Steve and Judy's Travels!

Dark Matter and Dark Energy.  It’s the stuff that makes up 95% of the mass of the universe, but it doesn’t reflect light, or anything else we can throw at it, so we can’t see it.  It’s a giant mystery.  Nobody can figure out what it is.  We know a lot about the 05% of the universe we can see, but 95% of the mass of the universe is a mystery.

We know dark matter and energy are there because our understanding of the universe requires that they be there to make the math work.  We can see how the visible matter behaves and work our way back to how much gravity there must be.  It’s the gravitational force of all this unidentified matter and energy that keeps galaxies together as they spin, instead of flying apart.  That mass has to be there.  Unless our understanding of gravity is wrong. 

Instead of looking for dark matter, some physicists are looking at our understanding of gravity.  Is there another way to look at gravity that doesn’t require 95% of the universe to be made up of something we can’t see, smell, touch, or taste.  Really, does it make any sense that all our cosmological efforts have only resulted in the detection of 5% of our universe?  Count me skeptical.  Sure, all the theorizing and calculating that I don’t understand requires these dark things, but I’ve seen situations before where a series of apparently logical steps can lead to an illogical conclusion.  Get one tiny piece of the string of logic wrong and the whole understanding can be wrong.  Maybe there is no such thing as dark matter, and we just need a better understanding of gravity.  Wouldn’t that be cool.  It goes with Occam’s razor too.  The simplest explanation is usually the best.  An explanation of the universe that doesn’t require these mystical undetectable dark forces would certainly be simpler!

I always take the stairs.  It’s a good thing to do, right?  Work up a little puff going up and down a few flights.

While on a recent trip, I had these hotel stairs to contend with.  Not a problem as far as number of steps or number of floors, but that rug pattern!  Never quite sure exactly where that first step began. 

Held on to the rail real tight until I was sure I was well established on the steps each time.

It’s a movie from a couple decades back.  It’s a story about a secret government project in Los Angeles that was going to use satellites and security cameras to detect crime and take out bad guys before they even committed their act, thereby rendering the city safe.  Ironically, they were going to end violence with violence.  Of course, in the end the good guy exposed the project, and it was abandoned.  The concept was a stretch in 1997. 

Now, it’s only twenty years later and satellite surveillance results in bad guys on the other side of the planet being located, tracked, and taken out by missiles fired from U.S. drones.  Wow.  I think we just ended violence with violence.

Petroleum fired utility plants have the advantage of working at any time of day or night.  No uncertainty.  Dependability.  When you know you’re going to need power, fire them up.  It takes an electrical grid to distribute the power, but you can generate the power in the region you need it.

Wind and solar have their limits.  They only work when the elements drive them, not just when we need them, so they all have to have petroleum utility backups.  Wind and solar have their limits, unless we had batteries that would hold their output.  If we had giant batteries that could hold enough energy for cities, we could produce excess power during the days when it’s sunny and/or when it’s windy, then use that energy during the night and when it’s not windy.  Energy storage is the third leg of the stool to make wind and solar a practical solution.  (California is working hard on grid-scale batteries, but we’re a long way from a national backup.)

We don’t have batteries like that yet.  But in a way we do.  We have a (mostly) national energy grid.  If we can produce more energy than we need during peak production in one area and share it with another area of the country, that other area of the country could share it back during their peak production.  Setting energy aside when we’ve got more than we need, then using it back when we need it.  That’s a lot like a battery!  Transferring energy back and forth across the country wouldn’t be exactly a battery, but it could produce the same results.  A band of solar peak production works its way across the Continental U.S. from east to west every day.  That’s four time zones in the Continental U.S.  That just bought us four hours of “storage”!  That’s four hours of energy we don’t need to put into batteries.  Conceptually, if we had 24 time zones, that would be our full-time global battery!  (Of course, there are transmission losses every time we move energy from one place to another, but let’s disregard that for this exercise.) 

For the bus.  We closed the deal 17 years ago today.  2005.  Drove that shiny new thing off the lot.

 188,000 miles later it’s a bittersweet anniversary though, because this year we’re not in the bus traveling, we’re running through options for how to part with it.  It’s not that we don’t still love it, it’s that the great indulgence is just no longer in our budget.  We can still travel, but it will be by other means.  No second (rolling) home.  A single home.  We’ll be away from home while we’re traveling, and we’ll be back home when we’re not.

 Sometimes simpler is better.  We’ll see.