Averting Real Life Enviromental Disasters:
05-13-2015, 05:59 PM
Right, so one of the big caveats of fenspace is that a lot of the problems that have been popping up lately don't happen over there. A bit of an issue, considering that for things like global warming and other issues, most of the groundwork was laid over the past century instead of the past 8ish years.
So, I figured it might be good to figure out how more recent changes might have been mitigated or averted thanks to the fen, or possible handwaves(Boo, hiss!) that might have happened in the fen universe rather than our own.
To start with: the atmospheric CO2 count. Still rising like a saturn 5 in our universe. But for the fen, it might be a pretty easy source of carbon for off-world settlements. You could repurpose ramscoops and magnetic ramscoops to filter out atmospheric carbon to take back to places like mars or for use in feeding plants on the moon or other settlements, say using lighter than air ships, or electric planes running on handwaved solar panels and batteries while flying at atmospheric mid-levels over the oceans. Depending on the efficiency, you might be able to halt or reverse the CO2 increase, and there might be story fodder in 'carbon runners' trying to scoop from especially dirty locations, like near the middle east, or off of China's coast while trying to avoid people trying to shoot them down. I know the NLR will need metric butt-loads of carbon for their nanotube plants for building the Plaskett dome.
Another thing that might help is the theoretical major solar minimum coming. Might happen much faster and far more intensely in fenspace, resulting in something like the Maunder Minimum to provide a major cooling effect for the Earth.
This stuff might be a good way to explore how mundanes and fendanes are using handwavium, since they would be much more interested in stopping enviromental issues, to the point of a fen-like fervor in doing anything necessary to help fix the damages already done.
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We could always spread surfactants in the upper atmosphere to increase albedo.
It's an effect that has already been document quite extensively. There was a marked uptick in average temperatures in the United States in the days surrounding Septembet 11th, 2001.... since there were no airliner contrails in the sky. Natural contrail formations dropped average temperatures by at least a degree. Some degree of global climate engineering should definitely therefore be possible with sufficiently accurate simulations..... all that would be required would be to divert the natural flightpaths of aircraft and alter aircorridors to manage weather and heating.
And it'll drive the chemtrail people wild.
The thing with geoengineering, is that people are reluctant to try it until they're sure it works. And people won't be sure it works until someone goes ahead and tries it.
Dump a few hundred thousand tons of iron filings into the ocean, create an algae bloom, suck up a fuckload of carbon, skim the algae...... boil and refine. Bang, cheap fuel.
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The problem is Geo-Engineering is that most of them are either "very difficult to do" or "very difficult to control".
And most of them have side effects... nasty ones.
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Woof, always the tough topics that get brought up, eh?
One of the (many, many) things I like to bring up now and then is that handwavium does get used on Earth, it just doesn't get used in what we'd call Fen-standard ways (i.e. going to space and/or biomodding). Think of all the ways you could use handwavium for basic stuff like power and water -- and since you're not trying for heavy absurdity the quirk levels would be low to nonexistent -- and by 2016 this sort of thing isn't common but it's gaining traction as people start using it and the world doesn't end.
Random thoughts off the top of my head:
* In 2015 Boeing unveils the Boeing 747-8W, a refit of the classic 747 using handwavium-based thrusters instead of jet turbines. The result is both familiar and a little weird, but it makes almost no noise and has zero emissions.
* In 2013 Tesla Motors (because of course they would) introduces a handwavium power cell for their cars & offers to lease the technology to other auto manufacturers.
* In 2012 TSAB activates the Farnsworth National Fusion Facility, which provides power (mostly as a publicity stunt) to the city of Santa Fe for a month before they shut it down for inspection.
* In 2014 the PRC starts a crash program for replacing existing coal plants with fusion reactors, basically hedging on handwavium's known safety record to allow for cheaper plant construction.
..stuff like that, y'dig? I admit that using handwavium as a panacea for all the world's ills doesn't sit quite right with me -- for all that Fenspace isn't a dystopia, it isn't a utopia either. But that doesn't mean things can't be better, nor does it mean that stuff like carbon skimming isn't possible. (It's flashy, impractical and kind of silly considering the Fen are sitting on, well, Venus. But it's not like flashy, impractical and kind of silly aren't Fen staples.)
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Yeah, stuff like that needs more publication on the wiki. It'd help a lot in developing Earthside more and putting out a ton of new ideas for stories. Another thing that might be good to detail would be people trying to clean up the 'dead zones' off the coasts, like off of the mississippi delta. Eat the nitrogen runoff runoff, stuff like that.
I mean, saying 'harvest carbon from venus' sounds nice on paper, but it's kind of a bad idea when you can help the nice planet right there that people are living on that isn't going to eat your supersonic zepplin with sulfuric acid storms. Plus, you know, enviromental fen. That's a lot of people who care enough to do drastic things to help out. Mads out to build giant solar plant trees to fix nitrogen and carbon while producing power, some company coming up with solar powered cargo ships. A lot of stories that ought to get told about earth.
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Threepony Wrote:Yeah, stuff like that needs more publication on the wiki. ... Plenty of things need more publication on the wiki - have you seen how little we have about the Trekkies and the Warsies?
People write what they want to write about. So far, that's mostly been space-related. I see the "empty" spaces in the wiki as spots on the canvas to doodle in...
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Well, back last June in the thread Odd science (chemistry?) question I discovered the potential profitability of scrubbing CO2 out of the air. At least until you flood the market with so many diamonds that even a certain wealthy and powerful cartel can't market their way out of the price crashing.
Actually, now I'm wondering if so many wacky things being managed with handwavium might not result in some real life hard-tech ideas getting funding. Such as Melvin Prueitt's smog scrubbing towers, basically hollow towers with open tops that have mist sprayers (which, important step, also applies a charge to the mist). The sprayed water cools the air causing it to sink. The sinking air spins turbines to generate power to help run the pumping system that feeds the misters. At the bottom you use an opposite charge to attract the droplets of water and feed them into a filtering system that extracts some of the pollution that the droplets will have picked up. Then take that water and feed it back into the misters. Prueitt figured it could scrub LA's air without noticeable aesthetic damage to the cities skyline. That seems a bit optimistic considering he also figured it would take about 190 towers each about 650 feet tall. I think even in a city the size of LA that would be noticeable. That said we're still talking about a system to clean the air without the use of the handwavium that would set off politicians and NIMBYers.
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Wavetech would likely be of use in quickly cleaning oil spills, and the submariner fen (whose name escapes me) would have likely volunteered to help with the PB oil rig mess in the Gulf of Mexico.
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Timote Wrote:... the submariner fen (whose name escapes me) ... The "Submariners".
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Damn. I knew I shoulda made that one more obvious.
Seriously, though, the Submariners are one of the "secret" factions, trying to exist in the Danelaw without anyone official noticing them. They might help, but if they do, it won't be visible or obvious.
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LilFluff Wrote:Well, back last June in the thread Odd science (chemistry?) question I discovered the potential profitability of scrubbing CO2 out of the air. At least until you flood the market with so many diamonds that even a certain wealthy and powerful cartel can't market their way out of the price crashing.
I dunno about that. I know the New Lunar Republic would have need for several million to maybe a billion tons of carbon for building the Plaskett dome in order to make the CNT supports and sheets for it.
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Well, perhaps the Fukushima cleanup efforts go at least a bit more smoothly than IOTL, for one.
And, simply due to Chaos Theory, certain weather events that occurred in real like might not even occur in the Fenverse. OTOH, perhaps some other nasty events occur that otherwise might not have (for example, perhaps a hurricane that IOTL was a weak and forgettable storm becomes a multi-billion-dollar disaster in the Fenverse).
Tennie Wrote:Well, perhaps the Fukushima cleanup efforts go at least a bit more smoothly than IOTL, for one.
And, simply due to Chaos Theory, certain weather events that occurred in real like might not even occur in the Fenverse. OTOH, perhaps some other nasty events occur that otherwise might not have (for example, perhaps a hurricane that IOTL was a weak and forgettable storm becomes a multi-billion-dollar disaster in the Fenverse).
Yeah, the 9.0(ish) earthquake would still likely happen, yeah. I don't see much reason why seismic and geological disasters won't continue to happen since their controls are beyond human effect. But, after the BP disaster, I'd actually see Fen putting a major effort into disaster-proofing or stopping major incidents like that in their tracks. Maybe the Blazers going in in radiation-proof suits to hook in emergency backup ship reactors to the cooling systems or something else like that when they realize that the reactor complex is suffering a critical failure, or mitigating it to begin with by convincing the UN or some other group to mandate greater safeties on nuclear reactors with solid handwavium backup batteries for cooling systems paid for by non-profit fen foundations. Might be a nice story there covering the news coverage blurbs of fen going into that disaster to stop the worst parts--force field projector getting set down in a critical tsunami spot to hold off the wave, cislunar space forces dropping everything to come rushing to victim's aid and pluck people out of the path of the surge, the aforementioned meltdown and fen efforts with their equipment to keep the reactor from frying--and the news dealing with fen doing their best to save as many lives as they can and what happens afterwards, maybe even the political fallout.
Still working on my own story, but I was thinking about a set of 1-hour ficlets of a carbon scrubber supersonic zepplin crew near LA, and the air traffic controller they keep bugging with their activities off the coast.
There is also the point that Japan and Europe will move away from Fission to (hardtech) nuclear power plants in beginning with 2018 (when the Aurora station delivers the first Helium-3).
About stopping a Tsunami with forcefields... I am not sure Fen technology is up to this task, that is A LOT OF WATER to stop... 
HRogge Wrote:There is also the point that Japan and Europe will move away from Fission to (hardtech) nuclear power plants in beginning with 2018 (when the Aurora station delivers the first Helium-3).
About stopping a Tsunami with forcefields... I am not sure Fen technology is up to this task, that is A LOT OF WATER to stop... Hold off, not stop it altogether. It was a hundred foot wall of water, the objective is 'slow it down long enough to get to da choppa'. Or, rather the flying cars from all over cislunar/dropships/everything that could be mobilized in thirty minutes or less. Save a couple of thousand lives, maybe cut the death toll in half or more depending on how fast the fen mobilize. But since the Big One happened in 2013, the move hasn't happened yet (and is probably why they do move, I'd imagine).
Might be easier to start "emergency floating devices" for the (parts of the) houses... just lift of for a few minutes. 
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I dont know if I'm recalling correctly or not, but it seems like International Rescue should also be a going concern...
Which, since the Thunderbirds are waved, would also explain why the members of International Rescue are so secrative
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International Rescue isn't secretive - they even have a website.
(Did I not suggest, years ago, that this is the group that became Fenspace's International Rescue?)
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I was certain that someone, had, in fact, proposed something like that...
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I have just realized that Fen | International Rescue have a non-obvious revenue stream. As the owners of the only station between Earth and Luna (as opposed to orbiting Earth, or at L4 or L5), they own the communications rooms of the only relay point between the two most populated bodies in the Sol system. One wonders how much they charge in rent to Virgin, ATT, BT, Bell, Docomo, and other cellphone service suppliers?
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I have to wonder how well Fen tech would do in the case of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (assuming that it happens in this universe, of course). Historically, they had trouble sealing the well because it was so deep and the pressures involved so massive. Could Fen tech circa 2010 be able to handle those challenges any better?
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Tennie Wrote:I have to wonder how well Fen tech would do in the case of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (assuming that it happens in this universe, of course). Historically, they had trouble sealing the well because it was so deep and the pressures involved so massive. Could Fen tech circa 2010 be able to handle those challenges any better?
PKE'd do it.
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No doubt StelOil has a team of experts whose services would be immediately offered on behalf of Stellvia Corporation and the entire Convention... for a price.
Although I quite like to imagine a discreet conversation taking place between representatives of 458 Tokio's... lower-profile community and relatives of the men killed in the explosion, after which money changes hands and several BP executives meet with dreadful accidents.
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We have http://www.fenspace.net/index.php5?titl ... mus_Riddle]Nick 'The Jovian Lizard' Riddle, first person to set foot on Jupiter (A.K.A. dived that far down). He did that in Fall '09. It's more than possible in my mind.
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As someone who grew up and lives in the area of the DWH and has learned quite a bit about underwater drilling over the years I have something to say here that I cannot do from a phone. Later tonight I will hopefully have an internet connection again and will be able to respond.
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