271–280 of 341 posts
From the pictures it makes the beach look like its covered in algae or seaweed. I don't think people will be very receptive to the idea if it looks like that.
I don't think people will be very receptive to the desolate hellscape that will be the world if we don't do drastic things to mitigate climate change. I am not saying that this is the solution though.
Dissolving olivine on beaches means releasing nickel into the environment. What is the effect of the release of many megatons of this element?
Yikes... I know coral and other invertebrates are very sensitive to heavy metals like nickel.
Hi HN, I am Eric Matzner, the Co-Founder of Project Vesta and I have been responding to all of the questions on this thread and will continue to answer them, but I just wanted to say thank you for all of the interest. When YC posted their Carbon Removal Technologies Requests for Startups page[1] about 8 months ago, I responded to a comment on the post where @btilly[2] mentioned one of the research papers that our pro…
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Can you point to a scientifically predicted and demonstrated (not just speculated) consequence of climate change we don't know how to deal with?
Hundreds of millions of refugees? Collapse of major ecosystems? Desertification? Flooding?
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"If" is the important word here. If an asteroid hit we won't be just dealing with 10-12 feet. Do you have any scientific proof that this will happen or that it's likely to happen?
Umm. Thwaites is indeed melting https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/02/1904822116 https://www.businessinsider.in/One-of-Antarcticas-biggest-gl...
To be more constructive, this is exactly the kind of hubris that gets me very wary of technoscience.
Let's assume Project Vesta is run by well intentionned folks and has the potential to offer a net positive in a distant future. Even in those conditions, such a project serves the toxic political agenda of not facing the elephant in the room: our growth based economic model is not sustainable and we need to transition away from it.
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true, but maybe we're in the mess simply because we don't worry about long term effects of our actions.
Climate change is the result of (mostly) unregulated profit-seeking. Not merely a lack of worry about long-term effects of our actions. It isn't accidental...we knew decades ago that there were consequences, but a few people with a lot of money bought policies ignoring the problem (from willing politicians worldwide). There is a profit motive behind our climate catastrophe, not "oops, I forgot to turn off the climate…
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If I'm not mistaken, the Earth contains several times as much olivine as it contains crust.
To my no doubt uneducated mind, I am living on the crust so I don't understand what you mean by this statement. Can you explain what the difference is?
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a processor made out of silicon sand, the screen is made of quartz sand The processor is made from silicon, plus trace amounts of aluminum, glass, and other materials. Silicon is smelted from silica, which is silicon dioxide; same difference as hydrogen gas and water, iron and rust, or aluminum and ruby. The common crystalline form of silica is quartz, which is the most common sand (precisely because olivine sand wea…
Yes, I was just quickly paraphrasing the major takeaways on the impact of sand and its importance in our lives from the excellent book I referenced, The World in a Grain. Here is an excerpt for you and any others interested: "He rummages through his knapsack, then pulls out a plastic sandwich bag full of white powder. “I hope we don’t get arrested,” he says. “Someone might get the wrong idea.” ... But it’s the minera…