The Super Fucking Awesome Engine

So I just had to replace the radiator on my car. I'm more of a tech nerd than gear head, so it was a learning experience. I always thought water circulates through the car (via water pump) to cool the engine. Not so, I discovered when I tried to fix break in hose with silicone sealant and duct tape. It actually circulates highly pressurized steam, thus no such quick hacks will work. But what I really learned is that engines, as they are currently designed, are a product of times when oil was infinite and cheap. Even in my late 90's car, those same old principles govern the design. I realized a huge amount of heat escapes through the radiator, going to waste. I was shocked to look it up, and find that about 12% of the energy in the gasoline is converted to moving the car, the rest escapes as heat through various systems. This means there are huge room for advances in gas efficiency.

I always knew that the braking system was a waste, all the accumulated kinetic energy of the moving car was released as heat in the brake pads every time you stop, and re-harvesting this energy (through applied electric induction through electric motor) was a major break through of cars like the Prius. But what really bothers me is the radiator itself: I mean, before we had gasoline engines, what did we have? That's right, we had steam. We heated water to its boiling point, at which point it became pressurized and pushed a piston up, turning the motor. So why not re-harvest the steam power gained from cooling the engine? I looked it up, and that's what BMW is up to, with its Turbosteamer technology. This system increases energy efficiency by 15%, with a comparatively simple system that can be retrofitted to old beamers. Kudos, guys.

However what really strikes me is the fact that this is the tip of the iceberg. The kinetic energy of steam comes from the 100 C boiling point of water increasing pressure enough to drive a piston. The released steam from this can heat another steam engine, with a chemical with a lower boiling point that drives another piston, and is cooled by yet another chemical with a lower boiling point, in a highly insulated enclosed system that releases virtually no heat, and therefore offers a total conversion of gasoline energy to kinetic energy. Feeling an electrical system and combined with hybrid brakes, we can envision a car that gets 80% gas efficiency instead of 12%, converting your 25 mile per gallon car to a 167 mile per gallon car with almost identical performance. Too good to be true? maybe, but I have a strong feeling I'm barking up the right tree with steam.

The issue is that the above multi-stage steam engine, unlike steam engines of yore, does not release steam of any of the chemicals into the air, but rather releases the steam into a cooling system like on a car, and from there its recirculated back into the original cylinder which heated it as liquid after its cooled. (remember the cooling system for it is the heating system for the next steam system down, as well.) The reason this whole system is appealing is because it smells like carbon capture and sequestration to me. I can imagine a system where c02 exhaust is re-liquefied into into a combustible fuel using a similar mechanism, probably involving electrolysis. Wouldn't that be awesome. Though that probably only exists in fantasy land, this general framework is the right one for a whole range of things managing gas and vastly improving efficiency for fossil fuel burning, which we will be reliant on until we get a quantum leap in batteries and solar panels. So I have seen the future, and it is steam punk:

The Rose Part I: The Holy Ritual of the Phoenix

The rescue of the trapped Chilean miners is at hand. From one article:

Once that operation is completed, at around 9am tomorrow, they will begin installing the complex pulley system that will help the “Phoenix” capsule lift the men, one-by-one, to the surface.

Phoenix in reference to the mythological bird, which rises from the ashes of the ruin reborn. In this case, the ashes are a hole deep underground. Holes being an important part of collective metaphor these days:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzRLV8IMRjU

Though in the Chilean case, the answer is clearly NOT to stop digging.

Anyway, as I type, this story is number 1 on Google news. Its a feel good story, its got amazing engineering coupled with a rescue. But there's more to it in the collective psyche. Its a redemption story in some ways, like there's this feeling we all have in the back of our minds that we are in some kind of hole of our own creation, trapped there. But hope is coming. Rescue is coming. We see ourselves reflected in the trapped Chilean miners in some way, we are all in that hole, and we all need each other to get out.

The human mind is a product of nature, and the thing about products of nature is that they don't separate form and function. The Rose is perfect in form, but also perfect in function. Everything is there for a reason. So what of the the Phoenix? What of mythology? The brain is an information system, and good information systems reuse resources, they are not needlessly redundant. They compress in this way so that a repeating pattern can be represented in all positions by a couple bytes. The brain is the same way, it seeks to maximize efficiency by looking for efficient ways to compress what it learns about the world. It seeks to apply the same archetypal stories, such as the phoenix rising from the ashes, to numerous different events for efficient memory. This is all a matter of function. However from a subjective experiential level, it creates beautiful form: That the rescue of trapped miners can be seen in terms of this mythological event is what gives it meaning. Its this compressing quality of the brain that lets us see the profound, mythological stories being carried out all around us, lets us live the Odyssey in the banal events of single day, like Leopold Bloom.

The secret is really in the rose. When a human asks "what does that mean", the question is really "how can this be compressed, related to a structure I already know for mental storage". Yet this functional mechanistic emphasis seems to rob from the importance of form, of the experiential, the subjective. This "compression schema" is how humans create meaning, and what is life is there is no meaning of life?

The hamartia of human reasoning is this separation of form and function, values and science, meaning and mechanism. Robert Pirsig writes about it at length in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but in my view doesn't address the full depth of the issue. More compelling to me is Sam Harris, who addresses the divide as a serious contemporary issue in his latest book, The Moral Landscape. (Which I have not read yet but know his argument) Harris addresses this from an atheist perspective which I don't agree with, but I give him kudos for saying what he's saying at all: That's the divorce of scientific reasoning from values is insane. The fact is, he has a point. We are in the time of quantum computers and instant satellite communication, with the value system given to us by Hebrews from 3000 years ago. I like religion, but Jehovah never made it clear to me: Is it a sin to use a product that damages of the environment if not using the product will just cause market forces to lower its price so somebody else will use the product in my place? There are a million questions like that. We need a major update to our concept of right and wrong to deal with the kind of moral scenarios we run into in this day and age.

However this is a truly daunting task. Pirshig said one way to tackle it was transparency of function in technology, (Thus his love of Harly Davidsons with their visible engines) but the truth is that tech has gone so far almost nobody can understand it, transparent or not. We live in a huge vastly complicated world, where our actions have moral consequences we cannot possibly anticipate. And if we accept Dawkin's idea that moral action (altruism he calls it) is an evolutionary trait which emerged to facilitate the survival of groups, the fact that we have no up-to-date moral guidelines means we are in big, collective, trouble. In one hell of a deep hole, you might say.

So what's the way forward? IT may help to consider the nature of the problem. We are in a collective hole, not an individual one. The nature of a collective hole is that you can't save yourself. You can only try to save your neighbor, and hope your neighbor saves you. Its like the old Buddhist story about the chopsticks. But there are obviously a lot of problems holding us back from that...One of the largest is the myth of inequality, the wild myth of the God-man. This really deserves its own post, so it will get one. Suffice to say that in order to realize our own capacity to help each other, we need to recognize our equality with so called "great people", we need to realize that we do indeed have the capacity to help, and that those who are "beneath" us are worthy of our help too, even it means a lot of work, like those rescuers are doing in Chile.

END PART I