[Ian Miller]

I am not replying to Kevin’s posts directly, but regarding CO2, there is plenty in the air, but mechanically extracting it is energy consumptive. Plants, however, do this nicely. Part of the reason I am advocating ocean harvesting is that much of the mechanical energy can be obtained from waves, and removal of CO2 from the oceans helps with local ocean acidification as well.

Water is a problem for liquid fuels because sit is the only source of hydrogen, and all chemical processing is somewhat water consumptive, irrespective of what anyone tells you. That is another advantage of ocean cultivation – no shortage of water.

[Ian Miller]

In my ebook, “Biofuels. An Overview” I calculated that to roughly replace oil with biofuels using technology not yet available, the land requirements would be such that there would be too much loss of environment, although the exercise would be possible if we used the oceans. Now, admittedly, I have spent much of my career on biofuel research, and on research into algae, so I may be biased, but it seems to me that only the oceans can provide enough area an productivity. However, there is another problem, and that is the rate of glacial melting. If we want to keep our current coastline, I think some start should be made towards geoengineering. Present-day levels of CO2 still lead to net warming, currently in the oceans of about 0.64 W/m^2, so just holding these levels is inadequate.

[Ian Miller]

In my “First Contact” trilogy, I had one character involved with the starting of building one of the space stations as conceived by Gerard O’Neil, which is like the hollowed asteroid, except that the rocks in this case came from the moon, and were cemented together. The problems with such an entity would be very similar to the problems for a hollowed asteroid, except that I think the hollowed asteroid could be in some ways more tricky.

Each has a problem with volatiles. Where do you get them from? Each has a problem with potential impacts. I considered these to have the same solution in the form of a “catcher” – a device that acted as an inverse mass driver. The water presumably has to come from “cometary bodies”, but from where? In my theory of planetary formation, the further out the body comes from, the greater the range of volatiles, simply because the volatiles sublime off once they reach a certain temperature. The Jovian system would have only water ice; if we go out to Neptune or the Kuiper belt, you have nitrogen, and carbon monoxide in addition to water, methanol, ammonia, methane, argon, etc. So you have to choose what you want, and deal with what you do not want.

The problem with air includes where the nitrogen comes from, although I suppose having some argon is not a disaster, and how to keep it in. The interior of a hollowed asteroid has to be completely sealed, and while you are excavating, strain will be stored in the rock. This is part of the reason why I suspect it would be easier to construct an outer shell and live in between, although you now have an engineering problem involving how to stop the two bodies crashing into each other. From the SF point of view, it may be easier to simply say, “the problems are solved”, but that is harder to actually do.

Finally, the concept of building an asteroid living space of the size often envisaged and using that as a colonising vehicle requires an enormous amount of momentum to be generated and ejected and that momentum will presumably involve the rock that has been hollowed out. Unless you can throw it out at very near light speed, you will probably consume most of your asteroid just getting up to speed. Lots of problems here!

As an aside, in my trilogy, the nominal reason for building the space station was not to use that as a potential space vehicle, but rather to gain the expertise so that if it were necessary for future interstellar explorers to build one (because an unrecognised problem arose) they would know what to do. Yes, that might make little sense and indeed the real reason was political – the point of the story.

[Ian Miller]

Energy is a problem, but transport fuels are a bigger one. So far there is no acceptable means of replacing oil in our transport systems by electricity because there is no acceptable storage system, acceptable being giving a good range, a long life and a  reasonable price. I have written two futuristic novels of what might happen of we don’t start doing something about this starting now. In one, petrol is $1,000 per fill, and hydrogen leads to serious disastrous explosions. In the other there is hardly any transport system. I have also written a more scientific overview of biofuels (I have worked in this area on and off – off when funding runs out – since the mid 1970s) and my conclusion is we can produce biofuels in a reasonable fraction of our current oil usage, but only if we use the oceans. You can make a useful contribution from other sources, including municipal refuse and sewage, but oil usage is huge. There is another problem. Unlike most other engineering, chemical engineering involves differential equations you cannot solve, so a certain amount of “trial and learn” is required, and a new process takes at least a decade to build a reliable demonstration plant, except possibly in Nazi Germany. It would take decades to install adequate fuel replacement.

[Ian Miller]

At the risk of self-promotion, I have written some futuristic Sci Fi that is based on what happens as resources run down. Of course, the whole point of fiction is to set up a system and then show what is wrong with it, but I have come to the conclusion that whatever is wrong is usually caused by greedy people in the wrong place. One conclusion I proposed was that you cannot separate economics from political governance, and one of the systems I proposed was for a Federation of countries in which the top level acted more as referees than law makers, although they required uniformity of opportunity and imposed a certain level of requirements that countries had to meet. To avoid competition for resources, resources were rationed between a limited number of major corporations, which were in effect dispersed economic countries, an extrapolation of one of J K Galbraith’s propositions. Countries maintained their own currencies, but international transactions, inter corporate transactions, and resource purchases had to be done in Federation Currency Units, which stopped  countries meddling with their currencies for their benefit. There was a bit more to it, but that covers the major concept.

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