing. They know this is not in the best interests of the species as a whole, but whether or not they are consciously aware of it, they are driven towards aggression, driven to seek wealth and power at all costs, because they are the product of generations of ancestors who reproduced successfully because they were able to acquire resources and impress potential mates. Today large nations have hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons, each capable of obliterating hundreds of thousands to millions of lives in seconds. Behaviors which favored the survival of the species in the past now threaten our extinction.

Until recently, I had wondered about something I’ve observed time and time again. Rich people aren’t content to be rich, they need to be richer than other people. I read about a study in which men were given the opportunity to receive $5 from a researcher gratis, the only condition was that when they received $5, another man whom they did not know would receive $20. Men who had high testosterone levels turned down the $5, while men with low testosterone levels accepted it. Why would they care if someone else got $20? Because the fact that someone else got more gives them a competitive breeding advantage. On the surface this seems absurd because $5 is nothing compared to a normal income. However, the part of our brains making these decisions isn’t the modern more evolved portion, it’s the primitive portions that evolved eons ago which are not so good with math or logic let alone ethics.

Now I’m not saying this is a conscious effect for most people, on the contrary, most people would deny it, women will say they marry for love, men will make up excuses for their behavior. For most people it takes place in a primitive portion of the brain at a subconscious level, but not for everyone.

However, we’ve evolved bigger brains capable of far more complex reasoning, but it is difficult for us to override the primitive brain. It still provides the “drive” for everything we do. The trick, I believe, is awareness. The more we as a species become aware of what goes on in our primitive brain, of our genetic programming, of our distant past and history, the more effectively our more recently evolved larger brain can override that programming and choose behaviors that are more appropriate for todays environment.

Women can influence the development of our species by making some conscious decisions with respect to their choice of mates. Does it really make sense to allow someone headed for Iraq to impregnate you? Dead people really don’t make good providers no matter how macho they might appear. Does it make sense to propagate genetic traits that are harmful to our species and the planet as a whole? No it doesn’t because it will ultimately harm or eliminate your descendants. So choose wisely.

Men, particularly older men who’ve done all the reproducing you’re going to, consider how irrelevant the number of your offspring are if the entire civilization collapses? Perhaps it’s time to put some of that wealth into the preservation of civilization? Helping people in poverty get out of it will ease the overpopulation problem, and the likelihood that your offspring and their offspring and future generations that follow, will survive. This is completely contrary to your genetic programming but remember that genetic programming largely evolved when clans and small tribes and a global population of perhaps a few hundred thousand existed, not nuclear equipped nation-states and six and a half billion people.

You powerful oil company execs out there, you need to allow, encourage better energy technologies to evolve so that poverty and in the long term, overpopulation, can be eliminated. All your money won’t mean anything if there is no civilization producing goods that you can buy, no potential mates that you can impress. Use that big brain for the betterment of mankind.

Haliburton, you could be making just as much money building infrastructure in impoverished areas as in rebuilding after war and providing support infrastructure during war.

GE, you make your turbines can be used to power civilian or military aircraft, they can be used to make electricity, you also make wind turbines. Presently, the demand for large wind turbines exceeds the capacity to manufacture them because the economics of power generation from wind are so favorable. Why not shift your production facilities to producing additional wind turbines, the whole economy will grow as the result of the increased energy input and in the long run you will profit more than if you place your emphasis on military products. Military products destroy infrastructure and economies, and in the long run this means less money circulating to buy your products. So GE, why not do the right thing and manufacture products for peace?

Raytheon, you guys make missiles and torpedos and military radar. But you also make Beech aircraft, civilian radar, and a variety of other products. Your focus though does seem to be on destruction, I don’t know if there is any hope for your company.

Powerful men you really need to think in terms of future generations. If you have a billion offspring in this lifetime, it will mean nothing if no future generations survive.

Women, you really need to put some conscious thought into your selection of mates so that future generations are genetically more adapted to present day conditions.