FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 4:42 pm Okay then. So you can describe how you can make it feasible without wishful thinking or batting aside questions with comments like "I've already thought about that".
It is feasible; I just said that. By feasible, I mean something like "probably possible" and that's all I really need. I'm a political philosopher. This myopic focus on the engineering is a pretty weird angle for a philosophy forum. I've given the matter some thought - but generally, most people are satisfied that there is a massive amount of energy down there, and that we can drill miles into the earth's crust. You're not wrong about me depending on others to fill in the technical details. I've given it some thought - but only enough thought to know that it's feasible.
"If wind and solar were adequate to address climate change, I wouldn't waste my time with magma energy."
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 4:42 pmThey're progressing rather nicely though, and can do so via incremental change. You need an as yet unknowable number of new technologies, fail in any one of them and your project goes nowhere.
I've explained why wind and solar cannot, EVER, meet our energy needs, several times. Sure, they're popping up everywhere - and producing some clean energy at commercial rates, but as energy policy they entrench a sub-optimal approach to sustainability that puts us forever behind the eight ball. We may be able to replace some fossil fuel energy generation with wind and solar, and so prevent some emissions, but we'll never have more energy. We'll never even meet our current needs from wind and solar. The UK alone would require something like 15,000 x £250m pound wind turbines - to be maintained, and replaced every 25 years. To say nothing of storing energy that's inconstant, or integrating that energy into existing grids. So, it follows that wind and solar - even pursued with extreme vigour, can only EVER take the leading edge off carbon emissions, and that's not enough.
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 4:42 pm But they both have the virtue of limitless energy from a pollution free source. The only thing your magma dream has that they don't is that you like one and you don't like the other. If you approached wind energy with the same pangalossian enthusiasm you reserve for this communist-volcano-irrigation tech of yours, you would say that is the cure for global warming.
Wind and solar are a limitless pollution free energy source, that's true, but your ability to capture them is not. I've talked about the scale of the infrastructure required above, so here I'll just point out that they are diffuse forms of energy, and so require a lot of infrastructure spread over a large area to gather; when the wind is blowing or sun shining - which isn't all the time. This irregularity of supply implies a storage requirement - which is more infrastructure, and storage of energy costs energy. These are harsh criticisms, but this a matter of existential necessity. I'm not going to soft peddle with the future of my species at stake. I'm trying to get you to see something - and your 'love of solar' based insistence that I'm wrong blinds you to it. Just ask yourself, what if we had limitless amounts of high grade, base load clean energy? It is feasible!
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Aug 02, 2021 4:42 pmThat's very dramatic, but we can end fossil fuel usage by developing a handful of technologies, and we have candidates for most them under development at competing institutions. If you are really into campaigning against carbon, I would suggest getting behind the carbon tax proposals which are less awe-inducing and sci-fi, but tangible, and would actually address the problem.
No-one need have a carbon footprint. I'll solve climate change for you - and you won't even notice! First, I'll develop magma energy, and use that to sequester carbon, desalinate, irrigate and recycle - not competing in the energy market, but building capacity while mitigating and adapting to the climate and ecological crisis. I don't presume to dictate terms but when this energy does hit the market, it might be wise to adopt a sectoral approach - like the cement industry, the steel industry, aluminium - big energy users first. Then you produce hydrogen fuel, and burn that instead of coal in the worst emitting power stations first, and proceed in that manner - from the supply side, functionally with regard the problem, such that cleaner fossil fuel infrastructure might remain for quite some time.
There's a lot of interesting ideas here that are not about what kind of one way valves will stand up to salt encrustation, or whatever, I thought perhaps might have formed the focus of a discussion on a philosophy forum. I don't need to provide blueprints for this to be an interesting idea worth talking about. The energy definitely is down there, and we need it just as certainly. Technologically, it seems feasible. I see no reason why it must be impossible. And there are not to my knowledge other technologies in development that could be applied as quickly, on a large enough scale to address climate change - less yet overcome it, transcend limits to growth and prosper into the long distant future. If magma energy has the potential I think it does, magma really could usher in a new phase of human existence - not unlike the energy revolutions that have accompanied every previous leap forward in our evolutionary history. In face of this existential threat, I think it is the right move to look beyond ourselves, and it's there - an endless amount of high grade, base load clean energy, and you ask me about the nuts and bolts? Why? That's not a rhetorical question. I'd like an answer. It's time for you to come clean about your motives. Why the constant attempt to side-track into a non productive and not particularly interesting area?