[HN Gopher] Mars Trilogy: Festival Night
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       Mars Trilogy: Festival Night
        
       Author : Amorymeltzer
       Score  : 4 points
       Date   : 2022-12-13 21:34 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (caseyhandmer.wordpress.com)
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | Another post from one of my favorite bloggers.
       | 
       | So far as synthetic hydrocarbons go for the last two years I've
       | been thinking about making a sunshade from plastic films using
       | material from an asteroid which got me interested in C1
       | chemistry. There is a lot of interest in C1 chemistry now to make
       | jet fuel out of renewable hydrogen and CO2 from the atmosphere
       | but it seems "when things change they stay the same" because it
       | still centers around the same Fischer-Trospch chemistry that the
       | Nazis tried to use to make motor fuel at Auschwitz which has a
       | terrible time being competitive if oil is available at all.
       | 
       | Casey describes it as a technology which might be "perfected" in
       | the next ten years but it has the look of a mature technology
       | which just isn't attractive unless you've got no other choice.
       | People aren't interested in using it for ground transportation
       | because you've got batteries, you can use single entity fuels
       | such as 1-butanol or dimethyl ether, hydrogen, methane, etc. It
       | is only aviation where people are so adverse to trying anything
       | new such as designing a new airplane (take a domestic flight and
       | you have a choice between the 1967 737 and the 1982 A320) that
       | people will even think of synthesizing hydrocarbons.
        
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       (page generated 2022-12-13 23:01 UTC)