Comment on Space is starting to look like the better mining operation
neshura@bookwormstory.social 11 months agoAdding chemicals to reduce pollution is how every internal combustion engine works, especially diesel engines.
Sodium reacts explosively with water, Chlorine is a lethal substance to humans yet when the two chemicals react they become a necessary part for our bodies. There are ways to turn toxic/harmful materials into harmless ones by adding more chemicals. The key part is making sure the result is actually harmless, which we can.
schmidtster@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Just because it can reduce pollution in a combustion engine doesn’t mean it translates to removing metal particulates from the atmosphere. Those are wholefully different scenarios.
We still barely comprehend the dangers of what we put in the atmosphere 30 decades ago, let’s not be adding more. Especially so when it’s completely unproven to this date.
neshura@bookwormstory.social 11 months ago
it is though. We haven’t found a solution, we haven’t even started looking for one but it is fixable. There is nothing in the known laws of physics/chemistry inhibiting us from removing these particles from the atmosphere.
You claim removing particles from the atmosphere is completely different from removing them from exhaust gas. It isn’t. The only differences here is that we need to filter the stuff in a less than accessible location. Chemistry doesn’t suddenly stop working because we are in the atmosphere and not on ground level.
And we can figure out how that stuff is impacting the atmosphere, we simply haven’t bothered running the numbers and experiments on it because there’s no funding for it. This isn’t some weird black magic nobody can/has figured out. What do you think the scientists will do with the newly acquired info on added particles into the atmosphere? Look at it and hum and hah? No they’ll use the numbers to model long term impacts these materials will have and, if paid enough, even figure out ways to remove them again.
schmidtster@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Fixable means that it doesn’t create another issue, which there is plenty of supporting evidence it would. We don’t even understand the future issues of removing the pollutants from ICE vehicles.
neshura@bookwormstory.social 11 months ago
By your definition nothing is ever fixable because you can’t ever fully remove the possibility that your choices have some unknown effect. A perfect solution never exists so looking for one is idiotic, we can only model the problem with our current knowledge and work on fixing it with that. Compared to other animal life I say we’re even doing a good job at it, so far we haven’t gone extinct despite being the predominant life form pretty much everywhere. Other animals would’ve ran into major problems sustaining themselves within two or three generations were they in our position. So unless you have some way to solve our problems that doesn’t involve regressing back to the stone age I think the “fix it now, worry about the new ways we broke it later” approach is the only workable solution we have on hand right now.