Large scale heat management: controlling or influencing temperature flows on a geographic (regional or global) scale. Heat management is one of the deep fundamental problems in life and engineering, but humans have never tried to do anything smarter or more ambitious in this area than standard HVAC stuff.
Humans like moderate temperatures, say 55-75 F, but we spend quite a lot of our time in discomfort or even pain because the actual temperature is outside this range. But the problem isn’t that heat (or cold) is in short supply, it’s just distributed unevenly. This fact hit home for me when I was riding in an Uber because terrible winter weather knocked out Boston’s subway system, and the driver told me she had just returned from a trip to Brazil, which was mostly unpleasant because the heat made it impossible to do anything outside.
Here are some options:
Heat banking: store heat during the summer in large reservoirs of water. Release it during the winter.
Heat trade: hot regions send heat to cold regions; both sides are happier.
I’m actually quite confident some version of this idea will work, because there are two vastly powerful forces working in its favor:
Economics: in heat trade, both parties feel that they are exchanging a good for a bad. This kind of exchange almost never happens, most normal trade relies on the parties valuing something at a different magnitude of positive or negative value, but with the same sign.
The Great Second Law: Humans suffer from temperature unevenness but Nature actually prefers temperatures to equilibriate. We just have to help Nature do what it already wants to do.
There’s a high-stakes variational calculus problem. For what seasonal temperature profile do we get the best long-term minimum for the sum of “deaths due to extreme cold” and “deaths due to tropical diseases whose vector insects are stymied by extreme cold”.
The problem is efficiency. Basically, it’s (much) more efficient to control the temperature locally at small scale rather than transfer heat over large distances.
There are some exceptions, e.g. geothermal can be very useful, see Iceland. I’ve seen mentions of trying to cool seaside cities with cold water pumped from the deep, but it’s wildly more expensive than doing it the usual way.
Not much lives 1000m under the surface. Also, the amount of heat that we would send is actually quite small compared to the heat capacity of the oceans. Water has 4000x higher heat capacity than air by volume.
Transferring heat from a hot place to a cold place is really easy. In principle you can just connect them with a highly conductive material like copper. In practice even copper might not have enough heat conductance, so it might be better to pump either water or air from one place to another.
Under the surface (for example, below the European continent) or in the deep seas? I’m not sure about the former but I’m quite confident that the following applies to the latter:
My layman impression is that investigating lower altitudes becomes increasingly (perhaps exponentially) difficult the lower you go. Wikipedia also says that “Humans have explored less than 2% of the ocean floor” so I would disagree with your assessment of “not much lives 1000m under the surface”.
I’m honestly interested in how you came to that conclusion though—If you have an interesting and reputable text that refutes me, please share. I came to mine based on reading Wikipedia too much.
I should have said “not much lives below 1000m until you get to the ocean floor”. Not much can happen in the deep ocean because light doesn’t penetrate that deeply. The creatures that do live there have to rely on organic material falling slowly from the surface.
The [Bathypelagic Zone] is also marked by very low temperatures (5 or 6 degrees Celsius) and having a very low organismal biomass, a trend that will continue until reaching the ocean floor.
Large scale heat management: controlling or influencing temperature flows on a geographic (regional or global) scale. Heat management is one of the deep fundamental problems in life and engineering, but humans have never tried to do anything smarter or more ambitious in this area than standard HVAC stuff.
Humans like moderate temperatures, say 55-75 F, but we spend quite a lot of our time in discomfort or even pain because the actual temperature is outside this range. But the problem isn’t that heat (or cold) is in short supply, it’s just distributed unevenly. This fact hit home for me when I was riding in an Uber because terrible winter weather knocked out Boston’s subway system, and the driver told me she had just returned from a trip to Brazil, which was mostly unpleasant because the heat made it impossible to do anything outside.
Here are some options:
Heat banking: store heat during the summer in large reservoirs of water. Release it during the winter.
Heat trade: hot regions send heat to cold regions; both sides are happier.
Heat sequestration: there are huge pools of cold water about 1000m underneath the ocean surface, when your city is too hot, send some heat down there.
I’m actually quite confident some version of this idea will work, because there are two vastly powerful forces working in its favor:
Economics: in heat trade, both parties feel that they are exchanging a good for a bad. This kind of exchange almost never happens, most normal trade relies on the parties valuing something at a different magnitude of positive or negative value, but with the same sign.
The Great Second Law: Humans suffer from temperature unevenness but Nature actually prefers temperatures to equilibriate. We just have to help Nature do what it already wants to do.
Huge, thin mirrors in orbit over the equator that reflect light that would have hit the equator to the area of earth experiencing winter.
There’s a high-stakes variational calculus problem. For what seasonal temperature profile do we get the best long-term minimum for the sum of “deaths due to extreme cold” and “deaths due to tropical diseases whose vector insects are stymied by extreme cold”.
The problem is efficiency. Basically, it’s (much) more efficient to control the temperature locally at small scale rather than transfer heat over large distances.
There are some exceptions, e.g. geothermal can be very useful, see Iceland. I’ve seen mentions of trying to cool seaside cities with cold water pumped from the deep, but it’s wildly more expensive than doing it the usual way.
Don’t send heat underwater, it’s a bad idea for everything that lives under there (and for us if we don’t want these things going up).
I’m curious though, how would you “send” heat ?
Not much lives 1000m under the surface. Also, the amount of heat that we would send is actually quite small compared to the heat capacity of the oceans. Water has 4000x higher heat capacity than air by volume.
Transferring heat from a hot place to a cold place is really easy. In principle you can just connect them with a highly conductive material like copper. In practice even copper might not have enough heat conductance, so it might be better to pump either water or air from one place to another.
Under the surface (for example, below the European continent) or in the deep seas? I’m not sure about the former but I’m quite confident that the following applies to the latter:
My layman impression is that investigating lower altitudes becomes increasingly (perhaps exponentially) difficult the lower you go. Wikipedia also says that “Humans have explored less than 2% of the ocean floor” so I would disagree with your assessment of “not much lives 1000m under the surface”.
I’m honestly interested in how you came to that conclusion though—If you have an interesting and reputable text that refutes me, please share. I came to mine based on reading Wikipedia too much.
I should have said “not much lives below 1000m until you get to the ocean floor”. Not much can happen in the deep ocean because light doesn’t penetrate that deeply. The creatures that do live there have to rely on organic material falling slowly from the surface.
From this article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heating is already a thing.
Don’t you think it would, say, wreck most ecosystems on the planet?
It would only happen in areas of dense human habitation, which already wrecks the ecosystem. No net harm.
How about disrupting streams?