Running Tide attracts VC names with plan to bury gigatons of CO2 on ocean floor | Hacker News Reader

Running Tide attracts VC names with plan to bury gigatons of CO2 on ocean floor

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26 pointsloosetypes10 comments

I once had an idea about a sci-fi movie plot where an ancient Earth civilization faced with global warming decides to sequester CO2 using bio matter and sink it to the ocean floor. They are too late and get whipped out but the sunk bio matter turns into our Oil, causing the cycle to begin again.

I love this. Might work better as a short story with a long reveal. But I don't know, I am not an author. The endless cycle philosophical trope plays well for a sense of continuance without needing a god and in way, can be seen as uplifting, that if we can get woke enough on this pass, we might push through whatever barrier that civilizations face.

The same meta idea could also be, that the Wow signal or better yet, some semi rare, but now not rare because we have the right sensors, that it actually turns out to be the whimper of a dying civilization and that heavens are actually full of civs expiring. Maybe it isn't that life is rare, but that civilizations that can make it past the Drake equation.

Have you patented it? https://www.theregister.com/2005/11/04/movie_plotline_patent...

It's crazy to be sinking assets.

But I'd suspect this will pivot, and this is the tech the world needs.

Massive amounts of the earth is ocean deserts. If we can green them for profit, along with that you will get a lot of CO2 being sequestered through waste, while also freeing up land for ecosystems.

If we ever want to remove CO2 from the atmosphere this is the only way to do it I've ever seen. Something biological in the ocean.

Cool start-up.

I am curious what the impact of sinking iodine, calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus and other trace elements along with the gigatons of carbon will turn out to be.

I wish there was some info on how many tons/km2/year C02 could be removed.

Is the profit plan to make lots of kelp and use it as cow feed?

More likely to sell the carbon credits like Tesla does.

Wouldn't this technology simply displace the pollution, and its effects, from the atmosphere onto the ocean floor?

In an effort to save the planet, this could kill it by destroying what life we have at the ocean floor.

That makes me curious - Does anyone know if there's a way to contain the damage done to our oceans into a certain region? Being able to designate a part of the ocean as an ecological deadzone by somehow directing all our dumping/carbon capture into there would leave the rest of the ocean less affected. All the trash in the ocean gets moved by the current into specific regions of the ocean, so I wonder if we can do that with the rest of our impact.

Nature abhors two things that humans adore: straight lines, and walls.

All kinds of innovative solutions to contain ecological damage have come and gone, and will continue to come and go - but there's no working around nature. Everything we do will be undone by nature at some point; probably sooner rather than later. Ultimately, the only thing 'containment' does is just make it somebody else's problem in the future.

I don't think there's any realistic prospect of 'safely' containing anything in the ocean - possibly some kind of tethered buoyant container might be a useful innovation for the immediate future, but it's not going to be a permanent solution, and our best bet is to massively reduce the damage we do in the first place rather than keep kicking the can down the road.

Even the continents will be destroyed and renewed ultimately - perhaps our best long-term bet is to try to manually send the 'bad stuff' down into the outer core and just let it be obliterated and recycled.

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