The article talks about mass producing the enzymes themselves, not the life forms that produce the enzymes. It’s a key distinction.
Plus these organisms already live on this earth. They can’t outcompete other life on the surface, in less harsh conditions.
It sounds like you have no idea the magnitudes involved, or the timelines. You’re talking about something that took place over a period of 400 million years and whose effects (the presence of oxygen in our atmosphere and our oceans) remain. There’s no chance that geoengineering would change the oxygen levels to anything we can’t handle, and if it starts to head down that direction we can easily handle it (just stop the processes that would sequester carbon).
It’s like being worried that your air conditioning is going to freeze your pipes in the house, in the middle of summer.
If we can get atmospheric CO2 back down to where it was 100 years ago that would be an amazing problem to have.
Read the article. They’re hoping to mass manufacture the enzymes involved, which have the following advantages over carbon capture through plant life:
The trouble with cow farts is the methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas that eventually turns back into CO2 in the atmosphere anyway. Concentrated methane sources tend to either be captured for use as fuel, or flared with a burning flame to reduce the greenhouse effect (at which point carbon sequestering might work). Less concentrated sources, like livestock farts, can’t really be dealr with in the same way.
That…sounds like they’re not actually sleeping those hours.
I think you have to look at the actual orders of magnitude difference in raising the temperature of water versus air. The Arizona story you linked is about a study that found up to +4°F (+2.2°C) temperatures in air.
The same amount of heat, spread across the same volume of water moving at the same speeds, would only raise that water by 1/830 as much, for a +0.0048°F (+0.0027°C) 1/3300 as much, for a +0.0012°F/+0.00067°C temperature change across the same area/volume.
(I got to 830 by taking the specific heat of dry air of approx 1 J/g K at room temperature and regular atmospheric pressure and 1.22 kg/m^3, versus water’s 4.184 J/g K and 1000 kg/m^3).
(Edit: I fucked my math. Water has approximately 3300 times the heat capacity as air, per unit volume, and I just looked it up directly).
The higher conductivity of water might be offset by the higher convection potential of air (because air responds to temperature changes with differences in density/pressure, which creates wind in itself), so that the heat will spread through either medium relatively quickly and therefore dissipate very quickly with distance to the source.
I just don’t see a world where a data center raises the water by even 1°C, even locally.
The plants on the lakes so monitor the water temp so they don’t affect the ecosystem during the warmer seasons still.
Yeah, but look at the magnitudes of the heat units involved. Modern nuclear plants generate 0.6-4.5 GW at around 30% thermal efficiency (so they generate between 2-15GW of heat). These underwater data centers are looking at 25 MW (0.025 GW) while surrounded by water in 5 of the 6 3-dimensional directions.
There is some risk to local ecosystems, but we’re literally talking 2 or more orders of magnitude difference compared to nuclear plants or other thermal plants.
But that’s true no matter where you put the data center. If you have to dump the waste heat somewhere, the high density and specific heat of water is a better heatsink than the air around us.
This page says the ocean is about 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons, which is about 1.3 x 10^21 liters, and each liter is a kg of water (yeah, yeah, the dissolved salt adds some mass but I don’t think it adds sufficient thermal mass to make a difference). It takes 4.184 kilojoules to raise 1kg of liquid water 1°C, and 1 joule is 2.778 x 10^-4 wh.
So that’s 1.55 x 10^18 watt hours, or 1,550,000 TWh.
Global electricity consumption is about 30,000 TWh per year, so if you use the entire world’s electricity consumption for 51 years you’d raise the oceans’ temperature by 1°C.
Or if you take global data center power capacity of about 125 GW, and ran them at full power 24/7, you’d be producing about 10.8 TWh per day or 3944 TWh per year. It’d take about 393 years of the world’s data centers to raise the ocean by 1°C.
Just goes to show that much more of the energy heating up our world and our oceans is coming from the sun heating up the planet and the planet failing to radiate it out past our greenhouse blanket, not from the actual heating of our atmosphere from our own energy sources.
So what makes you think the people eating these things are only eating them for health reasons?
Taste: it’s actually really hard to taste just as good as normal meat, as meat is not only meat but also fat, tissue and blood.
One thing I’d push back on is the idea that meat has one single flavor. It’s entirely possible that we’ll be able to replicate many different types of sausages and meatballs and ground meats, things like imitation crab or meatloaf or chicken nuggets, while still struggling to mimic whole muscle cuts. Or it may be easy to mimic certain types of flavors like meat-based soups and sauces, or poached/braised meats, while not quite getting there on grilled or roasted meats.
Meanwhile, I can also see a world where lab-grown meat is cost competitive with more expensive meats, like beef or lamb or lobster, while not being able to compete with cheaper meats like chicken.
It doesn’t have to be all or nothing substitution. Sometimes imperfect substitutes can partially replace something and reduce overall demand while the original item still remains available in smaller volumes.
a weird path to take
Is the idea of eating food for enjoyment so foreign to you that you wouldn’t understand why we eat foods for reasons other than absolute minimum nutritional needs?
I remember road trips in the summer, in the 90’s, where you’d just see a bunch of bugs splatter on your windshield, and where you’d have to periodically scrub them off with windshield scrubbers.
Now, 25+ years later, I almost never see bugs on bumpers and hoods and side mirrors. Certainly not to the same degree.
And I can believe that computer aided design helped make all cars much more aerodynamic so that fewer bugs would actually be hit and more would slip into the airflow around the car, but the sheer magnitude of the dropoff makes it totally obvious that there are just fewer insects around.
For the hallway picture, each blue line corresponds with what should be a parallel line, along edges of square tiles or the corner of the floor and the two walls.
For the dinosaur doll, each white dot connects a feature on the dinosaur to that feature’s reflection.
For the shadows, each white dot connects a corner of the object to the corner of the shadow.
I think each of these lines is meticulously chosen.
Let’s also assume the heat capacity of the hot dog is about 3000 J/kg*K
So the specific heat of water at those temperatures is 4184 J/kg K, and those food court hot dogs are probably about the same as Kirkland dinner franks, which have about 73g of water, 31 g of fat (specific heat of about 2300 J/ kg K), 16g of protein (1500 J/kg K), and 3g of sugars/carbs (1200 J/kg K), and let’s say negligible ash, so we’re left with a weighted average of about 3280 J/kg K.
That’s within 10% of your assumed value, so I think I just wasted my time trying to check your assumption, which was pretty close to my number that took a lot more work.
But fundamentally there is less energy storage in a charged sodium atom than a charged lithium atom so it seems sodium batteries must always be bigger and heavier than equivalent-capacity lithium batteries.
Well the battery chemistry will always include much more than just the loose charge carrier of Na+ or Li+ or whatever cation floating around. It’s always a suitable cathode material made from other elements, too. Lithium ion batteries in cars today have cathodes mostly of high performance lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides (NMC) or cheaper/more stable lithium iron phosphate (LFP).
The dominant sodium ion chemistry hitting mass production now uses Prussian Blue Analogues for the cathode (made from a 3d matrix out of sodium, plus a metal like iron/manganese/nickel, plus cyanide made from carbon and nitrogen).
Plus even separately from the raw chemistry of the battery, built in mechanisms for durability or longevity or charge cycles or thermal management or safety or other material properties may change the overall weight of the battery for any particular performance characteristics.
In the end, the performance of the entire battery is what matters, and lithium’s head start in less weight per cation may one day be overcome if the overall materials involved can be lighter in some as-yet commercialized sodium ion chemistry.
You got it all wrong.
An American oil company is going to have absurd windfall profits this year, because the global price for oil has skyrocketed while American production hasn’t gone down at all. So that CEO is warning everyone that he’s gonna have an extraordinarily large bonus this year.
California is famous for having different emission regulations. They have an exemption from the national law that they’re allowed to make stricter emissions and gas mileage regulations. None of those should prove to be a burden for anyone who wants to sell a battery EV in California, because there’s no standard that applies only in California to EVs.
What currency are you using for this comparison? Definitely not USD.
A Tesla Model 3 runs for about $40k. A Camry runs for about $35k. Or if we want to go down market a Nissan Leaf is about $30k and probably comparable to a $25k Sentra.
Similar trim levels of vehicles offered as both EV and gasoline powered show minimal difference. Compare the Ford F-150 Lariat in both the gasoline ($75k) and the EV versions ($79k). Or the new Lexus ES, where the EV ($49k) is actually cheaper than the hybrid ($51k).
And if you go into the used market, EVs are starting to hit that market in real numbers, too. Plenty of options for under $20,000, and a handful of options for under $10,000.
Cars are expensive. EVs generally are close to that already expensive price.