h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://shawcable.tucows.com/adkiller95.html

It IS true... I mean... of course it is.

Oil is the centre of everything. Iceland has cottoned on to this and they are actually taking steps to run the whole country on hydrogen. Now how cool is that? Hydrogen waste is actually... water. Nobody talks about this though. It's best not to go and give small countries any ideas. Even if only the smallest countries in Europe gradually stopped using oil, the damage to oil companies and multinationals would be huge. Iceland's got the right idea.

The sad truth is, a lot of the things we wish we could invent have already been invented and the patents are being buried.

It's a mean, scary world. Let's all buy the ugly e-Cars and s***w the system. We'll thank ourselves for it.

There is one interesting thing. There's at the moment work on making a car that runs on hydrogen/oxygen. It's only emission will be water vapour. Now that sounds all nice and natural. But actually when it comes to greenhouse gases, water vapour is one of the worst. Something like 10 times as bad as CO2. So perhaps it could worsen the situation instead of helping it.

Not necessarily - water vapour has this marvellous habit of forming clouds, and when it hits a critical mass, it falls as rain. Problem solved. I doubt water vapour emissions from H/O fuel cell vehicles could cause a serious global warming problem, because it'd just rain a little more. Maybe. If we'd even notice it - how much do you think evaporates from the world's oceans every day? Can we even come close to that level of emission? Especially if there's a mixture of fuel cell and electric cars in the future.

There's enough evidence to suggest that the oil companies have bought up patents that would threaten their business and equally you don't have to look far to see co-operation between oil companies and car manufactorers - but that's only natural.
But, you're all to short-sighted, with emission free or flying (or maybe emission-free flying) cars. What I want to invent is a hyper-drive, so you don't have to waste time travelling places.

I want a finite improbability generator, and a computer powerful enough to work out exactly how improbable it is that all the stupid people in the world will suddenly become very, very intelligent, and at the same time will gain enough education to realise how to save the planet. They will of course all agree on how this should be done, and ta-da! Human race saved.

I would then work out exactly how improbable it would be that I could go and build a mansion on the moon, then I'd go and do that, and watch them saving the planet with a large telescope.

The problem with most motorised transport is the pollution it causes, right? Whether it originates from the vehicle itself via internal combustion or from a power station whilst an electricallly powered vehicle is being charged. So we need to get rid of the pollution full stop, thats logical isn't it?
Well actually i don't think it is. I'd like to invent an easy way to catch and compress all our (unwanted) greenhouse pollutants and transport them to other cold planets safely and cheaply. If Carbon Dioxide and its other pollutant palls can warm up our planet why don't we use them to warm up others to make them habitable for human life?

The thing about electric cars is that yes, we're generating electricity in a polluting way at the moment, but if everyone's running electric cars, building new, clean power stations and switching over to clean electricity generation happens seamlessly, because at the consumer's end we can't tell the difference between electricity produced by a nuclear power plant, a coal power plant or thousands of fish riding bicycles. So it would then be easier to clean everything up.

Also, I'm not entirely sure but it _may_ hold that a fossil fuel power plant produces less pollution to produce the same amount of energy than a car's engine does. Then again, it might not, and I suppose it depends on the kind of fossil fuel it uses, not to mention its design. But the point is, you could replace all the power stations with fusion ones (when someone works out how to build them) and we'd all then get the benefit of it immediately.

Mr. Legion....Realy I've seen programs that do most of what you've asked...Of course it'd involve downloading about 20programs to do all that and probably take up half your RAM to just run them, but there are most of those programs. Well gotta go

Yeah, when I followed the link I found lots of them. I guess the trick is in finding the right one to download. One particularly annoying type of popup ad comes with Morpheus 1.9. The ads automatically whiz over to the edge of the screen, and then ooze slowly across in front of whatever you're looking at.

Well, the electrical cars could of course be powered using solar or geothermal power.

I don't know what effect the water vapour from the cars would have. I just know water vapour is a big greenhouse gas so maybe it could have quite an effect. Maybe it's smaller than what the oceans give off, but our cars have apparently also given off less CO2 in the last 100 than one volcanic eruption.

I would like to invent a clean efficient way of picking up oil spills from tankers that run aground or otherwise lose crude oil. I thought of modifying a cement mixer to work in reverse but I never worked out the details.

a mental techinque for flying that didn't involve physical exertion or any machinery or anything like that

a piece of legislation that was EFFECTIVE at stopping politicians from lying - i am a baby-politician and it is SO frustrating watching people bald faced LIE (i am thinking about Act's spurious crime statistics that are just lies) - of course i consider the current legal and political system to be fundamentally flawed, so this would just be an interim measure until the revolution, you understand

a dream recorder - so that you could play them back and thus catch all those annoying details that bug you all day

an organic method that didn't smell for keeping your immediate surroundings cosy

a foam car that didn't hurt anyone or anything when it hits things

genuinely non-stick cookware that only required gentle rinsing not hardarse scrubbing

letterboxes that were easy to deliver to (and all right on the pavement so that you didn't have to clamber over grass, stones, mud, dogs, small children, fences, etc)

span

Somebody has invented oil eating bacteria for oil spills. They're just afraid what might happen if they got away. They could start attacking natual oil deposits.

A foam car... now that would be good, except that all those speed-fanatics who want nothing better than a fast car under their fat a**es wouldn't like it very much, simply because it wouldn't go very fast because of air resistance. I'd buy one, of course, provided it ran on hydrogen or electricity

As for the dream recorder, I have a lot of nightmares that are best forgotten about Still, therapists all over the world would be very happy if it were invented

A personal air conditioner... perhaps built into your clothes like they're doing with phones etc. Downside being a permanent Michelin Man look

Alternatively the introduction of a decimalised year. We work 10 days on and 10 days off. Permanent jobshare opportunities while still offering the chance of a life. You wouldn't need to take holiday, you could agree to swap occasionally if you needed more time off

Wow! That would be good...

Sorry to butt in on your conversation, but if researcher BEX would go back to there own page and click on the "EDIT PAGE"button and write a little something about yourself , then an "ACE",(Assistant Community Editors), can come and welcome you there properly. Sorry for the interuption.

manda

You are talking about the H/O fuel powered machines but how about the sources of the elements if not processing its sources .That requires energy isn't? Doesn't it sound really ironical to use energy to produce energy? ,
JPJ.

Done