Gary Johnson is willing to admit that we have a climate change problem, but he thinks it is too expensive to do anything about it, so he wants to do nothing. Except for one thing: his solution is to emigrate.
Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson offered an outta this world solution on Sunday to the planet’s environmental crises.
We do have to inhabit other planets. The future of the human race is space exploration,Johnson said on ABC’s “This Week.”
This is what I regard as the thinking of locusts: burn through what you’ve got and just move on to fresh ground. Except there’s the little problem of the “what you’ve got” being the entirety of Planet Earth.
I do have some serious questions for Governor Johnson, however.
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Which planet do you think will be more habitable than Earth after Libertarian laissez faire policies get done with it, Venus or Mars?
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If neither of those two, which planet do you propose as the new homeworld for humanity?
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I assume that you acknowledge that some terraforming of this new home will be required. Since that would require the investment of a substantial portion of Earth’s resources to accomplish, over centuries to thousands of years, before we see any return on the investment, do you think the free market is capable of driving the greatest public works project in all of human history?
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Let us pretend you have a real habitable extraterrestrial planet in mind. How do we get there? By “we”, I mean the 7 billion people now on Earth. Or do you imagine this is more of an opportunity for the few incredibly rich people, while everyone else boils, fries, broils, or fricassees on Abandoned Earth?
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How do you reconcile the fact that you oppose closing coal plants because it would cost the economy too much, while proposing a solution that is immensely more expensive, currently impracticable, and requires allowing this lovely blue planet to choke on our waste? This does not sound at all cost effective.
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You seem to regard natural resources as fungible. Are you capable of empathizing with people who might love pieces of this Earth so much that they don’t see any possibility of substitutions? I don’t think we should surrender the Galapagos Islands, the Olympic Rain Forest, the Great Barrier Reef, or any of the millions of treasures we ought to be protecting. Do you also see your children as interchangeable, so you’d have no problem giving one up if we provided a replacement of equal or greater value?
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When do you leave?
The answer to every single one of those questions is the Standard Libertarian Response: “Fuck off, Jack! I got mine!”
He doesn’t care, he’ll be dead long before the worst of global warming strikes.
The link provided here does not relate what the hosts of “This Week” said in response to Johnson’s science fiction.
I can’t help but suspect it had something to do with either Clinton’s emails or the Kardashians.
“he thinks it is too expensive to do anything about it”
But I agree. Unfortunately it’s even more expensive not to do anything about it and that includes the option Johnson suggests.
Venus, obviously.
Its comfortably cool temperatures disprove the idea that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.
I think he already left.
Gary Johnson once saw a movie that had something called a “Genesis Device” in that could terraform an uninhabitable world into a habitable world in just a few hours. Since the profit margin on turning an uninhabitable world into a habitable world is so astoundingly high it is intuitively obvious that an unfettered free market will not only produce a ‘Genesis Device’, it will also turn that device into an iPhone app so that everyone can have their own habitable world – or even more than one! Such is the miracle of the Free Market! There are no limits to the unfettered imagination! (Or is that ‘unmoored imagination’? Gary Johnson has such trouble remembering which is which.)
[Anyone want to rhetorically bet on whether a careful interviewer could get Gary Johnson to give essentially that response?]
Look, Gary, just because you find having your head in Uranus comfortable…
As Neil DeGrasse Tyson has said, if we can make another planet more habitable for human life, we can do so with the Earth. Funny how GJ believes that the more drastic changes will be cheaper and more easily attainable than the less drastic changes.
The source of this batshittery is, not surprisingly, the climate denialist wattsupwiththat blog.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/19/terraforming-mars-may-be-less-expensive-than-climate-change-mitigation/
Which is all highly speculative since, a-no one has ever terraformed a planet before so any projected costs are better termed as “guesses”, b-the closest we’ve got is stuff like Biosphere 2 which demonstrated that a tiny mistake can fuck up the whole thing and no amount of money will turn back the clock and c-money spent mitigating climate change will be spent by lots of different entities private and public while terraforming mars would have to be done by a single agency doing a massive public works project with most of this planets GDP that most of the world’s countries would first have to trust with all that loot.
TLDR version, batshittery.
If there ever is a diaspora to the stars, I guess humanity could engage in a little long term experiment — by seeding worlds with groups of the most ardent adherents to a wide range of political philosophies and then leaving the to their own devices for, say, a couple of hundred years, before returning to see how things ended up.
Anyone think the libertarians would fare better than the liberals? Nah — me neither.
We could raise a few million dollars in a few hours if Gary Johnson promised to take the next rocket to Mars. Never mind that we don’t have any human rated Mars rockets.
When he runs out of food and air a few days into his journey, his magic will fix it. The Free Market always works, even in outer space.
Dealing with climate change is already costing us billions of dollars.
You have to deal with climate change!!! Whether you want to or not.
1. Right now we deal with what climate change does. Already there is flooding of low lying cities on the east and west coasts. The arctic coastline is washing away.
And the weather is becoming more extreme.
The drought in California made worse by climate change.
The Colorado river flow dropping along with Lake Mead.
The big flood in Louisiana.
And so on.
2. It’s estimated that the world will spend $15 trillion dealing with adapting to climate change in the 21st century. This number is very uncertain and likely an underestimate.
3. We really haven’t done much to deal with the cause of climate change, rising CO2 levels.
I can’t put a number on it because it may never really be dealt with.
One website says the world is spending $360 billion and that number isn’t going up.
Almost forgot to mention, the libertarian grand plan for terraforming mars would rely on massive government expenditure from multiple polities for what is essentially a public works project-so that only a small portion of said public would benefit. I wonder how Johnson, Watts et al propose this to their fellow Randroids with a straight face.
It’s beginning to look like we can’t deal with CO2, the cause of climate change in realityland.
1. We’ve known this was happening for decades. To date, not much has been done.
Every few years, there is a meeting, some agreement, and then everyone ignores it.
Given the residence time of CO2, if we had net CO2 increase at zero, the world will still warm up for centuries. That is already baked in.
2. It’s a world problem and requires a world solution. No one wants to burden their economy when everyone else doesn’t bother.
3. We now know our finance driven Hi Tech civilization is very fragile, thanks to the Bush Catastrophe.
It’s entirely possible that we can’t do much without pushing it over the edge.
Limiting CO2 emissions in the USA requires money. Lots of money. Money we don’t have laying around. The federal and state governments are all…broke.
(To be sure, the USA collectively does have the money. They don’t have the will to spend it this way though. It’s a zero sum game in the short term.)
I think he picked the wrong heroes from this movie: https://youtu.be/ZlawibQ_QKI?t=1m20s
I didn’t know they had one. I read a lot of fantasy but am more partial to graphic novels/short stories than Loonytarian fiction.
1. It wouldn’t take trillions of dollars. It would be way more. Quadrillions??? Who knows, probably no one.
And take centuries or millennia.
2. It’s worth doing. But it isn’t going to fix anything on earth.
We could use a new home and a backup.
This isn’t an economic decision. There are more important things than the bottom line. Like species survival. Or species dreams.
I think one of the more important questions that’s been overlooked here is this: how the fuck does a Libertarian expect to accomplish an endeavor of the scale involved in traveling to different planets and making them habitable for human life when they can’t even get their shit together to get a fucking boat built?
Galt’s Gulch Chile fell apart before it even got started.
IIRC, the promoters took off with the money.
The Loonytarian principle is “I’ve got mine, fuck you jack.” Oddly enough, they never think they will be …Jack.
Jake Harban @4 responds:
462 °C is “comfortably cool?” What are you, some kind of lava monster?
@ 19 some bastard on the internet
Fuckin’ sarcasm. How does it work?
Silentbob @20
Sorry, I haven’t been active here in a while, so I don’t remember all the ‘nyms. I may have confused Jake with some other “J” ‘nym that would’ve been serious with that statement.
If so, then I apologize to you, Jake.
I can’t believe he got to say all of that and was not grilled by the interviewer.
Reality is an option.
A really cheap method of reducing CO2 emissions is to exhale only on every second day.
He apparently finds the EPA somewhat tolerable (which I don’t believe as anything other than off-the-cuff stuff – he was basically a traditional Republican governor except on marijuana). Go figure.
As for his main point, it’s bad enough on the (thankfully) rare times that I hear it from Space Cadet type. We don’t have the resources or technological capability to move thousands of people to Mars (or wherever) except on a scale of decades or centuries or more, and during that time we’ll have to deal with climate change anyways. So even if you somehow believed that type of “back-up dump Earth” nonsense, you’d still need to support dealing with Earth’s environmental problems for that time period. And of course even then you still have to help the people who aren’t leaving, which will be the overwhelming majority of them.
Truth is, I think “space colonies” mostly disappeared as a thing once it became clear we could use robots much more cost-effectively than humans. The O’Neill Cylinder proposals in the 1970s had them providing comfortable homes to workers on orbital solar arrays, which now seems as unlikely as the original satellite proposals to have a space station with crews changing all the vacuum tubes in the 1950s. Only way that’s ever going to change is if the costs of getting and supporting humans in space go way down.
How did everyone fail to make a The Moon is a Harsh Mistress joke?
For shame!
As soon as the “B” ark is ready, obviously.
@Mike Smith #25, TANSTAAFL is a cute thing, when we’re talking about the survival of the species, well, things start to get quite real.
That said, I’ll happily give Gary Johnson half of my gross income to depart this earth and try to terraform Jupiter.
I have a free market lander quite ready for him. Freedom Ship MK II.
Constructed entirely out of a family heirloom, Reynolds Wrap.*
*Yeah, mom’s side of the family is from that Reynolds clan, alas, grandmom married “That Lutheran”, making her and us outcasts.
We never considered it a great loss.
Holy shit, that is one steaming pile of stupid.
What gets me, putting aside all the other bullshit, is that he doesn’t seem to appreciate the logical implication of this argument. If it cost about as much to mitigate carbon emissions here on Earth (which it sure as fuck won’t) as it did to terraform Mars, the only reasonable thing to do would be to spend the money on carbon mitigation. After all, what is terraforming if not a major transformation of a planet’s atmosphere? If it ever makes sense to spend money to terraform Mars, it makes way more sense to spend that amount keeping Earth habitable, seeing as we are, like, already living here. Ergo, if he thinks terraforming Mars is a neat idea, he should be even more in favor of not terraforming the Earth. Except he’s not, because he’s a stupid asshole.
For typical launch costs, see Capabilities & Services | SpaceX From SpaceX’s numbers, I calculate $2700/kg to launch into low Earth orbit, $7500/kg into geosynchronous transfer orbit, and $15,000/kg to Mars. So if you weigh 100 kg, you’d need $1.5 million to go to Mars, and that’s only your weight, and not a food supply or an air supply or the spacecraft structure.
Let’s see how many people we could send to Mars. In 2014, the Gross World Product was about $78 trillion. That gives 52 million people per year, counting only their weight. So one would need more than a century to send all of humanity’s present population to Mars.
And let me also add that if one thinks that terraforming Mars is possible… it’s because of greenhouse gasses. The whole idea is to warm up its atmosphere by injecting the very gasses that we’re busy injecting into the Earth’s atmosphere in an uncontrolled fashion. But isn’t this the very thing that Watts and his army of idiots are constantly arguing isn’t happening? Yeah, yeah, I know.
“Optimistic” may be better than “typical” about launch costs in my previous post.
I’ll now consider buying solar panels instead. From shopping.google.com, some retail panels cost about $0.9/watt. I also estimate about 70 grams/watt. That translates into about $500/watt to launch into low Earth orbit, so it’ll be much cheaper to deploy solar panels here on the Earth’s surface.
Humanity’s total energy consumption rate was about 12.3 terawatts in 2013. To get all that with solar panels at peak efficiency requires about $14 trillion. Adding in inefficiency factors like daytime (0.5), orientation (0.5), and cloudiness (rough estimate: 0.5), I find an efficiency of 0.128, giving a total cost of $110 trillion. That’s enough to send 73 million people to Mars if this cost covers only sending their weight. But it is easily affordable over two or three decades. Over 30 years, it’s about $3.6 trillion/year, about 5% of the Gross World Product.
And… this helps underscore just how trivial carbon mitigation really is likely to be. Anthony Watts is trying to compare an estimated $3 trillion cost of carbon mitigation vs. presumably the same cost of terraforming Mars (nuts, of course). So we’re talking about maybe 5% of one year’s GWP spread out over several decades. It’s peanuts. May as well do it just for fun, even if we didn’t have all of that science and shit telling us we really needed to do it.
raven, @16: I think your timescale estimate is probably off, and by several orders of magnitude. It took a couple of billion years to terraform the Earth just to the point where there was free oxygen in the atmosphere, and another couple of billion to get it to anything like the state we see now. Even if you imagine that we can speed the process up a great deal, planets are big things, and completely changing their atmospheric composition and surface geomorphology is a huge project that is inevitably going to take a very long time. You can’t just add air and water and move in – for example, building soil requires a combination of various forms of erosion and many different cycles of biological activity.
I’d say that anything less than billion years is a pretty optimistic estimate, and would require us to invent entirely new suites of technology that we can’t even imagine right now, able to simulate natural processes at vastly accelerated rates.
Dunc,
Alas, there’s a big difference between natural and directed (artificial) processes.
(Also, perhaps consider how long it has taken for anthropogenic activity to affect Earth’s climate — and that unintentionally)
Charles Stross did an essay on why he thinks libertarianism and space colonies are untenable. TLDR, space vessels, much less colonies are going to be tiny fragile things with tiny fragile biospheres that won’t tolerate laissez faire ‘I’ll do what ever I want, even if it does fuck up my neighbours.’
One of the things that bugged me about the Expanse TV series was where the shady businessman pays off the cops so he doesn’t have to clean the air filters. Realistically, there would have been an old belter custom about people who fuck up their life support jobs wind up sleeping in the void.
gijoel, yeah, and years before that, his opus: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high-frontier-redux.html
I explicitly mentioned that difference, in the text that you quote.
Just looking at climate, yes, we’ve started changing the surface temperature in the space of a couple of hundred years, but the process is nowhere near complete – “complete”, in this case, being the point at which the climate reaches a new equilibrium, which is going to take at least several hundred years. Bear in mind that that’s for a relatively small change of just a few degrees C – making Mars or Venus habitable requires changes a couple of orders of magnitude larger than that.
Also bear in mind that the surface temperature is about the easiest and quickest thing to change. Yes, we’ve shifted the concentration of a critical trace gas by a couple of hundred parts per million, but that’s a very long way from getting 20% free atmospheric oxygen or building productive soils, and no amount of mere hand-waving is going to convince me that you can do that on a timescale measured in a few hundreds (or even thousands) of years.
Is it a good idea to imitate the evil aliens in “Independence Day”?
BTW in C. S Lewis (sadly unreadable, hyper-religious) “Out Of the Silent Planet, the evil human astronauts appear to be Gary Johnson clones.
Going off on a tangent. This is what long-term (undirected) terraforming looks like. Shoggots???
“Shape-shifter” eukaryotes found in the “belt supergroup” (geology feature in Montana) —revelations about tappania plana http://phys.org/news/2016-09-shape-shifters-belt-supergrouprevelations-tappania-plana.html These sediments were laid down on a supercontinent that existed 2.1-1.3 billion years ago.
1. Even if terraforming Mars and repairing planet earth were in the same ballpark, which complete idiot would think that abandoning earth to start all over on Mars was a fucking reasonable idea. That’s like cancelling your rent contract without need without knowing if there is even a hotel room available. You fix earth and then you have all the time in the world and much better resources to make a second home.
2. If you think you know how much it would cost to terraform Mars, you’re an idiot and nobody should have a sensible discussion with you. You’Re excluded from polite society. Because holy fucking shit no human has ever been there and we only know very little about that place.
I recently bought a house. I visited that house several times before buying. I visited that house with an architect. I saw the building plans. Turns out there’s still a lot we didn’t know and that is different from what we planned (and more expensive. It’S always more expensive. There are never “oh, I thought we’d have to renew this but it’s still alright” surprises). If you think you can make estimates on a planet you’ve never seen you cannot sit at the adult table.
Why bother terraforming another planet? Johnson and the likes are going to screw it like they screwed earth anyway.
If my memory is correct, Mars’s gravitational pull is too weak to hold onto a Earth-style atmosphere with a pressure of c.1atm at the mean surface level. Assuming humans on the terraformed Mars are not expected to walk around on that surface wearing protective suits or breathing apparatus, then how is Mars going to hold onto the terraformed atmosphere? The mildly deranged penguin suggests, using the eejit’s same airy faerie handwaving, replacing the centre of Mars with a suitably sized black hole, or perhaps a neutron star. The replacement centre will presumably, eventually, consume the planet, but that before that happens, using the eejit’s same airy faerie handwaving, there will be a new, possibly terraformed, planet available. Ideally not in the solar system, since Sol will eventually expire.
How he plans to survive the heat death of the Universe is unclear. Probably involves cloning faeries.
A card-carrying Libertarian is a Space Cadet. Color me unsurprised.
Anyone who thinks the notion of “terraforming” is Solid Science(TM) and a Viable Solution(C) to the world’s ills must also think finding the philosopher’s stone is the answer to north-south divide.
Johnson’s ravings are essentially straight out of Robert Heinlein’s later books. Immortal supermen move out to the frontier, leaving everybody else to solve the real problems.
The bigger problem is the lack of a magnetic field, which allows the solar wind to strip the atmosphere and leaves you exposed to all sorts of exciting solar and cosmic radiation.
As an example of the sort of mentality of the people who advocate terraforming Mars, it’s been argued that it’s “feasible” to solve this problem by building “a series of planet-encircling superconducting rings”…
Libertarians are the best evidence for my hypothesis that economics is the religion of our times. Like the date cult in ancient Rome, everyone is required to participate in its public ceremonies and everyone sacrifices at its altar. We even have augurs casting the bones reading the liver to see what the great hand of the market will do. “Oh all ye wretches! Bow befor your one true god, worship and bask in its glory! Oh all mighty hand be that if we please you with low taxes and weak government, may it be that you will sower us with prosperity. May it be through you beneficent light that the poor and needy will get that which they need and the great and wealthy will get what they want
Let us pray brothers and sisters!”
State, not date. Though a date cult might be tasty.
no one has ever terraformed a planet
We have! We’re just terraforming it for tardigrades.
At least for the High Datetess, albeit after awhile she craves a pizza.
And he is the consensus choice of the Libertarian party. Worthless parasites, the lot of them.
Blf @ 42 & Dunc @ 45
A lot depends on timescale. Having an atmosphere that lasted well enough for human timescales is far more doable* than one that has to last for a large fraction of the lifetime of the solar system. I’d more worry that Mars’s gravity and lack of a magnetic field means that the gases we need aren’t frozen or trapped in rocks, but were lost: meaning you have to ship them in from elsewhere.
Cleaning up Earth is far less sexy than terraforming Mars, especially if we knock out bio-engineering and just keep it to ‘burn less carbon and prepare for climate change from the existing greenhouse’. But given that we have all our infrastructure and population on Earth, it probably will give more bang for the buck.
* Not easy or cheap. Again, the sort of infrastructure that would make even living on Mars possible, let alone terraforming it, would go a lot farther on Earth.
** Which wasn’t terraformed, IIRC.
Nah, nah, nah, all these so-called “technical” problems with terraforming Mars are easily solved once the small black hole is operating as the replacement centre.
Need a magnetic field? Probably got a helluva one. If not, glue some magnets onto the rotating black hole…
Need some gases for the atmosphere? Chuck a few rocks at the black hole and let all those nucluar thingerys make some. And cook the popcorn.
It’s easy! With added faeries!! And, of course, faerie dust!!!
Now dealing with AGW? Oooooh, that‘s complicated. And oh-so-obviously moar expensive with none of those groovy rotating black holes. Or faeries.
Even if terraforming Mars were possible, I don’t think we should.
The question of whether or not there is life on Mars is still open. Humanity has a pretty bad track record in terms of extinctions on this planet; I don’t think we could justify the potential extinction of a possible entirely distinct form of life just because we can’t keep our own house in order. It’s vandalism on a planetary scale.
GiJoel@36: One of the things that bugged me about the Expanse TV series was where the shady businessman pays off the cops so he doesn’t have to clean the air filters. Realistically, there would have been an old belter custom about people who fuck up their life support jobs wind up sleeping in the void.
Funnily enough, in the book, exactly that happens:
Leviathan Wakes, chapter 6:
“When I was homicide,” Miller said, “there was this guy. Property management specialist working a contract out of Luna. Someone burned half his skin off and dropped him out an airlock. Turned out he was responsible for maintenance on sixty holes up on level thirty. Lousy neighborhood. He’d been cutting corners. Hadn’t replaced the air filters in three months. There was mold growing in three of the units. And you know what we found after that?”
“What?” Havelock asked.
“Not a goddamn thing, because we stopped looking. Some people need to die, and he was one. And the next guy that took the job cleaned the ducting and swapped the filters on schedule. That’s what it’s like in the Belt.”
@10
the libertarians would end up with a hereditary feudal society with fighting between the powers for dominance
the liberals would end up with squabbling between political parties in parliaments
over taxes and spending.
uncle frogy
@mickll #13:
Via their usual mixture of cognitive dissociation and sociopathy, I expect.
So Johnson thinks we are the aliens from Independence Day?
Seems legit.
@53 Call Me Mark
Agreed on that one. Terraforming should be off the table until we’ve done an exhaustive search for existing life on Mars. That means multiple drilling sites worldwide in diverse environments that have gone down kilometers into the planet, to where it’s still warm enough for water to be liquid (2-3 kilometers IIRC, although it depends on where you are on Mars). And if we find extant life on Mars, no terraforming period.
If we don’t find any existing life after that, then we could go forward with terraforming attempts. It would take a long time to get Mars to a condition where we could breath outside unassisted, but that’s okay – just getting a terraformed Mars to the point where you could walk outside with nothing but a mask and filter would be a huge boon to people living there. You could even keep your habitats at the same air pressure as the outside air, which would mean they could be built much less sturdy without it being life-threatening. It’d be like if you were foolhardy enough to try and put a floating habitat in Venus’ “temperate” altitude.
@35 gijoel
You’d have some strong requirements on maintenance and recycling, but they’re not that frail. Unless you’re setting off a bloody nuclear weapon in one of them, a small hull breach isn’t a mega-disaster – you have plenty of time to find it and fix it, and any habitat realistically designed is going to be covered in sensors to detect any breaches or anomalies.
There are thousands of planets, each inhabited by a different Mormon man and his family. Surely they have room for some refugees.
Most of the time planetary habitability is discussed in terms of the silicate-carbonate cycle maintaining conditions for liquid water to exist. Mars is likely within the range of distances from the Sun where this is possible, but is too small and thus habitable conditions collapsed relatively early on. Thing is, in order to maintain habitable conditions that far from the Sun, you need more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Simulations tend to predict that Earth is quite close to the inner edge of the habitable zone, so relative to the typical silicate-carbonate-mediated habitable planet, we likely have unusually low concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. The levels of carbon dioxide needed to ensure liquid water on Mars would likely be lethal for humans, so even if you terraform it, the place would not be habitable. Great investment there.
@A momentary lapse, I dunno. If one increased the mass of Mars to equal Earth, that might be enough to remelt the core and permit a magnetic field.
Alas, I’m fresh out of Theia’s, anyone have on hanging around in their back pocket? ;)
wzrd1:
Not me, to my knowledge.
(In passing, what or who is Theia, and what is it of theirs which you imagine might be hanging around in their back pocket?)
@ 62 John Morales
I can’t believe you don’t know how to use Google, so have to conclude you are feigning ignorance.
AFAICT, probably not. It just requires changing some regulations to be reasonable and accommodating to a particular suite of technologies. Maybe shifting some public funds from oil companies to help out these fledging alternative companies. I’m talking about nuclear fission, and especially the next gen reactors ThorCon and other MSRs, and IFR.
That’s not completely set in stone. With enough cheap clean energy, we can probably pull CO2 directly out of the air and permanently sequester it in basalt deposits. It will not be cheap to do so, but it’s not impossible.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/4/7/1290380/-Navy-lab-makes-gasoline-from-seawater-as-low-as-3-per-gallon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-diesel
And other technologies like that might be able to pull CO2 out of the air at a plausible cost. Then, we just pump it into basalt.
http://www.nature.com/news/pilot-projects-bury-carbon-dioxide-in-basalt-1.13459
It may be cheaper still to simply dig up limestone, heat it to release CO2 and create quicklime, and capture that concentrated CO2 and pump it into basalt, and take the quicklime, grind it up, and dump it in the oceans, where it captures CO2 and forms limestone.
[meta]
Silentbob:
Well, I could have made assumptions/interpretations based on context — your very citation also links to a disambiguation page — but I acknowledge that your disbelief is well-founded (and, as it happens, true).
None of which negates my question to wzrd1.
So: wzrd1 claims to lack something from a hypothesised planetary-mass object that is not Earth, and wonders whether it’s in someone’s back pocket.
Care to tell me what it is of Theia’s which might have been (but is not) within my back pocket?
—
PS You do know this is supposedly a topical thread, not an open thread, right?
Well, the notion of having a small planet inside of one’s back pocket is rather humorous. ;)
But, adding that additional mass might be useful to a Mars mass planet, both for core re-melting/reinitializing the planetary magnetic field and initiating terraforming.
Downsides, moving a flipping planet around and waiting millions of years for the resulting molten mass to cool enough to even get close to.
It’s not actually that much more unrealistic than the typical terraforming scheme…
Which is not much more realistic than terraforming Mars. No-one knows, or can know, how an electricity-generating system heavily dependent on these reactors would perform, because there are precisely 0 MSRs (Molten Salt Reactors) in operation, and exactly 1 IFR (arguably) – the BN-800, in Russia*, which started to generate useful amounts of power in August this year. Nor can anyone know how long it would take to construct a fleet of such reactors that could operate with reasonable safety and make a useful contribution – although we can be pretty certain it would be too long to prevent catastrophic climate change, particularly as electricity generation produces only around 1/3 of the carbon dioxide emissions due to human activities (and of course methane, nitrous oxide and other gases also contribute to anthropogenic global warming, although much less). Electricity generated by low-carbon methods could contribute to reducing the use of fossil fuels for heating and industry – but only with either extensive equipment and infrastructure replacement, or the use of electricity to produce fuels – and only with the latter could it reduce the use of fossil fuels in transport. And of course there are the problems of proliferation, accidents, and terrorism. Claims are made that 4th generation reactors could not be used to produce bomb-grade material – if you believe that, you’ll believe anything, human ingenuity in producing weapons being what it is; and that they are inherently safe, i.e. failure of the cooling system would not cause a meltdown. The latter may well be true, but the more highly radioactive material you have around, the more likely some of it is going to be used to make “dirty bombs” – which, it is true, would not kill a lot of people, but would cost vast amounts to clean up after.
*And we all know what a stellar safety record the Russian nuclear industry has!
One. I am not advocating putting all of our eggs into a single basket. I endorse a “research all of the above” solution. However, certain so-called environmentalists are advocating a particular research program that excludes what is the most promising set of solutions to our problem, namely conventional and next-gen nuclear fission reactors. I have a problem with that.
Further, there is this notion that all things nuclear must take a very long time to build. This is in part because of the wrong technologies that we are using, and in part because of the ridiculous regulatory scheme that is in place. If you look at the historical record, they were prototyping and building full-scale reactors in timescales of 2 years. It was done before, and it can be done again. For further reading, I strongly suggest:
http://thorconpower.com/docs/exec_summary2.pdf … section “1.5 Three Examples”
Further, I must emphasize that ThorCon and IFR are not some unproven blackboard technology. ThorCon relies on well demonstrated technology, including the many years of experiments at Oak Ridge National Labs. ThorCon’s motto is “no new technology”, and there’s every reason to believe that their timescale of 4 years is quite doable, assuming the funding problem and regulatory problems can be fixed. Most of the IFR was also heavily demonstrated at Argonne National Labs. All the scientists said that it was working, and they were close to done, but the Clinton administration killed because of pandering to the so-called environmentalists. GE is prepared to build several of these under the name S-PRISM reactor, and Britain is looking at htem as a way of disposing their weapons plutonium, but they will also generate power. These are things that are ready for full scale prototyping right now, unlike solar and wind where “further unspecified development and improvement is needed”.
France went from IIRX approx 15% nuclear to 80% nuclear electricity in IIRC 20 years. And they were not in any particular hurry to do so. Based on this brute fact, 30 years to completely replace fossil fuel usagefor electricity production, worldwide, is a reasonable estimate of what is doable, especially if we manage to get some sort of simple worldwide CO2 emission tax. (Fuck cap-and-trade. It’s a scam to give money to bankers and traders.)
So, according to this random unvetted website:
http://whatsyourimpact.org/greenhouse-gases/carbon-dioxide-emissions
The breakdown is:
Human CO2 production:
** 4% industrial processes (other). This does not include CO2 directly emitted from fossil fuels. A large portion of this is cement manufacture which releases CO2 as part of the chemical process not relating to fossil fuel use. Other big sources in this category include steel, ammonia, and petrochemical products.
** 9% land use changes
** 87% fossil fuel use
**** 41% (of fossil fuel use:) is electricity and heat generation
**** 20% (of fossil fuel use:) industrial (other), this fossil fuel usage can be attributed almost entirely to manufacture of: paper, food, petroleum refineries, chemicals, metal-mineral products
**** 22% (of fossil fuel use:) transport fuels
****** 72% (of transport fuel use:) road transport
****** 14% (of transport fuel use:) marine shipping
****** 11% (of transport fuel use:) aviation
With nuclear electricity and heat, and something to solve the transport fuel problem such as synthetic gasoline ala e-diesel or the US Navy research (cited above), I believe that covers “electricity and heat generation”, “industrial use other, fossil fuel use”, and “transport fuels”. Together, that is all of human fossil fuel use. It’s not merely “1/3” of human CO2 emissions. It’s actually about 87% of human CO2 emissions. Because it does involve a large amount of cement and steel construction, say it’s only 86% if you want.
I admit that the production of synthetic gasoline from atmospheric or ocean CO2 is speculative. However, this problem of fossil fuel usage is true for every approach, and the solution(s) we take here are orthogonal to the electricity problem. This is why I’m merely advocating that we spend some real research money into this, as opposed to the current time where it’s getting little to no attention.
Again, IIRC the US has spent something like 25 billion on solar and wind subsidies. I just want 1 billion of that for a MSR like ThorCon, and IFR, and research on pulling CO2 out of the air or water to produce gasoline, kerosine, et al, at scales to replace current fossil fuel extraction. This is not too much to ask. We should be doing this yesterday, no – we should have been doing this 40 years ago.
Some people have wrongly claimed “impossible to make a bomb”. With a neutron source, you can make bomb material. However, it becomes a question of cost and difficulty. IIRC, every single nuclear weapon ever made was made with nuclear material that was made at a special-purpose reactor. IIRC, no one yet has used a civilian nuclear power reactor to make bomb material. Every time they have used a custom purpose-built reactor, and that is because it is cheaper to do it that way. I have been told by many sources that it’s simply cheaper and easier to build a whole new custom reactor or a lot of centrifuges than try to repurpose a civilian power reactor.
With proper IAEA oversight, I think we can be very safe here. Further, with the ThorCon design in particular, it’s extremely difficult to repurpose it to bomb making in a way that can elude even the simplest of oversight.
Accidents at nuclear reactors are a known problem, with known risks, and next-gen reactors will be even vastly, vastly better. I would take current-gen reactors. Their safety record in the west has been near immaculate. It is not an exaggeration to say that more people have died choking on sliced bread than have died from radiation poisoning from civilian nuclear power, including the waste, in the west.
I would be totally satisfied with current gen reactors like the AP-1000, but for one or two problems:
1: Cost. ThorCon and IFR has the real potential to be much cheaper than a pressurized light water reactor like the AP-1000, in part because of the lack of high pressure reducing necessary building materials, and in part because of the physical differences which lead to increased inherent safety which lead to decreased costly redundant safety mechanisms.
2: Abundance of fuel. Without a working breeder, our nuclear fuel supplies are as limited as fossil fuels – they will run out, within perhaps hundreds of years or less. With a working breeder, we can literally mine literal everyday rock, granite rock, as nuclear fuel. We’ll never run out of rock, and so we’ll never run out of fuel. We will run out of sun before we run out of rock. Thus nuclear power is sustainable and renewable under any reasonable definition.