Re:The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
by Hasu on Monday October 07, 2024 @06:29PM
(#41771790)
No technology has been invented that doesn't have costs and tradeoffs. Technology that deacidifies the oceans will have other costs, other externalities that we cannot predict now. Determining how we want to deal with those costs/tradeoffs is a social problem, not a technical problem. Technical know-how can only inform us about the what tradeoffs are available, it can't tell us what we prefer.
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The ion pumps enabled by the technology we are working on won’t have external effects. They basically just filter out certain small molecules from the ocean into crystal storage.
What kind of flow rate would be necessary to pull CO2 out of the ocean faster than it dissolves from the air, and is that achievable without affecting the surroundings?
CO2 wouldn’t be pulled out of the ocean. You’d have to liquify it from air in a different process. The molecular pumps are used to extract dissolved ions or solutes from sea water and only act as fast as diffusion.
So this is desalination? That seems unrelated.