Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[zapkitty]

Warwick wrote: According to you, an appreciable impact would be 10^17 to 10^18 W.

Well, what I gave was a numberless figure… “sufficient FF usage to start causing problems”… because I’m a lazy kind of guy 🙂

And I usually try to qualify the “zap” as a measurement of energy reserves and not as an indicator of actual power usage.

I’d not run the numbers on this before so I just tossed out rough ideas. I’ve got some numbers now and they are interesting…

Warwick wrote: Are there reasons why FF could not produce this?

None that I’m aware of.

Warwick wrote: So why is it pure SF?

The purpose of the article was to provide a proof that energy use expansion, and by corollary economic expansion can not continue indefinitely because of physical limits.

Which is true.

But It’s one thing to extrapolate a trend as a thought exercise aimed at the supporters of the <1% and another thing to continue to do so in disregard to other potentially limiting factors such as declining population increases with increasing prosperity, thermal load carrying limits and planetary engineering options. Which the author acknowledges.

So, yeah, straight line is SF 🙂

Warwick wrote: 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.

But in an future where FF works his predictions run into and are mooted by limits defined by other scenarios. I’ll get to those numbers in my next reply.

Warwick wrote: Do your water cannons take less energy to power than the increase in radiation they achieve?

What if you postulate hollow beanstalks that can hold pressure up to LEO altitude where they become open frameworks on their way to GEO? If that scenario works then you’d just need to prime the pumps 🙂

Warwick wrote: 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.

What I was thinking of was radiators expansive enough to both increase the FF heat dumped directly to space and to alter the global albedo equation. The radiators would alter their surface parameters as needed. One common idea is to turn deserts into farms, so do that… but make them enclosed multi-story plantlab-type farms and turn the roofs into radiators as well.

Any heat you can recover as electricity is good for your electrical needs but will still come back as heat. Albedo alterations will result in petawatt-range increases in cooling (or heating) but in the end will, again. run into limits.

Coruscant, Trantor, Borg Central… call it what you will, it won’t be Earth as we know it.