I think we are doing something very wrong with electric airplanes- namely, the idea, that you have to have one craft that has to archieve vtol lift off. My Question: Why?
Why not a tug drone, that gets a plane up to altitude in a VTOL way, fly with full battery capacity and then land with a rotor arrest like a helicopter - with the tug long detached and returned.
The tug could be more like a powerbank. It would not physically pull the aircraft up but assist by providing power. The aircraft could launch on its own but it is advantageous to use a tug because this increases the range or energy reserves that the aircraft itself has.
(outline of a launch: aircraft and tug are connected by cable before launch, both lift-off, gain altitude, cable is detached, aircraft moves on and tug returns to launch site)
Except you probably have another aircraft already landing, the slots are tight.
Maybe you could have another shorter landing strip just for the tug, but again, that seems like a lot of complexity (i.e risk) for maybe a 20% increase in efficiency at best.
That's an interesting and unconventional idea. If I remember Lilium's [0][1] numbers correctly, most of the motor power is needed for vertical take-off and landing and only a small fraction (1/10 to 1/5) is needed when they have transitioned to wing-borne lift. This means that supporting the aircraft for just 1 minute during take-off would give 5-10 minutes of extra vertical flight, which translates to 25km-50km of extra range at a cruising speed of 300km/h.
I always wondered, if there is a way to geoengineer clouds to refill those aquifiers.
Find out the main windband going there, go over the ocean, create a artifical thermic (via solar) and produce lots of moisture (ultrasonic foggers driven by solar?), creating rainclouds in a synethetic way.
Ultrasonic foggers would also increase the amount of salt in the air, so you’d have to run them far out in the sea.
Instead, flood Death Valley with ocean water:
1. Massive evaporative potential.
2. Moisture trapped by tall mountains replenishing the aquifer and making lush surroundings.
3. Massive hydro potential
4. Displaced species not seriously harmed since the moisture gradient would be large (are P. 2)
5. You could harvest the salt prolonging the suitability of the project (anyway measured in centuries if not millennia)
Basically you’d have the lushness of the surroundings of Salt Lake City (compared to the desert anyway). Except there would be a lot more moisture (lower salinity wrt it Salt Lake, moisture better trapped)
You could do the same thing in Egypt at the Qatara depression, except with potentially global benefits. Here the half of the Sahara could be turned into productive farm land.
I don't know if I would say I'm 'hoping' for this, but I'm certainly interested to see what kind of incredible projects will come out of the increased necessity brought on by climate change.
It seems like for a long time there's been resistance to really try to do 'big' things in NA. We hardly even build subways since the 60's -- too complicated, too expensive, too disruptive, too big! Maybe we'll increase our ambitions as a society when we're less comfortable.
Sigh. Let's destroy a vast ecosystem and fundamentally change the atmosphere of a hugely important agricultural region. Let's not solve one problem by creating 10.
What are these problems? I’ve asked (many) geologists and the best answer they come up with is salt seepage into the aquifer if it’s not done right, and a temporary increase of seismic activity due to relaxation from the added weight.
Look, the Three Gorges damn is much larger than this and much much more destructive. Entire cities disappeared.
But it also generates 22 GW of power.That’s an insane amount of coal that wasn’t burned.
So choose: burn coal. Burn U235. Flood valleys. Sashimi the birds. Carpet the desert with glass. Or massively decrease your standard of living.
For the record, I’m actually in favor of the last option.
Why do you think geologists are the right specialists for this question? I would imagine geological concerns would indeed be mild, but meteorological effects could be monstrous as the weather created by this new sea would massively impact local climates, which could have far-reaching downstream impact.
I agree with you, but at the same time, that is worth looking into because we are already changing the ecosystem fundamentally. We shouldn't just haphazardly try to geoengineer our planet, but geoengineering out planet is pretty much a necessity unless over half of us die and the rest turn into mostly pre-industrial methods of livings.
But you could have picked anyone of hundreds of other artificial lakes already in California. Ones that are deeper, with clean water instead of runoff.
You could also compare it to the Dead Sea, another body of water with no outlet.
The Salton Sea is already an ecological issue in terms of the run off and salinity you mentioned. Additionally there are economic concerns.
One of the plans is to use local geothermal power for desalination. Importing saltwater to freshwater lakes would disrupt ecosystems. Depth wouldn't necessarily be an advantage if we are are looking for evaporation.
I'd guess that it's more efficient to desalinate water and distribute it via pipelines than to go the extra step of getting it up to cloud height and then letting it fall down again.
It's all feasible, if you have cheap enough energy.
The installations themselves are not that expensive. The energy required is very expensive. And unless it's 100% 0-Carbon it will only exacerbate the situation.
Cloud seeding exists already. It works by distributing particles (I forget what of) in the air that water can coalesce around into clouds and then raindrops.
There are ethical and geo/political consequences though, since doing it is effectively stealing rain from another area.
Higherups will usually defend by hiding behind the process - aka the virtual will and orders of the social golem that is a company.
And nobody alone is responsible for the process. There is not necessary a feeling of responsibility on top- just because powers are granted by the process.
Yes, she is a nice little sockpuppet for the car-industry and obviously getting what you want as a industry always damaged the industry itself. No innovation, no risk taking, no fast adaption of new tech..
This sort of behaviour opened up a whole industry for disruption, so in a way corrupt politicians are the grave-diggers of old industrys.
If solar panels could be modified to create substained microclimates below that would be awesome. After all, there is still enough straylight getting below, to allow for a average forrestplant to exist.
Speaking of which, they also could be used to condense the (low) air humidity and channel it into the ground, so the possibility to create a micro ecology system is even more higher. Water immediately attracts life.
There was a small project where somebody used a hygroscopic substance (Silicagel) to collect water in the atmosphere in the desert and freed it with concentrated sunlight, and then condensed it.
Imagine if we could do solar in space.. infinite area- no soil wasted, the power transmitted as a ray of death... oh, so this is why we do not do solar in space.
Technically it's not infinite. The sun emits about 10^26 Watts of solar radiation energy produced from the nuclear fusion of about 4*10^6 tonnes of hydrogen per sec, i.e. a 100% efficient dyson sphere would capture that much energy at most.
How about building something similar to a space power station that loads huge batteries, then gravitationally launches them towards ground, while on the other side an automated system launches rockets with empty batteries that docks to the power station?
Guaranteed to be hugely net energy negative in the energy required to launch the batteries. Think about payload fractions and the huge amount of energy in rocket fuel.
Launch Loop or Space Fountain are superior. Even the Laser Transmitted Energy solution is. Why? Because they do not have such tremendous costs to install and do not rely on hypothetical yet to develop substances.
