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Hey Bill Nye, "Are You For or Against Fracking?" | Big Think. - YouTube
Channel: Big Think
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Hi Bill.
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My name is Susan, aka primordial soup, and
I have a question about fracking.
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Are you for it or against it and why?
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And on the subject of energies what’s the
holdup with the green energies?
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Is it that there’s not enough investment
money, not enough profits, not enough public
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interest, other, all of the above?
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Thank you for answering my question.
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Are you primal or primordial?
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If it’s a primordial soup I love you.
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So let’s talk about fracking.
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I left Boeing because they wanted me to work
on the 767 airplane which wasn’t going to
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fly for 15 years.
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And when you’re a young guy that just seems
like a really long time.
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So I took a job as an engineer in a shipyard
at the place where they skim oil slicks.
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They made at that time the best or the most
popular oil slick skimming boat.
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And then that led to a job for me in the oil
field.
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I worked in the oil patch for a while where
they frack.
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Now my uncle, my beloved mother’s younger
brother really was this guy.
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He was a geologist, graduated from Johns Hopkins
and he got a job with – then he was in the
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army during the Korean War as an engineer.
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And then he worked for DuPont Dynamite going
all over the world blowing stuff up.
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He loved to blow stuff up.
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It was big fun for him.
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He was – you’re not supposed to say your
favorite but he was my beloved uncle.
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Anyway I have his books on this business and
I have – he’s not living anymore.
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And I have a torpedo – and a torpedo is
something that they used to use in the oil
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field and in mining.
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It’s a tube.
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In English units it’s two and a half inches
in diameter and four and a half feet long.
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And it has a crude funnel soldered on the
top or brazed on the top.
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And according to him – now look I wasn’t
there and the guy was a storyteller.
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He’s a raconteur.
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They would usually stuff the torpedo with
dynamite but sometimes they would pour liquid
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nitroglycerine into this thing, this tube.
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I mean if it blew up that’s it.
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You wouldn’t even know it.
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You wouldn’t even know what happened.
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You’d just be powder or liquid powder, droplets.
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All right you’ve just got to keep it cold
Bill.
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You just keep it cold, 54 degrees Fahrenheit.
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Just keep it cold.
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You’ll be able to – what?
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So anyway they would lower it into the oil
well and then apparently in his day they would
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have wired electricity and they would set
it off – boom – dynamite or nitroglycerine.
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But in the old, old days – I’ve seen his
book – they had something like a shotgun
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shell and a rope and they would yank it – boom.
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So that would be fracturing or fracking right
at the bottom of the well straight down.
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That was the state of the art.
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But what’s happened now we can steer drill
bits in just three meters, in just ten feet
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from the floor to the ceiling in this room
I’m sitting in.
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So now you can drill down like this and go
sideways.
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And this has led to irresponsible fracturing
or fracking.
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And this is where it’s not inherently a
bad idea, it just can’t be unregulated.
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And apparently that’s been the problem where
people – oil companies especially are not
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– or the foreman on the job, the tool push
as he’s called, are able to get away with
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this irresponsible practice.
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And so the thing about it, you know, usually
these gas bearing shales, this rock real down
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deep is a layer formed from an ancient sea
or what have you.
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So I like to describe it this way.
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I don’t’ know if you’ve ever been around
an obnoxious kid at a sandwich shop.
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But he or she may take the straw – it’s
usually a boy – take the straw and poke
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it into the sandwich and then suck sandwich
out of the end of the straw.
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Now when you do that you’re going to get
a little pastrami but you’re going to get
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a lot of bread.
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But imagine if you could go into the sandwich
sideways.
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Then you can get all the pastrami or tuna
salad or chicken salad or cheese or whatever
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vegan meal, whatever it is.
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You could get it all that way.
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And that’s the principle behind modern – it’s
called hydraulic fracturing, fracking.
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You drill sideways and then you pump fracking
fluid – it’s incompressible stuff and
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give it a pow and then it cracks everything
and the gas comes up.
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The gas doesn’t always come out the tube
that you put it in or the opening you put
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it in.
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Sometimes it comes out in somebody’s sink.
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So fracturing is not inherently bad.
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The problem with renewable energy right now
is multipronged as you might imagine.
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The first thing is oil and coal are so cheap.
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Nobody pays for putting the carbon in the
atmosphere.
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That’s the drag right now.
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We are all – and I did it my whole life.
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I mean hey man.
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We were all able to drive cars, burn gasoline,
make carbon dioxide, make a greenhouse gas,
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leave open containers of gasoline around making
– that’s also those volatiles are also
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are greenhouse.
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Methane – yes you can talk about cows but
natural gas being flared or just leaked is
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another greenhouse gas.
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All that stuff we’ve been able to do for
centuries and nobody said anything.
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There’s no tax on it.
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Renewables are not – it’s hard to make
them compete when these other energy sources
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are so heavily subsidized.
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Just think about this.
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Having a military on the other side of the
world protecting oil fields.
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That is essentially a subsidy for oil and
gas.
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But then in the next bigger picture the problem
we have technically or from a physics standpoint
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is the sun doesn’t shine all the time.
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We have – you’re probably familiar with
it, a phenomenon called night.
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And then the wind doesn’t blow strongly
all the time.
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It blows strongest in the evening and the
morning.
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So what we need is the better battery.
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And when I say battery I mean writ large.
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We need better energy storage systems or new
or just enhanced or amazing.
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Now the Tesla Motor Company is now selling
batteries for your garage wall that have 10
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kilowatt hours I think which is a lot that
can run your refrigerator for a day and a
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half, you know, two days.
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It’s pretty cool.
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But we need energy storage in a much – like
on the scale of Hoover Dam, or Grand Coulee
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Dam on the Columbia River.
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Enormous energy storage capability.
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And there’s an idea that I am just thoroughly
charmed by.
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And that is you would make a huge hole in
the ground on purpose and we are really good
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at this.
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I mentioned – we talked about fracking a
moment ago.
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We, it was me doing the talking about fracking.
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We are really good at explosives, you know.
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We use almost half a billion pounds which
in old unit it’s like a quarter billion
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kilos of explosives every year just in the
U.S. Imagine trying to dig all that stuff
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up without explosives.
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Put it out of your mind.
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It ain’t going to happen.
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That’s how Nobel got so crazy rich that
he could just give away a million dollars
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five or six times a year and not think about
it.
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The same with DuPont inventing explosives.
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Good idea.
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All right.
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Blow a big hole in the ground and use the
tailings or the leftover rock to create a
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giant piston, a giant thing that you would
lift up every day with solar or wind energy
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let’s say – or even – I mean I’m not
trying to get carried away.
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Even a nuclear power plant.
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A smaller one than you would have to build
otherwise.
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And you would pump water under this piston,
lift it up and then at night or when the power
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is not running or just to deal with a peak
load at a power plant you let that piston
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fall down, squeeze the water back up, run
it through a nice Francis turbine is a very
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popular style – by popular I mean they’re
very efficient way to make – to run an electric
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generator.
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That’s what they use at dams and stuff.
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It’s a style where the water comes through
the inside instead of running like a paddle
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wheel.
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Anyway, we would do that and you might have
like a giant gravity weight cylinder water
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pump farm.
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You might have ten of these things.
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And then you start getting into being able
to store megawatt hours of electricity.
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You’d be on an industrial scale.
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And the thing is it wouldn’t cost that much.
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We have the technology.
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We have explosives.
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We have guys that people that love to make
concrete things.
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You take the broken up the rip rap rock and
make it into a giant piston.
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We have turbines.
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We have pumps.
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We’re good at all this stuff.
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No nuclear waste.
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No having to dam a river and screw up an ecosystem.
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And we have places around the country where
we have power plants which have a big environmental
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impact already.
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And we could build these things.
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And if you want to get crazy you could have
a forest on top of them.
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I mean that’s a lot to ask but this technology
really charms me.
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What we need is energy storage.
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And the other thing we need primordial soup
is better electrical transmission.
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We’re pretty good at it but I had the rare
opportunity and this is one thing that happens
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to you and I’m just some guy.
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I interviewed Rick Smalley who unlike many
of us here in the studio had a Nobel Prize.
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Anybody?
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I guess nobody here at Big Think has a Nobel
Prize either.
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Anyway, he got a Nobel Prize for discovering
buckeyballs.
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The buckminsterfullerenes.
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These are spheres of carbon.
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And his dream as a chemist was to stir it
up soup woman and they would – this tube
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like you cut the sphere in half and a tube
grows with the same pattern of interstices
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and network where you get this nanotube that
not be a few nanometers or billionths of a
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meter long but be meters long or kilometers
long.
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And then the electrons would flow through
these things with hardly any electrical resistance.
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If we could develop those things and run let’s
say direct current power lines around.
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It would, dare I say it, change the world.
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That’s a great question primordial soup.
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Thank you for asking.
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