Do We Need an Energy "Manhattan Project"?

Graeme

dohboi · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Dec 05, 2005 Posts: 1427

Yes we do. But let's not stop at a couple middling-sized cities. Let's blow up the whole world.

The MP was awesome--a bunch of really smart guys sitting around for weeks and months on end, trying to figure out the best way to evaporate a bunch of women, children and other non-combatants. What a high point for the human race. We should try to emulate it in everything we do.

But let's do expand the scope a bit. We can blow up lots more than a couple cities with energy. With our new energy manhattan projects, we're going to figure out how we can fry every last scrap of living tissue on the f'n planet----yeah! Go, manhattan!

Sarcasm off

Can't we please, please come up with another example of focused intellectual effort than a plan to melt the flesh off of tens of thousands of living children. Why choose such a horror as your paragon of planning. Are we all really that hopelessly lost and sick?

(OK, don't answer that.)

dohboi · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Dec 05, 2005 Posts: 1427

Wait a minute, I take that all back. It doesn't matter that we fried all those innocents in a flash, 'cause they weren't really people, they were just gooks, flat noses, japs, not humans. No real harm done. Let's get on with it.

(interpretation for the sarcasm-impaired: Using the name MP is not just morally loathsome, it is deeply bigotted and racist.)

Judgie

mos6507

mos6507

Jack · Dark Lord Joined: Aug 11, 2004 Posts: 5123

Schadenfreude · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jan 16, 2008 Posts: 606

hope_full · Heavy Crude Joined: May 27, 2008 Posts: 254

Sounds like youngsters talking. Lest we forget, the point of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to bring an expeditious end to the war. It was predicted that if American troops had invaded Japan, our casualties would have been very heavy.

Did you not know that the Japanese vowed to fight until "every man, woman and child" was dead? Have you never heard (or been told) what our American troops endured in Japanese POW camps? Well, that's the American soldiers that survived.

It was a horrible war and Truman did the RIGHT thing in finding a way to make it end. I know that that's a PC incorrect thing to say, but I'm also a student of history. The Japanese were formidable enemies who would stop at nothing to win the war.

Was that your grandfather whose life was saved by the atomic bomb? Further, both Nagasaki and Hiroshima were military targets with civilian populations. And lastly, before bombing, the US dropped leaflets warning the Japanese about these bombs and urging them to surrender. On both occasions, they refused, until after the SECOND bomb was dropped.

BOTH of my parents were WW2 veterans and they enlisted in the war for "the duration plus six months." They were called "The Lost Generation" because their youth was taken from them by the war. When Mom and Dad enlisted (after Pearl Harbor was ATTACKED by the Japanese), Hitler looked unstoppable. No one knew when and IF we would win the war. What do you think would have happened if Hitler got the A-bomb first? Or Hirohito?

My parent's generation was one that demonstrated great moral courage and how I wish more of today's whining youngsters had a smidge of the character exhibited by their elders.

We've seen 50 years of unparalleled prosperity in this country due in part to the outcome of World War 2. Don't write off the A-bomb before you do a little more reading in the history books.

HF

TreeFarmer · Heavy Crude Joined: Jun 26, 2007 Posts: 347

I've heard this term used a lot over the years. What I would like to bring out is the context of the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project was a focused group of scientists working in secret, toward a specific goal for which most of the science had already been done. To be more specific atomic fission had already been done in the lab and the Manhattan Project's goal was to build an atomic fission bomb. Another thing I'd like to point out is that due to the secrecy only a limited number of people were working on the project.

Now, fast forward to today's calls for a "Manhattan Project" to solve the energy crisis. Ok, what EXACTLY do you want the project to do? Don't give some nebulous goal like "solve our problem". Secondly, since the energy crisis is not a secret and lots of people all over the world are working on it, which 99.9% of them do you want to stop so that we can get down to a small group like we used in the Manhattan Project? Also, which streams of research do you want to stop so that we can concentrate on just one?

The bottom line is that research is happening all over the world on thousands of different items that will help to solve the problem. There are tens of thousands of people doing this research bringing to bear an unbelieveable amount of intelligence and creativity. The only place for a Manhattan Project style effort would be if some proven science shows that something is possible but requires a large focused effort to bring it to fruition.

TF

pup55 · Expert Joined: May 26, 2004 Posts: 3801

The end product notwithstanding, the Manhattan project consisted of basically commandeering the brightest people in the country, along with a lot of technicians, mechanics, support people etc. and trucking them all out into the middle of nowhere New Mexico, and throwing as much money at them as it would take to build something that would go "boom".

The urgency was that they knew that the Germans were doing the same thing, and they were afraid they would get there first.

Assuming you could get the political will together to do this (dubious) and find enough money (borrowing from future generations) and find enough scientists and engineers willing to do it without basically putting them under house arrest (questionable) you could probably do it. It would have been much easier in the weeks immediately after 9-11. Right now, we cannot develop a national consensus in the theories of evolution, plate techtonics, or climate change, so the odds of being able to accomplish this are actually close to zero.

grampybone · Tar Sands Joined: May 31, 2008 Posts: 82

It seems to me to be a better investment of money and time to have a "Manhattan project" for the energy crises then to do nothing at all.

Spend the money now while it is still of value and there is still some time left.

DomusAlbion · Last edited by DomusAlbion on Sat May 31, 2008 10:07 am; edited 1 time in total

My father flew in B24's in WW II. He was based in the Pacific and would have been right in the thick of any prelude to a land based invasion of Japan. The A Bombs took tens of thousands of lives but they made the Japanese surrender before we had to invade; thereby saving hundreds of thousands of American lives. My dad could have been one of those lives lost and I would not be here today.

I praise those heroic scientists of the Manhattan Project.

Now to get back to the original intent of this thread.

Yes, we need a Manhattan Project type effort in the area of energy research and also in transportation infrastructure. Bring back the trains! For those of you who didn't get to travel by train in America, and I would think that is most of you, let me tell you it is a very pleasant, all be it slower, experience. Much nicer than travel by car or bus and a ton more relaxing than travel by air.
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vision-master

After browsing through the stock holders report from Exxon, without a Manhattan Project to solve our energy needs, we are buggered, right quick.........

Lumpy

Amen to what Hope_ful posted above.

By the way, someone here said the Manhattan Project comprised all those people (scientists, et al) being concentrated in New Mexico. It is indicative of (1) how effective the level of secrecy was, and (2) how uninformed people remain after all these decades, that most people STILL don't know that Richland (Hanford Atomic Works), Washington and Oak Ridge, Tennesee were integral to the Manhattan Project.

It was a "space out of time" to have been born and raised in Richland, a true government town, where NO ONE talked about the work he/she was doing "out in the area." It was also probably the safest place on earth to be living during our growing up years (50's and 60's), in terms of crime -- because there was virtually none. The government saw to that. During the Cold War era, though, it was also one of the most dangerous places to be living in terms of being an international target, because of the active weapons grade plutonium being processed there.

My husband and I agree that you had to have been there to understand the unique atmosphere -- that we took for granted, because we were born into it. One of the reasons we ended up married after previous unsuccessful marriages for both of us is that we didn't have to try to explain that life to one another, because we both had lived it - and it is so much a part of who we are. It couldn't be clearly explained - although some people have given it a good try. (Amazon has a couple of books written by people from Richland, about Richland.)

Anyway, it was a 100% team effort, with zero tolerance policies for many things. And it worked.

So the idea of doing a "Manhattan Project" type effort now might be wishful thinking, but ... well ... read Hope_ful's post above.
No one thought it could work back then, either.

Lumpy
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