General > General Technical Chat
"if it wasn't for the invention of X we wouldn't have Y"
pcprogrammer:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on August 22, 2022, 02:06:27 pm ---Wind turbines aren't perfect. There's the problem of disposing of them when they've reached the end of life. The blades are made of resin bonded fibreglass which can't be recycled. I suppose it's possible to thermally depolymersise the resin, to produce oil and char and the glass will melt and reused, most probably as a building material. The problem is this won't be cheap. I can see most of it going to landfill.
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Solar panels have similar problems at end of live, or can even be a problem when they get damaged by hail. 25 years, or less, from now it is seen as nowadays asbestos.
Cyberdragon:
--- Quote from: Circlotron on August 21, 2022, 12:03:31 am ---And what if someone had invented really really good batteries in the late 1800s? So good that no one would have bothered with internal combustion engines? So much of the 20th century would have been different. Oil rich nations would have remained a backwater. Probably fewer wars. Less environmental damage of the type we see today. But I expect people collectively would have found another way to do the horrible things they do.
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They did have electric cars in the Edwardian era. But they faded into obscurity because of lack of support infrastructure, cost, exc. AFAIK they were mainly marketed towards women.
NiHaoMike:
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 22, 2022, 10:57:33 am ---Plants are definitely capable of converting CO2 into something else, but you need a lot of them to reduce the amount of CO2 currently in the atmosphere, and the big problem with that is where to grow them. We got rid of so many of them just to make space for where we live :o
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Use ocean algae, 3x as much ocean area as land area. And rapidly phase out factory farming to replace it with sustainable farming which uses much less land.
pcprogrammer:
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on August 25, 2022, 03:54:10 am ---
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 22, 2022, 10:57:33 am ---Plants are definitely capable of converting CO2 into something else, but you need a lot of them to reduce the amount of CO2 currently in the atmosphere, and the big problem with that is where to grow them. We got rid of so many of them just to make space for where we live :o
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Use ocean algae, 3x as much ocean area as land area. And rapidly phase out factory farming to replace it with sustainable farming which uses much less land.
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Topping of the oceans with algae to an extend that the surface is closed of by algae will cause other kind of problems. That is one of the things the human race constantly gets wrong. We often think up a solution without considering long term effects and when it goes sour it is repeated all over again. There never seems to be a balance in things.
As an example, we bring an animal species to the brink of extinction, and then flip to such an extend that things get out of hand to save the last couple from dying.
You mention sustainable farming, and that might be a good thing, but what are the costs?
A sustainable society is what is needed, but the question is what is a sustainable society. At least one where there is no population growth. And the consumption rate also has to drop to a level that is sustainable. This includes food as well as other things that we use and throw out when we are done with it.
At the moment we just produce more and more to fight something we created by a growing population and a growing rate of production.
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