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And physics, always physics. Joel Send a noteboard - 22/10/2011 08:34:07 AM
Those arguments make sense, but biomass will not cut emissions (though they might level emissions)

Plants get there carbon out of the air and release it back into the air in equal quantity, that's what 'carbon neutral' means... you can effectively sequester the stuff merely by increasing the amount of biomass on the planet, not just by dumping it back down in holes, which we can also do but in my opinion is needlessly wasting a valuable resource... I'd rather just see the biomass per acre increased in various spots like desert or tundra... but you miss a key point, one can sequester carbon by growing biofuels and simply storing them in cisterns as economic reserves. I'd rather have megatons of biofuel in a bunch of cistern then just dump carbon back into empty mines.

Sure, it would be better to sequester carbon as fuel than just wall it away somewhere never to be seen again, but the "increasing biomass" aspect is what has always bothered me about sequestration: It would take a fairly significant net mass increase to even temporarily reduce the amount of CO2 in the air, and unless we are talking about huge sequoia groves or something, nearly all of it will go back into the atmosphere in a century or two at most. Ironically, the most effective form of carbon sequestration was fossil fuels themselves compactly tucking huge amounts of carbon away where only someone hell bent on digging through a mile of rock to obtain and then burn it could release it. The genie may be out of the bottle on that one; I doubt we can plant enough trees and grow enough algae to offset a few hundred million years of global forests and building sized lizards. I would certainly love to see our deforestation trends reversed, because they exacerbate the problem, and finding a way to farm deserts and tundra to slow the retreat of forests in the relatively few areas where they remain would help that a lot, but carbon neutrality may be the best we can hope for at this stage.

and neither will carbon sequestration unless we plan to bury that excess carbon some place where no microbes can get to it for a few centuries. If we get biomass from space, sunlight and nutrients currently wasted that may be viable (though I am still uncertain that is the most efficient way to exploit those unused resources,) but only then. If biomass cannot rely primarily on resources not currently used I would rather concentrate on making hydrogen fuel cells with fission. That still is not efficient, but would be less inefficient.


I don't think space-based agriculture for terrestrial consumption is likely to be economically viable under any realistic circumstances, even if we never had anything better than solar and had to use space tethers to transport food it is cheaper to move raw electricity and heat... you'd dump power from orbital solar plants down a tether to massive many story hydroponic facilities and purge waste heat right back up those tethers or five mile high heat conducting towers. Theoretically you could pack trillions of people into that sort of setup essentially limited by how much heat you could pump out, and you'd probably be looking at something along the lines of a 100 kilowatts per person, though you could probably dump that down a good deal by only generating in hydroponic facilities the exact right amount of the proper light spectrum for optimal. That heat could only be ultimately radiated away... which is about 500 W/m2 at room temp but presumably one could construct the big orbital solar panels to have a surface area larger than their effective collection cross section of ~ 1300 W/m2 IIRC at this distance from the sun, nice crinkly rear sides, a straight flat panel would doing 1000 W/m2 while absorbing 1300 w/m2 which is no good but one with a pin backside like the heat sink on a processor usually has about 50x the exposed surface area of it's flat equivalent so presumably doing 25,000 W/m2 wouldn't be a problem, but I'm thinking the upper end of conductive heat transfer is around 5000 W/mK... which does happen to come from those same kickass new materials constructed out of carbon that one would tend to build space elevators and many-mile arcologies out of so I'd bet on being able to push out the heat loss to an order of magnitude or more above Earth's own current stabilized hundred petawatt or so amount... so maybe 10 Trillion people? If they all pretty much lived and grew food in ten thousand story buildings you could pretty much use 2% of the Earth's land surface for that with plenty of room for food crops and individual apartments larger than most mansions... pretty far into future to be sure but physically doable by known laws.

Whoa, there! :P I could have saved you a lot of typing if I had been more clear, sorry: By "space" I just meant "area" not "off world," thinking of what you were saying about how we can grow algae in areas we are not now using for agriculture (or anything else.) In other words, algae as biofuel sounds good if we grow it on a part of the planet we are not currently using for anything else, but making productive use out of parts of the planet that are lying idle is a good idea whatever form that use takes, and I would hate to see algae biofuel preempt a better one. Think of how well sea water could cool a nuclear reactor (until Godzilla showed up, of course. ;))
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This message last edited by Joel on 22/10/2011 at 08:35:06 AM
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Interesting new Biofuel innovation: Magnetic Algae - 22/10/2011 03:05:13 AM 492 Views
I must be missing something with biofuel, though this certainly sounds like good news for it. - 22/10/2011 04:41:17 AM 264 Views
It's rather difficult to cram a fission reactor into a car - 22/10/2011 05:10:23 AM 267 Views
If the batteries are that bulky then, yeah, biomass or something similar is appealing. - 22/10/2011 07:15:22 AM 344 Views
We're constrained by what economics and tech permit - 22/10/2011 08:09:22 AM 265 Views
And physics, always physics. - 22/10/2011 08:34:07 AM 309 Views
And scale... scale is important too - 22/10/2011 01:40:18 PM 248 Views
Forget Biofuel. When do we start making magnetic people! - 22/10/2011 07:43:43 AM 228 Views
One would have problems imagining why - 22/10/2011 08:09:55 AM 249 Views
Except during the middle of the day, you can usually use the sun. - 22/10/2011 08:36:54 AM 257 Views
Uh... have you ever tried to navigate by the sun? - 22/10/2011 09:05:40 PM 239 Views
Frequently, hence the comment. - 23/10/2011 09:35:31 AM 320 Views

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