[ExI] ?Existential hysteria (John Clark)

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 1:35 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Liquid SO2 is 1.437 times as dense as water.  18 miles would be about the
> same as a 26 mile deep ocean.  That's around 3.8 times the depth
> of the deepest place in the ocean.  The SO2 has to be pumped up in stages,
> a lot of them.


Sure. What's the problem? The tallest building in the world is nearly a
kilometer high, and the hardest part about building it was not figuring out
how to pump water to the top of it.

> The design of the hose, the pumps, the supporting balloons and powering
> the pumps is not a trivial task.


Compared with reducing CO2 emissions enough to actually make a difference
to the climate pumping a liquid up 29 km would be triviality personified!


> > I worked on a much less daunting 20 km StratoSolar design, this is
> almost 29 km.
>

You had to worry about finding a efficient way to get the electrical power
down those 20 km or it's not worth doing, Myhrvold is sending power (to rum
the pumps) up not down and electrical transmission efficiency is utterly
unimportant. And you wanted to build thousands of these things, Myhrvold
only needs one.

> Hot air for this use is not reasonable engineering.
>

Maybe not but worth thinking about; if hot air doesn't seem practical there
is always helium and maybe even hydrogen; it's cheap and if it burns up it
burns up and just go build another one, after all it's only a bunch of
unmanned balloons, a few pool pumps, and a hose.

 > How do you keep them hot?
>

By constantly replacing the hot air. I would imagine that without doing
anything the hot air that comes out of the top of a smokestack of a coal
power plant reaches an altitude of several kilometers, if a long
lightweight sleeve was placed over the smokestacks so that the hot air
wouldn't mix with colder air it would go much higher, perhaps as high as 29
km. And if not there is always Helium.

  John K Clark
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