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somethingnot commented on Europe’s Cities Weren’t Built for This Kind of Heat   citylab.com/environment/2... · Posted by u/pseudolus
xyzzyz · 6 years ago
I consider talking about Type II and Type III civilizations ridiculous in the context of discussing potential increase in the use of air conditioning in India.
somethingnot · 6 years ago
I see. So when you said "No, it won't ever(x) become a problem", it was like one of those ads "Unlimited(x) data", with the fine print "(x) unlimited is meant to be understood as less than 10 GB per month", or in your case "(x) ever means at most 200 years from now"

Note, that when I said "all of India being airconned" I literally meant all of India, as in the whole subcontinent being a single giant city with 100 billion people living in it. And on that scale you need energy not only for airconn, but food/water/waste disposal/... But I guess you exclude that possibility too. It's understandable through why you would just imagine that I was talking about making India into something like present day Europe. In general people find it really hard to imagine anything radically different than the status quo.

somethingnot commented on Europe’s Cities Weren’t Built for This Kind of Heat   citylab.com/environment/2... · Posted by u/pseudolus
xyzzyz · 6 years ago
Yes, it's obvious. There's no way a single person will consume as much energy as the whole country does today. These days, the energy use per capita goes down in developed countries, so the current energy consumption growth is mostly due to poorer places catching up.
somethingnot · 6 years ago
You seem very sure about how humanity will look like in 500 years and how much energy it would use.

Obviously you consider the concept of Type II and Type III civilizations impossible and ridiculous, since they would use more than 20 orders of magnitude more energy than we do.

somethingnot commented on Europe’s Cities Weren’t Built for This Kind of Heat   citylab.com/environment/2... · Posted by u/pseudolus
xyzzyz · 6 years ago
No, it won't ever become a problem. 7 orders of magnitude means we get 10 million times more energy from sun than we generate in electricity. Bringing rest of the world energy use to US/Europe standard will at worst result in 100 times more waste heat generation than now (and almost surely much less than that), which is still far cry from 10 million.
somethingnot · 6 years ago
You assume that it's obvious that we can't consume 7 orders of magnitude more energy than now.

We already grew our energy consumption 4 orders of magnitude in 300 years.

http://bwp.io/blog/2014/thermodynamic-limits-of-human-energy...

somethingnot commented on Europe’s Cities Weren’t Built for This Kind of Heat   citylab.com/environment/2... · Posted by u/pseudolus
xyzzyz · 6 years ago
> On a large enought scale, it creates global warming on it's own.

Any amount of energy we can ever generate from nuclear is trivial compared to the insolation. Average daily insolation on Earth is 6 kWh/m^2. Earth area is 5.1e+14 m^2. This means we get 3e+15 kWh daily from sun, or 1.1e+18 kWh annually. On the other hand, we produce 2e+11 kWh electricity annually. This means that solar insolation is 7 orders of magnitude larger than our electricity production.

somethingnot · 6 years ago
Which is why I mentioned that it will be a problem in the future, not today. Imagine all of India airconed. And it's also why I mentioned albedo. That will drastically increase the sun insolation effect, today a lot of the suns energy is reflected back into space. This will change, especially with solar panels.
somethingnot commented on Europe’s Cities Weren’t Built for This Kind of Heat   citylab.com/environment/2... · Posted by u/pseudolus
briandear · 6 years ago
Why not? Is the solution that everyone boils? We have technology to tame the hot interior of buildings. To many people, it’s like Jehovah’s Witnesses and blood transfusions though — irrational religious opposition to a modern tech that solves a problem. Just suffering through the heat is becoming a martyr for no good reason.

It’s hot. Get air conditioning. Build some nuclear plants to make more clean electricity. Problem solved.

somethingnot · 6 years ago
> Build some nuclear plants to make more clean electricity. Problem solved.

It doesn't work that way. Aircons dump unusable waste heat into the environment. On a large enought scale, it creates global warming on it's own.

Same with solar panels, they change the albedo of the earth surface, and this will be a huge problem in the future.

Dead Comment

somethingnot commented on Europe’s Cities Weren’t Built for This Kind of Heat   citylab.com/environment/2... · Posted by u/pseudolus
stirfrykitty · 6 years ago
My cousin lives up in East Anglia in a house built in the mid 1300s. They have bought box fans for every room otherwise they cannot even sleep. No aircon, obviously. The local council will not allow the house to be retrofitted since it's historical.
somethingnot · 6 years ago
There are mobile aircons, no drilling holes required.
somethingnot commented on Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows   fork.dev... · Posted by u/archagon
Spacemolte · 6 years ago
The whole, if the product is free you are the product etc. So, how is this free?

It really does look amazing, which is probably why I wonder how it can be free.

somethingnot · 6 years ago
Git is also free. So, how are you the product when you use git?

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u/somethingnot

KarmaCake day40July 20, 2019View Original