Scott Tinker
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Scott Tinker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The battery is less dense than dung on a per unit weight basis. A battery is a lot less dense than dung. Yes, on a weight basis. That's why it takes a thousand pounds of battery to drive a car. A Tesla S is a thousand pound battery pack, 7,000 batteries the size of your cell phone and that under the whole floor bed. It just, it has physics limits, okay.
So as we, but let's do electrons and molecules. We need molecules for a lot of useful things and burning them arguably is maybe not the best use if we had perfect other options for them now. I can electrify some things, vehicles, small cars, bigger cars. I can do hybrids for bigger buses. But because there's so much weight in that battery, when I fly here on an airplane...
The whole airplane would be a battery. Right, right, right. To get me to go.
Yeah, it's kind of cool. It's an electric plane, but it's doing nothing else. Right, right, right. And so go up that density curve again. I'm putting jet fuel, diesel, in those wings. Really dense energy. And that allows me to haul weight in humans and luggage and freight and other things. So you have to think about the end uses of energy.
It's not crazy to burn molecules when they're the only thing that will do that job. The rockets that Elon Musk launches and takes to space aren't flying on batteries. Those are on LNG, and they're actually on natural gas, but hydrogen too. So molecules have a great use for some things. natural gas and oil, electrons have a great use for other things.
We should try to get to the point where we're using the right form of energy to do the right job. Nuclear makes electricity.
And heat. You make a lot of heat with nuclear.
My nephew was the third in command, or my cousin, third in command of a nuclear attack sub. I've been on it. It's an incredible little... I didn't get to see it, but the core is not very big.
And you're putting... quite a bit of oomph to drive that patented propeller.
I can't remember, 50s and 60s, somewhere in there, and also aircraft carriers.
Yeah, they're... When I was young, I was trained to be terrified of nuclear war. It was a Cold War. I mean, in kindergarten, I got under my desk in drills and hid, preparing for a nuclear attack, Jordan. Because I knew the desk would protect me from a nuclear- Yes, of course, of course. Yeah, I was safe under the little desk. So my generation grew up, your generation are scared of that.
Oh, definitely. And there's still some reverberation in fear. Fear is extremely powerful. You know this better than I do as a psychologist. It's a powerful motivator. And it inhibits logical thinking sometimes. I mean, the beginning of wisdom is do away with fear, okay? But that's the fear we were trained with. Young people today haven't had that fear of nuclear baked into them.
They've had climate baked into them.
They're terrified of that. And they literally are gutturally terrified of that. They are emotionally, psychologically depressed. don't want to have kids, get married, suicidal.
In a productive world. Right. If you aren't allowed to be productive, you don't have the energy to be productive. It depends on where you are on that productivity scale. But, you know, Maslow outlined it pretty elegantly, I think, when he looked at the hierarchy from self-actualization kind of on down through love. But those bottom two tiers, safety, security, these things are made.
I know those are addressed by energy and wealth. the fundamental physio things that we need, physical things we need, and safety and security, those bottom two tiers in that pyramid, energy and wealth. That lifts people up. So that's what we're talking about here with 7 billion people, is the fundamental things that make everybody safer, more secure, and productive.
Food in your stomach, some clothes on your back, a shelter. some climate control, perhaps if you're living in a hot place or a cold place, et cetera, clean water to drink. These are healthcare, education. These are fundamental things.
Big time, big time. That is literally what drives a lot of those things. So you get to 7 billion people, that's a lot of energy. And you asked the question, do we have it? Are we running out? We would run out if we were using hay and wood and cutting biomass and dung. There's not enough of that to do. 8.3 billion people and growing.
We can talk about population because it's fascinating demographics, but there's not enough of that. Coal, there's quite a bit of coal still left in the world. Hundreds a year supply in the US. Asia has a lot of coal, blah, blah. Other impacts of coal from burning it.
It's solvable. The thing that you have to do, though, you want to say, what's my energy returned on my energy invested? That's a metric, EROI, it's called. And so how much energy does it take throughout the whole energy system to get useful energy out? With coal... You're mining it, moving it on trains, barges, trucks, you burn it.
Showing 81–100 of 207 · page 5 of 11
← Previous
Next →