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HerrJemine t1_j9qmtve wrote

Antarctica alone loses 220 gigatons of ice per year. To counter that, we would have to launch SLS, the most powerful currently operational rocket, about 25 million times a year.

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sl0wrx t1_j9qp3ny wrote

You just build a pipeline up into space with a pump, simple.

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km_j3825 t1_j9qq75s wrote

Yea, forget a space elevator gimme the space main water line

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Doomenate t1_j9qspcn wrote

It's funny your mention SLS. The payload is 231,485 lbs, but the liquid fuel is hydrogen and oxygen which combined after combusting would become 2,177,000 lbs of water. So we'd be splitting 2 million pounds of water into hydrogen and oxygen just to combine it again to move 200k pounds of water into LEO.

Might as well skip the launch and keep the fuel separated!

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Toebean_Farmer t1_j9qpjos wrote

Seems like a way bigger logistical nightmare than just reversing climate change

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Caolan_Cooper t1_j9qn9q9 wrote

You would need to send an absolutely massive amount of water into space to make an appreciable difference. Like, imagine taking an inch of water and then multiplying it by the entire surface of the ocean.

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Dittybopper t1_j9qlrrt wrote

Nope - that is how we brought on the last Ice Age!

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Bryllant t1_j9qm4w5 wrote

I imagine with that kind of advancement we could just reference some glaciers

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GloamerChandler t1_j9qpyaf wrote

The carbon dioxide from all those rocket launches would add to the global warming, I think.

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thisisjustascreename t1_j9qs5c5 wrote

yeah the monetary cost is irrelevant compared to the environmental damage it would cause, if it were even possible.

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solidcordon t1_j9qrkz9 wrote

It may be better / cheaper to do some other form of geoengineering.

Dig a really big hole in the middle of a desert, cover it with a highly reflective geodesic dome / tent and use canals to funnel "surplus" seawater into it. Use solar power to refrigerate the inside of the tent and harvest the (slightly) desalinated water for something useful.

Cover all the deserts with solar panels... cheaper.

Launch a big venetian blind in the earth sun lagrange point to reduce insolation by a percent or two.

We may need that water at some point, throwing it away seems silly.

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SneakyMOFO t1_j9qskl2 wrote

Yeah, let's burn 5 million kilos of fuel to shoot 500kg of water into space. There isn't enough fuel on earth to launch 10% of the worlds water. Rockets need propulsion (phisical matter to shout out one end). There are no electric rockets in existence.

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BlackFerro t1_j9qraip wrote

Well, see the thing about water is... we kinda need it. In fact, despite how much we Do have, we don't actually have enough. I'm not just talking about fresh water, even if we built a billion desalination plants and turned all the oceans into usable water, we'll still run out. So let's not speed that up.

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GorillaNinjaD t1_j9qrck5 wrote

Some factual and some snarky answers, which is to be expected, but friend, all the answers boil down to: You have massively underestimated the size of the Earth, including the staggering amount of water on the Earth, underestimated the weight of water, and/or overestimated the size of current human rockets.

It would take more than 90 of today's largest rockets to lift a single Olympic swimming pool's worth of water into space. It really doesn't matter how cheap it gets, there's simply no way it'll ever get cheap enough to move an appreciable amount of water off the Earth's surface.

(via rockets)

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