Is it available in digital format? 'Got a 20+ hour flight back to NYC from BKK tonight and that would be perfect for the flight...

Yea.

It would not download to my Kindle app until I realized that my email address had changed in the last year. De-register, re-register et Voila ! Four hours of reading bliss. This appears to be sharable to other friends with Kindles, although I have not yet tried it.

You can share it once every two weeks.

Will there be an audible version by Thanksgiving?

I do not know but will ping Wiley

Karl,

I just got an email update from Amazon and it said the release date has been moved up and that I should be receiving my hard copy of Karl Denninger "Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World"

Delivery estimate: November 1, 2011 - November 2, 2011

Rjazz wrote..

The butler Bernank did it.

Sorry to give the ending away.

Mine arrived in the mail today. I had pre-ordered with Amazon.

Exxxxcellent. The local bookstores here do not have it yet, but it is coming.

I got 2 today. WTF, where's the pictures?

Funny, Widgeon!

The one I had pre-ordered came one day before the two additional copies I bought for gifts.

They're on their way to Niceville for sigs!

There are no pictures b/c we never did have that TF party in Niceville.

Probably better off. Could have been damaging to a lot of careers!

Received my copy on Wednesday. Started reading last night. Since I've just started reading the ticker, I'm glad not to have to go through 4 years of archives.

I'm looking forward to the energy section the most. I barely know anything about Thorium and look forward to the difference between Karl's view and the Peak Oil crowd.

The Peak Oil crowd says we can't solve the problem.

Well, on a long enough time line they're right. The problem is that they think the "long time line" is 10, 20 or 50 years.

It's not - it's 500 years long using our proved coal reserves, and if we go further afield for the thorium (there's a lot of it; it's not rare at all) we can turn any source of carbon (CO2 anyone?) into petroleum. The cost goes up but the supply is basically infinite for feedstock since it replenishes itself when you burn it.

The bugaboo is the energy source to do that -- and that's what thorium solves for a very long time.

By the time that is exhausted we should have figured out something else. I'll take the bet on us being smart enough to figure out seriously-over-unity "hot" fusion in 500 years.

In 10 or 20, not so much.

Genesis wrote..

and if we go further afield for the thorium

The moon, Mars and probably other bodies in the solar system have plenty of thorium if we run out down here.

We're not going to run out here for thousands of years.

I'm simply not concerned about that. Once I get into the "several hundred years" range I trust in technological advancement.

Genesis wrote..

We're not going to run out here for thousands of years.

Of course, but the idea of economically-viable space colonization relieves a bit of my disappointment that Pan Am isn't running flights to the moon right now.

Eh, I don't know if we'll get there or not. We have a serious energy barrier to overcome in order to achieve that. I think we eventually will, but as things stand right now I don't know where it's going to come from; nothing in my vision from a physics perspective gets there today, so we're relying on someone finding something we don't understand as of yet to make it happen.

A space elevator makes it a lot easier to get in and out of the earth's gravity well.

Even without one of them if we're talking about mining the moon every unit of energy sent from the moon to the Earth will allow a certain amount of mass to get sent up from the Earth to the moon.

The ratios are most favorable (least unfavorable?) when you're talking about extremely energy-dense materials like thorium or uranium.

That's true, but the bad part of the lift out of the gravity well is that while it's very important for interPLANETARY travel it becomes less important when you're talking about interSTELLAR travel, simply because the fraction of "C" you must achieve to make that practical is much higher (or you have to cheat, which will require ridiculous amounts of energy by today's reckoning.)

I'd be happy with interplanetary travel right now. I think interstellar travel is pretty well covered by the Project Orion concept.

I just did a some calculating and it appears that 4 kg of thorium contains enough usable energy to accelerate the launch mass of the space shuttle to escape velocity so a lunar mining colony would surely be energy positive. How long before it would be economically profitable though...

You're talking usable instantaneously available energy. That would mean full depletion if the thorium which wouldn't happen in the minutes needed to reach escape velocity. Isn't the generation time of energy from a rocketscale reactor limiting on that?

Use the space elevator to get you up there and the reactor plus ion/plasma drive to get you to the moon and back.

I'm not talking about powering rockets directly with thorium.

The first hurdle that a lunar mining operation would need to overcome to even be within the realm of possibility would be that the amount of energy it exported to Earth would need to greatly exceed the amount of energy needed to ship supplies and people up there.

Since thorium is so energy dense you don't need to export very much of it back to Earth in order to balance the energy equation.