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Great Ideas!

What science may do.

One Hot Idea!

A computer furnace.

Dispersed processing is a growing thing these day. Now they are after the way proteins fold among other things. This is useful information to medicine that may stop or prevent diseases, like the mis-folding proteins that cause prion disease that eats up the brains of people and animals. Stop Alzheimer's, and bad bugs, etc.

One way this may be enhanced, particularly when fuel cells allow electricity to be made cheaply from a gas energy source; is to let the electricity do computer processing work and then use the heat it generates for warmth. Admittedly this may take some redesign work on the part of computer manufactures. But since there is little human interface necessary, and the memory requirements are relatively small, many components are not needed. The to match the equivalent heat output of furnaces presently the biggies are: the power supply, possibly 50 times the size of present PC's; and multiple processors, a count of up to a 100 or more. To equal just a typical milk-house heater would take maybe 1/10 that. Yet since a furnace now days usually does not run all the time, one may be able to scale back at least 1/3. Anyway, the present heater only has the electrons running around and bumping into one another with no benefit to anyone except that it makes heat.

Some other benefits that one might see out of it is large scale virtual reality generation for design and analysis as well as entertainment. Even to allowing automated systems to become better organized, dependable, and even possibly self made, and maintained.

Shepherding Moons

and the Light and Shadow of Rings

(a way to balance our Earth's varying orbit's effect on the climate)

Should men ever develop the earth's moon's energy and other resources (which would almost assuredly require heavy automation), there would readily be enough to make massive space stations that would orbit the earth. If they were massive enough one could then use them to keep material dispersed in rings, such as those around Saturn, maintained in orbit. The way this works is that the inner "moon" pulls on the material in the ring just beyond it and speeds it up a dab; as the moon is orbitting faster that that material. This keeps it from falling to earth. The outer "moon" does just the opposite and keeps material from wandering off.

Another effect that may be of interest is the fact that there is a natural stable point in the orbit of a massive object that tends to keep another object orbitting in a similar relative point. That point is one-third the way around the orbit from the primary object. This would make it easy to keep three "moons" in the same orbit and perhaps have the same effect with less mass. Having satelites in this arrangement also lets them, as a group, see or communicate with about all the earth's surface.

The principle purpose of such a ring would be its shadow or perhaps its ability to reflect extra light to the earth if it was orbitting pole to pole instead of around the equator. These effects could help offset the typical glacial/inter-glacial cycles the earth now has. I do not know how hard it is to generate and maintain a slow flipping of the ring; but if it was made to do so about every 80,000 years it may be able to consistently offset the solar system's planets' orbit effecting climate change to a large degree. The extra bulk at the earths equator may tend to stop the rings flip, though. So captured or reflected solar energy may have to be introduced into the system to maintain its desired position.

It is not impossible appearance of such rings may end up looking like a rainbow for the same reason a CD-ROM generates a reflected spectrum, if it is basically reflective yet not completely smooth and consistently orientated relative to the sun.

All this of course, depends on the strength and stability of the automated systems able to execute such work. The only way that it is likely to exist, is if the mechanisms for the system are pretty much self-maintaining and perhaps even self-designing. As for the potential of such a system, There are computer programs that have already self-designed circuitry up to the quality of the analog TV. If you have ever looked at a schematic for a TV set, you will surely have noted its complexity. And frankly, some of the older sets appear to have more complex interactions going on than many of the newer ones. So, it may only be a matter of time and focus for things to be quite well analyzed and for great ideas to become a stable health enhancing reality.

A heart for Fish.

Why Fish Ladders? Why not a Fish (Pipe)Line?

To me, it would seem to be very simple for us to make a modified pipeline around dams for the fish to use. All one needs to add inflating bladders that used the pressure ahead of them to enlarge and slow the water flow down a lot, as long as a fish is not trying to got through that spot. It probably wouldn't take too many in a line to do the job. And sensing when a fish was waiting to pass would be as easy as sensing a broken beam of light. A very common process these days.

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