The End of Suburbia

 

 

Since World War II North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia. It has promised a sense of space, affordability, family life and upward mobility. As the population of suburban sprawl has exploded in the past 50 years, so too has the suburban way of life become embedded in the American consciousness.

Suburbia, and all it promises, has become the American Dream. But as we enter the 21st century, serious questions are beginning to emerge about the sustainability of this way of life. With brutal honesty and a touch of irony, The End of Suburbia explores the American Way of Life and its prospects as the planet approaches a critical era, as global demand for fossil fuels begins to outstrip supply. World Oil Peak and the inevitable decline of fossil fuels are upon us now, some scientists and policy makers argue in this documentary.

The consequences of inaction in the face of this global crisis are enormous. What does Oil Peak mean for North America? As energy prices skyrocket in the coming years, how will the populations of suburbia react to the collapse of their dream? Are today’s suburbs destined to become the slums of tomorrow? And what can be done NOW, individually and collectively, to avoid The End of Suburbia?

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Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla

 

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2188562935002257117#

 

Alpha waves in the human brain are between 6 and 8 hertz. The wave frequency of the human cavity resonates between 6 and 8 hertz. All biological systems operate in the same frequency range. The human brain’s alpha waves function in this range and the electrical resonance of the earth is between 6 and 8 hertz. Thus, our entire biological system – the brain and the earth itself – work on the same frequencies. If we can control that resonate system electronically, we can directly control the entire mental system of humankind. Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Lika, which was then part of the Austo-Hungarian Empire, region of Croatia.

His father, Milutin Tesla was a Serbian Orthodox Priest and his mother Djuka Mandic was an inventor in her own right of household appliances. Tesla studied at the Realschule, Karlstadt in 1873, the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria and the University of Prague. At first, he intended to specialize in physics and mathematics, but soon he became fascinated with electricity. He began his career as an electrical engineer with a telephone company in Budapest in 1881.

It was there, as Tesla was walking with a friend through the city park that the elusive solution to the rotating magnetic field flashed through his mind. With a stick, he drew a diagram in the sand explaining to his friend the principle of the induction motor. Before going to America, Tesla joined Continental Edison Company in Paris where he designed dynamos. While in Strassbourg in 1883, he privately built a prototype of the induction motor and ran it successfully. Unable to interest anyone in Europe in promoting this radical device, Tesla accepted an offer to work for Thomas Edison in New York. His childhood dream was to come to America to harness the power of Niagara Falls.

Young Nikola Tesla came to the United States in 1884 with an introduction letter from Charles Batchelor to Thomas Edison: “I know two great men,” wrote Batchelor, “one is you and the other is this young man.” Tesla spent the next 59 years of his productive life living in New York. Tesla set about improving Edison’s line of dynamos while working in Edison’s lab in New Jersey. It was here that his divergence of opinion with Edison over direct current versus alternating current began. This disagreement climaxed in the war of the currents as Edison fought a losing battle to protect his investment in direct current equipment and facilities.

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Here Comes The Sun

 

 

If it were up to the sun, we would have no energy problem. Every half hour on the Earth’s surface, there is more than enough light to provide energy needs for the whole world in a year. We don’t have an energy problem, we have a conversion problem. If we are able to harvest sunlight in smart way, then we can prevent a global energy crisis.

That sounds nice but that does not mean it will succeed, at least that is what many different bodies want us to believe. It’s too expensive, takes too much space, too much material, it costs more energy than it brings, and it is still not efficient enough. While all these doubts play a role for solar energy in the distant future, it is still a marginal player in the global energy game. Back-light takes the edge off these myths and shows that a solar economy is much closer than we think. Next year, there are already rolling Giga Watts of solar cells on the conveyor belt. The industry has mastered the technology and the machines.

Radical German government measures have proved that it is possible. Villagers have completely installed solar power on empty lands. Power stations contribute to the network and where they are deserved. Many countries follow the German example: The Americans have their Grand Solar Plan and the French President Sarkozy is talking about a solar plan with the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. According to the Spanish electricity producers, oil companies will be left out. So what energy crisis? The sun is coming!

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Free Energy: The Race to Zero Point

 

 

We live in a vast sea of energy. Everything, every atom, every subatomic particle is in constant motion, spinning eternally.

Even in the cold, dark absolute vacuum of empty space, there exists what new physics is calling the quantum vacuum flux; it is the ether of the ancients, the life force energy of metaphysics; are the random fluctuations of this vast field of potential in which space and time are embedded.

Now theoretically and mathematically proven, the question no longer is: “does this zero point energy exist?” but rather, can we tap this inexhaustible resource of free and unlimited energy and manifest new technologies which are both inexpensive and environmentally safe.

One thing is certain, if we continue on the course of rapidly burning fossil fuels and relying on nuclear fission, the future of our civilization is in grave jeopardy. We’re at a critical juncture where the ravages of industrial pollution and radioactive waste have exceeded the carrying capacity of mother earth.

Our finite reserves of oil and gas will be completely exhausted by the year 2025 at the present rate of consumption. Large corporate and governmental self interests ignore this pending crisis and resist change to the status quo. The question must be asked: “Is this the kind of world we want to pass down to future generations?

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Moon For Sale

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3931004440707682179#

After 40 years, man is preparing to return to the Moon. But this time the astronauts won’t just land on the Moon – they plan to stay.

From his office in Nevada, Dennis Hope has spawned a multi-million dollar business selling lunar real estate. But scientists believe the real prize is trapped in the Moon’s rocks.

It contains large deposits of an extremely rare gas called Helium-3. Could Helium-3 be mined and used as a new source of almost inexhaustible, clean and pollution-free energy on Earth?

Whoever succeeds in transporting Helium-3 back to Earth could solve the world’s energy crisis. Who will win what has been dubbed the second Moon race? And should we be exploiting the Moon’s valuable resources at all?

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The Big Bang Machine

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5557611993547902875#

 

Professor Brian Cox visits Geneva to take a look around Cern’s Large Hadron Collider before this vast, 27km long machine is sealed off and a simulation experiment begins to try and create the conditions that existed just a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Cox joins the scientists who hope that the LHC will change our understanding of the early universe and solve some of its mysteries.

Not to be thwarted by a few annoying speed bumps on the road to discovery, CERN scientists have successfully slammed accelerated protons together inside the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in order to re-create conditions within the universe just moments after the Big Bang.

With two streams of particles travelling at close to the speed of light and moving around the giant ring-shaped accelerator in opposite directions, attending scientists at the CERN facility just outside Geneva created the very first collision at a little after 1100 GMT – causing widespread celebration amongst those who witnessed it.

“This opens the door to a totally new era of discovery,” enthused CERN’s director of research Sergio Bertolucci via a video relay from the LHC facility. “It is a step into the unknown where we will find things we thought were there and perhaps things we didn’t know existed.”

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Can We Make a Star on Earth?

Professor Brian Cox takes a global journey in search of the energy source of the future.

Called nuclear fusion, it is the process that fuels the sun and every other star in the universe.

Yet despite over five decades of effort, scientists have been unable to get even a single watt of fusion electricity onto the grid.

Brian returns to Horizon to find out why. Granted extraordinary access to the biggest and most ambitious fusion experiments on the planet, Brian travels to the USA to see a high security fusion bomb testing facility in action and is given a tour of the world’s most powerful laser.

In South Korea, he clambers inside the reaction chamber of K-Star, the world’s first super-cooled, super-conducting fusion reactor where the fate of future fusion research will be decided.

Nuclear fusion is nature’s power source. From the Sun to the most distant stars, the energy that lights up the Universe is released by sticking hydrogen nuclei together to make helium.

Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe, it seems sensible to ask whether we might endeavor to do the same and power ourselves out of our serious energy crisis by building stars on Earth.

The problem of course is that stars are big and hot; the Sun is the size of a million Earths, and burns six hundred million tonnes of hydrogen fuel every second.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?

There’s something very odd going on in space – something that shouldn’t be possible. It is as though vast swathes of the universe are being hoovered up by a vast and unseen celestial vacuum cleaner. Sasha Kaslinsky, the scientist who discovered the phenomenon, is understandably nervous: ‘It left us quite unsettled and jittery’ he says, ‘because this is not something we planned to find’.

The accidental discovery of what is ominously being called ‘dark flow’ not only has implications for the destinies of large numbers of galaxies – it also means that large numbers of scientists might have to find a new way of understanding the universe. Dark flow is the latest in a long line of phenomena that have threatened to re-write the textbooks. Does it herald a new era of understanding, or does it simply mean that everything we know about the universe is wrong?

14 billion years ago there was nothing; then everything exploded into existence and the universe was born, but a new generation of cosmologists are questioning this theory. Cosmologists have created a replica of the universe by using equations; it’s called the standard model of cosmology and it’s the reason behind the Big Bang theory; however, this model is now doubted. Professor Alan Guth’s theory challenges the Big Bang by stating that the universe started out small, allowing the temperature to even out everywhere, before expanding on a massive scale.

Stars nearer the edge of a galaxy move just as fast as those in the centre. This made cosmologists think that galaxies needed more gravity, but the only way to get more gravity was to create it. Astrophysicist Dan Bauer is hunting for dark matter half a mile under the dark plains of Minnesota in order to trace and record it more effectively. The discovery that the universe is speeding up suggests that a new force is powering the universe. This force is known as dark energy, and cosmologists have no idea what it is.

The combination of the standard model, inflation and dark matter has given way to a new theory called dark flow. The nature of this theory could show that our universe isn’t the only one. The standard model of cosmology has withstood much criticism, therefore making the theory stronger; however it could still be totally wrong.

 

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The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion

For thousands of years we have wrestled with the great questions of existence. Who are we? What is the world made of? How did we get here? The quest to answer these is the story of science.

Each week, medical journalist Michael Mosley traces the often unpredictable path we have taken. From recreating a famous alchemist’s experiment, to following in Galileo’s footsteps, and putting himself in the hands of a hypnotist, Michael unpicks how science has changed the way we see ourselves, and the way we see our world.

It is a tale of courage and of fear, of hope and disaster, of persistence and success. It interweaves great forces of history – revolutions, voyages of discovery and artistic movements – with practical, ingenious inventions and the dogged determination of experimenters and scientists.

This is the story of how history made science and how science made history, and how the ideas which emerged made the modern world.

 

 

What Is Out There? How we came to understand our planet was not at the center of everything in the cosmos.

 

 

What Is The World Made Of? How atomic theories and concepts of quantum physics underpin modern technology.

 

 

How Did We Get Here? Michael Mosley tells how scientists came to explain the diversity of life on earth.

 

 

Can We Have Unlimited Power? The story of how power has been harnessed from wind, steam and from inside the atom.

 

 

What is the Secret of Life? Michael Moseley tells the story of how the secret of life has been unraveled through the prism of the most complex organism known – the human body.

 

 

Who Are We? The twin sciences of brain anatomy and psychology have offered different visions of who we are. Now these sciences are coming together and in the process have revealed some surprising and uncomfortable truths about what really shapes our thoughts, feelings and desires.

 

 

 

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Visionaries: In Grave Danger of Falling Food

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6370279933612522952

Permaculture is a bit of everything. To some it is architecture, to others, organic farming. Some say it is a philosophy and a way of life, others believe it is their only hope. Permaculture is a design system, but the engineering principles it follows are those of life. Earth evolved from dust and gas and made in the energy of a huge hydrogen furnace known as the sun, a living system powerful enough to colonize an entire planet was born.

Mollison looked at this process and saw a model. Here was a system that was stable and fertile, yet became ever more complex… and that is how Mollison believes are own environment should be.

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