This was brought up in a conversation here. I thought Michael Crichton would be perfect since the speech seems so real and was given 20 years ago.
What brought it up was the conversation on Hydrogen. Without any government push, we have been moving toward Hydrogen as a fuel source for a long time. We are starting to get it directly, but it's not working perfectly. I expect all of that to be figured out soon enough.
This speech is what broke me from the lefty at the theater and design scene, to hiding what I actually believed out of fear. As he said in a different speech, this is all a religion in the guise of information. I would be a sinner and shunned.
Guy, if you think that Hydrogen is a viable method of energy storage then you are not living in this reality.
Hydrogen isn't a fuel. A fuel is a source of energy. You can make hydrogen out of fuel, but that isn't a good use of that energy source.
Hydrogen is a low density gas. To make it energy-dense enough to be viable for energy storage, it needs to be liquified. That requires energy in-put in the form of refrigeration.
To refrigerate hydrogen to a liquid uses more energy than the energy contained in the hydrogen.
To remain a liquid, hydrogen boils off as a gas, using the phase transition to carry away heat. Without active refrigeration (and remember just putting it in a commercial freezer isn't even close to cold enough) the hydrogen will all boil away within about a month.
Using hydrogen as energy storage neatly doubles or triples the energy required for any given use. More than 100% more for liquification and transport. This is ignoring the shelf-life and transport difficulties.
And where are you getting all this energy that you can waste so much playing with cryogenic liquefied gas? Natural Gas turbines? Coal Fire Power? Photovoltaic Solar Cells?
Here is a brain wave! How about you just run a fucking cable instead of pissing about with cryogenic liquids and tanker trucks?
If you are going to burn it anyway, like in ship IC engines, jet turbines or whatever, then what advantage does Hydrogen have over Methane?
Here is the process of liquid hydrogen production in a nutshell:
Methane Gas - > Hydrogen Gas [Hydrogen Steam Reforming is the only industrial process that scales up] between 30 and 39% efficiency. That is you put in three
times as much methane as you want to get hydrogen.
Hydrogen Gas - > Liquid Hydrogen (below -194 degrees C) Energy Efficiency of 30%. Cooling the Hydrogen to a liquid represents about 80% of the costs of the final product.
Transport of the Cryogenic Liquid: Who fucking knows. It evaporates every minute of every day until it is used. Keeping a liquid at -194 degrees C is energy intensive.
Hydrogen is a low density gas. To make it energy-dense enough to be viable for energy storage, it needs to be liquified. That requires energy in-put in the form of refrigeration.
Hogwash. Toyota Mirai has a range of 400 miles with a pressurized tank. It's somewhat bigger than a gasoline tank, but 400 miles is okay and point being it's not liquified H2. It leaks about the same as a li-ion self-discharges.
We might wish we could distribute liquified H2, but like you said it's not cost effective. Luckily there's not really any need to do so, as pressurized H2 is fine for cars, off-grid houses, and grid storage in caves and such. And there are alternatives like distributing ammonia and turning it into H2 on site.
Other common misconceptions are that it takes a lot of energy to pressurize H2, but for example it can be created from electrolysis while already under pressure for a minor 1%-2% overhead; the idea that you have to first create the H2 at atmospheric pressure and then compress it is junk bunk. Or that it embrittles metals - which is true - but they use carbon fiber and other materials instead. Or that it takes a lot of rare materials, but H2 cars already use less platinum than a catalytic converter.
Really there's only a few open questions: can the total cost get cheaper than batteries (car H2 tank plus fuel cell are well below $2k, but energy cost is higher), how much explosions will be a problem, and whether gasoline will be banned by policy.
Even then, pressurized hydrogen gas has a lower energy density than wood chips!
A reaction that converts ammonia to hydrogen occurs at about 600 degrees C, and is very slow. Even the most recent metal catalyzed reactions only bring that down to 500 degrees C. Lets say they halve that number and get a scalable process that operates at 250 dgrees C; that still is a major use of energy to produce the gas.
Industrial Conversion of Ammonia to Hydrogen in a nutshell:
Fossil Fuel -> Ammonia using the Haber–Bosch process at 550 degrees C.
Ammonia -> Hydrogen using a metal catalyzed reaction at about 500 degrees C.
All of those nice, high temperatures are supplied at the moment by burning fossil fuels. I'd bet that the whole process, plus shipping to your Toyota Mirai has a woeful energy efficiency.
As for catalytic reactions; Last time I checked Polymer Electrolyte Membrane cells were both expensive and ablative. That is, they were used up in the process of making hydrogen gas. As a result there was not yet a scalable process for industrial scale electrolytic hydrogen production, and there are no other serious contenders for a process right now, AFAIK.
The only way that I can see Hydrogen energy storage as having a future is if it is required by the government by outlawing everything else.
At which point we will still be using fossil fuels, just at very, very big an inefficient industrial plants far away from the point of consumption.
Energy for vehicles will cost four times as much, and the world will not be any greener.
So are you acknowledging that you don't need to have liquified H2, or are you pretending Mirai and other hydrogen cars don't exist? Sealed caverns can't store grid levels of hydrogen at pressure, it has to be liquified?
Energy density of wood chips is a red herring; does the Mirai have 400 mile range or not? The temperature of the reaction doesn't really matter at all to the efficiency; there are high temperature processes that are also efficient. Your comments are just long lists of these false premises, like that H2 has to be liquified.
What's great about H2 as chemical energy storage is that it's a common denominator that can be more easily converted to or from than other fuels. Ammonia is one of many ways hydrogen can be transported and there's no physics reason why it can't be efficient.
I asked you a question. How will the Hydrogen get transported from the very large, inefficient hydrogen production plant to your fueling station? Are you going to run a pipeline? Cart it in trucks? Convert it on site? How will it get there?
Lets pick trucks. You want to run 700 bar hydrogen in Carbon Fiber tanks on trucks? Okay, that will require (something like) fifty times more trucks than are currently used to cart petrol.
You want to pick Ammonia carted in trucks? Sure! At double the energy density of Hydrogen, it is still the lowest energy density fuel on the table (see figure 1, previous post) that isn't hydrogen. It is still lower energy density than Wood Chips. It still takes vastly more trucks and drivers and tire rubber than any other. Except now you have to add huge amounts of energy at the other end to turn it back into Hydrogen.
Let us draw a comparison. Natural Gas (mostly methane) is more than three times the energy density of Hydrogen. Moving it by trucks and ships isn't economical without liquifying it first. Low pressure natural gas is run through pipes or not at all.
To manufacture Ammonia you will require hydrogen (made from methane at 3 to 1) and nitrogen in the presence of intense heat and huge pressures. So next to your hydrogen plant you will have a second, industrial scale plant that heats thousands of tons of gas to 500 degrees, boiling it to a pressure of 200 atmospheres, where it will react with an iron catalyst.
Even if the reaction were very efficient, it takes a known quantity of energy to heat the reactants to temperature. You know how heating water for your home costs money? Well heating thousands of tons of gas also requires energy and costs money. Right now the process is only economically viable with access to low cost, low quality natural gas, a lot of which is burned for heat to bring the reactants up to temperature and pressure.
The Toyota Mirai is advertised as being 'zero emission' and 'clean'. It absolutely isn't. Current industrial hydrogen production is dirty as hell.
Even if low pressure hydrogen is the prefect energy storage method for cars, manufacturing it is eye-wateringly expensive, and not at all clean. Transporting the hydrogen is a damn nightmare, and more to the point, vastly expensive.
If we imagine a totally free source of hydrogen (sunlight falls on a genie that waves a wand in a factory) the logistics considerations to get that energy to your car would cost several times the costs of your current energy storage method.
The point I am making, isn't that it can't be done, or that it shouldn't be done. The point is that it will cost a lot more. Three quarters of the world will be riding bicycles because they can't afford hydrogen.... which is still made from natural gas and dirty as hell.
Cart it in trucks? Convert it on site? How will it get there?
Think about it for more than half a second. People are paying for usable energy - miles of range. Mirai shows roughly the same usable energy per volume and how does gasoline get there? By truck, so H2 could be delivered the same way.
Of course with H2 there are other alternatives, like if power is very cheap it could be made on site whereas gasoline that's not really possible because it's not as simple chemically.
The Toyota Mirai is advertised as being 'zero emission' and 'clean'. It absolutely isn't. Current industrial hydrogen production is dirty as hell.
It's just constant red herrings and nonsequiturs with you. Who's arguing whether it's putting CO2 into the air or not? It'll be made from cracking natural gas for a long while until electricity is very cheap. Could be made in many other ways though.
With high temperature reactions you use the output to heat the input. You're not using energy to heat all the material from scratch and then throwing that energy away. The reaction temperature has some bearing on efficiency, but not in the simplistic way you talk about 'it's 500 decrees C dude!'.
You started off with your thesis that it has to be liquified and kept at near zero temperatures to be useful. That's false so your conclusions based on it are false. End of story.
Think about it for more than half a second. People are paying for usable energy - miles of range. Mirai shows roughly the same usable energy per volume and how does gasoline get there? By truck, so H2 could be delivered the same way.
Sure. By taking something like fifty times more trips with the same truck, or perhaps 50 trucks and drivers instead.
With high temperature reactions you use the output to heat the input.
There are still energy inefficiencies. There are current commercial Hydrogen production plants available to study. There are many commercial Ammonia plants to study.
I have done a paper on the end to end efficiency of hydrogen production for maritime use WRT Australia as a net energy exporter. It went something like: "What if Australia put up a million square KM of PV Solar Panels. How would How would Australia Export the energy?" I cited sources and had reliable figures of end to end process efficiency.
You started off with your thesis that it has to be liquified and kept at near zero temperatures to be useful.
No, I did not. It is right there in black and white. I said that:
Hydrogen is a low density gas. To make it energy-dense enough to be viable for energy storage, it needs to be liquified.
Which is entirely due to the logistics of getting it from the point of manufacture (say, the Australian Desert Solar Farms) to the point of use.
The idea "We can just make 50 trips!" adds to the cost! You haven't given a single example of a viable logistics method. Hopes and dreams for a magic future don't actually solve any problems.
I am all for advances in electrolysis, but so far the gold standard is Polymer Electrolyte Membrane cells. The worlds biggest plant is 20 MW, which is tiny. The individual cells are expensive and they wear out. The Magic 8Ball says "Check back in 2030".
Look, I hope you get your golden future of cheap hydrogen energy storage. I hope you get a jetpack too. But right now all you haves are pipe-dreams and Jam Tomorrow, all pushed by the same geniuses that came up with "Carbon Capture" on coal plants; which neatly doubles the coal burned for the same electricity generation. Like carbon capture, any solution which starts by doubling the price of energy is doomed to failure, and hydrogen is much more expensive than double the cost an alternative.
If I were to put down cash, I'd bet that we get an alternative battery technology and plug in Electric Vehicles before we cheap on-site electrolysis. Even a significant improvement in the anode and cathode of LiPo or LiFePo batteries could halve the size and cost of EV battery packs. There are a number of candidates.
I'm intrigued by your mention of hiding your true beliefs in the theatre and design scene. I am an artist/designer who had to completely detach myself from other creatives since an overwhelming number of them are devout members of the cult. I would love to hear more of your story and how you may have continued those interests after breaking away from the scene. I've felt such a decline in creative drive out of an inability to network and get my work out there, there aren't many of us to relate to this plight.
The theater scene is really awkward. There are very few willing to tell them the truth. I had a hard enough time explaining I was straight. I was told specifically not to bend over for anything at one theater because the fly guys had a thing for me. I moved into the convention scene to get out of it, and to study anthropology. Arcades and stuff like that are way less pozzed. People from wizards of the coast, Microsoft, Google, various theater scenes, and others all get into arcades and need to prove they can play.
I'm taking it into a master's in design and architecture. I don't want to take it any further on what I am doing, but there are a lot more folks who can't stand that crap in Central Florida than others. The theater scene is still like it, but you can still have fun. The convention scene still has people showing stuff off. Disney is the Cult, but Universal just speaks about it nicely. Dezerland couldn't care less. I've watched all the people who have tried to control the narrative fail and lose standing and burn some bridges. Those who figure out how to work with everyone regardless win. It's nice, but I'm worried the wrong people will move I to lake Nona and try to take control.
While I was never on the bandwagon, this speech works as well as an article today as it must have back then.
Recall the 'earthquake in Pakistan' that he mentions? I don't. Neither does anyone who didn't live in the area of Pakistan affected.
It is more illustrative today than it was the day it was penned, because instead of a reference to today's catastrophes, it's a reference to one that has become largely irrelevant.
I thought the exact same thing about "that earthquake in Pakistan." As he says, there's one every 8 months. Imagine even naming the vibrations of a planet.
He died by cannibalism. Not the best story Crichton had written, but an absolute wake up call to how the world worked. Reading it now shows Covid in such an insane light.
This was brought up in a conversation here. I thought Michael Crichton would be perfect since the speech seems so real and was given 20 years ago.
What brought it up was the conversation on Hydrogen. Without any government push, we have been moving toward Hydrogen as a fuel source for a long time. We are starting to get it directly, but it's not working perfectly. I expect all of that to be figured out soon enough.
This speech is what broke me from the lefty at the theater and design scene, to hiding what I actually believed out of fear. As he said in a different speech, this is all a religion in the guise of information. I would be a sinner and shunned.
Guy, if you think that Hydrogen is a viable method of energy storage then you are not living in this reality.
Hydrogen isn't a fuel. A fuel is a source of energy. You can make hydrogen out of fuel, but that isn't a good use of that energy source.
Hydrogen is a low density gas. To make it energy-dense enough to be viable for energy storage, it needs to be liquified. That requires energy in-put in the form of refrigeration.
To refrigerate hydrogen to a liquid uses more energy than the energy contained in the hydrogen.
To remain a liquid, hydrogen boils off as a gas, using the phase transition to carry away heat. Without active refrigeration (and remember just putting it in a commercial freezer isn't even close to cold enough) the hydrogen will all boil away within about a month.
Using hydrogen as energy storage neatly doubles or triples the energy required for any given use. More than 100% more for liquification and transport. This is ignoring the shelf-life and transport difficulties.
And where are you getting all this energy that you can waste so much playing with cryogenic liquefied gas? Natural Gas turbines? Coal Fire Power? Photovoltaic Solar Cells?
Here is a brain wave! How about you just run a fucking cable instead of pissing about with cryogenic liquids and tanker trucks?
If you are going to burn it anyway, like in ship IC engines, jet turbines or whatever, then what advantage does Hydrogen have over Methane?
Here is the process of liquid hydrogen production in a nutshell:
Methane Gas - > Hydrogen Gas [Hydrogen Steam Reforming is the only industrial process that scales up] between 30 and 39% efficiency. That is you put in three times as much methane as you want to get hydrogen.
Hydrogen Gas - > Liquid Hydrogen (below -194 degrees C) Energy Efficiency of 30%. Cooling the Hydrogen to a liquid represents about 80% of the costs of the final product.
Transport of the Cryogenic Liquid: Who fucking knows. It evaporates every minute of every day until it is used. Keeping a liquid at -194 degrees C is energy intensive.
Hogwash. Toyota Mirai has a range of 400 miles with a pressurized tank. It's somewhat bigger than a gasoline tank, but 400 miles is okay and point being it's not liquified H2. It leaks about the same as a li-ion self-discharges.
We might wish we could distribute liquified H2, but like you said it's not cost effective. Luckily there's not really any need to do so, as pressurized H2 is fine for cars, off-grid houses, and grid storage in caves and such. And there are alternatives like distributing ammonia and turning it into H2 on site.
Other common misconceptions are that it takes a lot of energy to pressurize H2, but for example it can be created from electrolysis while already under pressure for a minor 1%-2% overhead; the idea that you have to first create the H2 at atmospheric pressure and then compress it is junk bunk. Or that it embrittles metals - which is true - but they use carbon fiber and other materials instead. Or that it takes a lot of rare materials, but H2 cars already use less platinum than a catalytic converter.
Really there's only a few open questions: can the total cost get cheaper than batteries (car H2 tank plus fuel cell are well below $2k, but energy cost is higher), how much explosions will be a problem, and whether gasoline will be banned by policy.
Not Hogwash!
How do you produce industrial scale quantities of Hydrogen and get it to where you fill up your Toyota Mirai?
Put it in a tanker truck at 700 PSI?
http://www.olicognography.org/graph/energydensity.jpg
Even then, pressurized hydrogen gas has a lower energy density than wood chips!
A reaction that converts ammonia to hydrogen occurs at about 600 degrees C, and is very slow. Even the most recent metal catalyzed reactions only bring that down to 500 degrees C. Lets say they halve that number and get a scalable process that operates at 250 dgrees C; that still is a major use of energy to produce the gas.
Industrial Conversion of Ammonia to Hydrogen in a nutshell:
Fossil Fuel -> Ammonia using the Haber–Bosch process at 550 degrees C.
Ammonia -> Hydrogen using a metal catalyzed reaction at about 500 degrees C.
All of those nice, high temperatures are supplied at the moment by burning fossil fuels. I'd bet that the whole process, plus shipping to your Toyota Mirai has a woeful energy efficiency.
As for catalytic reactions; Last time I checked Polymer Electrolyte Membrane cells were both expensive and ablative. That is, they were used up in the process of making hydrogen gas. As a result there was not yet a scalable process for industrial scale electrolytic hydrogen production, and there are no other serious contenders for a process right now, AFAIK.
The only way that I can see Hydrogen energy storage as having a future is if it is required by the government by outlawing everything else.
At which point we will still be using fossil fuels, just at very, very big an inefficient industrial plants far away from the point of consumption.
Energy for vehicles will cost four times as much, and the world will not be any greener.
So are you acknowledging that you don't need to have liquified H2, or are you pretending Mirai and other hydrogen cars don't exist? Sealed caverns can't store grid levels of hydrogen at pressure, it has to be liquified?
Energy density of wood chips is a red herring; does the Mirai have 400 mile range or not? The temperature of the reaction doesn't really matter at all to the efficiency; there are high temperature processes that are also efficient. Your comments are just long lists of these false premises, like that H2 has to be liquified.
What's great about H2 as chemical energy storage is that it's a common denominator that can be more easily converted to or from than other fuels. Ammonia is one of many ways hydrogen can be transported and there's no physics reason why it can't be efficient.
Read my post again.
I asked you a question. How will the Hydrogen get transported from the very large, inefficient hydrogen production plant to your fueling station? Are you going to run a pipeline? Cart it in trucks? Convert it on site? How will it get there?
Lets pick trucks. You want to run 700 bar hydrogen in Carbon Fiber tanks on trucks? Okay, that will require (something like) fifty times more trucks than are currently used to cart petrol.
You want to pick Ammonia carted in trucks? Sure! At double the energy density of Hydrogen, it is still the lowest energy density fuel on the table (see figure 1, previous post) that isn't hydrogen. It is still lower energy density than Wood Chips. It still takes vastly more trucks and drivers and tire rubber than any other. Except now you have to add huge amounts of energy at the other end to turn it back into Hydrogen.
Let us draw a comparison. Natural Gas (mostly methane) is more than three times the energy density of Hydrogen. Moving it by trucks and ships isn't economical without liquifying it first. Low pressure natural gas is run through pipes or not at all.
To manufacture Ammonia you will require hydrogen (made from methane at 3 to 1) and nitrogen in the presence of intense heat and huge pressures. So next to your hydrogen plant you will have a second, industrial scale plant that heats thousands of tons of gas to 500 degrees, boiling it to a pressure of 200 atmospheres, where it will react with an iron catalyst.
Even if the reaction were very efficient, it takes a known quantity of energy to heat the reactants to temperature. You know how heating water for your home costs money? Well heating thousands of tons of gas also requires energy and costs money. Right now the process is only economically viable with access to low cost, low quality natural gas, a lot of which is burned for heat to bring the reactants up to temperature and pressure.
The Toyota Mirai is advertised as being 'zero emission' and 'clean'. It absolutely isn't. Current industrial hydrogen production is dirty as hell.
Even if low pressure hydrogen is the prefect energy storage method for cars, manufacturing it is eye-wateringly expensive, and not at all clean. Transporting the hydrogen is a damn nightmare, and more to the point, vastly expensive.
If we imagine a totally free source of hydrogen (sunlight falls on a genie that waves a wand in a factory) the logistics considerations to get that energy to your car would cost several times the costs of your current energy storage method.
The point I am making, isn't that it can't be done, or that it shouldn't be done. The point is that it will cost a lot more. Three quarters of the world will be riding bicycles because they can't afford hydrogen.... which is still made from natural gas and dirty as hell.
Think about it for more than half a second. People are paying for usable energy - miles of range. Mirai shows roughly the same usable energy per volume and how does gasoline get there? By truck, so H2 could be delivered the same way.
Of course with H2 there are other alternatives, like if power is very cheap it could be made on site whereas gasoline that's not really possible because it's not as simple chemically.
It's just constant red herrings and nonsequiturs with you. Who's arguing whether it's putting CO2 into the air or not? It'll be made from cracking natural gas for a long while until electricity is very cheap. Could be made in many other ways though.
With high temperature reactions you use the output to heat the input. You're not using energy to heat all the material from scratch and then throwing that energy away. The reaction temperature has some bearing on efficiency, but not in the simplistic way you talk about 'it's 500 decrees C dude!'.
You started off with your thesis that it has to be liquified and kept at near zero temperatures to be useful. That's false so your conclusions based on it are false. End of story.
Sure. By taking something like fifty times more trips with the same truck, or perhaps 50 trucks and drivers instead.
There are still energy inefficiencies. There are current commercial Hydrogen production plants available to study. There are many commercial Ammonia plants to study.
I have done a paper on the end to end efficiency of hydrogen production for maritime use WRT Australia as a net energy exporter. It went something like: "What if Australia put up a million square KM of PV Solar Panels. How would How would Australia Export the energy?" I cited sources and had reliable figures of end to end process efficiency.
No, I did not. It is right there in black and white. I said that:
Which is entirely due to the logistics of getting it from the point of manufacture (say, the Australian Desert Solar Farms) to the point of use.
The idea "We can just make 50 trips!" adds to the cost! You haven't given a single example of a viable logistics method. Hopes and dreams for a magic future don't actually solve any problems.
I am all for advances in electrolysis, but so far the gold standard is Polymer Electrolyte Membrane cells. The worlds biggest plant is 20 MW, which is tiny. The individual cells are expensive and they wear out. The Magic 8Ball says "Check back in 2030".
Look, I hope you get your golden future of cheap hydrogen energy storage. I hope you get a jetpack too. But right now all you haves are pipe-dreams and Jam Tomorrow, all pushed by the same geniuses that came up with "Carbon Capture" on coal plants; which neatly doubles the coal burned for the same electricity generation. Like carbon capture, any solution which starts by doubling the price of energy is doomed to failure, and hydrogen is much more expensive than double the cost an alternative.
If I were to put down cash, I'd bet that we get an alternative battery technology and plug in Electric Vehicles before we cheap on-site electrolysis. Even a significant improvement in the anode and cathode of LiPo or LiFePo batteries could halve the size and cost of EV battery packs. There are a number of candidates.
Have a great day.
I'm intrigued by your mention of hiding your true beliefs in the theatre and design scene. I am an artist/designer who had to completely detach myself from other creatives since an overwhelming number of them are devout members of the cult. I would love to hear more of your story and how you may have continued those interests after breaking away from the scene. I've felt such a decline in creative drive out of an inability to network and get my work out there, there aren't many of us to relate to this plight.
The theater scene is really awkward. There are very few willing to tell them the truth. I had a hard enough time explaining I was straight. I was told specifically not to bend over for anything at one theater because the fly guys had a thing for me. I moved into the convention scene to get out of it, and to study anthropology. Arcades and stuff like that are way less pozzed. People from wizards of the coast, Microsoft, Google, various theater scenes, and others all get into arcades and need to prove they can play.
I'm taking it into a master's in design and architecture. I don't want to take it any further on what I am doing, but there are a lot more folks who can't stand that crap in Central Florida than others. The theater scene is still like it, but you can still have fun. The convention scene still has people showing stuff off. Disney is the Cult, but Universal just speaks about it nicely. Dezerland couldn't care less. I've watched all the people who have tried to control the narrative fail and lose standing and burn some bridges. Those who figure out how to work with everyone regardless win. It's nice, but I'm worried the wrong people will move I to lake Nona and try to take control.
Nothing to add but it was a good read so thanks for sharing.
While I was never on the bandwagon, this speech works as well as an article today as it must have back then.
Recall the 'earthquake in Pakistan' that he mentions? I don't. Neither does anyone who didn't live in the area of Pakistan affected.
It is more illustrative today than it was the day it was penned, because instead of a reference to today's catastrophes, it's a reference to one that has become largely irrelevant.
I thought the exact same thing about "that earthquake in Pakistan." As he says, there's one every 8 months. Imagine even naming the vibrations of a planet.
And yet has all the same markers and movements.
That was one of the few essays I've ever read start to finish. And maybe the only one that was actually interesting.
He was an amazing writer.
He died by cannibalism. Not the best story Crichton had written, but an absolute wake up call to how the world worked. Reading it now shows Covid in such an insane light.