3 ms·

Similar to Panchaea from the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

• jjoonathan 4y ago
  Exactly -- but funded with a straightforward profit motive, not charity / policy / illuminati.
  • vkou 4y ago
    If it were profitable to build a machine to turn air into gasoline, I'd buy gasoline, burn it, and run that machine for free infinite money.
    • jjoonathan 4y ago
      Why buy and burn the gasoline? I think you are reaching for an "if it were easy, someone would have done it" argument, which is trivially true in the short term but not very informative in the long term because we get better and better at doing things that are not easy. Profitability is a function of execution, feedstock prices, scale, cost of capital, etc. So far air-to-fuel hasn't been profitable, even in contexts that help reduce profitability concerns (e.g. Air-to-Fuel on aircraft carriers), so there is clearly a long road between this "movie" and reality. However, variables vary. If the nuclear industry gets back in gear, air-to-fuel gets de-risked on smaller emissions-capture projects, and we see advances in construction and chemical engineering, who knows?
      • vkou 4y ago
        Presumably this machine would work better if I were feeding CO2 straight into it, rather than have it suck it out of the 420 ppm air.
  • somewhereoutth 4y ago
    The profit motive can't exist without policy (for example, the policy of not letting thugs take everything you have)