The climate change movement: July 28, 1995 to August 14, 2020 RIP

[Piotrsko]

As in real estate: location , location, location.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Connected yet differentiated somehow. The poles used to be tropical, something changed.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* It was a very long time ago.
* Antarctica was part of the supercontiment, Gondwana.
* Tectonic plate movement was terrific, Lithosphere' carbonate rock being ripped apart, releasing unimaginable amounts of carbon dioxide into the Troposphere.
* Greenhouse Earth.
* Both poles free of ice.
* Sea level up by 650-feet.
* Antarctica averaging 12-C ( 53.6-F ), with summers at 19-C ( 66.2-F )
* Solar-forcing Milankovitch, 96,000-year ellipticality, 41,000-year obliquity, and 26,000-year precession cycles working their magic.
You wouldn't want to have been there to see it.

[freebeard]

I didn't get through this whole thing, but it is in topic:

spectrum.ieee.org: STARTUPS BEGIN GEOENGINEERING THE SEA

Dozens of field trials and pilot projects have begun, and in 2025, Captura and several other companies will begin scaling up their facilities.

Their approaches are as diverse as they are bold. Some groups are growing kelp forests or microalgae in the sea. Others propose pumping seawater between shallow and deep layers to move carbon around. Two strategies caught IEEE Spectrum’s gaze—Captura’s ocean carbon dioxide removal approach, which sucks carbon out of the sea, and ocean alkalinity enhancement, which stores carbon in the sea. Both have inspired the engineering of novel, highly efficient electrochemical systems to treat copious amounts of seawater.
...
But the challenges facing marine carbon companies feel as grand as the companies’ plans. Most of their business models ultimately depend on selling carbon credits on voluntary markets. And to sell carbon credits, they must quantify how much CO2 they’re causing the oceans to draw down from the air. This can’t be done with physical measurements alone; instead, they must rely on numerical models that come with considerable uncertainty.

On top of that, a lot of environmental monitoring needs to be done to prove that marine carbon-removal strategies aren’t harming aquatic life. And then there’s the issue of scale. To make a dent in the more than 1,000 gigatonnes of excess CO₂ lingering in Earth’s atmosphere, and the few dozen gigatonnes continuing to be emitted each year from human activities, companies would have to process ocean water in biblical proportions.

So one company injects CO₂ into the oceans and another sucks it back out -- for money. ...to crash the market for industrial CO₂. [shrug]

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

I didn't get through this whole thing, but it is in
So one company injects CO₂ into the oceans and another sucks it back out -- for money. ...to crash the market for industrial CO₂. [shrug]

Selling arms and coffins isn't a bad business strategy. After having a business idea to sell "stratosphere burials"; weather balloons to release the ashes of the deceased from 100k feet high, I joked to my wife that she could get them coming (medicine), and I could get them leaving.

My wild hunch is optimal concentration is nearly twice as high as current. Good to start thinking of these strategies now, but premature to implement.

As a huge tangent, I played a board game called Terraforming Mars, and that got me wondering again if it's even theoretically feasible. Somehow I was under the assumption most of the water on Mars was carried away by solar winds, but apparently most is trapped within.

We've got a very long way to go to understand the insanely complex field of climate engineering.

[freebeard]

'Terraforming' Mars is just trading one gravity well for another.

More interesting to me is Phobos.

en.wikipedia.org: Shklovsky's "Hollow Phobos" hypothesis

Shklovsky's "Hollow Phobos" hypothesis
In the late 1950s and 1960s, the unusual orbital characteristics of Phobos led to speculations that it might be hollow.[40] Around 1958, Russian astrophysicist Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky, studying the secular acceleration of Phobos' orbital motion, suggested a "thin sheet metal" structure for Phobos, a suggestion which led to speculations that Phobos was of artificial origin.[41] Shklovsky based his analysis on estimates of the upper Martian atmosphere's density, and deduced that for the weak braking effect to be able to account for the secular acceleration, Phobos had to be very light—one calculation yielded a hollow iron sphere 16 kilometers (9.9 mi) across but less than 6 centimetres (2.4 in) thick
...
Subsequently, the systematic data errors that Singer predicted were found to exist, the claim was called into doubt,[44] and accurate measurements of the orbit available by 1969 showed that the discrepancy did not exist.[45] Singer's critique was justified when earlier studies were discovered to have used an overestimated value of 5 centimetres (2.0 in) per year for the rate of altitude loss, which was later revised to 1.8 centimetres (0.71 in) per year.[46] The secular acceleration is now attributed to tidal effects, which create drag on the moon and therefore cause it to spiral inward.[47]

The density of Phobos has now been directly measured by spacecraft to be 1.887 g/cm3 (0.0682 lb/cu in).[48] Current observations are consistent with Phobos being a rubble pile.[48] In addition, images obtained by the Viking probes in the 1970s clearly showed a natural object, not an artificial one. Nevertheless, mapping by the Mars Express probe and subsequent volume calculations do suggest the presence of voids and indicate that it is not a solid chunk of rock but a porous body.[49] The porosity of Phobos was calculated to be 30% ± 5%, or a quarter to a third being empty.

Much more achievable than colonizing the planet or O'Neill Cylinders.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

I didn't get through this whole thing, but it is in topic:

spectrum.ieee.org: STARTUPS BEGIN GEOENGINEERING THE SEA


So one company injects CO₂ into the oceans and another sucks it back out -- for money. ...to crash the market for industrial CO₂. [shrug]

Originally Posted by freebeard

'Terraforming' Mars is just trading one gravity well for another.

More interesting to me is Phobos.

en.wikipedia.org: Shklovsky's "Hollow Phobos" hypothesis


Much more achievable than colonizing the planet or O'Neill Cylinders.

Yeah, I'm not big on Mars in particular. We don't get much benefit merely occupying other objects. Send the AI robots to colonize these places and mine/terraform.

I'm more interested in locating and traveling to other suitable solar systems.

[freebeard]

I'm more interested in locating and traveling to other suitable solar systems.

That may require a little patience. I'd settle for thermal nuclear propulsion.

You might like:

Accelerando
Science fiction novel by Charles Stross
Accelerando is a 2005 science fiction novel consisting of a series of interconnected short stories written by British author Charles Stross. As well as normal hardback and paperback editions, it was released as a free e-book under the CC BY-NC-ND license. Wikipedia

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

That may require a little patience. I'd settle for thermal nuclear propulsion.

Yeah, more of a 10,000 year plan.

Only way I can figure humans making it to another solar system is for self-directed robots to locate the place and prepare it for habitation, while frozen embryos are sent to the new location and entirely nurtured by robots.

I'll have to be content with folks on the moon and possibly Mars.

[freebeard]

...self-directed robots to locate the place and prepare it for habitation, while frozen embryos are sent to the new location...

That's why I recommended Accelerando. It's got IIRC an interstellar ship with 63 individuals DNA or something, the size of a Coca Cola can*. Then it gets weird.

It's been years since I read it.

*

The alien router, orbiting a 3-light-year-distant brown dwarf star named Hyundai +4904/-56, is visited by the spacecraft Field Circus, a Coke-can-sized mass of computronium propelled by a Jupiter-based laser and a lightsail. Amber and 62 others have uploaded themselves to become the virtualised crew.

[Piotrsko]

Neat trick. How did they manage to decelerate the coke can? Or was it a coke can stuck in a rocket the maybe size of los Angeles?