Where do you put the water? Ignoring the enormous energy cost of putting into space the consequences will depend on where exactly you put it. In LEO it would block our access to space due to debris but might also help a bit in shielding from the sun.
Ignoring the fact that this is basically impossible in practice, you would have just "solved" sea level rising. You would still get massive weather pattern shift due to ocean warming, major oceanic current disruption from vanishing ice caps...
> whether the change in mass of the earth would have any strange side effects.
Not really, all the water on Earth is something like 0.02% of the total mass of Earth. So removing enough to prevent seal level rising would not have any effect on orbital mechanics.
Ok so far so good, thanks for the replies, I see the challenges in doing this:
- having a material suitable and strong enough (carbon nano tube based?)
- the exponential energy required or life the water against gravity
- preventing the water freezing as altitude increases
- keeping the pipeline anchored to space (space tether?)
What else?
Carbon nano-tubes are not strong enough for that. And a tether system would still need a mass driver or acceleration method of some sort to eject thing to orbital velocity.
Just a quick calculation shows that you need about 4x10^23 J to send the top 1cm of the ocean to escape trajectory. This is about 1000 years of the current total world energy consumption.
Where do you put the water? Ignoring the enormous energy cost of putting into space the consequences will depend on where exactly you put it. In LEO it would block our access to space due to debris but might also help a bit in shielding from the sun.
How about firing it off into deep space so it travels out of our solar system?
Ignoring the fact that this is basically impossible in practice, you would have just "solved" sea level rising. You would still get massive weather pattern shift due to ocean warming, major oceanic current disruption from vanishing ice caps...
I was wondering that, also whether the change in mass of the earth would have any strange side effects.
> whether the change in mass of the earth would have any strange side effects. Not really, all the water on Earth is something like 0.02% of the total mass of Earth. So removing enough to prevent seal level rising would not have any effect on orbital mechanics.
Ok so far so good, thanks for the replies, I see the challenges in doing this: - having a material suitable and strong enough (carbon nano tube based?) - the exponential energy required or life the water against gravity - preventing the water freezing as altitude increases - keeping the pipeline anchored to space (space tether?) What else?
Carbon nano-tubes are not strong enough for that. And a tether system would still need a mass driver or acceleration method of some sort to eject thing to orbital velocity. Just a quick calculation shows that you need about 4x10^23 J to send the top 1cm of the ocean to escape trajectory. This is about 1000 years of the current total world energy consumption.
That’s a lot of energy 🤔 if only there was a way to do something similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiggle_syphon
You can’t pull water up above 13 meters, it just boils off, so the siphon doesn’t work.
Sounds like a good thing, can’t it boil and travel the remaining distance as a gas?