[ExI] Global Temperatures to Decrease

[Damien Broderick]

At 09:44 PM 4/20/2008 -0400, Rafal wrote:

>AFAIK, the current hypothesis for why Venus is so hot blames it on the
>absence of functional plate tectonics, which lead to an accumulation
>of carbon dioxide and sulfur oxides well beyond anything that could
>happen on Earth, even if we burn every last piece of coal and squeak
>out the last bubble of methane.

Good points all, and fairly made (but then nobody expects Earth, like 
Venus, to go to 740K, c. 460C). I wonder what the max we could 
achieve by doing that *is*? Robert Bradbury has expressed concerns 
about cooking ourselves with degraded heat from a vast number of 
nanoassemblers (even, presumably, if they've gobbled up a lot of CO2 
from the air). Rob Freitas once noted:

"A simple calculation (http://www.nanomedicine.com/NMI/6.5.7.htm#p4) of
the hypsithermal limit for Earth, when combined with a few other reasonable
assumptions, suggests that a per capita allocation of about 10 kg of active
nanomachinery will generate about the maximum amount of extra thermal
pollution that our planet can handle without sustaining ecological damage.
This limit or something like it may someday be enshrined in international
law."

Damien Broderick