A hole in the ground

In the Doctor Who episode "The Hungry Earth," a scientist named Nasreen Chaudhry is trying to break the previous record for deep drilling into the Earth, ostensibly to find the source of some minerals that seem to occur nowhere else, but also because "let's see if we can actually do it."  The team running the drill is trying to send it down 21 kilometers, and it just about reaches the target depth when...

It suddenly shuts down.  The reason, it turns out, is that it is endangering an underground colony of hibernating Silurians, the reptilian race that used to be Earth's dominant species, and some of them were automatically awakened when the threat was detected, and proceeded to sabotage the drill -- and head up to the surface to destroy the humans who had created it.  The resulting conflict is anything but a quick good-guy-vs.-bad-guy story.  It explores all sorts of uncomfortable topics like xenophobia, fanaticism, righteous and unrighteous anger, revenge, and how hard it can be to trust when you don't know what the other person's motives are.  Some of the Silurians come out looking pretty awful -- but then, so do some of the humans.

I couldn't help but think about this episode when a friend of mine, the wonderful writer and blogger Andrew Butters (of Potato Chip Math, which you all should subscribe to right now) sent me a link to an article in Vice describing a project that is doing the exact same thing.

The company is called Quaise Energy, and at least is doing it for sound reasons.  The borehole, which is projected to be almost twenty kilometers long when it's completed, beats the previous record (twelve kilometers) by a large margin).  The idea is that down that deep, the rock is being heated by the mantle, and it would be a nearly limitless supply of geothermal energy -- literally, just pump water down pipes inside the borehole, and the return pipes will bring up steam that can then be used to generate electricity.  (They already do this, on a much smaller scale, in Iceland; the boreholes can be far shallower there, because the island sits right on top of the Mid-Atlantic Rift Zone, and is one of the most volcanically active places in the world; in some places, all you have to do is dig down a few inches and the soil is hot to the touch.)

At twenty kilometers down, the ambient bedrock temperature is about 500 C, so there's no question that the energy is there.  Getting down that far, however, is no mean feat; they're using collimated lasers called gyrotrons, which can burn through rock, so unlike the unfortunate drill team in Doctor Who, there's less machinery to get jammed up, or sabotaged by lizard people from the dawn of time, or whatever.

The nice thing about this is that it's about as close to zero carbon footprint as you can get.  "This funding round brings us closer to providing clean, renewable baseload energy," said Carlos Araque, CEO and co-founder of Quaise Energy.  "Our technology allows us to access energy anywhere in the world, at a scale far greater than wind and solar, enabling future generations to thrive in a world powered with abundant clean energy."

All of that sounds great, and it's nice to see people putting time, energy, and money into ways to unhook us further from fossil fuels.  And fortunately, there probably are no Silurians down there, so the overall risk is fairly low.  The hope is that when they get proof-of-concept from the first borehole, it might be an incentive to place them elsewhere.  The best thing about geothermal is not only that it's effectively limitless, but once you get the pipes and pumps in place, it needs very little maintenance, and no additional expense for fuel; some of the electricity produced by the steam can be siphoned off to run the pumps, and the rest of it is essentially free energy.

So I'm all for it, and I hope the project proceeds quickly, because heaven knows we need better and cleaner energy sources.  I'd love it if there was geothermal here where I live -- because in this region our electricity is mostly from coal, and our house is heated with fuel oil (supplemented considerably, I have to add, by our solar panels.)  On the other hand, if a super angry reptilian military leader suddenly bursts out of the borehole and starts killing people who get in her way, I'm gonna be right the hell out of here.

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The solar vacuum cleaner

Poe's Law has claimed another victim.

Well, more than one.  Lots more than one, to judge by Facebook and Twitter over the last couple of days.  This particular iteration of the rule that any sufficiently well-done satire is indistinguishable from the real thing comes at the hands of The National Report, which shares the stage with The Onion as a hysterically funny source for completely fake news.

This time, The National Report has taken aim at the solar power industry with a stunning exposé called "Solar Panels Drain the Sun's Energy, Experts Say."  In the article, we find out about a study done at the Wyoming Institute of Technology that showed that solar panels suck energy from the sun in the fashion of giant leeches:

Scientists at the Wyoming Institute of Technology, a privately-owned think tank located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, discovered that energy radiated from the sun isn’t merely captured in solar panels, but that energy is directly physically drawn from the sun by those panels, in a process they refer to as "forced photovoltaic drainage." 

"Put into laymen’s terms, the solar panels capture the sun’s energy, but pull on the sun over time, forcing more energy to be released than the sun is actually producing," WIT claims in a scientific white paper published on Wednesday.  "Imagine a waterfall, dumping water.  But you aren’t catching the water in buckets, but rather sucking it in with a vacuum cleaner.  Eventually, you’re going to suck in so much water that you drain the river above that waterfall completely."

WIT is adamant that there’s no immediate danger, however.  "Currently, solar panels are an energy niche, and do not pose a serious risk to the sun.  But if we converted our grids to solar energy in a big way, with panels on domestic homes and commercial businesses, and paving our parking lots with panels, we’d start seeing very serious problems over time.  If every home in the world had solar panels on their roofs, global temperatures would drop by as much as thirty degrees over twenty years, and the sun could die out within three hundred to four hundred years."

And to make the article even funnier, the study was supposedly commissioned by none other than Halliburton:

"Solar panels destroying the sun could potentially be the worst man-made climate disaster in the history of the world, and Halliburton will not be taking part in that," the company stated in a press release issued Friday morning.  "It’s obvious, based on the findings of this neutral scientific research group, that humans needs to become more dependent on fossil fuels like oil and coal, not less."

My mirth over this story dwindled, however, when I noticed that almost every person who posted this story had done so because... they thought it was true.

[image courtesy of photographer M. O. Stevens and the Wikimedia Commons]

I wish I were making this up.  Here's a selection of the comments that I saw appended to the link.  You may want to put a pillow on your desk for the inevitable faceplant:

Green technology my ass.  The liberal pseudo-environmentalists are selling us out as usual. 

Pass this link along!  Don't let this get swept under the rug! 

Just another way they're going to make money off the fake climate change agenda. 

Alot [sic] more believable than what you hear about the "greenhouse effect" bullshit. 

I wonder how long it will take for the warmists to suppress this.

*sits, hands over face, sobbing softly*

I don't know, folks.  I think that this one may have pushed me over the edge.  "Warmists?"  "Liberal pseudo-environmentalists?"

What, because we have the brainpower to recognize that you can't suck up sunlight with a fucking vacuum cleaner?

And even if light did work this way, we'd have a slightly larger problem than solar panels, you know?  Namely: plants.  As light-suckers go, the plants are a hell of a lot more efficient than solar panels, and there are a great many more of them.  So, what should our slogan be?  "Down with photosynthesis?"  "Pave the forest, save the planet?"

I know all too well, first hand, the state of science education in the United States.  And this is despite teaching in a pretty good school system, where there are a great many opportunities for in-depth study in science.  I know that between school budgets cutting staffing to the bone, and the purely ideological hacking of science education standards to remove controversial topics like climate change and evolution, it's a wonder kids don't graduate thinking that all matter is composed of the four elements Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.  (And interesting, too, that according to the article I linked, the first state to reject public school science standards explicitly because of the issue of climate change was the state of Wyoming -- a point that no doubt the writers of the satire in The National Report were trying to make by siting the fake "study" in Cheyenne.)

But really, people.  How ignorant about the world around you can you get?  This goes way past "dopeslap" territory, right into "please don't breed."

And to the people over at The National Report:  I'm uncertain whether to applaud, or ask you to publish a retraction.  Poe's Law notwithstanding, we really don't need more people voting against clean energy.