Is carbon-dioxide still a problem in 100 years?
Today of course, over abundance of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere is the biggest concern facing the world. But will it still be in the future?
Carbon is an extremely useful element. It's in our food, our oil, and is the exclusive ingredient in diamonds. It's in wood furniture and houses, and it's in plastic. Even steel and stone contain lots of carbon.
So in 100 years, when we're building spaceships to travel to other planets, and buildings large enough to house dozens of billions of people, where are the resources for all this going to come from. Traditional sources of carbon like coal and graphite mines will be politically unnavigable and costly. Cutting down trees and crops will be seen as an incredibly inefficient use of water and land. But there will still be tons of carbon just floating around in the sky.
I predict that within a century there will be a large-scale industry that uses cheap power (Solar? Fission? Fusion? Dark-Anti-Matter??) and uses it to convert CO2 into C and O2. The oxygen obviously will find it's value as rocket fuel, or just for breathing. The purified Carbon will be collected and turned into carbon-fiber, nano-tubes, bucky-balls, or whatever other brilliant substance we've figure out how to make. This carbon will end up removed from the ecosystem as it travels to other planets, or is merely encased in materials that won't break down for millions of years.
Within a few years, the world government will have to step in and put limits on how much CO2 this industry can remove from the atmosphere in order to keep the air healthy for plants. They'll look back on the "Carbon Taxes" of the early century and laugh.
Computers will search for the earliest mention of this phenomenon and my blog entry will appear prescient.
---
Either that, or global warming will have killed us all...
Carbon is an extremely useful element. It's in our food, our oil, and is the exclusive ingredient in diamonds. It's in wood furniture and houses, and it's in plastic. Even steel and stone contain lots of carbon.
So in 100 years, when we're building spaceships to travel to other planets, and buildings large enough to house dozens of billions of people, where are the resources for all this going to come from. Traditional sources of carbon like coal and graphite mines will be politically unnavigable and costly. Cutting down trees and crops will be seen as an incredibly inefficient use of water and land. But there will still be tons of carbon just floating around in the sky.
I predict that within a century there will be a large-scale industry that uses cheap power (Solar? Fission? Fusion? Dark-Anti-Matter??) and uses it to convert CO2 into C and O2. The oxygen obviously will find it's value as rocket fuel, or just for breathing. The purified Carbon will be collected and turned into carbon-fiber, nano-tubes, bucky-balls, or whatever other brilliant substance we've figure out how to make. This carbon will end up removed from the ecosystem as it travels to other planets, or is merely encased in materials that won't break down for millions of years.
Within a few years, the world government will have to step in and put limits on how much CO2 this industry can remove from the atmosphere in order to keep the air healthy for plants. They'll look back on the "Carbon Taxes" of the early century and laugh.
Computers will search for the earliest mention of this phenomenon and my blog entry will appear prescient.
---
Either that, or global warming will have killed us all...
posted by Ze Ace at
10:06 PM
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3 comments
