101–110 of 314 posts
How much energy is in the core of the Earth? What happens if we cooled the core to the point that it became solid? I’m guessing that would be bad, but is it something that’s not conceivably possible on any human timescale?
Not until humanity becomes a type 2 Civilization. Which seems like at least a 1000 years away.
Yeah right. They drilled in Strasbourg, France, to get this "free" energy. When they entered production, the city was experiencing an earthquake every month, waking the city at night. After a magnitude 4 earthquake, they finally shut down the plant. A town in Germany is devastated also due to geothermal power: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staufen_im_Breisgau
This is why pushback against climate change policies is, I believe, a healthy thing. Yes, protecting the environment is super important, but time and time again we are told to trust the science, trust the experts, everything is going to go exactly as planned. And time and time again, it turns out the experts didn't account for this, or for that, or were just flat out wrong, and then everyone pays for the "oops". We s…
The only tool needed for that is a really simple one: a bumper sticker that says "when you mix science and politics you get politics".
People who can't grok that are not going to come around.
Yeah right. They drilled in Strasbourg, France, to get this "free" energy. When they entered production, the city was experiencing an earthquake every month, waking the city at night. After a magnitude 4 earthquake, they finally shut down the plant. A town in Germany is devastated also due to geothermal power: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staufen_im_Breisgau
This is why pushback against climate change policies is, I believe, a healthy thing. Yes, protecting the environment is super important, but time and time again we are told to trust the science, trust the experts, everything is going to go exactly as planned. And time and time again, it turns out the experts didn't account for this, or for that, or were just flat out wrong, and then everyone pays for the "oops". We s…
No, it's not. In the past we did next to nothing and we now see the consequences. We may fail if we try, but we are guaranteed to fail if we don't.
And science is like democracy, it's not perfect sometimes even bad, but it's still the best we have. Everything else is worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had the thought for a while now that it might be a good idea to start changing the climate change narrative to a problem of planetary heat engineering, not simply a problem of GHG reduction. The current narrative is largely defeatist and regressive. It's largely about rolling back growth and the amount of energy civilization has harnessed. But if the narrative was altered to be a heat engineering problem, then i…
I think there are other effects of increased CO2 concentration that are not well understood and could be catastrophic. Like ocean acidification. That actually scares me far more than the heat aspect.
Microwave drilling. It's a known thing at small scale.[1] If it can be done at larger scale, it ought to have other applications. Doing it downhole at the end of a long pipe string is going to be much harder than doing it in a factory. So why isn't this an industrial machining process already, like plasma cutting? GA Drilling was pushing plasma drilling back in 2018.[2] They're still pushing it, but not making holes.…
> Anything that works would be used by the oil and gas industry, and if they're not trying it, one suspects it might not be working. To flip that around: this would imply that the most under-investigated-in-industry approaches to deep hole boring would be the ones that destroy the economic value of any oil-and-gas in the ground, no? Ones that make the ground radioactive, perhaps. Or that would set any potential oil f…
That is only one explanation to why a technology would be among the most under-investigated-in-industry approaches. There are many others, such as:
- It does not work at all.
- It is more expensive than traditional methods
- It is illegal in some way
- It is incompatible with the rest of oil&gas processing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there are other effects of increased CO2 concentration that are not well understood and could be catastrophic. Like ocean acidification. That actually scares me far more than the heat aspect.
It's also a bit more difficult to diffuse out of classrooms and such with 400+ ppm background vs 300ppm. At what threshold it affects alertness, cognition, or motivation is disputed.
Microwave drilling. It's a known thing at small scale.[1] If it can be done at larger scale, it ought to have other applications. Doing it downhole at the end of a long pipe string is going to be much harder than doing it in a factory. So why isn't this an industrial machining process already, like plasma cutting? GA Drilling was pushing plasma drilling back in 2018.[2] They're still pushing it, but not making holes.…
> Anything that works would be used by the oil and gas industry, and if they're not trying it, one suspects it might not be working. To flip that around: this would imply that the most under-investigated-in-industry approaches to deep hole boring would be the ones that destroy the economic value of any oil-and-gas in the ground, no? Ones that make the ground radioactive, perhaps. Or that would set any potential oil f…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy
Regarding drilling operations that destroy value: you're forgetting that drilling is 1D while oil fields are 3D (technically quasi-2D with horizontal dimensions 100x to 1000x larger than vertical dimensions). If your drilling messes up everything in a 10 meter radius from the drill string, you don't care.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are correct in that the earth core is really well insulated from the surface. So well that the light of the sun delivers an order of magnitude more energy per M2 to the Earth's surface. That information also answers your question, our problem isn't with the amount heat we produce, it's with how much of that solar radiation we trap in our atmosphere due to the green house effect of CO2 and similar gases. So yeah w…
I've had the thought for a while now that it might be a good idea to start changing the climate change narrative to a problem of planetary heat engineering, not simply a problem of GHG reduction. The current narrative is largely defeatist and regressive. It's largely about rolling back growth and the amount of energy civilization has harnessed. But if the narrative was altered to be a heat engineering problem, then i…
So not a great plan, but a great example of how some of the solutions can be a lot more complex than just "remove CO2". At the same time any plan that cools without removing CO2 (e.g. planetary sunshades[1]) have the downside that they don't solve ocean acidification.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many countries have almost no wilderness left; everything is either urban or agriculture or mountains with no convenient place for an earthquake.
Seismic disturbances are generally a concern for dense urban areas. It seems unlikely that agricultural areas would care that much.