My hometown is Houston, and there's an inland port that goes all the way into downtown. Or it once did. Back around the time the Panama Canal opened, the Houston Ship Channel was dredged out to within a few miles of
downtown.
I recall seeing an old picture of a ship at dock in downtown Houston, with visible landmarks like the Harris County Courthouse in evidence. The pic I recall was about the time the Canal opened. If you go down to Allen's Landing, you can see where the ships tied up. It looks really different down there.
The Ship Channel is one of those interesting ideas that is somewhat like the outback sea idea. How so? You
could use tides and such to keep it filled, and to replenish the water a bit so that it won't get so alkaline.
The idea is to dredge a very large pool, in which the tides can overflow, but can only channel back out through a narrow opening. In this way, large amounts of water can be impounded behind a type of dam that can be overflowed during high tide, and re-emerge during low tides, with the water rushing out through the channel.
Fresh water can be captured in dams as well in order to provide additional flushing. This is kind of the way the Houston Ship Channel Works. Houston is 50 feet above sea level. How do you get ships up stream, except some way to impound a lot of water to keep them afloat?
The outback sea will require a lot more water than the Houston Ship Channel. You would definitely need a LOT.
There are flood control dams in Houston. It rains a lot in Houston, and so I am to understand, does the Australian northern shores. Rainfall will help provide water, but there may need to be much, much more to make a really large lake so far inland.
7/15/25:
There's at least a couple videos like this one on the subject of the inland sea down under. Now they've got me thinking about it!
What if you could use the natural tidal action and siphoning effect to move massive amounts of water for long distances?
It was studied for many years, and then abandoned after the adoption of the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963.
The idea is discussed in the following video.
Not all of the technical challenges could be overcome at that time. The sticking point seemed to be with the pusher plate. There wasn't any way to model it, so that it could be developed. In order to do the tests, real nuclear bombs would have to be used. Such a testing procedure was deemed to be infeasible. After the treaty, it became illegal.
A question: What if it were to be developed in deep space? It couldn't do much harm way out there. If such could be developed successfully, would it not be better to send large numbers of people to another planet, like Mars, using a few bombs? Such a system could be used instead of the Starship. Indeed, the Starship could be used to send up the large amount of mass needed to construct such an ark, and send it on its way.
Imagine the world in which power is cheap, pollution is gone and people are enjoying affordable housing, locally produced foods, and cheap healthcare. With fusion energy, everything can change for the better – in a heartbeat.
You could make them out of superwood! 80% lighter than steel, and moldable into shapes fitting for an automobile, superwood could make the cars that much more efficient.
5/25/25:
The engine described on the main blog may be useful in several ways. It is a powerful engine in a small package. Therefore, it would not need a massive frame to hold it. It could be optimized to make just enough power to keep the batteries charged in a hybrid engine.
The engine in the video was about half a liter, with a power output of 200 hp. You could get away with a much smaller engine. Let's say 1/2 the size and output. That would mean a 250 cc engine with 100 hp. That 100 hp engine could power a generator, which in turn, would power an electric engine.
You wouldn't have to run it all the time. Just long enough to charge the batteries. With the new batteries coming out soon, you wouldn't need much weight on them either. They could also be charged an indefinite number of times, since they would actually operate more like a capacitor than a battery.
The engine would be quite versatile, since it could run on a variety of fuels. The ones mentioned in the video include hydrogen. Perhaps it could run on ammonia? In that case, if ammonia could be synthesized economically, it could replace carbon based fuels. Not that I would think that important, but some people believe in the global warming theory.
Anyway, I would speculate that a super efficient ICE hybrid may be feasible in the near future. Question is, will it ever be built?
Seems like I've heard about this design before somewhere. Once you acquire enough speed, the sky is the limit. Imagine a single stage to orbit aircraft that can take off from a runway. It would be air breathing, which could remove the need to carry oxygen. Oxygen could represent the lion's share of the mass needed to get to orbit.
Venus Aerospace Completes Historic U.S. Hypersonic Engine Flight Test https://t.co/ev3zNEcllQ --- Uses a rotating detonation ramjet engine concept. It is claimed to be scalable. Goal is to produce aircraft that can sustain Mach 4. Doesn't require rocket engine boosts.
I'm going to suspend this for awhile. Reason being that there's not good enough reason to add yet another distro to the collection. If Mint craps out again, maybe...
Just added a restore version on Mint, so if it does crap out, then at least I can try a restore option. Didn't have that the first go round.
2:39 PM:
Note to self: Installing Fedora via Live Environment installation disk will not work. Insufficient disk space. Well, duh.
So I had to do a real install of Mint, which is always an adventure. As of this writing, Mint is now re-installed. What happened to the first install?
Just say it got discombobulated and there was no backup or restore capabilitity. So I did without it for awhile until now, when I decided I might need it again. Trouble is, I forgot how I got the thing installed the first time. Always a fun time to rediscover how all of this was a pain in the arse.
Maybe I can install Fedora now. This post is made in the Mint environment, so that's poof proof. The last time I tried this, I was in the mint install environment, and google yanked the post.
5/15/25,6:50 PM:
Fedora may be simpler, but getting Linux Mint installed again is a bit of a tussle. Spent the better part of today working on this.
Why did I ever start bothering with computers???? Seemed like a good idea at the time.
This is a video which shows how to install the Fedora Linux distro. I've used this YouTube Channel (AgileDevArt) for videos on how to install other Linux distros, among which is Zorin OS. My impression of the video is that the installation of Fedora seems relatively simple in comparision with Zorin or any other Linux distro that I've installed. Perhaps this is a good sign. As of yet, I'm only considering this new (to me) distro.
P.S., 11:11 AM:
This video isn't the SilverBlue distro mentioned on the other blog. AgileDevArt installed it via Windows. I'm contemplating doing it through Mint. That's a difference.
JP discusses a tandem airship. However, there's a better idea with his airship to orbit concept employed on Mars. However, there's nothing wrong with idea of using the tandem airship to launch a rocket with Mars samples to a waiting spacecraft for a return to Earth.
But there won't be any takers, unfortunately. There's nobody who would fund this, in my opinion.
The device enables the use of pretty stable temperatures below ground level. Such a "heat pump" will only take the relatively constant temperature below ground, and move it into ground level structures in order to facilitate climate control. A heat exchanger and air pump is about all that would be needed, but that really isn't discussed in this video. The video is about the drill tech.
