30 ms·
Somewhat different, but this reminds me of an approach that uses temperature gradients in the ocean to power a heat engine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean
by HPsquared 11mo ago
Somewhat different, but this reminds me of an approach that uses temperature gradients in the ocean to power a heat engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- jasonpeacock 11mo agoOTECs are amazing, and step 1 of "The Millennial Project: Colonizing the galaxy in eight easy steps"[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project There's a shore-based research OTEC in Hawaii, but the best is a floating, closed-loop OTEC in the ocean.
- andbberger 11mo agowiki article states "Up to 10,000 TWh/yr of power could be generated from OTEC without affecting the ocean's thermal structure". which converts to about 500GW which... isn't that much
- pezezin 11mo ago10 000 TWh/yr is one third of the current total electric energy generation of the whole planet, is not a small amount. Source, page 39 of the full report: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/electricity https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/electr...
- nine_k 11mo agoThis can't be correct. 10,000 TWh/y = 1e+7 GWh/y, divide it by 365.25 days/y to produce daily output of 27,379 GWh/day, then by 24 h/day to get pure power of 1,141 GW. It's still more than a terawatt, three orders of magnitude larger than the largest nuclear reactors.
- andbberger 11mo agooops. yes. still not that much though. i mean it's a lot but it's "one more large industrialized country" a lot not "kardashev 2" a lot
- AstroNutt 11mo agoInteresting link. I would think step 7 would come before step 6 though. I thought about this for a few minutes and can't come with a reason otherwise.
- adastra22 11mo agoThe timelines are increasing powers of 2. It’ll take much longer to colonize all asteroids than to settle Mars.