171–180 of 213 posts
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Super interesting, thanks! Any idea what the timeline will be on your fund?
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Yes, and sort of. The ISS is constantly losing gas, I believe that the primary source of new O2 is actually electrolysis of water, not pressurized tanks, but that they do also have pressurized tanks as a backup. A person breathes out roughly 1kg of CO2/day, and it follows you breathe in about the same amount of O2, not an impossible amount of mass to resupply.
> 1kg of CO2/day which is crazy low if you put it in perspective and see that (gas powered) cars release about 0.2 kg of CO2 ... per kilometer.
https://www.bts.gov/statistical-products/surveys/national-ho...
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Methane is fairly short-lived in the atmosphere, at only 12 years, so it probably wouldn't be particularly effective at terraforming mars. Perfluorocarbons or sulfur hexafluoride can stick around for thousands of years, so they would probably be a better place to start.
Current SF6 level (four orders of magnitude more heat-trapping than CO2, by weight) accounts for 10% of heat forcing. How the heck do we get that stuff out of the atmosphere? There is a replacement, now, for SF6, for use in power stations and wind turbines. Now the SF6 in use needs to be pumped out and disposed of safely, and SF6 actually banned. And, we have to persuade China to replace theirs too.
Source? This does not match what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_list_of_greenhouse_gases says.
In my naive mind, Methane seems like the it could be a good candidate for removal from atmosphere: If you could just get it to react with oxygen, it turns into water and the much less harmful CO2, so you don't have to sequester anything, and the reaction is exothermic i.e. it already "wants to happen"... we would "only" need an effective yet cheap catalyst to make it happen at low temperatures.
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If people were willing to work through the issues with nuclear power, running a bunch of nuclear plants to power the scrubbers would be semi-reasonable.
It's far more reasonable to use solar than nuclear for this, solar has leapfrogged nuclear now. The carbon capture startup founder of Carbon Engineering talks about how he got this wrong, and how they switched their plans from using nuclear to solar. Here's a talk from two years ago on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYopOt9siLg Note that many disagree with his optimism on the carbon capture side of things, but…
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Starting a greenhouse effect on Mars would help it become more livable by humans.
Do you realize the amount of effort we would have to put in to make it habitable? And the time scales involved?
Essentially it would be almost infinitely easier to reverse all climate change on earth than to make another planet livable but it is in theory possible.
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Just remember that only the C part makes you lighter as the O2 comes from the air. So based on that number it's 375g/day (edit: it's 273g)
I get 273g/day? C is lighter than O. Also... this is a typical number for a typical lifestyle, I believe it can vary substantially if you exercise a lot. Also... I know nothing about wait loss, but surely a lot of the mass is in water?
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It'd be much, much, more effective to hook up a nuclear reactor to the grid to take fossil fuel plants offline, and avoid releasing CO2 in the first place. Though in the long term, it might be useful to do what you propose to produce carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuel for things that need exceptional energy density. Like air travel or space launch vehicles.
> Though in the long term, it might be useful to do what you propose to produce carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuel for things that need exceptional energy density. Like air travel or space launch vehicles. Yes that's what I had in mind - thanks. I do remain sceptical that electric cars will save us. If everyone buys an electric car, and then plugs them in the evening to charge - I'm not sure the grid will cope very well…
But another problem is that road construction itself is a huge cause of greenhouse gas emissions and isn't solved at all by electric cars. Only fewer and lighter cars would make things better. Personally I think electric scooters could replace a fair bit of car travel. The little sit down ones are sufficient to get you around for most trips and carry a bags worth of stuff.
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Current SF6 level (four orders of magnitude more heat-trapping than CO2, by weight) accounts for 10% of heat forcing. How the heck do we get that stuff out of the atmosphere? There is a replacement, now, for SF6, for use in power stations and wind turbines. Now the SF6 in use needs to be pumped out and disposed of safely, and SF6 actually banned. And, we have to persuade China to replace theirs too.
> Current SF6 level (...) accounts for 10% of heat forcing. Source? This does not match what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_list_of_greenhouse_gases says. In my naive mind, Methane seems like the it could be a good candidate for removal from atmosphere: If you could just get it to react with oxygen, it turns into water and the much less harmful CO2, so you don't have to sequester anything, and the reaction is exo…
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Liquid hydrogen LH2 electrically synthesized on-site at airports from excess peak production will be important in aviation after maybe 2035 (provided civilization doesn't collapse first). Aside from LH2's usefully extreme energy density, pumping less CO2 directly into the stratosphere would be good. We may reasonably expect production of the needed aerogel-insulated LH2 tankage to be mature by then.
Asking as someone only remotely familiar with hydrogen as a fuel: Don't you have the problem of tanks and pipes becoming brittle from hydrogen diffusing into the material? Are there existing/upcoming solutions for this? I was under the impression that this is a pretty fundamental problem with hydrogen being just a proton essentially..
Gaseous H2 at the extreme pressure people try to use is a much greater nuisance.
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Liquid hydrogen LH2 electrically synthesized on-site at airports from excess peak production will be important in aviation after maybe 2035 (provided civilization doesn't collapse first). Aside from LH2's usefully extreme energy density, pumping less CO2 directly into the stratosphere would be good. We may reasonably expect production of the needed aerogel-insulated LH2 tankage to be mature by then.
You need to consider the volumetric energy density, not the specific energy (which is energy per mass). LH2 has a high specific energy but pretty low volumetric energy density which means that much larger tanks are needed to store the same amount of energy than for other fuels. The conditions for storage of LH2 and demands on materials in contact with LH2 are much harder than for e.g. methane.