[ExI] Why not ask the Engineers?

[Keith Henson]

Not too many years ago, when people had problems like floods or things
they wanted to do like going to the moon, they asked engineers how to
do it and how much it would cost.  Then after some political debate,
they had big companies with thousands of engineers and related
technical workers do the job.  The Transcontinental railroad, Panama
Canal, Hover Dam, Manhattan Project, Apollo, you get the drift.

However, in recent years, people have not been asking the engineers.
There has been a tendency to assume we already know how to fix the
problems.  The solutions assumed are usually the "hair shirt" kind
with a religious flavor to them and lots of sacrifice—for other people
of course.

Just being an old engineer, I can't say how society could be induced
into asking engineers how to solve the problems again.  However, on
the off chance that someone might ask, I have put some thinking into
the problems that show up in the daily news.

Take sea ice melting in the Arctic.

 One solution, which might work, is vast numbers of floating thermal
diodes.  These are not new.  They were developed for the Alaskan
pipeline as pipe supports where the pipe ran across areas of
permafrost.  They are very simple, a pipe sealed on both ends with a
gallon or two of ammonia in it.  When the air temperature is lower
than the permafrost, the ammonia boils at the bottom end, condenses at
the top end where it is exposed to very cold air.  It then runs down
the pipe to boil again.  When the air temperature is higher than the
permafrost, the ammonia stays in the bottom.  I ran the analysis and
found that in a few years each pipe would become a 100-foot ball of
very hard ice, too cold to melt over the summer.  It takes a lot of
them, millions, but they are dead simple and not very expensive.

The same thermal diodes could freeze glaciers to bedrock.  The
large-scale effect would be to raise the wintertime temperature in the
Polar Regions, which increases the radiation into space.

For low cost energy, I have been talking for a few years about
building lasers propulsion to lower the cost of hauling millions of
tons of power satellite parts into orbit.  This has become a 26-page
document full of numbers.

However, we could do something else with a large transportation system
into space, sunshades that lower the brightness of the sun.  Robert
Kennedy and his co-authors have produced a 25-page paper analyzing how
this would work and what it might cost.

An alternative is to overbuild the power satellites and put CO2 back
in the ground as synthetic wax.

Lots of answers, the problem is how to get people to ask.

Keith