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It might be limitless, but Gerald O’Neil did point out that there’s only so much heat the Earth can radiate into space, global warming reduces this even more.

It might be limitless, but Gerald O’Neil did point out that there’s only so much heat the Earth can radiate into space, global warming reduces this even more. The main alternative would be to move a fair amount of industry into space, but even then thermal management is not trivial. Dumping heat into the air as cooling is one of those things that’s taken for granted.

hedora 4y ago
The good news is that, for the forseeable future, we can use some percentage of the generated energy to capture carbon, creating a net loss of heat.
credit_guy 4y ago
No idea who Gerald O'Neil is, but he's absolutely wrong. The entire world consumes about 20 TW of electricity. At the same time, we receive about 200000 TW of energy from the Sun. We are in a rough balance, so we also radiate about 200000 TW. 20 TW is not even a rounding error. If we increase our electricity consumption by a factor of 100, it's still going to be a rounding error compared to how much we receive from the Sun and then radiate into space.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  And 3% forcing is enough to cause cataclysm. Which gives us 100 to 200 years to get off the growth train. ie. we are exactly where we were WRT direct thermal forcing now as we were WRT GHG when the alarm first started being raised. So when your rube goldberg plasma machine produces ten times as much heat as work then we need to end exponential growth before the transition happens rather than 50-10 years after and immediately replace it with solar. If it produces 100x as much heat as work, it's not even useful for that. Luckily the process of extracting the energy and containing the plasma is so convoluted it's never going to be viable anyway even if the fusion step works. Inertial confinement might result in a viable machine, but I'm not holding my breath
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
Use heat-pipes along the space-elevators we will have by then. Radiate away from up there.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  That's so much simpler and more achievable than using a solar panel instead and not wasting orders of magntude more energy than we need. Thanks
dreamcompiler 4y ago
I assume you mean Gerard O'Neill, and I don't recall him saying this. Can you cite the source? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill

hedora 4y ago

The good news is that, for the forseeable future, we can use some percentage of the generated energy to capture carbon, creating a net loss of heat.

credit_guy 4y ago

No idea who Gerald O'Neil is, but he's absolutely wrong. The entire world consumes about 20 TW of electricity. At the same time, we receive about 200000 TW of energy from the Sun. We are in a rough balance, so we also radiate about 200000 TW. 20 TW is not even a rounding error. If we increase our electricity consumption by a factor of 100, it's still going to be a rounding error compared to how much we receive from the Sun and then radiate into space.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
And 3% forcing is enough to cause cataclysm. Which gives us 100 to 200 years to get off the growth train. ie. we are exactly where we were WRT direct thermal forcing now as we were WRT GHG when the alarm first started being raised. So when your rube goldberg plasma machine produces ten times as much heat as work then we need to end exponential growth before the transition happens rather than 50-10 years after and immediately replace it with solar. If it produces 100x as much heat as work, it's not even useful for that. Luckily the process of extracting the energy and containing the plasma is so convoluted it's never going to be viable anyway even if the fusion step works. Inertial confinement might result in a viable machine, but I'm not holding my breath

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago

Use heat-pipes along the space-elevators we will have by then. Radiate away from up there.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
That's so much simpler and more achievable than using a solar panel instead and not wasting orders of magntude more energy than we need. Thanks

dreamcompiler 4y ago

I assume you mean Gerard O'Neill, and I don't recall him saying this. Can you cite the source? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill