The Noughties in Retrospect 2000-2010

Perhaps the biggest phenomenon from a western view has been the rise of China as a superpower.

Internet services and applications, terrorism and wars in the middle east, oil, global warming politics, are some of the big things as well.

What will 2010 see? Well, my bet is that energy will be a big part of it. Oil is limited and is getting more expensive, coal is not. But coal is bad in the global warming sense. The big coal powers USA, China, Germany, UK, Canada, Australia at least are probably just going to keep burning it and not care what it does to the rest of the world.

During the noughties, CO2 rose from about 365 to 385 ppm. If the decadal rate is constant at 20 ppm per decade, then 600 ppm, a doubling from 1950s levels will require 215 ppm more, or about 110 years. Of course, the decadal emissions rate is probably going to accelerate. Local climate change phenomena will come earlier than things like significant sea level rise but it’s harder to point out that greenhouse gases are responsible for them. A fascinating experiment, this atmosphere alteration.

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Waiting for the Start Signal

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Some Chinese Problems

If you want to give people a higher material standard of living, you need energy. If you need to do this via industrialization, you need even more of it. China has done it with coal. There is this lengthy article by Greg Peel describing the situation much closer. The energy intensity of GDP has not gone down all the time.

Then there’s this video report by Journeyman pictures showing some effects you get when the use of a dangerous resource, in this case, coal, is badly controlled:

I’d take some claims there with a grain of sand, but it is something to take note of anyway, if you are interested in real world energy policy.

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Chinese Mini Space Station

From Slashdot via Hobbyspace.

There’s some confusion regarding Shenzou 7 (the upcoming mission), 8, 9 and 10 forming a space station by snapping together in orbit.

The orbital module of Shenzou can stay behind on orbit just fine, it can function as an independent spacecraft, while the crew returns with the crew module. They have done this with previous Shenzous as well. If the OM:s (or some of them) have docking ports on both ends, I don’t think it will be that hard to dock and chain them.

I don’t remember if they have demonstrated rendezvous and docking yet in any scale. I imagine it being quite a lot easier nowadays with better comms and computers than during the days of Gemini.

Of course, this is a model for orbital propellant depots as well. Too bad the western space agencies are too corrupt and self-absorbed to think anything like that.

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