Alan J Fletcher wrote:
This is like suggesting that a nation that happens to have a lot of
silicon to make glass will go on using vacuum tube computers long
after transistors are invented.
Bad analogy : excepting Galium Arsenide, most chips are made up of
Silicon, Oxygen and Aluminum ...
It was a pretend analogy. No one would think of using discrete vacuum
tubes instead of integrated circuits. That would be economical lunacy.
Imagine trying make a Pentium Dual Core CPU with 167 million discrete
components.
Using a source of energy that costs your nation billions of dollars a
year, when you can 10 times more energy, or 100 times more, for zero
dollars per year would also be economic lunacy. No one would do that.
This is not even taking into account the fact that conventional energy
causes tremendous damage. The use of coal in the United States kills
roughly 20,000 people per year. And that is not even taking into account
global warming.
Imagine a containership company trying to run oil-fired ships competing
cold fusion powered ones. The oil fired ship costs about $100,000 per
day for fuel. The cold fusion ship fuel cost is zero dollars to five
significant decimal places over the entire life of the ship. the cold
fusion powered engines themselves are much cheaper than the oil powered
ones, because they are simpler and do not require pollution controls,
and they do not require optimization for efficiency, because it does not
matter how much heat you waste.
If you have a fleet of 20 ships you pay $2 million a day more than the
competition, plus your ships cost about millions more to construct and
maintain. You think any business could compete on that basis?
Here is a containership engine:
http://www.emma-maersk.com/engine/Wartsila_Sulzer_RTA96-C.htm
My second analogy is somewhat more realistic. In fact, poor nations with
lots of open grassland, bad roads, and low population still do use
horses. You see this in South America and Mongolia for example. They use
automobiles too, of course.
- Jed
