I am worrying a bit about our solar system, having been reading Dava Sobel’s excellent book The Planets.
According to Dava, the sun is one big nuclear explosion, whereby all the hydrogen is getting used up and turned into helium, at the rate of 700,000,000 tons a second, which is really quite a lot of hydrogen disappearing really quite fast. Once all the hydrogen has turned into helium, then things start turning bad. The helium starts burning, much, much hotter. So that, when that happens, we are told, the earth will melt. Now, they say there is plenty of hydrogen left. Another three to five billions years’ worth. But talk is cheap. They said that we had stonks of coal and oil and all, and then a wet weekend later, they are telling us that that is all just about the run out, and what we need to do is to have lots of wind turbines, which will last us for eternity, or at any rate until Al Gore pops his clogs, which feels like pretty much the same thing. But now we see that the wind turbines are all rusting up, like an elephant’s graveyard; on Hawaii alone (which you might think is a jolly good place for wind turbines, what with it being pretty windy there) there are apparently six wind farms that are now abandoned.
Continue reading →