Such interplanetary geoengineering is not a good idea. Please leave mother nature alone in terms of the amount of carbon we can get our hands on. The real long term danger to humankind is the next ice age. JoJo is right, if we use all our CO2 reserves now, we will not be able to stop the new onslaught of the next ice age. There are chlorinated fluorocarbons that can do the job instead of CO2 to manage global warming but IMHO, the best way to manage the climate is through the carbon cycle.
The disagreement in this tread is at its heart, how to best manage the climate, and with the dawn of the LENR age such grand things are possible. Pick an optimum parts per million CO2 level:(350? ….The way climate is now) and keep it there). LENR can enable this sort of climate management. What mars needs is more water, it has enough carbon in its atmosphere in the form of CO2. It also needs a protective magnetic field, and LENR can help power this high energy particle radiation deflection system. We need to direct water bearing asteroids to Mars to provide this water. And LENR can help in doing this job too. Cheers: Axil On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 4:38 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > I wrote: > > >> There might be market for carbon or carbon compounds on the Moon or Mars >> for all we know. We might send millions of tons a day up by space elevator >> and dispatch it around the solar system. I doubt that will happen, but you >> never know. >> > > This may sound utterly impractical. You might think the gigantic mass of > material involved makes it out of the question. Think again. We know the > approximate mass of material, and it is not so gigantic. We have already > moved that mass of carbon compounds. We just have to move it again. The > mass of carbon or carbon compounds that we would ship to Mars (or whoever > wants to buy it) would be roughly equal to the mass of coal and oil that > has been mined and shipped around the earth since 1800. That is a lot, but > not an unthinkable amount. I think it takes ~50 supertanker deliveries per > day to move oil around the world. A space elevator terminal dispatching 50 > supertanker-sized loads of carbon compounds or wood to other planets would > be expensive and large, but not much bigger than than a major port such > as Savannah, Georgia. It would be operated entirely by robots. > > If you were to extract carbon from the atmosphere, and then keep > dispatching carbon compounds on something like this scale for 200 to 400 > years, you would reverse the effects of the combustion from the beginning > of the industrial revolution. You would do it at a profit. I hope 200 to > 400 years would be fast enough. > > It might be more profitable to simply export the remaining coal from the > earth, or to extract carbon from other sources in the solar system. > However, the purpose of would be to reverse global warming while at the > same time producing something useful. > > I suppose we would use a combination of techniques. Selling some carbon, > burying some, using some to build wooden houses. > > I predict that people will want to live in wooden houses far into the > future, with wooden furniture, even after other synthetic materials become > available. Wood looks nicer. People like traditional materials. Japanese > people will want tatami made from natural rice straw and rush far into the > future. Why wouldn't they? It smells nice. New tatami is a pleasure to sit > on. As they say, to live a pleasant life you should get new tatami and a > new wife, often. > > - Jed > >
