Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[Warwick]

zapkitty wrote:

The article extrapolates to 10^17 W in 400 years, 10^18 W in 500 years.

Yes, any arbitrarily large number can be too big to deal with 🙂

I was speaking of a hypothetical point where FF use grew enough to have an appreciable input on global temperatures… a concept which is pure SF at this time but solutions still seem quite possible.

The article speaks of something far beyond that and gets there through extrapolations I myself find unlikely. I can play the game and handwave something clever but that’s all it would be… Perhaps the borg of that era will use the oceans as part of a vast liquid droplet radiator system with gigantic water cannons shooting streams of seawater into the exosphere and catching the droplets as they fall… 🙂

According to you, an appreciable impact would be 10^17 to 10^18 W. Are there reasons why FF could not produce this? So why is it pure SF?
Projecting 400 years into the future is too far for reliable predictions, but then, so is 400 days to some extent. And he makes quite conservative assumptions, it could be 250-300 years before you’d see some problems.
Do your water cannons take less energy to power than the increase in radiation they achieve?
I think probably radiation is a red herring and you’d instead need some kind of clever way to recycle some proportion of the heat being created back into other forms of energy.