<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:Courier New, courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif;font-size:12pt"><div><span>Why not turn a bad effect into a positive benefit.</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Courier New, courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; background-color: transparent;"><span>We could use the extra water from the polar meltings, to create new rivers and lakes connected to the seas, in the desertic regions transforming them in agricultural areas and promoting millions of jobs as well as wealth. A well planned water distribution system can change our planet and turn the sahara desert into a new and habitable continent stopping desertification.</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Courier New, courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; background-color:
transparent;"><span> </span></div><div><br></div> <div style="font-family: Courier New, courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div style="font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div dir="ltr"> <font size="2" face="Arial"> <div style="margin: 5px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); height: 0px; line-height: 0; font-size: 0px;" class="hr" contentEditable="false" readonly="true"></div> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Da:</span></b> Keith Henson <hkeithhenson@gmail.com><br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">A:</span></b> ExI chat list <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org> <br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Inviato:</span></b> Mercoledì 26 Settembre 2012 10:44<br> <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Oggetto:</span></b> [ExI] Why not ask the Engineers?<br> </font> </div> <br>Not too many years ago, when people had problems like floods or things<br>they
wanted to do like going to the moon, they asked engineers how to<br>do it and how much it would cost. Then after some political debate,<br>they had big companies with thousands of engineers and related<br>technical workers do the job. The Transcontinental railroad, Panama<br>Canal, Hover Dam, Manhattan Project, Apollo, you get the drift.<br><br>However, in recent years, people have not been asking the engineers.<br>There has been a tendency to assume we already know how to fix the<br>problems. The solutions assumed are usually the "hair shirt" kind<br>with a religious flavor to them and lots of sacrifice—for other people<br>of course.<br><br>Just being an old engineer, I can't say how society could be induced<br>into asking engineers how to solve the problems again. However, on<br>the off chance that someone might ask, I have put some thinking into<br>the problems that show up in the daily news.<br><br>Take sea ice melting in
the Arctic.<br><br> One solution, which might work, is vast numbers of floating thermal<br>diodes. These are not new. They were developed for the Alaskan<br>pipeline as pipe supports where the pipe ran across areas of<br>permafrost. They are very simple, a pipe sealed on both ends with a<br>gallon or two of ammonia in it. When the air temperature is lower<br>than the permafrost, the ammonia boils at the bottom end, condenses at<br>the top end where it is exposed to very cold air. It then runs down<br>the pipe to boil again. When the air temperature is higher than the<br>permafrost, the ammonia stays in the bottom. I ran the analysis and<br>found that in a few years each pipe would become a 100-foot ball of<br>very hard ice, too cold to melt over the summer. It takes a lot of<br>them, millions, but they are dead simple and not very expensive.<br><br>The same thermal diodes could freeze glaciers to
bedrock. The<br>large-scale effect would be to raise the wintertime temperature in the<br>Polar Regions, which increases the radiation into space.<br><br>For low cost energy, I have been talking for a few years about<br>building lasers propulsion to lower the cost of hauling millions of<br>tons of power satellite parts into orbit. This has become a 26-page<br>document full of numbers.<br><br>However, we could do something else with a large transportation system<br>into space, sunshades that lower the brightness of the sun. Robert<br>Kennedy and his co-authors have produced a 25-page paper analyzing how<br>this would work and what it might cost.<br><br>An alternative is to overbuild the power satellites and put CO2 back<br>in the ground as synthetic wax.<br><br>Lots of answers, the problem is how to get people to ask.<br><br>Keith<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>extropy-chat mailing list<br><a
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