You must log in or # to comment.
I think y’all are missing the point here.
It’s really to justify the production and testing of an insanely large planet altering weapon that would create a really cool firework.
Actually, one of their feasibility assumptions is that the device is too large to be used militarily.
I think they underestimate a military’s desire to use all of the things that go boom.
Ah. I suppose building an 81 gigaton nuclear weapon wouldn’t be small.
Let’s fire up the antimatter then!
The only way to convince conservatives to fight climate change is if we do it with guns and bombs
If it gets the job done, I’m willing to make that compromise.
Carbon sequestration is not going to solve global warming. CO2 is less than 2% of atmosphere. Even if you pass a shitton of air through the strata the difference will be negligible.
Water absorbs a lot of co2 and removing it from the water via weathering is a valid idea.
I don’t know. What do you think is the concentration of CO2 in the sea water? I am just not convinced.
The concentration isn’t as important as the difficulty to remove it. It’s still a hard problem, but rock weathering is one way to accomplish it, but it would need a lot of exposed rock surface.
The biggest threat of co2 emmisions is ocean acidifcation. A collapse of the ocean ecosystem would be devastating to the rest of the planet. A warmer planet sucks, but dead phytoplankton would result in a global plumment in O2 production.
Uh oh. What an apropos American way to go.
Well, I’m sure controlled slow-paced mining is more energy efficient and will emit less carbon to create…
But I’m not stopping that guy. Go on. I’ll just watch from a safe distance.
Going of the value in the paper and wikipedia it would take the energy used by all of humanity in two months.
You either spend a truckload of resources during decades to make a bomb that explodes releasing the same energy humanity spends in two months, or you spend a truckload of resources doing the end task at a slower pace for decades.
The later is guaranteed to require a smaller truckload.
Why is the second guaranteed to be smaller?
We know how nuclear bombs work. The majority of the energy comes from nuclear fission, a highly exothermic process, that can (in the foreseeable future) only be used in bombs.
If we don’t need to drop the bomb, but rather assemble it in place, it can just use deuterium as a fusion fuel. Deuterium can be distilled from normal water for much less energy that it generates in fusion.The majority of the energy comes from nuclear fission
Yes, from an extremely inefficient fission reaction that can be improved by an order of magnitude by doing it slowly in a reactor.
Mixed up fission and fusion there, they sound so similar in English.
The comment talks about fusion.Most of the energy does not come from fusion.
I mean… if we’re being honest, the long-term effects of global thermonuclear war would be (very eventual) carbon sequestration in tens to hundreds of millions of years, and then we’ll renew our oil reserves! We of course won’t be around to use them, seeing as we’ll have been sequestered into the oil.
Being sequestered into the oil sounds pretty nice at this point.
Can we get new oil actually? I thought we now have organisms that can break down every organic matter and thus it can not really accumulate anymore?
If you squeeze a baby hard enough
Oil actually comes from aquatic life (mostly plankton) that sinks to the sea floor and gets buried, squeezed and heated. Oil still forms today, but it’s a process of millions of years.
Coal is formed from plants, and that does indeed require something doesn’t eat it first. Swamps, for example, help a lot, letting the fallen trees sink down where most stuff can’t eat it. Peat can also form into coal. Coal forms even slower than oil though, and it’s much rarer, but it also doesn’t require an ocean, so it’s often more accessible for us land-living humans
Coal is much rarer than oil? I have to look that up, I always thought there is far more coal.
Nope, there is about 3x more coal than oil.
IIRC, all that coal comes from plant material from before there were microbes that can break down cellulose. Meaning that while it’s possible to regenerate oil over millions of years, coal cannot.
So yes, there may be more of it now, but when we burn it, it’s gone forever.
There’s an abiotic pathway that creates new oil geologically. It’s a very small amount.
The theory is popular in Russia, where it’s claimed to be the main way oil is produced. That’s complete bullshit. It turned out there is some, but not enough to matter.
I’m pulling for artificial diamonds. It’s the funniest solution: dumping truckloads of precious gemstones back down empty wells. Or burying them in the desert. Or I guess just handing them out for industrial uses, since even grinding them to dust isn’t the same problem as CO2. Have a free bucket of aquarium gravel, made out of worthless tacky gold.
Hey, if you can make diamond that easily, we can exchange a LOT of substances for it. Not just windows and glasses, but pretty much every ceramic object, insulators, but also just toilets (slap some paint on it and done).
Drop a plate, floor breaks.
Drivel…
I love fusion explosions, I love fission explosions.
Just spitballing here. These grand ideas good/bad practical/or not are the beginning of mankind learning how to geo engineer planets or moons. I’ll be long dead before I get proven right or wrong so it’s easy to spitball
Every proposal to save the world ultimately comes back to the plot of The Core
You mean the smash hit 2003 documentary The Core?
Yes, by plot I of course mean those things that happened
That would just make the molepeople mad and double our problems
They already hate us surface dwellers!
Gotta nuke somethin’.
The last time I checked, we don’t have a whole lot of climate solutions that feature the bomb. And I’d be doing myself a disservice… and every member of this species, if I didn’t nuke the HELL out of this!
The point is that it’s a passive process, not an active one. No need for pumping.
Water is so much denser than air that you do get more exposure time per unit time.
The only way that works is if all the oil execs are in ground zero.
I have a similar modest proposal to solving the wealth inequality hoarding problem of billionaires
Someone needs to work out the inheritance fallout. With our luck it will still fall within the same families, or the government.
Government is fine. Remember money is just IOUs from the government, if billionaires assets were sold and the money went to government it would be deflationary, all money in circulation would become more valuable
