I like the idea making some of the email I receive about my "Rants" available to others. I like those with insight and arguments that make me think and maybe reconsider my opinions. I will include those that I consider to have valid and lucid logic, not just opinions or beliefs.

If you have likes, opinions, and pet peeves; I will try to have links to your pages. I haven't figured out exactly the details where and how yet.

Here is the first:

Hi Lafarr, So nice to hear from someone with views, different from my own, and yet able to rationally and cogently express them. Given that all organic chemicals were synthesized by some process here on Earth I believe that the only question is that of energy. With sufficient energy and a process, any organic chemical can be synthesized. One of the things the Petroleum Institute did at USC was synthesize the equivalent of 'crude oil' from its component parts. The challenge was that creating it took more energy than you could recover by combusting it (those pesky laws of thermodynamics). However, they did manage to show that a nuclear power plant could provide the energy necessary to synthesize gasoline for internal combustion engines. I've not read their technical reports, only what I get in the alumni blurb, but they should be available. To your question about 93 miles east of here and fusion. I was of course making a weak reference to the Sun which is 93 million miles from here (nominally east if you map the tangent from the surface of the planet at dawn). Further, the increasing efficiency of solar cells which makes them financially viable for a number of people is helping as well. You did make the comment, But the facts are with today's technology it takes more energy to produce a solar cell than it will ever produce in its' lifetime. This is arguably not true, but it happens to be irrelevant. For the sake of argument lets say it takes EXACTLY as much energy to produce a solar cell as it will generate over its lifetime. The function of the solar cell is that of _transport_ rather than generation. With no "loss" I've managed to transfer all the energy needed to create the solar cell to its destination. Now thermodynamics tells us there is loss, but that loss is "made up" because on location additional energy is added to the system that would otherwise be converted only to heat. So to use a contrived example, I build 10 nuclear power plants in the middle of no where powering a huge silicon solar cell manufacturing complex. I carry the manufactured cells from that complex to all the places in the world where they need power. The cells over their lifetime generate the same amount of energy that I generated with nuclear power to create them, but now its done where its needed without risk and without additional infrastructure (overhead wires etc.) Another way to look at this is that over the millennia the Sun helped flora and fauna to grow which then died and became compressed organic chemicals in the ground. This allowed the solar energy from the Triassic period to be transported to modern times in the form of chemical bonds. Building solar panels with available energy lets us transport it more easily, just as using available energy to create heavy hydrocarbons that can be burned lets us transport it. Its all just energy. The *only* "net gain" processes are based on nuclear fuels, we can either figure out how to harness them or we can build devices that harvest the existing reactors in the universe (stars). We've proven very adept at manipulating it once it is in electrical form. --Chuck

It turns out Chuck is a very interesting high tech person, and his web site deserves much more than the simple link I gave at the top. Check it out. I intend to do more exploring there also.