Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Solid Hydrogen: BUSTED!" video.

  1. WHICH CHANNEL are you talking about, he's actually pointing out at least 4 that I recognize. 3 of them Matt Ferrell, Alex Guberman (E for Electric) and Ricky (Two Bit da Vinci) are this new classification of social media type called "science communicators." In the past most science communicators where science people - physicists, chemists engineers, etc. These days a lot of them have NO SCIETIFIC qualifications or training. Its basically a fancy way of saying journalist who reports on technology. It does NOT mean they have ANY science background and for some it shows. Occasionally you'll see a person with genuine tech credentials stuffing up. The 4th guy shown here is Sandy Munro (the old guy just before 2 minutes) who actually is a real car guy and does know his stuff regarding cars and manufacturing them. I'd expect he's going to be making a retraction on this once he finds out its a dodgy technology. This vid actually highlights how bad most of the Science Communicators are. Even thunderf00t made a couple of mistakes here. 1: Early on he talks about there is no hydrogen in the atmosphere THAT'S NOT TRUE. There is free hydrogen in the atmosphere there's just not much of it. 2: Where thuderf00t talks about greenhouse gases at the end he's talking as if CO2 is the only green house gas which ITS NOT. Methane which is the main component of biogas like that found in sewers and waste treatment plants is an extremely potent greenhouse gas. In fact gram for gram its far more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Thunderf00t should know that. 3: On the positively charged subject. Yes Hydrogen gas (H2) is not positively charged. Yes free Hydrogen atoms (H2) are not positively charged. BUT hydrogen ATOMS stripped of their electron ARE positively charged. Thunderf00t should have also jumped on that because to create ionized hydrogen plasma takes energy and these guys are claiming there is no energy required. Where thunderf00t has this totally correct is the energy density, but even on that there is a point he missed. The only way these guys could claim they are getting the energy density is if they were capturing and storing the hydrogen as Metallic Hydrogen. If these people are claiming or even suggesting they are creating metallic hydrogen then that's even crazier than all the other claims put together.
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  2.  @Letsgosurfing-cc3ly  I'd agree for some things "just have a think does" but mostly he reports what he can cite. He rarely promotes things as definitive solutions or game changers and I emphasize promotes as in hype like happened with this. He's not perfect but clearly better than average, but then its a fairly low average.
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  3. That's a good point. Nobody was actually questioning this technology and its claims. I'm an aerospace engineer and I didn't pick it as a SCAM but it was fairly obvious something was wrong. I usually avoid these so called "science communicators" because they get so many basic things WRONG. In the past most science communicators were actual physicists, chemists, engineers, etc. Even when they were journalists they were journalists who usually took the time to get their facts right. Neil DGT recently commented that these days the "news industry" is so geared to being first to report something they don't check anything. Its in the first few minutes of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S58vlJwhwDw Just in the aerospace area I see so many BADLY researched stories produced. Half the problem is there are so many companies trying to promote their ideas and get funding. That's such a competitive space and its a space where there are so many people scamming investors.
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  4.  @OolTube02  That's part of the confusing thing in what they are claiming. Where is it actually coming from. There isn't enough free hydrogen in the atmosphere. The main constituent of sewer gas like biogas is methane. The biggest part of this confusing mess is that the main suppliers of information aren't technically qualified in any way so they just miss things (in this case lots of things). They aren't asking pertinent questions like - where are you going to get this much hydrogen? To power the worlds cars you need a lot of hydrogen. It has to come from somewhere. What I like about thunderf00t's argument is the energy density. I actually missed that point when I first saw this presented. I was trying to figure out their chemistry, which didn't make a lot of sense. The energy density should be pretty easy for most people to grasp. Even if they don't exactly get it they can understand you can't put 5 gallons in a 1 gallon tank.
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  5. That's a great point which should have had everybody jumping on the claims from the first moment these guys started making claims. I think they confused (we'll go with confused for the moment) a lot of people with the military angle. Their claim was basically "This was banned because the US military wanted to keep it to themselves." That's a good technique if you trying to get people to wonder why? Its a believable line because any tech that gives the military an edge they don't generally allow out in the real world for others to copy or use.
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  6.  @Skylancer727  You have very accurately summed up many of these so called "science educators." I started with a degree in aerospace and work in automation, robotics and control systems and like many STEM educated people have had enough of the fantasy promoters. We (as in the entire human race) have some really serious issues to solve in the next 10 or so years and none of us can get a seat at the table because there are so many clowns confusing the daylights out of every one. We spend more time explaining basic things rather than working on solutions.
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  7.  @blargh3428  There are letting Elon do a lot of things. Ruining the environment with rockets is pretty small compared to the rest of what he does. AND all of the rockets combined are NOTHING compared to the power industry.
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  8.  @vigilantmug5028  Great point - there are many countries with energy issues. A lot of people forget that as populations grow they also require more energy. For most of the last 20+ years few western countries kept building major base load power stations to provide a solid foundation to underpin their energy needs. I'm Australian and I have seen claims that 75% of our main base load power stations are past their design life. As an engineer that's partly questionable because you can re-life a power station with a major rebuild. That can only be done so many times. Our major issue is some of ours are so old there is nothing that can be done. and we aren't the only country
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  9.  @awesomeferret  You've just pointed out the hyper-elephant in the room that's trampling on human society right now - misinformation that people choose to accept as fact irrespective of how idiotic it might be. Its not simply a matter of people speaking garbage, that's been happening since the dawn of society. Its that we (for the first time in history) have a mechanism for distributing verbal garbage (social media) to every person on the planet who WANTS to believe any particular piece of garbage they like. There's a great line about how the village idiot used to be restricted to the village, but thanks to social media they village idiots across the globe can now gather together and spread their stupidity everywhere. Arguably the biggest problem is when people like what they hear they don't fact check anything and then mistakes and lies become facts.
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