@Cerberus No... you are not preventing anything from happening, thermodynamically, if you wrap a scarf around your car motor. The heat is still generated and that heat warms up the planet.
@Cerberus Because the damage was done the instant the energy was generated by smashing the nucleus of a uranium atom. From that moment there was new heat on the planet's surface, just waiting to be radiated out of an electric motor or computer screen, warming up the surface.
@Cerberus you are speculating that we will have ways, to contain, say, all the energy of a star, in a battery, or something?
@MrShinyandNew安宇 But as long as it is waiting forever, and not affecting us, what does its presence on our planet matter? Cf. 90 % of the matter of which our planet consists: the heat of all the magma etc. does not bother us.
Listen to your computer right now. It has a fan whirring. That fan is making noise, which equates to heat, and radiating heat, which is heat. All that heat is warming up the surface.
@Cerberus Well, it is not waiting forever. It is being radiated out of your computer screen, or your cellular phone antenna, or your car engine.
There is simply no way to capture all that heat. If there were, we could just re-use it.
if you could wrap all car engines in a magic blanket that captured all the waste heat, you could then take those blankets and put them into, say, water. And the water would then boil from the release of that heat, and turn a turbine which generates electricity, which powers your car.
@Cerberus I don't actually see that I'm allowing any wild speculation at all. And you haven't actually suggested anything practical.
Actually there would be lots of money to be made with a system that could recover even a tiny portion of the heat wasted by cars, trucks, boats, planes, etc.
Even if the waste heat problem were somehow completely solved, it doesn't change the details that much. It stretches the timeline out somewhat, but the point is that nuclear energy generation must, by definition, add to the energy on the surface of the planet.
I think, actually, that if we had a way to capture waste heat in cars, etc, then global warming wouldn't be an issue at all either. We could just use it on the planet itself, turning that global warming into free energy.
@Cerberus I'm pretty sure you'd be bothered by an average global increase in temperature. Even an average increase of a couple degrees would probably destroy lots of your country.
It would probably destroy more of my country than of Cerby's. The Netherlands has already demonstrated that it's rather good at coping with being below sea level.
So Cerb, did you notice the first half of the article, where he mentions how there simply isn't enough solar energy to maintain a 2.3% energy growth rate for more than a few centuries, even if we were to capture 100% of the sun's energy on earth?
@Cerberus So your only problem is with the notion that adding nuclear generation to the mix generates energy that is ultimately added to the burden of the earth's surface energy?
@Cerberus so assume that we can't get any more energy from burning oil, or solar cells, or wind power, or hydro power, because we've tapped it all. The only choice is nuclear, or geothermal, or tidal.
geothermal and tidal are very limited in what they can generate
(but actually that doesn't matter)
So we are using nuclear energy: converting mass into energy
all the mass we convert into energy is new energy that is on the surface of the planet
Anyway, the point is not that we might be able to terraform our own planet in order to render it livable. The point is that continued growth is impossible, for practical and thermodynamic reasons.
But fine, rest assured that if we ever invent the magic blanket that you wrap around something and it captures all the waste heat, the problem becomes moot because we can use that heat instead of generating new energy from fusion/fission.
Another one of the thousand options. We create large boxes around the parts of our planet that we like. Inside, we will have A/C. The heat is moved out of the box.
@Cerberus No, see, putting all of our civilization in an air-conditioned box doesn't change the fact that you have increased the surface of the planet to 100 C!
What you're saying is that continued growth is possible, for the definition of possible where the planet is unlivable but we increasingly use more and more energy to keep out all the extra energy
@Cerberus No, you have it backwards. It's not speculative at all that the earth will over heat in 400 years if we generate 2.3% growth in energy in nuclear power. The speculative part is that we can even maintain that high a growth level.
@DavidWallace I'm pretty sure we have a good idea of what technology we won't have. and an earth-sized air-conditioner is probably one of those things.
You said "this is theoretically impossible because of thermodynamics", and then, when I offer a potential, highly theoretical solution, you go into practical objections, instead of staying with your thermodynamic objections.
The moon, btw, probably would make shitty heat-sink. There's no air in space so the only mechanism for venting heat is IR radiation, which is what the earth already does, and it's not that fast.
@Cerberus No, I said your solution of capturing the waste heat violates thermodynamics.
@Cerberus Well, gee, if you slow the growth, you aren't maintaining 2.3% growth, are you? THAT IS THE POINT. The growth cannot continue at the current pace.
@Cerberus I don't know if your box solution violates thermodynamics to the point of being completely impossible. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work for a variety of other reasons.
@Cerberus we can't all live in boxes. And why would we want to?
if you want to allow unlimited growth AND the corresponding unlimited heating, but deal with that by building habitats that can live in an increasingly hot environment, fine, that might work, if only we could build enough habitats
I don't think our use of energy will continue to grow at this rate indefinitely, because we will be unable and unwilling to do so, so it won't happen. That is my practical objection to the whole speculative article.
@MrShinyandNew安宇 All right, that's all I wanted to hear.
@Cerberus ok... the whole point of the article, which speculates conservatively, is that we are unable to consume so much energy, and unwilling to live on a planet where we had consumed so much energy.
And yet: we are consuming that much energy
The rest of the blog posts go into the energy and growth problems in more detail
such as the problem of continued economic growth, which is also impossible
and the problem of the various replacements for fossil fuels
and the problem of building enough batteries to store energy
@Cerberus Your solution is comparable to the situation where you're driving in a car at a high rate of speed, and I tell you "stop, there's a cliff dead ahead!" and you reply "well, maybe by then I'll have grown wings, and I can just fly out of the car as it plunges into the ocean"
Pretty speculative. I won't even say it's 100.000000% impossible. But wouldn't it be better to acknowledge the cliff, then stop the car?
Anyway, Tom Murphy, the physicist who wrote those posts, also examines many of the other fundamental limits. Like, if you want to propose earth-sized airconditioners, your proposal needs to at least estimate how much Freon you'd need, and where it would come from.
@Cerberus not really. If there just isn't enough freon to go around, you haven't solved the problem. Unless you've, say, 50% solved the problem, and some other solution can do half.
@MrShinyandNew安宇 It is too practical for us to solve now, isn't it? And, yes, it could also be part of the problem. Or we could find some other substance to do the job.
@Cerberus The point remains that there are many fundamental limits that need to be considered, and the whole blog is about looking at those limits and how close we are to reaching them.
Like, if we had solar cells on every house, are there enough rare-earth minerals to manufacture all those cells? solar cells imply energy storage, is there enough lead-acid or lithium to make enough batteries? how much battery are we talking about?
I don't feel that the amount of a certain substance that we happen to use for A/C now and that we could possibly get from anywhere is as fundamental as thermodynamics.
@Cerberus reminds me of when my daughter learned that there was a singer named "Lady Gaga". She said "Gaga? Ga-ga? That's what I say when I don't want to say something"
@Cerberus No, but you are talking about making an air-conditioner powerful enough to counteract a planet whose surface-temperature no longer has liquid water., and this air-conditioner is big enough to encapsulate the whole earth's population. you have raised the bar so high that you can't just say "well, we'll figure it out"... it's completely impractical based on anything we know in physics.
Not to mention the logistical burden of building and maintaining it.
@MrShinyandNew安宇 One more example before I go. To people who lived in a house and used fire to bake bread, but who were unfamiliar with using an oven to contain the heat locally, and an chimney to remove the heat from their house, there seemed to be no solution to the problem of baking bread inside without baking themselves too.
@Cerberus yes, I understand your example. But it's one thing to make a chimney. It's another thing to make a huge frickin' project like drilling through the crust (Russia), or making a huge canal that cuts two contnents apart (Panama) or making a big-ass damn (Hoover dam). But you are now asking for a box that would hold the entire United States. Where would the material for that box even come from?
@Cerberus An air-conditioned box as big as a continent. read that again a few times and think about how that is different from, say, the Burj Dubai or the Hoover Dam or anything we've ever built ever.
@Cerberus interestingly the building was originally going to be called the Burj Dubai, then the property markets collapsed and they ran out of money, so they were bailed out by the Kalifa in Abu Dhabi, so they had to rename the building.
@Cerberus I'm not demanding any guarantees. But I don't think it's unreasonable to ask where the concrete for a building the size of a continent might come from.
@Cerberus Yeah I knew the name changed but I can never remember the new name
Does someone know what the tattoo design on the back of this man is called?
I'm sure I have seen this design elsewhere, but I'm not able to recall where.
In spanish there's a word "integral" which, when used as an adjective means something like "it includes everything".
When we was "servicio integral" we mean that the service includes all aspects related to it. For example, an "integral" service of ecommerce includes consulting, design, coding/de...
You mean this one? It's open. I agree with you, it's not a question I want on the site, but at the same time, mods are only supposed to act unilaterally if it's not borderline.
@JasperLoy Welcome, Jasper. I was lonely without you. Simchona has done his best, but it is not the same thing. However, I confirm. I am an engineer and I said that when I replied to Reg on the radiator question (em1 user). He said something in contrast with Laws of thermodynamics. "I would add, though, that even if it emitted frost" The contrast is that doesn't exist a body that emit frost.
Does someone know what the tattoo design on the back of this man is called?
I'm sure I have seen this design elsewhere, but I'm not able to recall where.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…