Transmat World: civilization

Showing posts with label civilization. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Climate Change Will Herald the Age of Island Cities

Courtesy The Seasteading Institute and Gabriel Scheare, Luke & Lourdes Crowley, and Patrick White (Roark 3D)

Maybe you haven't heard of the Seasteading Institute. Their idea is to create ocean-going island cities with separate laws and governance from the rest of the world; more for sociopolitical reasons than practical. Little do they know they are ahead of the curve on what will be a major trend in the future.

Accurate ice core readings now show the atmosphere has more CO2, way more, than at any time in the past 800,000 years. Less accurate but 95% reliable are studies showing the last time CO2 levels were this high was during the Miocene 15 million years ago.

As our world heats up due to the unrelenting rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, it will begin to resemble the Miocene era.

You will find arguments that since average temperatures were much higher (5-8 degrees Centigrade higher) along with sea levels (130 feet higher) during the Miocene, there is no correlation with our current situation since we are not seeing those conditions. Those CO2 changes in the Miocene took place over a period of thousands of years. Ours has taken place over just the last 250 years.

If climate change were a light bulb, we have flipped the switch and are living in that geological microsecond the bulb filament is glowing a faint red. We are wondering why the light does not come on, but it did. It will get brighter at it's geological pace. Humanity is handicapped by not being able to visualize clearly the scale of really big things, be it time or space or the thermal inertia of a planet. Plus, we want patience and we want it now.

What the hell does this have to do with island cities? As that light bulb gets brighter, the planet’s oceans will become the most pleasant, practical places to live over the next century or so. When they talk about the seas becoming warm and too acidic, they are talking about the uppermost layer of the ocean called the Epipelagic Zone, also known as the Sunlight zone. Towards the lower boundaries of this zone is a thermocline that is a demarcation of warm, mixed upper sea water and frigid, stratified deeper sea water. Ninety percent of the ocean is below the thermocline and is 32-37 degrees F. This means if you lived on the ocean in 2100 A.D. you could be as few as a hundred meters away from a precious commodity in a hot and getting hotter world—the coolest liquid on the planet.

What can you do with it? You can pump it through the water side of a water/air heat exchanger, blow hot moist ambient air (there will be plenty of that) through the air side of the exchanger and collect the condensate off the coil for one of the cheapest ways to produce large quantities of fresh water known to man; cheap enough to use for farming. Use the cool air produced as a byproduct of this process to air condition living quarters and refrigerate food. This would eliminate the hydrofluorocarbons typically used in air conditioning. They are some of the worst greenhouse gasses around as far as potency; 1,430 times worse than CO2 per unit mass.

But wait! There’s more! That cold seawater your pumping can go into a large fish tank as it leaves the heat exchanger. It is full of nutrients and, because of its temperature, can hold a lot of oxygen, unlike the warm acidic water surrounding the island city. Many species of fish and shellfish may be saved from extinction by being raised in such tanks. This will also serve as a major source of food for the island city. The still cool overflow from the fish tanks will be dumped into the warm surrounding water, forming oases for wild organisms following the island around. With enough island cities and given enough time, this cool water from the depths may begin to help cool off the planet, assuming CO2 emissions are under control. It puts a whole new spin on the idea of deep-sea fish farming.

These island cities may be built with modules—habitat, water, plant farming, fish farming, solar power, wind power, manufacturing, harbor, recreation, etc.—linked together to form a large floating mat of functional habitability. Or they could be like huge, sail-driven cruise ships specially built to be self-sustaining. I can also see where they would run the gamut from well-planned and custom engineered to an old freighter with attendant sea barges roped to it a la Waterworld.

The engineered island cities will make excellent platforms for exploring the depths of the oceans for minerals, metals, and scientific studies. They will trade with other cities and whatever ports are still functioning to form a network of civilization the likes of which the world has never seen.

There are other reasons living on a floating island city may become a much better option than living on land in the future. For many, living on land will be a scramble to stay ahead of rising seas and ever hotter middle latitudes. There is evidence that equatorial regions may have been uninhabitable by living creatures during the hottest parts of the Eocene, another time period when temperatures rose along with an increase in CO2 due to major volcanic eruptions. This may cause a migration of humanity and animals on a previously unimagined scale, causing strife and conflict between haves and have nots. Many people will look to the sea for a less stressful life.

One could get a taste of this lifestyle by simply going to work on a cruise ship or going for an extended cruise. It's only about $45,000 for a year’s cruise. That would certainly be cheaper than buying a cabin on The World cruise liner for 13.5 million dollars. Probably would not be the same. They won't put you to work wiping off solar panels, gutting fish, or harvesting crops on a cruise ship. I wouldn’t, however, count on living at sea becoming a necessity in the immediate future. That light bulb filament won’t be orange for a couple of decades yet.

Other articles you may enjoy:

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

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Why the Oceans Will Be Humanity’s Life Raft

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A Convergence of Technologies Will Create a New Age of Space Exploration

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Are Seeds of Conflict Brewing Over the Moon?

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Sunday, April 28, 2019

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

Photo by Cata on Unsplash

Our modern lives insulate us from and make us forget a knowledge that came simply and unforgettably to our hunter-gatherer forebears. That is the discrimination between needs and desires. We don’t need smartphones, automobiles, TV, indoor plumbing, granite countertops, Nikes, non-fat lattes with caramel drizzles, YouTube, scented candles, or video games. We do need food, air, water, a modicum of shelter, and a proper temperature range in which our species can exist. The last was a given until recently. That’s why there’s no life on Mars or Venus—too cold, too hot. The fact that temperatures go up in lockstep with CO2 levels now makes CO2 capture and sequestration mandatory to provide us with one of our necessities, a livable temperature range.

If you want to make a lot of money, figure out a cheap way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and stash it somewhere for several hundred years or forever. Everyone will thank you and shower you with cash. Ahahaha! That’s not true, but it should be true. Unfortunately, Trump is gutting U.S. funding for research in this area. That leaves the Chinese as the world leader for this technology. At the rate CO2 levels are increasing, we may end up renting the technology from them. Ironic, since they probably stole the idea from us to begin with.

Since energy companies revealed they are spending 5 trillion dollars over the next decade for fossil fuel exploration, it is a foregone conclusion that CO2 capture and sequestration (CCS) will be a technology of existential necessity. The fossil fuel industry has an enormous cache of wealth acquired at the expense of the Earth’s climate. They are going to use that wealth to continue doing what they do by gaming the legalized bribery system at the heart of many of America’s problems—lobbying. The energy companies plan to sell combustibles until fossil fuels are gone, they are too expensive to extract at a profit, or their client base has plummeted due to “natural causes.”

We are currently at 413 ppm CO2. We are on track to hit 550 ppm by end of century. This will raise average temps 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit. At some point in the next century, if we keep going at our current rate, we could see 700 to 900 ppm CO2, something not seen since the Eocene some 50 million years ago. Temperatures were up to 25 degrees Fahrenheit higher on average. There was no ice at the poles, but probably alligators and palm trees in Antartica.

Looking at past geological records, it appears there is a lag time of one to four centuries for sea levels to catch up to rapid changes in CO2 levels. None have been as rapid as the last 200 years. We know that sea levels were a hundred feet higher during the Miocene, 15 million years ago, when CO2 levels were similar to what we have now. The reason we don’t see that large increase in sea levels or the 11 degrees F. higher temperature yet is because of the buffer provided by our still-cool, deep ocean waters. Ninety percent of the ocean is between 32 and 37.5 degrees Fahrenheit. But over the next couple of centuries we will see increasingly rapid elevations in sea levels and temperature.

If we burn the rest of our fossil fuels scientists estimate atmospheric CO2 levels could rise to 1000–5000 ppm. If it is toward the upper limits of this estimate, it is debatable whether life will continue as we know it on Earth. Before we get there fossil fuel companies will, hopefully, realize they could lose their customers and, therefore, make some changes. These same scientists say just 450 ppm will be disastrous. It is a certainty we will reach that. With uncontrolled fossil fuel use and no capture and sequestration, CO2 levels will easily blow past 500 ppm; and our civilization could collapse under the strain of drought, food chain disruption, defrosted pathogens, resource wars, heat prostration, and tropical diseases.

That is where CCS comes in. Various means of scrubbing CO2 from the air have been developed. It is then used for making lubricating oil and putting the fizz in soda water. Those are pretty small markets for the amount of CO2 we need to eliminate. Plus, who is going to pay for it on the industrial scale that is required. It would be ideal for those responsible for the CO2 in the first place to pay for capture and sequestration by implementing a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme. Otherwise, we are simply paying to clean up the energy companies’ mess which, in the end, may not be out of the realm of possibilities.

In the past it was thought that CO2 capture would have to take place at those industries where it is produced—chemical, power, concrete, steel, and fertilizer plants. Then it would be pumped somewhere to be injected into the ground. This is very expensive and unlikely to be adopted.

A recently developed CCS technology allows carbon to be extracted directly from the air. Not oddly at all, it is called Direct Air Capture (DAC). With current technology it may be possible to get this down to about $100 dollars per ton. It needs to be ten times less expensive ($10 to $20 per ton) not to be a drag on the economy. This is the only technology that can realize a carbon negative offset. In other words, it could remove more carbon than is produced by mankind and nature to reduce overall levels in the atmosphere. The only alternative coming close is massive reforestation and afforestation. These have their own sets of problems and need funding to iron out the bugs.

The problem is money. No one except a few universities and Bill Gates are spending money in the U.S. to develop this technology. It is not enough that we strip carbon out of the atmosphere. It must be put in a stable environment or condition and left there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Turn it back into limestone? Make CO2-foamed concrete? Make plastic to feed our 3D printers? Plant all available land with trees? I don’t know. That is why we need some smart people working on this right away.

Environmentalists are in a moral tug of war about CO2 capture and sequestration. Some believe it will give the fossil fuel companies an incentive to keep on doing what they are doing. That ship has sailed. We cannot be picky now about how carbon is removed from the atmosphere. It is all good, but CCS offers at least the possibility to reverse the levels of carbon in the atmosphere, staving off the worst of global warning until the climate stabilizes at a reasonable temperature—one of the basic needs that will allow us to keep on drinking non-fat lattes with caramel drizzles.

Other articles you may enjoy:

There May Be a Quadrillion Dollars Lying About on the Moon