silicates withering is sort of workable, if very drastic.
the drastic part is the scale of damn problem, you have to shove 100 everests (in american units) into fields fairly rapidly, while scale of gravel production is around 1 gigaton, singular, which has to be scaled up like 100 times, good thingy though the tech for rock blowing up is easy and known, but . i think this was like on the edge of feasibility of available silicate to be found, so it cannot be the only method in use in any case, but it is the fastest. (don’t quote me on numbers though, there is also a lot of logistics hidden there, some rocks are just not usable for that purpose, cause you have to transport them too far, defeating the purpose)
A good ballpark that helps communicate the scale of this is that we’d need to spin up a new industry operating on roughly the scale of the whole fossil fuel extraction industry–coal, oil, and gas together–basically all at once. We’d need similar levels of extraction, transportation, storage, and processing. It would be the fossil fuel industry operating in reverse. It took 200 years to get the fossil fuel industry this big, and that was with the incentive of it basically being a money printer too. It isn’t going to happen.
silicates withering is sort of workable, if very drastic.
the drastic part is the scale of damn problem, you have to shove 100 everests (in american units) into fields fairly rapidly, while scale of gravel production is around 1 gigaton, singular, which has to be scaled up like 100 times, good thingy though the tech for rock blowing up is easy and known, but
. i think this was like on the edge of feasibility of available silicate to be found, so it cannot be the only method in use in any case, but it is the fastest. (don’t quote me on numbers though, there is also a lot of logistics hidden there, some rocks are just not usable for that purpose, cause you have to transport them too far, defeating the purpose)
A good ballpark that helps communicate the scale of this is that we’d need to spin up a new industry operating on roughly the scale of the whole fossil fuel extraction industry–coal, oil, and gas together–basically all at once. We’d need similar levels of extraction, transportation, storage, and processing. It would be the fossil fuel industry operating in reverse. It took 200 years to get the fossil fuel industry this big, and that was with the incentive of it basically being a money printer too. It isn’t going to happen.