Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "I recently learned that waste heat will boil the oceans in about 400 years." video.

  1. I like it. You've got some good ideas there. The reason we don't design our homes more efficiently is because burning fuel has been (relatively) cheap, and it costs nothing to vent heat to the outside. As our population continues to grow these things may become more expensive. It's hard to imagine a waste heat tax, but the rising cost of energy could inspire technology that uses heat in more thrifty ways. I'm intrigued by the idea of a common thermal bus, but the temperature difference between the bus and the rest of the home probably wouldn't be great enough to heat machinery. We just don't use washing machines and stoves and the like often enough to keep the bus cooking at a decent temperature. But your idea of essentially making a heat battery under apartment buildings could be promising! Big buildings are constantly using power, so you could probably divert a decent amount of heat into the geothermal unit (or whatever) all through the year.
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  2. Thank you for a most interesting video! It was really thought provoking. The first time I ever heard of this particular problem was in the "Night's Dawn" science fiction trilogy by the author Peter F. Hamilton. He saw this coming back in 1996, a pretty good prediction for a non-scientist. In his books civilization exists within domed cities, while outside of them the weather rages on an Earth with a surface temperature of hundreds of degrees. It's just bare rock and superheated air and water outside of the domes. In real life the solution to this seems fairly clear: 1. Use renewable energy as much as possible. 2. If renewable energy isn't enough, use other sources of energy outside of the Earth's atmosphere and bring manufactured products down to be used on the surface. In other words, outsource as much of the industry that produces waste heat as you can. Who knows, maybe the problem of balancing global temperature against the waste heat produced by a large civilization (plus contributions caused by greenhouse gases) may be one of those great filters that winnow out potential alien civilizations. If they can't get the numbers right they bake in their own heat.
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