I wrote:
> There might be market for carbon or carbon compounds on the Moon or Mars > for all we know. We might send millions of tons a day up by space elevator > and dispatch it around the solar system. I doubt that will happen, but you > never know. > This may sound utterly impractical. You might think the gigantic mass of material involved makes it out of the question. Think again. We know the approximate mass of material, and it is not so gigantic. We have already moved that mass of carbon compounds. We just have to move it again. The mass of carbon or carbon compounds that we would ship to Mars (or whoever wants to buy it) would be roughly equal to the mass of coal and oil that has been mined and shipped around the earth since 1800. That is a lot, but not an unthinkable amount. I think it takes ~50 supertanker deliveries per day to move oil around the world. A space elevator terminal dispatching 50 supertanker-sized loads of carbon compounds or wood to other planets would be expensive and large, but not much bigger than than a major port such as Savannah, Georgia. It would be operated entirely by robots. If you were to extract carbon from the atmosphere, and then keep dispatching carbon compounds on something like this scale for 200 to 400 years, you would reverse the effects of the combustion from the beginning of the industrial revolution. You would do it at a profit. I hope 200 to 400 years would be fast enough. It might be more profitable to simply export the remaining coal from the earth, or to extract carbon from other sources in the solar system. However, the purpose of would be to reverse global warming while at the same time producing something useful. I suppose we would use a combination of techniques. Selling some carbon, burying some, using some to build wooden houses. I predict that people will want to live in wooden houses far into the future, with wooden furniture, even after other synthetic materials become available. Wood looks nicer. People like traditional materials. Japanese people will want tatami made from natural rice straw and rush far into the future. Why wouldn't they? It smells nice. New tatami is a pleasure to sit on. As they say, to live a pleasant life you should get new tatami and a new wife, often. - Jed
