How do we end the era of suicide bombers? We must give them a future that is worth living for. Currently we are destroying their futures, leaving them with only their hope of taking a shortcut to heaven.
Author: Ben Harack
I'm an aspiring omnologist who is fascinated by humanity's potential.
Curtis Dorosh: Green living, building, and volunteering
How to live green? Build green buildings? Put our efforts towards a better future? Curtis Dorosh has spent much of his life trying to answer these questions. Collected here are some of his answers.
How to argue with trolls and extremists
How to argue against those who will never change their mind, and who will undermine your attempts to discuss things meaningfully. These are our best tips for how to deal with trolls and extremists.
Vision of Earth in social media
At Vision of Earth, we have been innovating our social media presence. Here we discuss how you can interact with us through Facebook, Twitter, RSS, email, Digg, Reddit, and our newsletter.
Demand side management to help build a renewable power grid
Demand side management helps make our power grid more cost-effective and aids in the transition towards renewable energy. It can also be considered as a very green policy on its own, as it reduces the amount of power we need to produce, and thus our impact on the environment.
How trolls and extremists are damaging our public discourse
Trolls and extremists contaminate our public discourse with falsehoods, logical fallacies, irrational argument, poisoning the well, false expertise, and the creation of de-facto knowledge. Individuals must learn to resist the onslaught of ideas driven by these sections of society.
Vision of Earth has a newsletter!
We have created a newsletter for Vision of Earth! The intent of this effort is to stimulate continued two-way communication with our readers and to provide concise summaries of important content we have created and experienced.
31 Ways to Reduce Paper Usage
Why should we care about our paper usage? For me the key points are that it is an expensive, impermanent storage medium that is made primarily out of those wondrous things we call trees.
Power system performance metrics
Everything has its price. Every form of power production has costs in dollars, time, land, materials, pollutants, greenhouse gas emissions, and human deaths. We look at the most important factors for analyzing the feasibility of a proposed power project. Considering only some of these factors will lead to an incomplete picture of power system costs.
Fusion fast ignition systems
Fusion ‘fast ignition’ systems are some intriguing new possibilities for fusion development. They may make it possible for humanity to achieve functional fusion reactors in a few decades.
Laser implosion fusion reactors
Laser implosion fusion is a proposed method for creating nuclear fusion power plants. It is showing some great promise, being the most likely candidate for the first fusion method to reach net energy gain. Exciting new developments may make fusion power a reality in the coming decades.
Lindsey Simpson of TEDxMcGill on volunteerism and planning major events
Lindsey Simpson, one of the organizers of TEDxMcGill, talks in this interview about why she likes to volunteer and work hard to plan such big events. TEDxMcGill is an externally organized TED event in the city of Montreal, Canada on November 20th, 2010.
Feed-in tariffs: A fitting policy for renewable energy
Here we talk about what a feed in tariff is and how it works. We also conduct an overview of how effective feed in tariffs have been at stimulating the renewable energy industry around the world.
Interview with wind power guru Paul Gipe
Wind power expert Paul Gipe advocates that we deliberately create our green energy future rather than wait around for it to happen. He says that we should aim to democratize our energy production for a more prosperous future.
How do we turn nuclear fusion energy into electricity?
How do we turn fusion power into electricity? There are two main methods. We can use heat engines like steam turbines or we can use a very new system called ‘direct conversion’ which has some interesting properties.
The basic realities of fusion reactor design
Issues and difficulties with creating a physical system for nuclear fusion. To succeed, we must face temperatures that vaporize all known materials and other requirements that make this the most difficult technological endeavor of our age.
Fusion fuel cycles: What they are and how they work
There are a number of different fuels that can be used for creating fusion power. Here we look at the useful ones and look at their advantages and disadvantages. Different fuel cycles require very different implementations.
How can renewables deliver dispatchable power on demand?
What does dispatchable mean? Why is it important? How do we currently do this? Can renewable energy fulfill this role? What other tricks can we use?
Helpful tools for understanding nuclear fusion
These are the concepts I found to be very useful during my fusion research. Here we define ignition state, Lawson criterion, fusion performance parameter, and energy gain factor Q.
The science behind fusion power
In order to understand nuclear fusion at a deep level, you must have a strong grasp of a number of areas of physics. I have collected here some resources for learning these skills. The general areas are electromagnetism, nuclear physics, thermodynamics, and plasma physics.