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Originally Posted by TLAM Strike
But once the Infrastructure is in place the cost drops a lot. Take space elevators and mass drivers for example one expensive piece of equipment makes everything down the line a lot cheaper (dollars and cents cheaper). The days of the rocket are over I just wish NASA and the ESA would realize that.
Making hydrogen fuel on Earth will fuel humanity for what a century or two? Going out and getting it will fuel it forever. Someone was complaining about the short sightedness of energy policy well this is about as long term as you can get without quoting Prof. Dyson.
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Earth's supply of hydrogen would technically last indefinitely. How so, you ask? When you burn hydrogen, it bonds to oxygen and reverts to the water that it was originally taken from (except that it is in the form of water vapor). This water vapor will eventually condense in the atmosphere and rain back down upon the Earth, where it can be recollected and re-separated into pure hydrogen and oxygen, to be reused for energy. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the only problem is getting the energy to re-split the hydrogen from the oxygen.
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Originally Posted by JSLTIGER
The problem is that on Earth, all of the hydrogen is bonded to oxygen, in the form of water. In order to retrieve the hydrogen, a large amount of energy must be put into the water. That energy has to come from somewhere.
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P.S. Isn't chemistry wonderful?