Friday, October 14, 2016

Cooling the Rock City Remains a Huge Problem

The standard practice with heat produced by anything is to vent it to the atmosphere and everything will be fine ... except the atmosphere.  I still have the outstanding problem of how the Rock City will find a way to put that to good use.  It took all that resource to produce the heat and wasting it is just stupid and probably environmentally destructive.

The Republican cop might be the Earth is radiating so much heat in reflected sunlight that human heat contributions to it really don't matter too much.  That kind of specious logic is useless since the effect of human heat contributions is cumulative with the Earth's radiated heat and wasn't there previously (i.e. prior to Industrial Revolution or so).  Making more of it only compounds the problem.


We have all this heat in the water so how about the possibility of giant heat sinks which 'vent' the heat to the Earth since the Earth is generating so much heat internally from radioactive elements that it's extremely unlikely we could significantly affect it.  A disadvantage is the process would be slow but that says to me use a bigger reservoir and let the water take as much time as it likes to cool.  This is only a marginal variation from the Republican cop but the Earth may be able to afford that and we have seen the consequences of using the atmosphere (e.g. cities affect the weather around them and it differs from the surrounding countryside because of all the heat).

Note:  we're looking for credibility, not a Nobel Prize (larfs).

Another possible disadvantage is the heat sinks will exchange the heat with the rock but eventually they will heat that too and then we're still screwed.  We need some Ice 9 which isn't quite so potent as Vonnegut's magic compound which didn't work altogether too well.

Note:  using Ice 9 works fine for a satire and was so darkly funny but we're looking for somewhere we will live rather than where we won't.


One problem the Rock City seeks to fix is the way humans are so inordinately wasteful.  We need to go total space station in which we're not allowed to waste anything whatsoever.

(Ed:  by law?)

Nope.  The Rock Cities are free and they're definitely not militaristic camps.

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