The Game of Intelligent Design

It’s not like i have a shortage of AGI thoughts to talk about – ask my recent BBQ guests who got an earful after they mentioned how cute Asimo is – but lately the topics here have turned to more commercial matters, and since work is still in progress i admit that i’m a bit reluctant to provide details. Actually, i’m reluctant to provide overviews. But i wouldn’t want this blog to start getting stale for the absolutely awesome fellow who reads it, so i’m expanding its topical realm for the time being. Hope you don’t mind…

Watching TV again the other day. (I know, i just watched it last year…) There was a program on that was very excited about Tidal Power. I was interested since i conceived a bit of a plot on this topic myself a couple years ago, and actually spent a bit of time and a tiny bit of money on research. My plan was to “put a clock in a pizza box and throw it in the ocean”. More specifically, a pendulum whose axle was attached to a generator would be fitted inside a narrow box. The box, when put in choppy water, would be bandied about causing the pendulum to swing, and, voila, energy is captured. This of course is Wave Power, not Tidal Power, but whatever… go with it. The thinking was that bays could be created with thousands of these pizza boxes tethered together near the shore because, if they formed a shell around some otherwise exposed shore, the energy that they captured from the waves would render still the water on the inside.

Well, my testing showed that, at least with the $20 worth of equipment that i was using, the actual power that would get generated couldn’t defibrillate a Manitoban horse fly. But, in my defense, at least i recognized – and found a benefit of – the effects on the environment of the technology being there in the first place (i.e. that devices would suck the energy from the waves and create still water in the “bay”).

Thoughts of this project – if you’re generous enough to call it that – returned to me when i watch the Tidal Power program. In their case they were lowing turbines into straights (e.g. New York’s East River and some place in Ireland) where tides caused powerful reversing flows. In the NY case the project ended up costing millions of dollars so that they could use 6 turbines to produce 65% of the power to light a parkade, and also light a mid-sized grocery store. (Considering the cost of grid power for the same, their millions vs my $20 actually made my work into a resounding success.) The program dubbed this exercise a shining example of the triumph of “green power”, i.e. a completely renewable power source.

Being a software developer by trade, i naturally take things to extremes since that’s where interesting things happen, and not only with software. First i considered what insidious materials the turbines might be made out of, and if, say, a Zimbabwean submarine happened to crash into one, would that nasty stuff be released into the environment? More interestingly though, what if these turbines were actually remarkably good at generating power? The obvious thing to do is fill the East River to the brim with them. But remember, just like pizza boxes, each one sucks at little bit of energy out of the tidal flow, and each new one you put in the water makes the ones before it a tiny bit less efficient. There will come a point where the next new turbine will make the whole project no longer cost effective. I don’t know when this would occur, but the show didn’t even raise the point, it being too busy pissing out the fires in coal-burning generators.

Moveover, what would happen to the East River’s tides at that point? There would be a mass of turbines resisting the flow of the water, such that there would be a non-trivial water level rise on the source side, potentially flooding both sides once a day. Sure, you can say that the government would never let it get that far, but i’ve got two things to say to that: Hoover, and Three Gorges.

A few years back, i watched a different program that was demonizing the Chinese Three Gorges Dam, and also was kind enough to throw a new shots in Hoover’s direction too. I don’t recall if the producers came from one of the many environmental NGOs with perpetual reefer madness, but i can’t say there were a lot of holes that needed plugging in their arguments. Overall i recall being pretty much convinced. The environmental devastation that the Three Gorges area will experience while it adapts to the massive changes can’t really be denied, nor can they be fully contemplated. Even still, how much greener does power production get than hydro-electric dams? Most certainly, the answer isn’t Tidal Power.

And the answer isn’t Solar Power either. To generate enough power to even make a dent in North America’s astonishing electrical thirst huge swaths of land would need to be blanketed with panels. And what do you think would happen to the land underneath the panels? Without any exposure to sunlight,  it would quickly become cold and dead. Wind Power? I’m not sure what the effect of sucking energy from the winds would be. Day after day of muggy heat? Or maybe it would just tame the increasing number of hurricanes supposedly being created by supposed global warming.

So, is nothing safe from the rebuke of environmentalists? Nothing we’ve tried so far. But there is a solution, albeit one that i can’t research for $20. Put solar panels out in space where they are not shading the earth and radiate the power back. Of course, redirecting energy from space to the planet will inevitably warm the planet too, so if we’re hoping for environmental parity we’re still out of luck.