Best Geoengineering Options

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, wumpus said:

16 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

much. 

Thirty years of knowing just what we are doing and *now* we should stop poisoning it?  I've only seen half-hearted efforts all this time

Half-hearted is too kind.  Clearly you are a hopeless optimist! ;D

We are a selfish and short sighted species.  Quarterly profit reports and growth models alone should tell you that we are willing to sacrifice almost anything in search of short term profit. Subsequent failure is someone else's fault, so sad-too bad... I've been promoted and moved on to the next great thing. 

The problem is that most people are motivated by fear rather than opportunity. 

And the truth is that the climate is not yet painful enough nor scary enough to prompt action. 

... My hostility is that - and kludging is a great word - everything I've read says that any geoengineeringkludging 'cure' will be worse than doing nothing. 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

https://www.wired.com/story/think-climate-change-is-messy-wait-until-geoengineering/

Think Climate Change Is Messy? Wait Until Geoengineering

HERE’S THE THING about the stratosphere, the region between six and 31 miles up in the sky: If you really wanted to, you could turn it pink. Or green. Or what have you. If you sprayed some colorant up there, stratospheric winds would blow the material until it wrapped around the globe. After a year or two, it would fade, and the sky would go back to being blue. Neat little prank.

.... 

While it’s not likely that someone will colorize the atmosphere anytime soon, it's getting increasingly likely that someone will decide it’s time for stratospheric aerosol injection

... 

But the science isn’t ready. This anthropogenic geoengineering might trigger unintended effects

 

 

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

They can launch more Starlinks, and make the "day" and "night" arbitrary, managing the insolation by the sat orientation.

P.S.
Wait...

Oh, ...

That's their plan!

Actually, some sort of gigantic parasol or sunshade deployed at high altitude (loitering drones) or in space may be the most benign geo-engineering option: no nasty chemicals with foreseeable or unforeseen side effects, and fairly simple to “turn off” if it’s not working out as planned. Of course, it would need to be able to reflect a significant percentage of insolation to have any noticeable affect.

Perhaps combined with space-based solar power systems for a better return on investment….

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Just now, StrandedonEarth said:

Actually, some sort of gigantic parasol or sunshade deployed at high altitude (loitering drones) or in space may be the most benign geo-engineering option: no nasty chemicals with foreseeable or unforeseen side effects, and fairly simple to “turn off” if it’s not working out as planned. Of course, it would need to be able to reflect a significant percentage of insolation to have any noticeable affect.

Perhaps combined with space-based solar power systems for a better return on investment….

Plus, if we don't like someone we can turn off their growing season... Indefinitely. 

[kerbiloid]

50 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

How did the USSR/Russia overcome PR issues after Chernobyl?

Jokes, anecdotes.
_{Including the famous short poem about the now-neighboring republic, violating the forum rules, especially now.}

Monthly money bonus to salary and sometimes veteran status for those who was potentially irradiated.

1990s economical troubles, making the Chernobyl topic look obsolete, compared to the daily issues.

Also Chernobyl was on the Ukrainian SSR territory, and the most irradiated territory was in Belorussian SSR, on the border.
When the USSR had divided, the Russian SFSR was anyway guilty in everything in the local political narrative (so nothing changed), while EU was regularly giving good money to Ukraine to keep the exploded reactor safe for Europe, and even built a new sarcophage.
Thus, for Russia it was a sad but a foreign problem, for Ukraine - a source of additional funding, for Belorussia/Belarus - idk exactly, but also in some way it had gone.

And as in all three countries people were more busy with daily problems, and the Chernobyl horrors were mostly being kept hot by the post-Soviet "professional exposure" press (becoming more and more yellow), and no new two-headed cows were appearing, and the Chernobyl mutants somehow had disappeared, the Chernobyl became irrelevant, and mostly an object of horrors and humors.

Also, the STALKER computer game series made the Chernobyl zone a kind of Black Mesa, and the real Chernobyl became a popular aim for illegal (then- legal) tourists, wishing to watch the abandoned city, also covered by numerous idiots with numerous thematic graffiti. Thanks also to the similarity of the Chernobyl Zone with Strugatsky brothers' sci-fi about another anomaly zone.

As the nuclear topic in whole in Soviet/post-Soviet countries is a mix of the superstitious horror of simple rural guys, the man's vanity of the same guys after army service, the pride of the technically educated engineers, and traditional optimistic fatalism and enthusiastic pessimism in whole, and unlike the Western population, the "traditional" mentality in USSR is of Soviet epoch (i.e. the local version of "modern", with "we have the space and atom" , and without any significant traces of Victorian nostalgy or so), finally only those ones care about Chernobyl, who wants to care. Most part prefers it as an object of humour and urban legends.

Edited July 20, 2022 by kerbiloid

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

41 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

in all three countries people were more busy with daily problems

Yup. 

Hence the efficacy of the SEP field. 

Edit - FWIW, I really enjoyed reading this.  

Also 

44 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

traditional optimistic fatalism and enthusiastic pessimism

No one does this better 

[kerbiloid]

3 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

48 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

in all three countries people were more busy with daily problems

Yup. 

Hence the efficacy of the SEP field. 

A traditional tool when you have to do something upleasant to a horse, to make it not care.

Spoiler

 

It thinks about the twisted lip and stands still.

[Nuke]

i saw a video the other day about something called accelerated basalt weathering. its a carbon sequestration technique where by mining waste is pulverized and used as a soil additive in farms. supposedly it restores soil nutrients while also causing a runoff that makes it to the ocean and feeds crustaceans. when they die their shells sequester carbon. the extra krill will likely also help the ocean's food chains and it will also reduce ocean acidity. its a slow natural process cranked to 11 by industrial means. long term consequences? probibly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_weathering

Edited July 22, 2022 by Nuke

[Pixophir]

That is certainly one of the less intrusive options. The effect is known since long. Actually, phases with high weathering rates in earth history may have contributed to cold phases, even to ice house phases in earth's past climate. The rising of the Himalaya was/is a global cooler actually, and a contributor to earth's ice age conditions. But that is of course far beyond any imaginable technological capability.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00798-x

As with all measures taken, yet unknown or even known (eutrophy, acidification, ..) side effects must be determined and quantified as well as the means of production and distribution discussed. Like if done by industrial stone mills driven by thermal power plants and distributed by diesel engines it may offset the cooling effect, or worse.

It is also a huge question how the sheer amount of CO2 that is released by human activity, and by positive feedbacks caused by this could be countered, as long as the burning of fossil fuels continues. Those measures are of no use as long as that idiocy continues.

tl,dr: Maybe can help, have a sharper look, don't ignore side-effects.

 

Edited July 22, 2022 by Pixophir

[kerbiloid]

The heroic struggle against the fossil fuel and global warming is just a shifting of dog poops from one sandbox corner to another one, and back again.
A lot of fun, but pretty useless.

"We need to go deeper!" (c)

***

Gather humans into compact megalopolises:

1. To decrease traffic distance of everything. 
Use a 1 km long wide pipe instead of 10 km of narrow ones. 
This decreases total length of pipes, their total surface area (and thus, losses and points to repair).
The same happens to the electric cables. 

2. To have more shared resources.
No need in ten 10 hospitals when you can have 1 big one, with less equipment used once per year but still needed.
The same about cinema theaters.
The same about restaurants.
The same about almost everything what can be shared to use it constantly or for bigger crowd.

3. To gather the concrete urban world into a compact place, several kilometers in diameter, making the territory around it a huge green park.

4.  To decrease the amount of  personal weak engines, like the personal cars, lawn mowers, etc.
Make/let everyone habe a 1 km foot or tram trip instead of 100 km daily driving, 1 huge park lawn mower nstead of 100 far ting devices.
Remember the square-cube law: a big engine has less heat losses, it's more effective than many small ones.
Also, 1 big engine can be easier replaced with an electric one, which allows to burn the fuel in big plants with big and effective industrial purifiers (which can't be put on cars, lawn mowers, and chainsaws), and finally replace that with a fusionuke powerplant.

5. To easily control any polution activity.

6. To easily provide the wastes gathering and recycling.

7. To provide the population with concrete shelters right under their homes, and to prevent mass fire, flood, tornado, and so on disasters.

***

Automate the industry, the agriculture, and the office.

Make as many people as you can unemployed but entertained.
When they can buy less, they spend less, and produce less unnecessary wastes. 

Thus, simplify their home life, decrease their QoL standards, but not for the price of their health or inability to do something.
Build more public and shareable places like gyms, parks, and so on, when it's easier to walk 300 m rather than buy your own to home.

This is much easier in a megalopolis rather than in a suburban or a town.

Provide them with cheap expendable goods to prevent their personal stockpiling.
When you can buy only cheap and simple thing, but it's easily available for you right in twenty steps from your room, unlikely you will buy a hundred of them to store at home.
So, make the people have as less personal things as possible. Let the shops be their wardrobes.

Use as much virtual reality as possible.
Color the walls of the house with cheap LED lights. It makes it look like a magic palace.
Use one- and two-sided glass display panels as internal walls in the flats.
Thus when you switch them off and make transparent, you have a large studio with glass partitions, but when you switch them on and run an animated pseudo-3d thematic set of screensavers, you see a garden, a palace, a castle, a starship, a dirty garage of biker club, or whatever you wish to see. Costs nothing, funs a lot.

Let the home equipment be rented and serviced.

Replace furniture with closet rooms and platforms, and lightweight plastic chairs.
Make the home easily rented, and the furniture either built-in or omsignificant.

You total aim is to make/let people have as few personal things as it's possible, but provide them with everything they reasonably wish for.
Expandable clothes in expendable closet, expendable plastic chairs around massive built-in "stone" table. Expendable plastic magazine table.
When you rent a room, the plastic junk just gets thrown out and recycled, while all big forms are disinfected.
Thus, high cost of the high-tech apartments is compensated with their long-term reusability.

If possible, let everyone own only his biometric account in the municipal data center and personal souvenirs.
Thus they can easily change their location and don't need to store a lot of things. The things are either rented or shared.

***

With everything above it's by orders of magnitude easier to collect and recycle the wastes and spent things.

Make "easy get → quick use → total recycle" your religion. A cult of purity.
Things are a dirty junk. Fewer things - fewer dirt. Every thing which you aren't interact with, is a junk to recycle, like a dry skin you want to bite off.

As most part of produced wastes will be biowastes (food, post-food, spent clothes), this means that they should be burnt in plasma oven and recycled into water and simple chemicals to be used for new cheap things production.

This will make a control headshot into the "garbage selection" idiocy.
Nothing to select. Everything organic should be atomized, togethre with biowastes, everything metal should be replaced with either ceramics or organics.

This dramaticlly reduces the need in mining, and allows to encapsulate the recycling process into clean facilities with no exhaust but water.

***
Once you have the total recyclng run, you mix it with the mined resource processing.
And you mostly recycle the wastes.
This means that you should just fully ionize the pulp of wastes and mined stones, and separate the ions into pure chemical elements.
So, any stone becomes a metal ore, and you can close most of mines, as now you need only rare metal ores.

Of course, you need energy.

First, you can use fossil fuel for several centuries more. Just not in cars and lawn mowers, but in powerplants. Everything other should be electrified.
Of course, all those huge wind/sun powerplants heresy should be uprooted, eliminated, and recycled together with other plastic junk.
This is for a lonely rancho in the middle of desert, not for a respectable civilization.
Only atom, only hardcore.

The infinite fuel is oceanic deuterium. Every 6000th atom of hydrogen is deuterium.
(Also deuterium can be mined everywhere in the universe from ice.)

The other things you need are lithium and uranium, which are dissolved in the ocean, too.

The D-D fusion produces a lot of heat and neutrons, so you shold build the deuterium reactor right at the sea coast, to cool and shield it.
As an artificial islet in a bay, separated from the sea with embankment and gates, forming the bay.

Obviously, it's the place to extract deuterium, lithium, and uranium right from the water.

So, this will be a huge, city-sized, seawater-to-power fusion-fission facility, with a system of bays and fusion reactors in them.

At the same time you can bring the mined resources by ships right to there and process them right there.

You don't need personal or portable nuclear reactors, because you just connect your megapolises and special areas to the powerlines.

(But you need portable reactors for spaceships, which should obviously be aneutronic, boron-hydrogen.)

***

Following these recommendations, you will turn the planet into much better and greener place

Spoiler

just to ensure that the human input was negligible, and that the nature itself pollutes much more.

Edited July 23, 2022 by kerbiloid

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

(Laissez-faire is working so well, n'est cie pas?) 

[StrandedonEarth]

13 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

(Laissez-faire is working so well, n'est cie pas?) 

Well, the Earth will be just fine. It's the humans and some other living things that will be inconvenienced...

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

(Laissez-faire is working so well, n'est cie pas?) 

Of course. It's exactly what's bringing the total automation and mass liberation of human resources, and is the locomotive of the idyll above.

[Nuke]

im all for martian libertarianism, and the lack of air certainly keeps the riff raff off my lawn loose martian soil.