General Chat (Non-Music-Related)

It's going to be a cold cruel day when you are sitting in a freezing house, with no running water, and no food, and no power to even plug in and play guitar. Your demise will be eminent. Your family sadly gone.

We have enough resources to move us into the future. The future is not here. I completely agree with anyone that is for protecting our little satellite of the SUN. However all I see are short sighted people using these excuses as a way to gain financial success in the form of world domination.

We need to RE-EMPOWER NASA... Bring all those brilliant minds back together... To search for solutions that are far in the future.

Anything less is just inviting short term chaos and anarchy. Unfortunately the policies WE the PEOPLE have been promoting fall far short of moving all of mankind forward.

I hope you don't freeze or starve to death!

It's going to be a cold cruel day when you are sitting in a freezing house, with no running water, and no food, and no power to even plug in and play guitar. Your demise will be eminent. Your family sadly gone.

We have enough resources to move us into the future. The future is not here. I completely agree with anyone that is for protecting our little satellite of the SUN. However all I see are short sighted people using these excuses as a way to gain financial success in the form of world domination.

We need to RE-EMPOWER NASA... Bring all those brilliant minds back together... To search for solutions that are far in the future.

Anything less is just inviting short term chaos and anarchy. Unfortunately the policies WE the PEOPLE have been promoting fall far short of moving all of mankind forward.

I hope you don't freeze or starve to death!

maybe we can start by mining the moon Glen? LOL

. Your demise will be eminent. Your family sadly gone.

any idea on the schedule here....i've got a bunch of laundry to do. i'd rather not waste my time on that if i don't need to.

This may surprise a few people but I have always been against fracking, at least once I looked it up and found out what it's actually doing...I wish I could find my geology book, I can't remember specific dates and locations.

In the late 60's the Army decided to dispose of some toxic waste by shooting it into a deep hole in the ground, mixed with water and under high pressure. Sometime around 1968 or 69, in Colorado. IT didn't take long until earthquakes started to hit the area, the waste being pumped into the ground was found to be the problem. After more than a year they stopped pumping it, the quakes stopped shortly.

This take a bit of explaining...the concept of tectonic plates was only proven very recently, and in the late 60's when this happened it was still a brand new and little understood process. The entire planet is made up of huge slabs of bedrock called tectonic plates, all with either continents or oceans sitting on top of them, and we're talking 50 miles thick or more. These tectonic plates move around, the mechanics of it still not well understood. But this movement is the cause of the "ring of fire" around the pacific, the earthquakes along the San Andreas fault in California, and other various earthquake zones, volcanoes, volcanic islands like Hawaii, and so forth. For example the plate the Pacific sits on is both moving counter clockwise, and diving underneath the area around Japan. In 5000 years, LA will be part of Alaska.

Earthquakes occur when these plates suddenly move. Usually the fault lines, areas where two plates meet, are not straight lines, but jagged, like saw blades. They bind against each other and pressure gradually builds, and when it finally lets go you have a quake like some of those we've seen in California and the recent one in Nepal. California generally moves northward about 2 inches a year...when a quake occurs it might move a foot at one time.

When you drill a hole deep into the plate, into the bedrock or shale layer, and soot water into it under high pressure, the water acts as a lubricant, the rocks can now move where before they were held in place by friction. Drill a hole and drop in some explosives to "fracture" the shale layer and suck out some oil, you just created an earthquake looking for a chance to happen. What was once solid rock is now many chunks of rock and can move around.

This was known 40 years ago and is an incredibly bad idea. Any so called scientist the tries to tell you fracking does not cause earthquakes is lying, most likely because he is being paid by oil companies to find more oil. Again, it was proven 40 years ago. The water acts as a lubricant, and the rocks can now move around. That may sound odd, but you're also dealing with incredible amounts of pressure and high heat as well, and ordinary substances act much differently under those conditions. Wanna see? Pour a cup or two of water on a ceramic tile floor and walk fast. I dare ya...and that's not under high heat or pressure. I know what will happen, you'll slide all over the place on a good day and fall on your ass more often than not. Been there done that...so t hat tells what a good lubricant water can be under the right circumstances. Shoot it into the ground under high pressure and you're asking for disaster.

Fracking may be letting some of the oil companies suck more oil out of the ground, but it's also causing a lot of problems. I've been all for developing alternate energy sources for a long time, because the oil now being used is finite. We will run out sooner or later. Unfortunately research in this area has not been well supported, oil makes too much money. The alternatives we currently have, solar and wind, don't make enough profit for most companies to seriously invest in them. Research into other possibilities is stifled, anything that is discovered would cost oil companies, and they have a lot of pull with government, especially those involved in getting out funding for new research...so we're not seeing a lot happen in that area.

So we have a pretty ugly situation brewing. Greed is resulting in earthquakes in areas that have never had them, the people responsible are denying it, saying the real scientists are full of crap, and nobody seems to be willing to look at the larger picture and look into the future. Texas is not the only place, I looked into this a while back and found that other places in the country are seeing the same thing happen, and the same denial taking place.

I don't have any solutions, politicians on both sides of the fence are only looking at how much money they can pocket, nobody wants to listen to the few who are telling the truth and they certainly don't listen to us...the people they are supposedly representing...and yes the means BOTH sides, not just one.

I've always sworn that when I hear the air raid sirens I'm off to the drugstore for a pack of camels!

Talbot

The need for fracking will end when discover true, long term solutions. Some of the posters just show their endgame which is very short sighted to say the least. Typical liberal comment... Better go do the laundry

The need for fracking will end when discover true, long term solutions. Some of the posters just show their endgame which is very short sighted to say the least. Typical liberal comment... Better go do the laundry

wow...are you such an easily played puppet of the big money corporate scum that you actually believe there's a "need for fracking" to supply our energy?

the only "need" it serves is satisfying THEIR greed and their need as you say to "gain financial success in the form of world domination."

and you're willing to accept the consequences because why? you want to line their pockets w more money? how gullible are you?

they rely on "short sighted people" like you who are are sooooo easily played.

The need for fracking will end when discover true, long term solutions. Some of the posters just show their endgame which is very short sighted to say the least. Typical liberal comment... Better go do the laundry

wow...are you such an easily played puppet of the big money corporate scum that you actually believe there's a "need for fracking" to supply our energy?

the only "need" it serves is satisfying THEIR greed and their need as you say to "gain financial success in the form of world domination."

and you're willing to accept the consequences because why? you want to line their pockets w more money? how gullible are you?

they rely on "short sighted people" like you who are are sooooo easily played.

Wow, are you such an easily played puppet of the liberal left scum that you actually believe there is no need to become energy independent? Buying foreign oil and enriching the people that want to kill all non- muslims?

Wow, are you such an easily played puppet of the liberal left scum that you actually believe there is no need to become energy independent? Buying foreign oil and enriching the people that want to kill all non- muslims?

jeff, no surprise to see that you've drank their kool aide. you BELIEVE fracking is worth the earthquakes, sinkholes, and the other problems all to stick it to the evil muslims!

get a clue...it's not just liberals who see the problems and dangers of fracking. do you really consider paleopete a liberal?

quite simply, you're being played by the fat cats....they're playing on your hatred of muslims and libs.

as if only liberals have concerns about the downside. keep sucking on their corporate junk and see where that gets you.

I didn't see Jeff say a word about fracking. He referred to the "need to become energy independent", which is definitely a big issue. As it is we're buying huge amounts of oil from the middle east, the very same people who want to destroy this country. That makes no sense whatsoever, it gives them more money to try and do it.

I don't know what Jeff thinks about fracking, he didn't say, but getting away from buying middle east oil is something we do need to do. I think we need to look into a lot more serious research into other alternative methods of producing energy without sucking more oil out of the ground. Breaking up the bedrock this country sits on is a bad idea. And I wonder if anyone has even thought about the long term geological effects of oil drilling. Pulling oil out of the ground that was there for a reason to begin with, and I doubt that reason was so we could have cars and planes.

Use your head for something besides a hat rack. You pull a bunch of oil out of the ground. That leaves a big hole where that oil used to be, and instead of having the oil there to cushion the rocks and offset the pressure they create things can now move around. I wonder if anyone has done any research on that? We've been drilling for oil for about 100 years now, how many empty holes are in the ground just waiting for something to happen to let them collapse and the huge slabs of rock we're sitting on start to move around a lot. Sound like fun? Sounds like earthquakes to me.

Fracking is making it worse, since some of the spots it's being done are oil wells that stopped producing long ago. There's already a good chance it's geologically unstable, now you want to break it up and compound the problem.

I still can't find my geology book, but here's an insane idea that was proposed sometime years ago, after the incident in Colorado when they found out pumping water into the ground at high pressure would cause quakes. Someone got the bright idea to drill a line of holes along the San Andreas fault, pump water into them, cross their fingers and hope they could set of a series of mini quakes and let the fault move but in small increments rather than one huge mega quake.

Is that insane or what? Fortunately it seems that sanity prevailed, as far as I know it hasn't been tried. Now we're seeing why it would be a bad idea.

What we need is some serious research into other means of producing energy without disrupting the geological stability of the entire planet. Every continent on this planet is already moving around but very gradually. Mountains are built when two plates collide and the edges are squeezed upwards. Earthquakes occur when the jagged edge of a plate lets go and the other plate moves a lot all at once instead of the usual very gradual movement. Volcanoes are cause by friction when two plates either rub against each other or one dives underneath the other, that's the position Japan is in. Japan has both, so does the western portion of North America. Chile has had some serious quakes in recent years, same thing. I don't remember the details but they should also have volcanoes. Yellowstone is a monster volcano called a caldera. If it erupts, and it's thousands of years overdue, it will produce enough ash to cover half of the US in a layer at least 6 feet thick.

And trying to get more oil is tinkering with that pandora's box of geological disasters. What about trying to work with the motions of the seas, the built in heat deep in the earth, more efficient and less expensive wind generators, possibly even some means of capturing solar power in space and getting it here. The Mississippi River could be used, not by dams, but by more efficient paddle wheel methods used long ago, if some research were done into that idea. Smaller local power generators of that type might be feasible.

There should be other possibilities that can be tried, if people would realize oil is finite and breaking up the bedrock the continent sits on is a dangerous way to try and get at more of it, simply for more profit. And profit is behind it, not "energy independence". Billionaires only care about more billions, not the planet, not the politics, just the money.

I'm wasting my time of course, the people who need to listen refuse to do so...they are the billionaires...

I didn't see Jeff say a word about fracking.

He referred to the "need to become energy independent", which is definitely a big issue.

isn't this thread ABOUT fracking? sure seems to me he clearly believes that if you're AGAINST fracking that means you're AGAINST finding ways to break free from our dependence on foreign oil.

nothing could be further from the truth.....i'm all for energy independence but not w something as short sighted and dangerous as fracking.

There should be other possibilities that can be tried, if people would realize oil is finite and breaking up the bedrock the continent sits on is a dangerous way to try and get at more of it, simply for more profit. And profit is behind it, not "energy independence". Billionaires only care about more billions, not the planet, not the politics, just the money.

exactly so.....it's about profit and greed.....not energy independence. it's about lining their already stuffed pockets at any cost. to hell w the consequences.