I've been asking all my associates about what they think the worst problem in the world was (so that I could find a solution of any credibility whatsoever.) All of them said that violence was the worst problem.
It's not an easy problem to solve. Every nation on earth has some degree of violent crime. Several wars are raging as I type this sentence. A few other wars are threatening to happen. Some violence is unreported, like people in bars getting into alcohol-fueled fistfights, or children being spanked. (Weather or not spanking is legitimate as a discipline method is another story. My point being, it is unquestionably violent.)
Aside from a world-wide prescription to vallium, I think the best way to reduce violence is a strong and honest police force. Police forces take issue to assaults on citizens under their protection. They have the brute force to do something about it, and in most communities, the legitimacy to make pariahs of any opposition.
Wars can be reduced with extra diplomacy, but not entirely eliminated. If two nations have overlapping land claims, either one must relinquish the claim or there will be war. Nations have also fought wars over issues of prestige and power. Nothing makes a nation seem more powerful than to humiliate a smaller nation. Thankfully, this tactic is largely going away due to changing politics and larger, more it-would-be-suicidal-to-challenge military forces.
I do not know how to prevent bar violence, other than immediately tranquilizing drunks that so much as look angrily at each other. Intra-family violence is also tricky because everyone involved often feels that it is justified. Some parents do feel that children must be spanked when they misbehave, or they will never learn to be reasonable people. Some people feel that a fistfight is the only way to solve severe enough interpersonal problems. I do not have an answer.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Lower the Ocean
I constantly hear about how global warming is melting the north pole and raising the sea level. The raising sea level would be bad -- if you own land in Egypt, Florida, Beijing, Loiusiana, or central California....well, not anymore you don't. And yes, with no ice whatsoever, Greenland and Antarctica would raise up and leave the earth with more land than before, but honestly, which would you rather live in? Louisiana? Or Greenland?
So I've decided today to do the opposite. I'm going to LOWER the level of the seas to get more useful land for human use. And I'm going to do it in a very ironic way. I'm going to do it by applying heat.
Start by building a platform in the south pacific, between Australia and Antarctica. Then build a nuclear reactor on that platform, and use the ocean as a heat sink. The heated ocean will evaporate more water. When the winds blow north, Australia will benefit from rain, alleviating their drought. When the winds blow south, the water will fall as snow on Anarctica. Anarctica has a thick layer of snow, not because it snows often there, but because what little does fall there never melts. The power generated by the reactor can be brought to Australia via an undersea cable, or it could power a research station on the platform. Even if the power was not used, the additional wetness to the area would be a benefit. Also, Australia has large reserves of Uranium that they are not using, so refueling the reactor is easy.
Water that falls as snow on Antarctica will not melt without a rather large increase in global warming, which should be contained in other ways. Lastly, should the world need fresh water in the future, it can be sawed out of Antarctica in an emergency.
So I've decided today to do the opposite. I'm going to LOWER the level of the seas to get more useful land for human use. And I'm going to do it in a very ironic way. I'm going to do it by applying heat.
Start by building a platform in the south pacific, between Australia and Antarctica. Then build a nuclear reactor on that platform, and use the ocean as a heat sink. The heated ocean will evaporate more water. When the winds blow north, Australia will benefit from rain, alleviating their drought. When the winds blow south, the water will fall as snow on Anarctica. Anarctica has a thick layer of snow, not because it snows often there, but because what little does fall there never melts. The power generated by the reactor can be brought to Australia via an undersea cable, or it could power a research station on the platform. Even if the power was not used, the additional wetness to the area would be a benefit. Also, Australia has large reserves of Uranium that they are not using, so refueling the reactor is easy.
Water that falls as snow on Antarctica will not melt without a rather large increase in global warming, which should be contained in other ways. Lastly, should the world need fresh water in the future, it can be sawed out of Antarctica in an emergency.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Terraforming Venus
Venus, poetically referred to as our sister planet, is much more tempting as a target of terraforming. It has nearly the same size as Earth (98% of earth's size, compared with Mars's ~60%), is closer to the sun, which would both improve plant growth and allow for greater use of solar power, and due to gravitational aspects too complex to discuss here, would be an ideal launching area for missions to the asteroid belt.
Unfortunately, the downsides are much bigger. For starters, Venus's surface is 482C, hot enough to melt lead. The atmosphere at the surface is 94 times earth's pressure, which is so thick that it starts acting like a liquid. So anything we send now would get crushed and melt down. At the same time. On top of that, Venus has little hill-sphere, so using satellites would be much much harder, and Venus rotates extremely slowly, and backwards. (The sun would rise in the west on Venus.) The Venerial (That's 'related to Venus,' btw. It does not refer to sex.) day is only two weeks shorter than it's year. So any plants grown on the surface would die from lack of light during the night, assuming they didn't crush or catch fire. Or melt. Lastly, it rains on Venus right now, but not exactly water. It rains sulphuric acid, a compound that works great in a car battery, but would really suck if it fell on your face, or your crops.
Thankfully, the late Carl Sagan did think up a way where Venus could be lived on today. See, the upper atmosphere of Venus has an earth like temperature and air pressure, and if you were to build a city inside a glass (or other transparent surface, plexiglass would do the trick) bubble, and fill that bubble with earth's atmosphere, the bubble would float like a helium balloon on earth, up five miles. There it would float, and with some of NASA's new ion jets attached, it could be sped into a 24 hour "day" of circling the planet. While all of this is workable, and I would strongly suggest this to displaced people in need of a hard to invade nation (Tibet and Palestine, for instance), it's just too sensible for this blog. Besides, the bubble would only make one city that would need special effort to get in or out of, I want a planet that works like earth. Thankfully, Sagan's city-balloon is the first step in what previously would have been impossible.
The other half of this plan comes from New Mexico, where a group of scientists made a little device, the size of a beer keg, that, when heated to 2600F (1444C), strips oxygen out of carbon dioxide, leaving carbon monoxide that extracts into a small container, to be piped away as fuel. Cooled back down to 2000F (1111C), it releases the oxygen into the atmosphere. If water is added, it produces hydrogen gas instead, with a similar oxygen-extracting process. These scientists are suggesting heating it with solar panels, and keeping it near a coal fired power plant, where it would extract 45 pounds of CO2 from the air per day, pressing it into 2.5 gallons of monoxide to be made into fuel, and then releasing its stored oxygen during the night, resetting itself for another day's extraction. Amatures, I say! I have a much grander, insaner plan!
I plan to have a Sagan bubble-city with a number of these oxygen-cans on movable arms. The bubble city would use ion jets to stay in perpetual daylight. Cans would be raised hourly, with a new can lowered. Only a little solar power would be needed to heat it to the insane temperatures needed, as Venus is already very hot. The cans might occasionally be damaged by the sulpheric acid, but they should extract the hydrogen from the water before suffering significant damage. A human could live in the bubble city, or a city of humans. They would extract some monoxide for their use as fuel, but put most of it onto an off world rocket. For best results, this rocket should go to Mars, which needs greenhouse gases. And Martian people will need fuel too, of course.
Over time, thousands of years probably, these combined actions would use up a large amount of the Venerial atmosphere. The bubble city would find itself lower and lower until it scraped bottom, with no increase in temperature. The remaining carbon dioxide could be used to synthesize baking soda to neutralize the sulphuric acid, as one promising American company has done with their smokestacks. The planet's spin speed could be increased by meteor impact. At this point, plants would be planted, water used to form oceans, and the planet of Venus would be a beautiful place to live.
The faster plan would be to put a solar shade in front of it, with an ion jet to hold it in place against the solar wind. After 1000 years of cooling, it would only be a matter of sawing up, packing up, and rocketing away the dry ice, hitting the meteor, removing the shade, and doing the plant thing. Still, that has the disadvantage of no one being able to USE venus while in the process of terraforming, while still being rather expensive.
Unfortunately, the downsides are much bigger. For starters, Venus's surface is 482C, hot enough to melt lead. The atmosphere at the surface is 94 times earth's pressure, which is so thick that it starts acting like a liquid. So anything we send now would get crushed and melt down. At the same time. On top of that, Venus has little hill-sphere, so using satellites would be much much harder, and Venus rotates extremely slowly, and backwards. (The sun would rise in the west on Venus.) The Venerial (That's 'related to Venus,' btw. It does not refer to sex.) day is only two weeks shorter than it's year. So any plants grown on the surface would die from lack of light during the night, assuming they didn't crush or catch fire. Or melt. Lastly, it rains on Venus right now, but not exactly water. It rains sulphuric acid, a compound that works great in a car battery, but would really suck if it fell on your face, or your crops.
Thankfully, the late Carl Sagan did think up a way where Venus could be lived on today. See, the upper atmosphere of Venus has an earth like temperature and air pressure, and if you were to build a city inside a glass (or other transparent surface, plexiglass would do the trick) bubble, and fill that bubble with earth's atmosphere, the bubble would float like a helium balloon on earth, up five miles. There it would float, and with some of NASA's new ion jets attached, it could be sped into a 24 hour "day" of circling the planet. While all of this is workable, and I would strongly suggest this to displaced people in need of a hard to invade nation (Tibet and Palestine, for instance), it's just too sensible for this blog. Besides, the bubble would only make one city that would need special effort to get in or out of, I want a planet that works like earth. Thankfully, Sagan's city-balloon is the first step in what previously would have been impossible.
The other half of this plan comes from New Mexico, where a group of scientists made a little device, the size of a beer keg, that, when heated to 2600F (1444C), strips oxygen out of carbon dioxide, leaving carbon monoxide that extracts into a small container, to be piped away as fuel. Cooled back down to 2000F (1111C), it releases the oxygen into the atmosphere. If water is added, it produces hydrogen gas instead, with a similar oxygen-extracting process. These scientists are suggesting heating it with solar panels, and keeping it near a coal fired power plant, where it would extract 45 pounds of CO2 from the air per day, pressing it into 2.5 gallons of monoxide to be made into fuel, and then releasing its stored oxygen during the night, resetting itself for another day's extraction. Amatures, I say! I have a much grander, insaner plan!
I plan to have a Sagan bubble-city with a number of these oxygen-cans on movable arms. The bubble city would use ion jets to stay in perpetual daylight. Cans would be raised hourly, with a new can lowered. Only a little solar power would be needed to heat it to the insane temperatures needed, as Venus is already very hot. The cans might occasionally be damaged by the sulpheric acid, but they should extract the hydrogen from the water before suffering significant damage. A human could live in the bubble city, or a city of humans. They would extract some monoxide for their use as fuel, but put most of it onto an off world rocket. For best results, this rocket should go to Mars, which needs greenhouse gases. And Martian people will need fuel too, of course.
Over time, thousands of years probably, these combined actions would use up a large amount of the Venerial atmosphere. The bubble city would find itself lower and lower until it scraped bottom, with no increase in temperature. The remaining carbon dioxide could be used to synthesize baking soda to neutralize the sulphuric acid, as one promising American company has done with their smokestacks. The planet's spin speed could be increased by meteor impact. At this point, plants would be planted, water used to form oceans, and the planet of Venus would be a beautiful place to live.
The faster plan would be to put a solar shade in front of it, with an ion jet to hold it in place against the solar wind. After 1000 years of cooling, it would only be a matter of sawing up, packing up, and rocketing away the dry ice, hitting the meteor, removing the shade, and doing the plant thing. Still, that has the disadvantage of no one being able to USE venus while in the process of terraforming, while still being rather expensive.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
The Surprising Facts about Famine
Famine, a lack of available food to a person, does not occur for the reasons that most people think it does. Most people think that famines occur because there is not enough food on earth to feed everyone. This is, much to their surprise, incorrect.
The world contains, as of last year, 6,602,224,175 people. Each of them will need, according to NASA, 3.1kg of food per day. If I do the math, this translates to 20,466,894,942.5kg/day. Quite a lot, certainally, but the planet is very large. 160,800,000,000kg of barley were grown last year. The amount of rice grown alone would feed everyone, albeit not well. (5.24 x 10^11kg of rice was grown in 2007).
However, food has a number of problems. It goes bad unless refrigerated. (Humans are not the only things on earth that eat! Rats, bacteria, and other pests do their best to eat up any food they get their paws, pseudopods, or grasping impliments on.) It gets stolen. Farmers expect to be paid for their efforts, as farming is hard work. Some of it is worth more as fuel, or alcohol. (I'm looking at YOU, corn.)
Every starving person on earth is arguably starving for political reasons. The most obvious is poverty -- They are unable to provide the farmer with an economic exchange due to a lack of funds. This can be dealt with in a way that imposes few political problems. Namely, a third party charitably buys food for them. This way, the people eat, the farmer gets paid, and everyone is happy, except for the hard core libertarians.
More insideously, however, are dictatorships that force people to live in places that do not have food, forbid them from leaving, and forbid trade outside of their country. And most insideous of all are dictatorships that have decided by fiat that certain people do not get to eat as a way of exterminating them forever. Our resident historian notes that no democracy has ever had a famine, as people tend to leave areas where food is hard to come by.
As an engineer, there's no machine I can build to overthrow cruel dictatorships. There's no chemical reaction for justice. Starve happy dictatorships have to be dealt with diplomatically, politically, or possibly militarily if the first two options don't work. Or possibly another solution is at hand. Ask your local political science expert.
The world contains, as of last year, 6,602,224,175 people. Each of them will need, according to NASA, 3.1kg of food per day. If I do the math, this translates to 20,466,894,942.5kg/day. Quite a lot, certainally, but the planet is very large. 160,800,000,000kg of barley were grown last year. The amount of rice grown alone would feed everyone, albeit not well. (5.24 x 10^11kg of rice was grown in 2007).
However, food has a number of problems. It goes bad unless refrigerated. (Humans are not the only things on earth that eat! Rats, bacteria, and other pests do their best to eat up any food they get their paws, pseudopods, or grasping impliments on.) It gets stolen. Farmers expect to be paid for their efforts, as farming is hard work. Some of it is worth more as fuel, or alcohol. (I'm looking at YOU, corn.)
Every starving person on earth is arguably starving for political reasons. The most obvious is poverty -- They are unable to provide the farmer with an economic exchange due to a lack of funds. This can be dealt with in a way that imposes few political problems. Namely, a third party charitably buys food for them. This way, the people eat, the farmer gets paid, and everyone is happy, except for the hard core libertarians.
More insideously, however, are dictatorships that force people to live in places that do not have food, forbid them from leaving, and forbid trade outside of their country. And most insideous of all are dictatorships that have decided by fiat that certain people do not get to eat as a way of exterminating them forever. Our resident historian notes that no democracy has ever had a famine, as people tend to leave areas where food is hard to come by.
As an engineer, there's no machine I can build to overthrow cruel dictatorships. There's no chemical reaction for justice. Starve happy dictatorships have to be dealt with diplomatically, politically, or possibly militarily if the first two options don't work. Or possibly another solution is at hand. Ask your local political science expert.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Terraforming Mars
Perhaps you've heard in the news about the US (and perhaps other countries), trying to travel to Mars. One of the goals of the project is to finally either confirm or deny the existance of life on Mars, be it now or thousands of years ago.
Many people are complaining, as this mission is expensive and doesn't produce a material result. (It wouldn't be worth bringing back any materials that didn't have a large scientific interest, and mining is done in tons anyway.) Well, for material results, I've got something for you that I read in a magazine once.
Terraforming is a slow process that would make Mars more Earthlike, until we could build cities and wildlife reserves on it. It'd be like gaining another Eurasia for all of earthly life. (Mars is smaller than earth, and the lowest land on Mars would become flooded by the new ocean.)
The first step would be to crash Mars's two moons into the surface, as the moons aren't as scenic as ours and would be inside the Martian atmosphere by the time we finished, which would crash them anyway. Then have satellites release CFCs from the surface. This would not erode the Ozone layer as it does on earth, because Mars does not have an ozone layer. The thickening of the atmosphere would increase the temperature, which would allow for better options. At this point, we would release large amounts of methane and CO2 into the Martian atmosphere, which is useful to us as both of those are essentially waste in our atmosphere.
By this point, Mars is like the polar regions of earth: cold and miserable, but able to support some life. Lichens would be seeded at strategic points on the Martian surface. Mars has some water to sustain them, but probably not enough for, say, a penguin, or a polar bear. We would want to add more. NASA would find asteroids in the asteroid belt rich in water, and crash them into Mars. As it warms, small lakes would develop. More CO2 and methane would keep it from freezing back over.
In addition to providing oceans and life support, vaporized water is a greenhouse gas, further raising the temperatures. We're at the three quarters completed point, and now some regions of mars resemble Siberia. The wetter areas would support arboreal trees.
We continue to add CO2, but now we're planting more plants. The plants break down the CO2 with the power of the sun. The carbon becomes their food and bodies, the oxygen is released into the atmosphere. The original CFCs have probably decayed or escaped into space, so an ozone layer would form, protecting Martian life from the powerful radiation of the sun. Water would also need to be added. Contaminated earthly water could be used too, if bacteria are added to break down the pollution.
It would also be wise to find a way to reactivate the magnetic core of Mars. Earth's molten core provides a magnetic field that in addition to aiding in navigation through the use of compases, also reflects harmful radiation from space.
At the end of the project, mars has oceans, plants, and the deserts on which plants continue to expand into. We add animals now, including ourselves. Any humans there build cities, and run civilizations, be it as a colony of the sponsoring nation, or independantly. Space travel would connect the two planets economically, and I imagine the Martian population booming from the rich resources and lack of people to compete with the colonists.
All in all, this project would cost trillions of dollars and take over a thousand years to complete, and there is some risk of Mars slowly de-terraforming, returning to the lifeless husk it is today. I am absolutely convinced that it is worth doing
Many people are complaining, as this mission is expensive and doesn't produce a material result. (It wouldn't be worth bringing back any materials that didn't have a large scientific interest, and mining is done in tons anyway.) Well, for material results, I've got something for you that I read in a magazine once.
Terraforming is a slow process that would make Mars more Earthlike, until we could build cities and wildlife reserves on it. It'd be like gaining another Eurasia for all of earthly life. (Mars is smaller than earth, and the lowest land on Mars would become flooded by the new ocean.)
The first step would be to crash Mars's two moons into the surface, as the moons aren't as scenic as ours and would be inside the Martian atmosphere by the time we finished, which would crash them anyway. Then have satellites release CFCs from the surface. This would not erode the Ozone layer as it does on earth, because Mars does not have an ozone layer. The thickening of the atmosphere would increase the temperature, which would allow for better options. At this point, we would release large amounts of methane and CO2 into the Martian atmosphere, which is useful to us as both of those are essentially waste in our atmosphere.
By this point, Mars is like the polar regions of earth: cold and miserable, but able to support some life. Lichens would be seeded at strategic points on the Martian surface. Mars has some water to sustain them, but probably not enough for, say, a penguin, or a polar bear. We would want to add more. NASA would find asteroids in the asteroid belt rich in water, and crash them into Mars. As it warms, small lakes would develop. More CO2 and methane would keep it from freezing back over.
In addition to providing oceans and life support, vaporized water is a greenhouse gas, further raising the temperatures. We're at the three quarters completed point, and now some regions of mars resemble Siberia. The wetter areas would support arboreal trees.
We continue to add CO2, but now we're planting more plants. The plants break down the CO2 with the power of the sun. The carbon becomes their food and bodies, the oxygen is released into the atmosphere. The original CFCs have probably decayed or escaped into space, so an ozone layer would form, protecting Martian life from the powerful radiation of the sun. Water would also need to be added. Contaminated earthly water could be used too, if bacteria are added to break down the pollution.
It would also be wise to find a way to reactivate the magnetic core of Mars. Earth's molten core provides a magnetic field that in addition to aiding in navigation through the use of compases, also reflects harmful radiation from space.
At the end of the project, mars has oceans, plants, and the deserts on which plants continue to expand into. We add animals now, including ourselves. Any humans there build cities, and run civilizations, be it as a colony of the sponsoring nation, or independantly. Space travel would connect the two planets economically, and I imagine the Martian population booming from the rich resources and lack of people to compete with the colonists.
All in all, this project would cost trillions of dollars and take over a thousand years to complete, and there is some risk of Mars slowly de-terraforming, returning to the lifeless husk it is today. I am absolutely convinced that it is worth doing
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
The Farming Tower
I have a vision. Sometime in the future, a peasant in a poor country hears from a friend about a new government project. He gathers together his family, a few bags of seeds, and some farm tools, and loads them into a truck that his brother managed to buy before a random militia killed him. They drive to the site.
The site is a building that covers hundreds of acres. A worker there explains that the building contains farms enough for everyone, and that this worker may have one for 5% of his yield. This is agreeable to our farming family. They are given a card-key (the kind that some fancy hotels give out to allow access to exactly one room), and a pair of sunglasses each, and told to drive the truck into the far part of the building. They are told to bring everything into the room, then put the card into the slot in the wall.
After loading the room up, our intrepid farming leader puts the card into the small slot in the wall, which accepts it. Suddenly, there is a feeling of movement. This entire room is an enormous elevator. It moves for a long time, then stops. With a ding, the doors open to a non-descript room. The card is returned from the slot, and our farming family walks in. The doors close behind them. The elevator leaves with a wirr, presumably back to the surface.
An electronic sign on the wall notes that this is the entrance to this family's farm in the local language. Another sign, this one hand made, informs visitors that they should wear their sunglasses while in the farm. The enormous door, large enough to drive a truck through, has a slot next to it, the same as the
elevator room. Our family puts on their sunglasses and inserts their card. The large doors swing open revealing a light brighter than the sun.
After everyone's eyes adjust, it becomes apparent that this light is coming from the ceiling, which is covered in LEDs. The room is a farm, hundreds of acres in size. In fact, it is the same size as the building, but 20 feet tall. The soil is warm, moist, and composty, but nothing has been planted yet.
With the feeling that their new farm was good indeed, our family gets right to work planting. Clearly this will be a good year, barring no disasters and little government corruption. Gentle music combined with quiet nature sounds fills the air, apparently coming from the walls. The seeds are quickly all planted.
Our family then wishes to return to their dwelling. They close the enormous doors and remove the keycard. They then use the keycard on the wall with the elevator, which returns within ten minutes. They drive the truck into it and insert the keycard into the elevator's slot to indicate that they are ready. The elevator wirrs as it pulls them back to the surface.
Meanwhile at the farm, the pleasant music has been replaced with loud cacophanous sounds that would be quite objectionable to any people present, if there were any. These loud sounds benefit the plants by causing vibrations in the air. (An experiment showed that plants grow best in the presence of loud heavy metal and worst in complete silence.) The light remains on until 6pm local time, at which time it is extinguished. The plants grow in the darkness until 3am, when sprinklers in the ceiling spray them with water for two hours. At 6am, the bright lights are once again lit. All of this happens by automated computer control, without any human intervention.
Some time in the next morning, our farming family returns. Before they open the door, the cacophanous noise is replaced by gentle music and nature sounds. The plants are growing well, our family observes. There are no pests here, no vandalism, and disease has not taken hold, and with care it never will.
Our family doesn't necessarily know this, but there are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of these layers, each one only accessable with the right keycard. Some layers have mechanical equipment, or tanks of water, but most are farms, just like our family's. This building roots deep into the earth, so deep that it can supply the immense energy needs party by purely geothermal sources. Though utlimately, more exotic technologies must supply most of the immense needs, probably around 2-5 megawatts per layer.
Will it happen? Probably not. It's too expensive.
The site is a building that covers hundreds of acres. A worker there explains that the building contains farms enough for everyone, and that this worker may have one for 5% of his yield. This is agreeable to our farming family. They are given a card-key (the kind that some fancy hotels give out to allow access to exactly one room), and a pair of sunglasses each, and told to drive the truck into the far part of the building. They are told to bring everything into the room, then put the card into the slot in the wall.
After loading the room up, our intrepid farming leader puts the card into the small slot in the wall, which accepts it. Suddenly, there is a feeling of movement. This entire room is an enormous elevator. It moves for a long time, then stops. With a ding, the doors open to a non-descript room. The card is returned from the slot, and our farming family walks in. The doors close behind them. The elevator leaves with a wirr, presumably back to the surface.
An electronic sign on the wall notes that this is the entrance to this family's farm in the local language. Another sign, this one hand made, informs visitors that they should wear their sunglasses while in the farm. The enormous door, large enough to drive a truck through, has a slot next to it, the same as the
elevator room. Our family puts on their sunglasses and inserts their card. The large doors swing open revealing a light brighter than the sun.
After everyone's eyes adjust, it becomes apparent that this light is coming from the ceiling, which is covered in LEDs. The room is a farm, hundreds of acres in size. In fact, it is the same size as the building, but 20 feet tall. The soil is warm, moist, and composty, but nothing has been planted yet.
With the feeling that their new farm was good indeed, our family gets right to work planting. Clearly this will be a good year, barring no disasters and little government corruption. Gentle music combined with quiet nature sounds fills the air, apparently coming from the walls. The seeds are quickly all planted.
Our family then wishes to return to their dwelling. They close the enormous doors and remove the keycard. They then use the keycard on the wall with the elevator, which returns within ten minutes. They drive the truck into it and insert the keycard into the elevator's slot to indicate that they are ready. The elevator wirrs as it pulls them back to the surface.
Meanwhile at the farm, the pleasant music has been replaced with loud cacophanous sounds that would be quite objectionable to any people present, if there were any. These loud sounds benefit the plants by causing vibrations in the air. (An experiment showed that plants grow best in the presence of loud heavy metal and worst in complete silence.) The light remains on until 6pm local time, at which time it is extinguished. The plants grow in the darkness until 3am, when sprinklers in the ceiling spray them with water for two hours. At 6am, the bright lights are once again lit. All of this happens by automated computer control, without any human intervention.
Some time in the next morning, our farming family returns. Before they open the door, the cacophanous noise is replaced by gentle music and nature sounds. The plants are growing well, our family observes. There are no pests here, no vandalism, and disease has not taken hold, and with care it never will.
Our family doesn't necessarily know this, but there are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of these layers, each one only accessable with the right keycard. Some layers have mechanical equipment, or tanks of water, but most are farms, just like our family's. This building roots deep into the earth, so deep that it can supply the immense energy needs party by purely geothermal sources. Though utlimately, more exotic technologies must supply most of the immense needs, probably around 2-5 megawatts per layer.
Will it happen? Probably not. It's too expensive.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Ending Global Warming
Climate change is occurring, and while there's a big debate raging about how much of it is human-caused (and those that believe that humans cause 'none' are clearly kidding themselves, as are those who insist that humans cause 'all' of it,), no one seems interested in doing much about it.
Partially this is because two of the main causes, an increase in carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, both of which come from industry and farming, which in turn makes our lives directly better. No one wants to quit their job or live in a smaller house, or eat less for the earth's sake. Well, maybe a few people, but they are a distinct minority.
However, besides reduction, there is also a way we could remove existing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere: plants. A plant is, for as long as it is alive, keeping its own weight in greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere. This is because the proteins that make up the plant's body are constructed from sugar that the plant makes itself, and nitrogen compounds from the soil. Some plants can even extract nitrogen straight from the atmosphere, enriching the soil with yet more nitrogen compounds.
So my plan is this: Deliberately grow fast-growing short-lived plants, and when they die, either sink them to the bottom of a swamp (where, over the course of millions of years, they will become new fossil fuels,) or lacking a swamp, encase them in cement and sink them to the bottom of the ocean. Should fertility slow down, harvest the current plants and grow clover, which is one of those plants that can get nitrogen from the atmosphere. One year's growth of clover should refresh the soil enough to grow five years of faster growing plants.
On the US west coast, Eucalyptus would work best. In the US gulf coast and east coast, kudzu would be better.
Transportation still needs to be worked out, as this plan will be useless if the dead plants are sent by truck. (The gas burned by the truck might very well return every molecule of CO2 that the plant extracted, statistically.)
Partially this is because two of the main causes, an increase in carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, both of which come from industry and farming, which in turn makes our lives directly better. No one wants to quit their job or live in a smaller house, or eat less for the earth's sake. Well, maybe a few people, but they are a distinct minority.
However, besides reduction, there is also a way we could remove existing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere: plants. A plant is, for as long as it is alive, keeping its own weight in greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere. This is because the proteins that make up the plant's body are constructed from sugar that the plant makes itself, and nitrogen compounds from the soil. Some plants can even extract nitrogen straight from the atmosphere, enriching the soil with yet more nitrogen compounds.
So my plan is this: Deliberately grow fast-growing short-lived plants, and when they die, either sink them to the bottom of a swamp (where, over the course of millions of years, they will become new fossil fuels,) or lacking a swamp, encase them in cement and sink them to the bottom of the ocean. Should fertility slow down, harvest the current plants and grow clover, which is one of those plants that can get nitrogen from the atmosphere. One year's growth of clover should refresh the soil enough to grow five years of faster growing plants.
On the US west coast, Eucalyptus would work best. In the US gulf coast and east coast, kudzu would be better.
Transportation still needs to be worked out, as this plan will be useless if the dead plants are sent by truck. (The gas burned by the truck might very well return every molecule of CO2 that the plant extracted, statistically.)
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