Had a few people die of cancer in my arms. Heard all the doctor stories. All the talk about brand new treatments and experimental treatments and trying to get into the latest new treatment that in the 6 months that you're diagnosed with cancer might just possibly be different than all the other experimental treatments that have been going on for the last 40 years that didn't do much. I mean they have had some success. But it's just cause me to be very skeptical.

There been some huge breakthroughs I think like gleevac for some forms of leukemia which is apparently just been a effortless cure and a pill and there may be some others I'm not aware of but I don't know. Things like prostate cancer and colon cancer if you catch them early or almost trivial now so catching things Early is important.

Anyway that's all I know. I'm not a doctor and it's not medical advice it's just my own personal thoughts.

I'm also met two people who have survived pancreatic cancer which used to be a certain killer so they're apparently some treatments now little take care of that so it just depends on when they're diagnosed and you got to do a lot of research and find out what really works.

Well I bought panels off of ebay. They're also some places you can buy used panels. But at $89 for 100 Watts on Amazon delivered it's hard to beat it. A pulse with modulated inverter which is not the best but will work with most things will be about 100 bucks for 1,000 W maybe 200 bucks for 2000 watts.

If you shift your appliances to use less Watts for example buy a 700 watt microwave oven instead of trying to get a 2000 watt microwave on and then it'll take 4 minutes instead of 2 minutes to reheat your food but you won't have to buy a more expensive inverter or thicker wires.

I think solar panels are so cheap now that it's worth getting one or two and beginning to offset your energy costs immediately. I mean if you can run a 3 amp 110 volt air conditioner in your window off of a couple of solar panels for a few hours in the middle of the day I would imagine that that's going to save you so much on your energy bill these days in Europe in America that that alone is a good reason to do it. Not to mention the fact that a lot of places in Europe are going to experience some brownouts and things so if you can run an electric heater for a few hours in the day and use that to heat up a pile of sand or some rocks then that can emit heat all night when the sun's gone down and you might have heat when no one else does in freezing europe.

Don't forget that the primary use of electricity is for heating and air conditioning in most houses. And you can skip batteries completely if you just run some resistance wire under a pile of sand and a large 55 gallon metal barrel sitting in the middle of your floor and you heat that all day when the sun is out and when the Sun goes down that will radiate that heat all night. You can also heat hot water and put it in hot water bottles in your bed. Etc etc. It's rather easy to store heat to radiate at night. Air conditioning is a little tougher but you can run an ice maker on your solar panels during the day and again blow air over that ice or put it in a plastic bag in your bed to keep you cooler if it's very hot at night. I literally bought an ice maker that can run off an inverter and runs off a 300 watt solar panel system I have and I stuck a beer or two right inside the little ice maker instead of buying a refrigerator.

Or you could just skip certification and mount the panels on the ground outside or above a little shock you built and run a gorilla cord from your inverter into the window of your house and run whatever you want it off that cord and never ever tie into the grid. In fact I highly recommend people don't tie into the grid for their first solar installation. If you tied into the grid you have a whole lot more cost and you lose some Independence if the grid goes down and you've got a lot of people monitoring what you're doing. If you just have a large thick extension cord running from your solar panels and an outdoor inverter to go into your window then that can be considered a temporary use which you can do with what you want.

But here's what you're missing. You don't need a lot of batteries anymore. When you can buy thousands of watts of solar panels for dirt cheap and you don't need to worry about storing a lot of that electricity and batteries. You can get yourself one 100 amp hour lithium iron phosphate battery for $300 and that thing will last you longer than your life. Literally. Those 100 amp hours will be plenty to run anything except a massive electric heater all night. And with daytime solar panels you won't be draining the battery at all you'll be stuffing it full of electricity while you're using all of your appliances inside. So since solar panels have gotten so cheap it's better to just buy a lot more solar panels and you just don't need to have many batteries anymore. That's the big change.

Go to any sailboat Marina and you'll find huge numbers of owners are pulling out their diesels and installing electric motors and or many are buying torquedo electric outboards to use when navigating into and out of marina.

The big catamaran makers are switching to solar covering their roof area with panels which gives them enough to navigate purely by solar without draining the batteries and still even charge the battery so they can continue to operate overnight. I actually expect catamarans to get rid of sails pretty much completely and go pure solar as for most latitudes the solar is a guarantee much more than the wind.

Or you can just buy 3 100 watt solar panels on Amazon for $89 each and nail them to the side of your house or the top of your shed and buy a 10 amp hour lithium iron phosphate battery for $30 and buy a inverter which is going to be able to run your window air conditioner or your other daily implements or charge all your devices or keep your computer running during the day when you're awake and actually using it. All for less than $500.

Another one of those stories that endlessly repeats over decades and decades. To give you an example of how long this has been proposed a guy named Gerard O'Neill wrote a book about space stations that were going to be launched that were big cylinders that rotated that his Princeton students helped him devise and whose primary function was going to be giant solar panels in space which used microwave beams to direct that power back down to earth.

That was in the late 1970s. And even in the 1970s with that technology that seemed like one of those ideas that was well within the technology reach of the day if only somebody just decided to do it. So no improvements in solar technology or rocket technology have really done much more than make a practical system more practical today. But that's not why it won't ever get done. It won't ever get done because it's always going to be cheaper to have that power from the ground.

When you been reading consumer scientific publications and websites like I have for 20 or 30 years you see the same stories recycled over and over. And every new generation that comes up thinks it's a new innovation. The only thing that I can remember is actually progressed greatly and this includes stories like biodegradability and flying cars and cancer cures is actually solar panels. Solar panels are one of the few things that have actually increased and changed in such a huge degree over that. Of time as to make a huge difference. I'll add to that battery technology. You have small devices that can run for long times independently because battery technology is improved probably 100 times in the past 20 years.

But all these stories about biodegradability and cancer cures and new fuel sources from recondensing all kinds of waste etc etc and wind power and everything else and unfortunately the cancer cures that are going to be derived from your immune system learning to attack cancer rather than body cells well their stories that are recycled over and over and apparently continue to generate money from venture capitalists who I guess didn't see the same story 10 years ago.

That's just a little long-term experience perspective. I remember the molar flying car from the 1980s that appeared on the cover of popular science or popular mechanics magazine once a year. It always sold magazines. We still don't and never will have flying cars because no one wants a million people flying over your head in their own personal car.

Remember when they started talking about biodegradable plastics being the greatest thing? So suddenly instead of a milk jug floating around the ocean for a thousand years that milk jug is going to break down into tiny tiny pieces. Well it turned out that microplastics were a whole lot worse than having The milk jug floating around for a thousand years. You could easily grab the milk jug and put it in the landfill or do something else with it but those tiny microplastic particles are getting into fish and you're eating them and they're getting into everything in the ecosystem and they're leaching their chemical and often hormone mimicking properties into life everywhere.

We have to be careful about biodegrading things that are not of a natural origin. Making it smaller doesn't mean it's going away. In many cases it's better to have it in a big thing that doesn't deteriorate that you can compress and put in a relatively small space underground. Like a garbage dump.

Great. So now when you buy a computer it'll Fall apart just like those grocery bags when you put the cans in and they break because they're so biodegradable they start to fall apart immediately.

Not to mention the fact that they'll be able to sell a whole lot more computers if your computer start failing as they degrade.

I still have an old IBM pc. It was created before they took the lead out of solder so the solder doesn't create spikes which cause short circuits in electronic devices and cause them to fail. Theoretically except for the hard drive that computer could probably be running in another 200 years.

There's something nice about owning something that actually might last forever.

At this point it wouldn't surprise me at all if the old science fiction idea that aliens created our race simply to store information for themselves that they could extract millions of years later turned out to be true.

I remember a study how glioblastoma's were caused by extensive dental X-rays in young children. These manifested in brain cancers decades later.

Don't listen to all the banana cancer radiation comparisons. True studies have shown that for every increase in radiation that you're exposed to there's a proportional increase in cancer. So small amounts of radiation including even dental X-rays increase your risk of cancer by a similar small amount. But extensive full skull around the head dental X-rays to detect early cavities in teeth that are going to fall out anyway are absolutely extraordinarily irresponsible. Let your kid get the cavity and have it filled when they get the cavity if they need to. Do not let a dentist fill your kids mouth and head with radiation for something as stupid as that.

Actually there are several cancers that are viral based. One of the most well-known ones afflicted AIDS patients who after they got the AIDS virus ended up getting very noticeable distinctive unusual skin cancers called some kind of sarcoma. I forget what it was. When AIDS was first happening in the 1990s I remember very well the discussions that this caused a cancer that was contagious and it was the first known type of cancer that was contagious. Now you don't need to tell me that the cancer wasn't directly caused by the virus. I know that. The virus reduced your immune system which left your body open to the cancer. Nonetheless the cancer itself was contagious because of a virus.

The other contagious cancer I know of is the well-known cancer that young girls are being told to get vaccinated against. It's the uterine cancer caused by that HPV virus.

I hate to be a downer but if you've ever known anybody with cancer who's passed away from things like this you know that those months of prolonged life are filled with doctor visits and the terror of whether or not your treatment is working.

And even if the side effects aren't bad the mental trauma that the patients are going through as they get a treatment that might give them a chance that they're hoping for a cure from that they have to then wait a month to see if they're going to get a cure or reduction in their cancer leaves them basically on pins and needles for the remaining months of their life.

No, I'm not saying it's wrong to have these treatments because certainly every scrap of life that you can claw back is important to people who are dying and I have no doubt that if I was in that situation I would probably scrap for every moment of life as well.

But what I am saying is when something says that a treatment prolongs life for months or even a year it's wrong to think that people are taking a treatment and then they're having a wonderful life for those months or years. They arent. They aren't getting their old life back. They're entering into some weird new nerve-wracking state of existence filled with Hope and dreams all pivoting on the next doctor visit every single week or month that this goes on. If I was diagnosed with cancer if I had the courage and the smarts I personally think again if I had the courage the wise thing to do really would be to take whatever last vacation trip or do whatever thing you really wanted to do before you died and enjoy that last period of time rather than fighting for a few extra months under those other circumstances.

There are certain cancers that they absolutely have been able to cure now and that's certainly worth doing. But these treatments that only promise a few months of extended life are in retrospect probably not the best way to spend the last few weeks or months of your life.

If you have never experienced having some solar panels with an inverter and a small inexpensive battery like a $30 10 amp hour lithium iron phosphate battery then you really can't understand the dramatic gains that have happened in solar panels lately. Suddenly you have an immense amount of power being put out by something that's just sitting there in the sunshine that's not even very big. We're talking about power that can kill you coming out of an inverter. We're talking about power that can make a Big Arc of electricity. Two or three Solar panels today can make whopping amounts of power and not even in bright sunshine. They'll make power even in cloudy skies.

This is radically changed boat ownership because boat owners no longer need to run gasoline generators or their engines to operate their equipment and because they now have an abundance of electrical power they can run things like air conditioners and ice makers and refrigerators and other things and water makers and water purifiers endlessly without returning to port for gasoline for a generator.

It's also changed life for boondockers and rvs.

There used to be an endless quest for free energy on the internet 20 years ago. The primary driver of that I believe was people wanted to get off the money sucking tit of utility companies in governments in general. Well solar panels are that free energy. It's much more understandable than the old free energy quests that used to proliferate but the results are the same. You spend $300 $400 on solar panels and you can have 10 to 15 amps of 12 volt power continually at your fingertips as long as the sun is shining.

This is a big deal.

what many people who don't have exposure to solar panel systems like this don't realize is although they may sit in their house and their house is constantly draining a thousand or more watts all the time with even a little bit of planning that same house can drain no power unless an individual device is actually turned on and used at that moment. Since boats and RVs are set up with systems that are not left on unlike houses. It quickly becomes obvious to boat owners and RV owners that are very small amount of power on tap for short periods of time is really what it takes to provide living quarters for someone. And specially if you're living quarters are well insulated you don't even need much for heating and air conditioning. Some of the window air conditioning units that are now being put into boats and RVs that you can buy for $150 at Home Depot are so efficient that they might only use 3 amps of power and that's plenty to be run by very small solar panel systems in the middle of the day when you most need that air conditioning.

The fabled free energy is here.

Edit:

After reading some of the other comments here I see so many of the old tropes being marched out again. Things like Central utilities need big battery packs and solar power isn't reliable and all these other things which are all true but they missed the point.

The big difference today is you can buy 100 watt solar panels right off Amazon for $89. Those consumer level panels are approximately 20% efficient today instead of 10% efficient like they were five or 10 years ago.

That 20% is enough to mean that you only need to buy three or four of those to run a window air conditioner or to run any other single device for shorts periods of time through a small $100 inverter.

What this means is you can run everything you need to live off of that solar power and small battery setup. Boat owners and RV owners know this but even homeowners can make this work by simply setting up a few solar panels with a very small battery like a 10 amp hour battery that really acts more like a capacitor and an inexpensive inverter and running an extension cord through a window and running a window air conditioning unit In the heat of the day to knock a huge amount off of their utility bill in the summer. They can run 90% of the things they need to run like a computer their phones and other things off of that same solar power setup. The only thing they can't run is an electric heater that's running constantly all night. You can even get around that somewhat though by using your solar panels to heat a large thing of water during the day and having that water radiate its heat all night long when the solar panel isn't available. That alone will cut your room heating cost quite a bit. It's just a modern variation on filling a hot water bottle up before you go to bed and stick it again in the bed with you. That water will radiate heat for a long time. Or the old boy scout trick when camping of putting in a rock into your fire while the fire is burning and then when you're ready to go to bed taking the rock out of the fire and wrapping it in a blanket and putting it in your sleeping bag with you. It makes the heat available earlier available to you all night.