NASA's plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
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Re: NASA's plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
#2The Afghanistan campaign costs about 3 billion a month, so drilling a volcano for a similar amount shouldn't break the bank. This will contribute far more to our security!
Re: NASA's plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
#3So they need to re-drill constantly? (after each m3.)
Re: NASA's plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
#4Unfortunately, any project to drain the supervolcano's energy will meet with immense resistance from various groups of humans with limited intelligence who don't realize its power and the extinction-level destruction its explosion will cause. The article lists at least two ways of safely extracting the supervolcano's power without risking the triggering of an explosion, but this won't be enough to convince the idiotic naysayers. By harnessing its energy, we can have clean energy for millennia.
Re: NASA's plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
#5Seems like it might be prudent to first try extracting 35% of the heat from a volcano smaller than the Yellowstone Caldera. We might learn some things, and if we get it wrong the consequences don't result in widespread starvation.
That said, it's obvious that this plan is just the start of serious investigation into how we can engineer mitigations to an eruption at Yellowstone. I would be interested in seeing a model of the impact that surface-level cooling would have on the pressures deeper in the system. If we prevent an eruption now, are we making it worse in the future?
Other solutions I can envision might be to deliberately trigger smaller eruptions over longer timescales at the boundaries of the caldera. We could also look at large-scale mitigations for volcanic particulates in the atmosphere, including solutions that may require several hundred or thousand years of advanced preparation for success. If we could control the impact of a significant yellowstone eruption to a single hemisphere, or limit the duration to a single summer, most ecosystems would be able to recover quickly.
Re: NASA's plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
#6The Afghanistan campaign costs about 3 billion a month, so drilling a volcano for a similar amount shouldn't break the bank. This will contribute far more to our security!
Well the enlightened human being are so small a fraction of the population, that this argument probably doesn't even ends up being made aware to the vast majority of this nation...
Re: NASA's plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
#7Unfortunately, any project to drain the supervolcano's energy will meet with immense resistance from various groups of humans with limited intelligence who don't realize its power and the extinction-level destruction its explosion will cause. The article lists at least two ways of safely extracting the supervolcano's power without risking the triggering of an explosion, but this won't be enough to convince the idioti…
I think this government failed to educate people the important lessons
Re: NASA's plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
#8So they need to re-drill constantly? (after each m3.)
I have no idea what you mean by "m3", and I did some google searches ("m3 volcano" "m3 drilling") and it's still not clear.
If "m3" is jargon related to volcanos, geology, drilling, or geothermic power generation, I submit to you that most HN readers will be unfamiliar with the term.
Or maybe it's just me.
Re: NASA's plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
#9So they need to re-drill constantly? (after each m3.)
Nope. Once its energy is drained, it will become dormant. This will take a lot of gradual deep drilling.
Re: NASA's plan to save Earth from a supervolcano
#10So they need to re-drill constantly? (after each m3.)
I have no idea what you mean by "m3", and I did some google searches ("m3 volcano" "m3 drilling") and it's still not clear. If "m3" is jargon related to volcanos, geology, drilling, or geothermic power generation, I submit to you that most HN readers will be unfamiliar with the term. Or maybe it's just me.
Cubic meter?