Use heat to make steam to drive generators.
Dangerously Cold Record Low Temps
- Thread starter drbrumley
- Start date
Use heat to make steam to drive generators.
genuineoriginal
New member
That high of heat is only found in limited areas.
In most locations you will need to drill down several miles to reach that high of a geothermal heat source.
Yep. But efficiency requires a high temperature gradient. You could build huge Stirling engines to run on lower differences, but they are low torque devices, and don't work very well. Drilling several miles down is feasible. In a pinch, Yellowstone could become a huge energy farm. The park is essentially one large volcanic caldera. And the magma is very close to the surface, there.
The impact of 15km asteroid would be devastating, although it probably wouldn't kill everyone. We'd lose a sizeable proportion of the world's people unless we had decades to prepare. But since geothermal heat would continue, and since the technology for using it is available, there would be many areas where it could be employed.
Fossil fuels would presumably still be available, and since the darkness would likely last for years, but not for decades, survivors could hang on. And the location of the impact would matter. An ocean strike might cause more casualties initially, but all that water vapor going into the atmosphere would mean more rain to clear the atmosphere, and more of whatever infrared we'd get from the sun would be retained.
It would be a very different world afterwards, but one with human survivors, I think.
Unlikely.
An event would either only wipe out a low percentage or the entire population. Getting something large enough, but limited enough to kill, say, 75 percent would be extremely improbable.
Moreover, having the knowhow available would be next to useless in a situation where much of the infrastructure had been destroyed. The remainder would be too preoccupied with survival to implement new tech.
There wouldn't be darkness. The dust in the atmosphere would last little longer than a regular sandstorm. Physics doesn't stop because of the imagination of science fiction writers.
The only way to kill a substantial number of people — relative to the population of the world — would be with tsunami.
The waves would be significantly worse than from those seismically sourced, but there are limiting factors on how bad the effect would be. These things don't scale well. You can do more damage than the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, but you have to step the initial conditions up exponentially.
Ironically, the energy involved in the quake was vastly greater than what would be involved with a strike.
Back to location issues, it seems like you place too much emphasis on the presumed "nuclear winter" scenario.
Such things are almost certainly exaggerated.
It would be one or the other: Either everyone would die, or life would go on pretty much as it does now. Global events are very difficult to survive.
Show us the numbers. That seems crazy on the face of it.
How would a 15km asteroid take out infrastructure all over the world? The Chicxulub asteroid would have produced a large tsunami, and would have been lethal over a large part of the continent. The biggest factor would have been dust tossed up into the atmosphere, which would have persisted for a year or more. Even large volcanic eruptions can toss up enough material to cause drastic cooling.
The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer (also the Poverty Year and Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death)[1] because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F).[2] This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.[3]
Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). This eruption was the largest eruption in at least 1,300 years (after the extreme weather events of 535–536), and perhaps exacerbated by the 1814 eruption of Mayon in the Philippines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Existing technology would be sufficient. Most people might die, but a hemisphere away, not so much.
You've been misled about that. As you just learned, the effects of just one or possibly two large volcanic eruptions essentially affected an entire year. There would be a lot more micron-level ejecta from a large asteroid hit. Physics doesn't stop because of the imagination of science fiction writers.
No, that's wrong too. Just the entry of a asteroid 15km wide would release a huge amount of heat, over a very large area. A relatively small body entering the atmosphere over Sibera, likely around 50 to 200 meters wide, flattened forests over 2000km, and broke windows over a hundred miles away.
If that had entered over Europe, there would likely have been millions of casualties.
Show us your numbers. That seems rather unlikely:
A magnitude 5.0 earthquake is about 200 tons of TNT, magnitude 6.0 is 6,270 tons
https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/energy-hurricane-volcano-earthquake3.htm
The Tunguska hit in Siberia is estimated to have been about about 30 megatons of TNT. And that was only a tiny fraction of what a 15km object would be.
Last time it happened, almost every land animal larger than a few kilograms, died.
The researchers were even able to estimate what kind of asteroid must have impacted the Earth 65.5 million years ago to throw up such a consistent layer of debris around the entire planet. They estimated that the impactor must have been about 10 km in diameter, and release the energy equivalent of 100 trillion tons of TNT.
When that asteroid struck the Earth 65.5 million years ago, it destroyed a region thousands of kilometers across, but also threw up a dust cloud that obscured sunlight for years. That blocked photosynthesis in plants – the base of the food chain – and eventually starved out the dinosaurs.
https://www.universetoday.com/39801/k-t-boundary/
ok doser
lifeguard at the cement pond
i may watch deep impact tonight - haven't seen it in a while and tea leoni :Shimei:
Show us your numbers. :idunno:
That's nice.
However, your incredulity isn't a very convincing counterargument.
I never insisted that it would. :idunno:
The point was: If it was enough to wipe out more than half, it would go on to take out the other half. I also assumed that whatever amount the immediate aftereffects of the strike killed, it would also take out all their infrastructure.
If indeed it actually happened — a very unlikely scenario — the waves would not have gotten much more than about 10km inland. The first decent slope would have all but ended things.
You've been watching too many science fiction movies.
genuineoriginal
New member
Yep.
With the population distribution, it wouldn't be difficult to kill off all the people that live near the ocean.
Yep.
Diminished sunshine can last a lot longer than then initial darkness and catastrophes can have global effects that are survivable.
What would happen if we had another year without a summer?
| Year Without a Summer The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer (also the Poverty Year and Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death) because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F). This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere. Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). This eruption was the largest eruption in at least 1,300 years (after the extreme weather events of 535–536), and perhaps exacerbated by the 1814 eruption of Mayon in the Philippines. In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent "dry fog" was observed in parts of the eastern United States. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the "fog". It has been characterized as a "stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil". |
You saw it too? :chuckle:
Well, let's take a look...
Looks as though you were fooled again. And since much of the data is now by satellite, it really wouldn't be an issue. Indeed, if scientists were foolish enough to weight the United States more than the rest of the world, we'd actually get lower temperatures for much of the latter part of the 20th century.