171–180 of 180 posts
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Doesn't matter since you want to dump the gunk somewhere anyways. Just dump it and start over.
Losing entire batches of your product on a regular basis is pretty bad for a commercial product
If a machine were invented that scrubbed carbon from the atmosphere and turned it into useful food, construction materials, animal feedstocks, and fibers, all while rebuilding topsoil, it would be on the cover of every tech magazine in the world and its inventor would be a celebrity millionaire. Yet I’ve never seen a tree on the cover of Wired. https://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2012/06/vertical-farms-and-lab... Sometimes…
> Sometimes we overlook the simplest approaches. We should plant trees. Lots of them. It's not a perfect solution That's because it's not a solution at all: https://www.wired.com/story/trees-regenerative-agriculture-c...
Here's a back of the envelope calculation: a tree absorbs about 48 pounds of CO2/year [1], which is 22kg. So, one trillion trees absorb 22 GT/year. The world puts out 36 GT/year (or about 50 GT of CO2-equivalent if you include methane and other greenhouse gases). One trillion might not be enough, but 2 could do the trick.
[1] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2015/03/17/power-one-tree-ve...
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Another perhaps even cooler and not so unrealistic that people are actually working on it, is building the solar farms out in space and beaming the energy down to where it’s needed! Edit: OK I looked it up again and there are two stages. The one that's having actual work done is beaming energy between two places on earth, but the space one is being "explored". https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/02/…
The Sun is beaming free energy to Earth already. If it's not enough then humans should become extinct as a species unfit to live in Solar system
Armchair strategizing on the topic I know nothing about (but it's fun to think about!): Constraints: - C removal requires lots of energy (can't avoid thermodynamics) - electricity on that scale is either expensive, dirty, or both Additional concerns: - cheap/clean energy is intermittent (and still a small percentage) - excessive electricity is as bad as not enough electricity Solution: - build lots of new (safe and c…
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Losing entire batches of your product on a regular basis is pretty bad for a commercial product
It is not lost, just a little more dilute than usual, and the gunk is not the end product, just a step in between. It is like prematurely harvesting grass. You get shorter stalks, and some extra work, that is all.
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Some numbers: The US Forest Service estimates that 1 acre of forest stores about 80 tons of carbon. You could store about 180 billion tons of carbon onto that area if it were all a forest. CO2 makes up about 3 trillion tons of the atmosphere. ~27% of it is carbon, therefore there is roughly 800 billion tons of carbon in the atmosphere. It seems plausible that if we somehow planted a forest on the entire Sahara desert…
The reduced albedo effect from the no longer radiant Sahara would cause a significant amount of heat absorption. While it would remove CO2, for a while, the increased heat would be enough to almost offset the entire benefit from the project.
If a machine were invented that scrubbed carbon from the atmosphere and turned it into useful food, construction materials, animal feedstocks, and fibers, all while rebuilding topsoil, it would be on the cover of every tech magazine in the world and its inventor would be a celebrity millionaire. Yet I’ve never seen a tree on the cover of Wired. https://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2012/06/vertical-farms-and-lab... Sometimes…
Isn't the issue with trees is that they release the carbon back after they die and decompose? You have to actually sequester carbon somehow. No idea how easy it is to do with trees (presumably you'd have to cut them and put them somewhere they don't degrade?).
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Isn't the issue with trees is that they release the carbon back after they die and decompose? You have to actually sequester carbon somehow. No idea how easy it is to do with trees (presumably you'd have to cut them and put them somewhere they don't degrade?).
Right, trees provide a buffer. If you can plant faster than the trees are dying, you gain ground.
All the trees that were cut down to built my house are not rotting - that carbon is captured and out of the system until/unless my house is burned down or left to rot.
It's funny to think - right now "green building" tries to minimize the amount of wood in a structure, but are we approaching a future where green building means locking up as much wood product in a structure as possible, to get it out of the carbon cycle?
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That's just baseless fear from the moment that the system has been designed to be safe. Plus, you can count on the bazillion scientists working on it to whistleblow any sticks that would have been put in their wheels during the design if the military wanted to middle. There are only two kinds of projects: secret projects for the military, and civil projects where the design and the safety are pretty much the thing of…
'Trust me, I'm an engineer' doesn't fly with me, and it sure as hell isn't going to fly with another country's government - for the same reason that an engineering firm using nuclear bombs to dig canals isn't going to fly. It's a dual-use technology that can be trivially repurposed for aggression, that cannot be defended against.
If the system is designed to be cut in the event that it would be unaligned with its on-ground receptors, through opto-mechanical interrupters, then you cannot use it for an aggression, unless you move the on-ground receptors all the way to your target, but that would be very flagrant and difficult to hide, and every worker at the receptor facility would see it, as well as any other civilian far or near the project.
The only way that such satellite could go wrong is if it actually does not integrate such failsafe mechanisms, and if its real design is hidden, and ill-known to anybody except a handful of military-secret-bound engineers.
If I were to follow your reasoning, then by the same rule any energy plant or even any technological artifact would be incredibly unsafe. But the fact is that we integrate security mechanisms in those, and are mostly satisfied with them, such that we accept to use these technologies.
Of course accidents happen, but the security mechanisms evolve too. Some are so good that they rarely fail anymore, like for example the master cylinder in car brakes (it is an actuator that enhances your effort on the brakes, but if it fails then you end up just pushing raw on the brakes and thus it works anyway, just a little harder).
Of course, this kind of Dyson sphere project will require quite a bit of popular education to convince and explain why its mechanisms make it safe.
This reminds me of the company who developed RNA vaccines because they don't risk to change cells' DNA and they are safer globally, and then they have to explain endlessly to people that no, it's not an evil design, and, no, it does not even include nano-5G-antennas....
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Well obviously what I said only stands in non-dictatorship. I don't care to comment on the dictatorship case, that's bad anyway if they launch any satellite at all, we'll never know what's in, so that's not an actionable subject of discussion (except, shoot down all of their spacecrafts).
Democracies have throughout history conducted plenty of assassinations, and started wars of aggression. Some of them have even killed a few hundred thousand people with firebombing and nuclear weapons. Any country with ASW capabilities would find it prudent to shoot this thing down, because there is no defense from it being used against it - with exactly zero warning.
So, any project conducted for the sake of energy production, i.e. in the civilian realm, would have no chance to include these elements of aggression.
Heck, in democracies, even for military projects that are too evil, there are whistleblowers. Especially in high-tech projects, because among scientists there is quite a bit this kind of mindset.