{"id":66,"date":"2007-10-13T04:12:51","date_gmt":"2007-10-13T11:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/?p=66"},"modified":"2007-10-13T14:55:01","modified_gmt":"2007-10-13T21:55:01","slug":"haber-bosch-process-has-often-been-called-the-most-important-invention-of-the-20th-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/13\/haber-bosch-process-has-often-been-called-the-most-important-invention-of-the-20th-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Haber-Bosch process has often been called the most important invention of the 20th century"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> this ties in with  the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/?p=49\">earlier post on Peak Phosphorus<\/a><\/p>\n<p>from Juergen Schmidhuber's site<\/p>\n<p><small>Since age 15 or so Prof. J\u00c3\u00bcrgen Schmidhuber's  main scientific ambition has been to build an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.idsia.ch\/%7Ejuergen\/optimalscientist.html\">optimal scientist,<\/a> then retire.  In 2028 they will force him to retire anyway. By then he shall be able to buy hardware providing more <a href=\"http:\/\/www.idsia.ch\/%7Ejuergen\/raw.html\">raw computing power<\/a> than his brain<\/small><\/p>\n<p><font size=\"-1\">Their Haber-Bosch process has often been called the most important invention of the 20th century  (e.g., <em>V. Smil, Nature, July 29 1999, p 415)<\/em>  as it \"detonated the population explosion,\" driving the world's population from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font size=\"-1\"> <strong>Haber-Bosch process:<\/strong> <\/font><\/p>\n<p><font size=\"-1\">Under high temperatures and very high pressures, hydrogen and nitrogen (from thin air) are combined to produce ammonia.   <\/font><\/p>\n<p><font size=\"-1\">Nearly one century after its invention, the process is still applied all over the world to produce  500 million tons of artificial fertilizer per year. 1% of the world's energy supply is used for it <em>(Science 297(1654), Sep 2002);<\/em> it still sustains roughly 40% of the population <em> (M. D. Fryzuk, Nature 427, p 498, 5 Feb 2004).<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.idsia.ch\/~juergen\/worldpopgrowth1.jpg\" height=\"270\" width=\"450\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.idsia.ch\/~juergen\/worldpopgrowth1.jpg\">http:\/\/www.idsia.ch\/~juergen\/worldpopgrowth1.jpg<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.idsia.ch\/~juergen\/\">http:\/\/www.idsia.ch\/~juergen\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>tags needed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>this ties in with the earlier post on Peak Phosphorus from Juergen Schmidhuber's site Since age 15 or so Prof. J\u00c3\u00bcrgen Schmidhuber's main scientific ambition has been to build an optimal scientist, then retire. In 2028 they will force him to retire anyway. By then he shall be able to buy hardware providing more raw &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/13\/haber-bosch-process-has-often-been-called-the-most-important-invention-of-the-20th-century\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> \"Haber-Bosch process has often been called the most important invention of the 20th century\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,13],"tags":[95,96,64,37,36,78,94,8,49,55,93,56,7,54],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-field","category-jai-note","tag-ammonia","tag-artificial-fertilizer","tag-awareness-expansion","tag-ecodelics","tag-future","tag-gaia","tag-haber-bosch","tag-math","tag-media-ecology","tag-peak-energy","tag-peak-food","tag-peak-minerals","tag-peak-oil","tag-phosphorus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.useriscontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}