XPost: soc.men, talk.environment, sci.environment
From: rally2xs@att.net
On Sat, 27 Jan 2007 12:12:57 -0800, The Ghost In The Machine
wrote:
>In sci.environment, amused onlooker
>
> wrote
>on Sat, 27 Jan 2007 16:19:11 GMT
><3YKuh.81948$HV6.22835@newsfe1-gui.ntli.net>:
>> "Dave Head" wrote
>>
>>> On Fri, 26 Jan 2007 12:54:15 GMT, "amused onlooker" wrote:
>>>
>>>>"Dave Head" wrote
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> because we don't have the capability to
>>>>> do anything radical enough to prevent it anyway
>>>>
>>>>Actually we do.
>>>
>>> Actually, we don't. There's no way in hell to get the CO2 down to a
>>> sufficiently low level to keep what's about to happen from happening
>>> without screwing up millions of lives, which includes a lot of deaths
>>> from lack of the resources that would otherwise be produced by the
>>> activities that now produce the CO2 but would have to be eliminated -
>>> power generation, transportation, etc.
>>
>> The "short term" solution I was thinking of was a solar screen to
>> control/cool the earths temperature. Not ideal I realise but it would buy us
>> some time to develop alternative energy sources and maybe find a way of
>> cleansing the atmosphere.
>
>Let's crunch. The general GW imbalance AIUI is about 1 W/m^2, averaged
>worldwide. The world's surface area facing Sol is 2.5559 * 10^14 m^2.
>The insolation averaged daily is about 600 W/m^2. In order to
>adjust this imbalance one needs a space mirror whose total area is
>2.5559 * 10^14 / 600 m^2 = 4.25988 & 10^11 m^2. If one assumes aluminum
>foil thickness of 0.02 mm, one gets 8.51976 * 10^6 m^3 or 2.3 million
>metric tonnes of aluminum. At a launch cost of about $1000/kg that
>works out to 2.3 trillion US dollars.
If we could produce aluminum on the moon, and send it toward L1 with a railgun,
I think the cost might be much less for both production and launch. This may
be doable in 20 - 40 years with sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence
and other robotic advances. The power source for doing this, direct sunlight,
packs more energy when striking the moon than when filtered by the earth's
atmosphere, so, providing solar energy recovery advances sufficiently in terms
of $ / watt, it would seem that basing such a thing on the moon might be
doable.
>Looks vaguely doable but very pricey. (These factors of
>course are very rough estimates; Google in particular suggests the
>imbalance can be from 0.1 to 0.6 W/m^2. This may mean I'm
>overestimating by a factor of 2 to 10. Of course, counterbalancing that
>is the launch costs, which are highly variable depending on vehicle used
>and destination.)
And where its launched _from_...
>There is the further complication of what we put into the atmosphere as
>the result of a launch.
...and here's hoping for a largely electrical launch eventually, especially
enviro-friendly if it were to be done by space elevator. (Someone is _going_ to
get that working in the next 50 years or so, I'd bet...)
>>>>But it would require lots of investment and experimentation in large
>>>>scale,
>>>>zero-gravity manufacturing in outer space.
>>>
>>> If we had the capability, we wouldn't have to be doing experimentation.
>>> Having to experiment implies not knowing how to do what you're wanting
>>> to do.
>>
>> If a large space station was built for the purpose of zero gravity
>> manufacturing then I'm sure it wouldn't take long to figure out how to build
>> huge structures. And we do have the ability to build something like that.
>
>If one can boost the materials into space. One can't build huge
>structures out of nothing. :-)
Yep. Somebody's gotta figure out a cheap way to orbit if this is going to
work.
Dave Head
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