Private space travel appears more likely. SpaceShipOne has had successful trials in America and two Australians, Wilson da Silva and Alan Finkel of Cosmos magazine, have already booked to be the first Australians to make the seven-hour frolic.
Going to Mars will take much longer, and is likely to be preceded by the landing of an expandable base made from the fuel casings of the spaceship. It is likely that the first venturers will be asked to stay there. Who would want to take a one-way ticket to another planet? Well, Lord Rees, for one. The President of the Royal Society of London told me that making only one journey is safer. Besides, he added, in the old days of exploration, folk were sanguine about not coming home!
Back on Earth: trains first carried passengers in South Wales just over 200 years ago. They flourished in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries; but in Australia and Britain, they’ve since gone backwards. Visitors who come to see us on the South Coast of New South Wales and take the trundler from Sydney cannot believe the time it takes to grind through the short distance. Has no one noticed France ’s TGVs (trains à grande vitesse) or Japan ’s bullet trains, which travel on time, CBD to CBD, and make the plane alternative look ridiculous?
Like Concorde and the Apollo missions to the moon that ended in 1972, modern trains appear to be a dream that faded. Despite our budget surpluses, we are unwilling to invest in infrastructure and railways cost plenty. Yet many of us would be more than willing to sit in the comfort of a TGV that could take us from Melbourne
Future Perfect to Sydney, or Sydney to Brisbane, in four hours-only about one hour longer than the present best estimate of door-to-door trips using air travel. The British Conservatives discovered the promise of better rail travel in 2006, observing that magnetically elevated trains could go at over 500 kph, as they already are doing, experimentally, in Asia. Cut that inter-city link to 50 minutes! In Holland they have the Maglev, part train, part bus- it can switch from ordinary roads to supertracks, run on fuel cells or batteries, and reach speeds of 250 kph.
The Rail Infrastructure Corporation has noted that our spending in 2005 in Australia on such essentials as rail and bridges was $28.5 billion below what it needed to be, and that deft investment in infrastructure would increase Australia ’s productivity by 10 per cent.
What of light trains? Their development in the northern suburbs of Perth appears to have been a howling success. Peter Newman, a professor at Murdoch University and adviser to the Premier of Western Australia, believes commuters will take trains willingly if a) they are faster than cars and b) they come so often that timetables are unnecessary. A UTS study has also found that travellers will opt for public transport if it is convenient, safe and affordable.
What is needed is a revolution based on total costing. Add the fuel, pollution, delays, real-estate costs and trauma, and then consider the option of making buses and trains free. Some studies indicate that the price of tickets covers only their collection. Remember the remarkable cheerfulness and freedom Sydney experienced during the weeks of the Olympic Games? Cars almost invisible, public transport laid on-what could this be like in the long term? Would a short series of experiments of this kind be worth considering? If the petrol price rises and pollution concerns continue, maybe the unthinkable will be tried.
Won’t new fuels come to the rescue? Hydrogen, cars running on water, even solar cars (which manage to glide regularly from Darwin to Adelaide)!
Hydrogen is a real prospect, but distant. It’s an expensive way to produce and distribute energy. A hydrogen economy may not emerge generally until well after 2027. Its contribution by then will be substantial, however, and-so I was assured by Professor Omar Yaghi at UCLA (University of California Los Angeles), one of Popular Science magazine’s Top 10 stars of American science of 2006-hydrogen may flourish as the energy source in laptops and mobile phones before it leaps successfully into transport. Even then, containing costs will be tricky. Geophysicist cum economist Peter Terzakian was quoted in The Australian as saying ‘If all 230 million cars in the US were to switch from petrol to hydrogen, so much electricity would be required to create the hydrogen that 350 new nuclear plants would be needed. Or more than 1000 coal-fired power stations.’
Cars driven by water have turned up regularly as a hot prospect, ever since Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the then Premier of Queensland, drooled over them a generation ago. The idea is a variant on the hydrogen theme: use the electrolysis of water to separate hydrogen and oxygen (as schoolchildren used to see done in science in their first year), harness the hydrogen and expel the oxygen. It may work one day, but don’t expect it to break any land speed records soon.
Diesel, paradoxically, is due for a new golden age- nanoparticle additions, promised by experiments in Oxford, will increase burning and efficiency by 8-10 per cent while removing foul exhaust fumes. Cars running on diesel already offer greater mileage without incurring the large outlays and battery renewal costs of hybrids.
Biofuels have everyone swooning in fresh anticipation (the love affair erupts every fifteen years, to coincide with the latest oil crisis) and the yield could be colossal. Ethanol is an American boondoggle. It is used as a way for politicians in Washington to appease farmers (as brutally enacted in the TV show The West Wing, during primaries in the presidential race). At worst, the fuel requires its equivalent in oil to produce. The best outcome involves using crop residues, so a double benefit is achieved. Dr Timothy Jones, at the University of Arizona at Tucson, has even discussed mining America ’s vast number of landfills, where concentrated organic matter could provide anything from methane to oils. He claims more than 20 per cent of his nation’s fossil fuels could be replaced in this way. Ron Oxburgh says this source could one day be enough to run America ’s entire fleet of cars and trucks.
Ron is a sheer delight as a friend. He’s as eminent as you can get without being embalmed. House of Lords, former head of Imperial College London, once head of Defence Procurement in the UK, a lively chairman of Shell Oil, this snowy-haired, bushy-browed geologist, with his lilting, almost-Welsh accent, is as close to being the best authority on energy anywhere. At our last meeting in Sydney, at the end of 2006, he was as outspoken as ever about climate change:
The evidence that emissions from fossil fuels are modifying the Earth’s climate is overwhelming. Unless we act fast to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there will be damaging and irreversible environmental change; and Australia looks like being very vulnerable. There will be costs, but doing nothing is even more expensive in the long run.
He was proved right almost immediately, when it was announced by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology early in 2007 that we are already suffering more than almost any other nation from the effects of climate change.
So what does Ron recommend? In terms of transport-linked sources, there are quite a few possibilities, but it is their adjuncts that will make the difference. He says that the intermittent-flow energy technologies-such as wind, solar and tidal power-will be transformed by redox flow batteries, which can store unlimited amounts of juice and make it available instantly. These energy cells, also known as vanadium redox batteries and patented by UNSW in 1986, are being harnessed to store wind power by the Irish, who expect to get half of their base-load electricity from this source in the near future.