I'm not entirely sure how your points are supposed to relate to each other there. Any unbiased observe would just note that you are weighing known and quatifiable challenges for technologies in the real world against unknown and unquantified challenges for a fantasy project.Vitruvius wrote: ↑Sun Aug 01, 2021 10:45 amVitruvius wrote: ↑Sun Aug 01, 2021 12:20 am it looks possible to me to tap into what must necessarily be billions of cubic meters of rock heated to very temperatures by proximity to magma - and that would provide energy on the scale needed to adequately address climate change. Massive, constant, base load clean energy. It's there if we can get at it - why do you say it's impossible?There is more solar, wind and wave power than we could use - in theory, but you have to consider the infrastructure necessary to harness it. You could build a huge solar array in the middle of the Sahara, but how do you get the energy to where it's needed?FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sun Aug 01, 2021 1:21 amIt's harldy the only optionthat offers more energy than we can conceivably use though is it? There is more than we can use by far from each of wind, wave, solar, nuclear and probably others. So you are offering a false dichotomy there from the off.
To transmit electrical energy along a cable you need to step up the voltage, and this costs energy, to push it along the cable, at a further cost of around 10% per 1000 km. Similarly there's plenty of wind and wave power, but you need a lot of infrastructure to gather it from a large area, and lots more infrastructure to translate it into a useful form, and get it to where it's needed.
Magma is more akin to nuclear - in that it's base load energy at source, so now we've just got to figure out whether it's more cost effective to drill a hole through hot rock, or build a giant toxic teakettle inside a steel and concrete bunker! It's not a false dichotomy if you look closer. Magma energy has definite advantages - assuming suddenly, that it is possible.
You can easily search for power loss per 1000 km of high voltage direct current by the way, it's listed at 3.5%, and AC at 6.5. I don't raise this to accuse you of fiddling the figures so much as to show what I mean by quantifiable. Maybe materials science will step in with an accessible superconductor one day, but until that day, 3.5% per 1000 km seems like a surmountable problem anyway.
If you don't want to play that game then what is everyone else supposed to do? Are we required to just humour and indulge you?Vitruvius wrote: ↑Sun Aug 01, 2021 10:45 amI have given some thought to the subject, but don't want to play this game. I don't have the relevant experience to speak authoritatively about drilling or geophysics, and you and I wailing on each other with a series of hastily googled half comprehended facts, doesn't appeal. I have said several times previously that the idea would be to contain the evaporate within pipes - not just pour water into a hole in the ground. I've also previously described two design ideas - for descriptive purposes, labelled 'plug in' and 'drill through.'FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sun Aug 01, 2021 1:21 am You have no idea how to dig the hole you are sort of describing, to a depth you only sort of indicate, with a width of.... some wideness I guess ... You have little idea of what engineering challenges await, and you only want to be told about the ones that seem a bit easy. You obviously have no design. It seems as if you think you really just need a couple of very deep tubes with one to pour water down and one to bring steam up, and if there's any problem with that you're sure it's a simple thing to fix if you can just talk someone smart enough into fixing it for you.
The 'plug-in' design is one hole drilled directly into the rock, and a probe inserted, trailing pipes carrying cool water in and hot steam out.
The 'drill-through' design is a bore hole struck through a mountain - pump water in one end, harness the jet of superheated steam coming out the other.
We see people with impractical projects to change the world all the time. Age is convinced he speaks on behalf of some ultimate reality and brings the wisdom that will save the Earth. Someone perfectly sane told me here that space mining for platinum would safeguard humanity's future against some catastrophe, I forget which. We had a dude who tried to launch his own special political party to utilise the power of corruption and multi level marketing to fix .... just all of the problems.
I've already been told I am not "open and curious enough" to understand more mad-bastard schemes than you can shake a stick at. They always want cheerleaders instead of critics, but the scheme usually needs to be a bit less mad before that's on the cards.
If you want to approach this as philosophy, you can make a thought experiment out of your magma energy thing no problem. We're quite used to impractical thought experiments where dumb things happen. In a famous one astronauts go to a new planet and find it's exactly the same as Earth except that they have no words for mind or any mind contents. In another you get told all about the planet you are about to be born in before you go there. The second most pointless one has some girl brought up in a black and white room reading about colours for the first half of her life, somebody would intervene on ethical grounds of you tried that irl, but hopefully the sanme is true of the worst one, where a psychopath ties people to tram rails and makes an idiot choose who dies.Vitruvius wrote: ↑Sun Aug 01, 2021 10:45 am I've given it this much thought to assess whether it is technologically feasible - and I think it is; in relation to questions of political philosophy - which is where I entered into this. I have given the engineering side of the proposal about as much scrutiny as can be expected of a political philosopher; in support of the assertion that limits to growth is factually incorrect, and a wrongful assumption on which to base approaches to sustainability.
For such excercises we never worry if they are realistic and achievable because they are never designed to be, and that is never the point.