You must log in or register to comment.
So… Just turn a blank round into a live bullet…
Maybe we can fire it at the planet that keeps sending those asteroids that nearly hit us.
Why yes, I would like to know more.
Excellent analogy, but now I want the math. Think we could push this past the gravity well? Fuck space elevator, I got ejecto-volcano cuz.
I would imagine very small section might be able to? I know one of jupiters moons has geysers that shoot water into space and out of orbit.
Isn’t a space cannon or whatever it’s called a very old sci-fi idea?
Apparently launching a metal cover with a nuclear weapon might not even be enough to reach space
It’s like the oldest, it’s how Jules Verne sent men to the moon in “From the Earth to the Moon”
Pretty much as soon as a cannon got invented and shot, some guys were like “…maybe we could shoot ourselves out of that…”
SOURCE: John Paul Stapp
New idea: build a small town on top of the block that’s placed on top of the vulcano and start exploring space(and colonise other planets).
I’m pretty certain that it would destroy whichever object was launched. The air friction alone would tear it apart.
Very rough Google math (mostly because of “fuzzy” answers on the energy required and how you define space) suggests that the 1980 Mt St Helens eruption had enough energy to orbit three billion kilos…
I based that on the eruption being rated at 24MT, which converts to 100b MJ, and a minimum of 30MJ/kg being enough for orbit. Didn’t find a straight answer on escaping the gravity well, could be way higher.
That doesn’t seem right to me, but that eruption did, in fact, move the entire top of a mountain a pretty silly distance, so as ridiculous as it sounds, it could be accurate? I mean… 500 billion KGs of ash was spit out of it…
That’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever googled i think. I feel like I don’t actually want to know the actual math on this. It’s fucking plausible dude.
Or a cheaper space program.
The source of all that stuff leaking out is the sea which all our mountains float on.
Nobody going to mention that we have a sentient mountain with internet access? Wtf
It’s 2023 things are weird now you just gotta accept it
true.
I feel like this is a Veratasium video in the making
“Well ‘Rods From God’ didn’t really work out as we’d hoped, but we’re feeling good about our new plan: ‘Boulders From The Devil’”
The Devil’s Boulders is a good band name.
Better yet - use helicopters to drop chunks of icebergs into the volcano to extinguish it.
Keep fuckin around and you’re gonna end up in a Republican cabinet one day.
M.A.G.M.A.
Is that where they keep their gay whores? Or the piss tapes? Which cabinet? Oh, maybe the cabinet?
Once and for All!
But…
Well now you have a very large cannon
Meh, the pressure will do the ball the way into space I bet.
We should launch rockets like this, would save on fuel.
Even still best case scenario would be like a pimple popping internally. There’s still something going on below the surface that is not good.
But there would not be that best case scenario with a volcano. It’s gonna blow if it wants to blow. Bonus: flying shards of concrete to compound the death and disaster all around.
Big problems require big solutions.
Would concrete even hold. I mean lava is molten rock and cement is kind of a rock. So wouldn’t the cement melt before pressure could build up?
Most cements melt at a higher temperature than most lava gets to, so it would be solid chunks of cement getting blasted miles out when the pressure builds high enough to erupt
It probably wouldn’t melt, but if you heat moist concrete it will spall ans crumble to bits before too long.
Even if the plug would hold the volcano would just split open another hole in the earth and erupt from there
More job opportunities. Volcano hole filler would look great in my résumé.
Giggity
And that would be a literal lava canon
Yes. That’s the joke.
Yes, there are many levels of stupid in this person’s proposal.
edit: “heavy metal rocks” would likely also meet the same fate.
A depleted uranium cap with a “whistle” pressure release might just be what’s needed to solve the issue though
Does remind me of my ongoing question of why we aren’t using volcanoes as generators for geothermal power.
Apparently it can be implemented in a way that deliberately draws heat away from the source that’s being used for the power, so why not just stick cooling rods into volcanos and then get free electricity courtesy of the earth being a hot pocket?
Because the electricity wouldn’t be free, you’d have to build a ton of expensive infrastructure in the middle of nowhere (people tend not to live near active volcanoes), in an area that is very geologically active (cos of the volcano) with a real risk that everything you’ve built gets wiped out at some point in the next few decades (volcano).
There are a ton of ways to generate clean electricity, the trick is doing it in a way that is even remotely cost effective $/MWh
Your comment is of course completely accurate. The last paragraph is depressing though, “we have all the solutions, but we won’t do them because money”.
Good news: solar and wind are actually substantially cheaper than coal or gas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Bad news: large parts of the world have built their economies around coal and gas extraction, and the cost to society of those industries collapsing is harder to quantify
When the price difference is big, it’s kind of, ‘oh well, have to be practical’, when the shitty solution is picked. When the price difference is small and the shitty solution still gets picked; that’s depressive. That is when governments need to incentivice the better solution; cause capitalism won’t.
“(people tend not to live near active volcanoes)”
[Hawaii enters the chat]
People absolutely live near active volcanoes. They have some of the just fertile soil on the planet. Naples, Sicily, Hawaii, Iceland, Japan, Indonesia etc. In fact Iceland is almost entirely powered by geothermal energy.
Geothermal use steam to generate power tho, and active volcanoes is quite risky to build a high cost power plant because we wouldn’t know when it will erupt. Also active volcanoes might be too hot for the job.
How hot is too hot tho? Doesn’t more hot just mean more energy?
Also, could you locate the electricity generating parts away from the volcano itself and just conduct the heat from the hotzone itself far enough away to still draw the heat out of the system without posing an infrastructure risk to the system?
I really wonder about the potential to basically turn volcanic hot zones into batteries and just suck the excess heat energy that makes them dangerous out of them. It seems like the biggest untapped source of power we have at our disposal next to the sun and all the forces it drives.
How hot is too hot tho? Doesn’t more hot just mean more energy?
It just boil water to create steam to spin the turbine, too hot will harm the equipment quicker.
could you locate the electricity generating parts away from the volcano itself and just conduct the heat from the hotzone itself far enough away to still draw the heat out of the system without posing an infrastructure risk to the system?
Yes, they already been doing it, either close (but not too close) to volcano, or in a place where the earth crust is thinner(which is still near volcano), but never on the volcano itself. It’s one of the location specific renewable energy.
Also we don’t just turn heat to electricity, we use heat to boil water to create steam to generate electricity, the source of heat is what different between power plant, like for example coal, incinerator, nuclear, and sunlight, all are just to boil water.
Nuclear reactors and geothermal power plants both simply boil water to push steam through a spinning turbine to make energy. That’s literally it. There’s no other way to utilize that heat in a safer or more efficient way.
In the volcano that’s about to erupt, there is a geothermal power plant right next to it. Same for the similar eruption in Hawaii, it had a geothermal plant already.
I feel like when the volcano does explode it’s just gonna launch that concrete plug like popping a pimple.
Tens of thousands of tons of rapidly fragmenting concrete being launched into the upper atmosphere - cos what a major volcanic eruption needs is extra shrapnel
I’d imagine it would just melt…
¿Porque no los dose?
Concrete is a mixture of rocks , sand and cement which kind of acts like a glue. So, yeah concrete would probably melt.
It’s concrete, not cement. Cement does fuck all without water, aggregate and sand. Don’t forget your tensile strength in rebar. It’s like calling ketchup tomatoes.
I think this could actually be someone impersonating a famous mountain on Twitter, however, the account is verified with a Blue Checkmark, so this must be the real Mt. St. Helens then.
But how could this be possible?
Clearly, the lava is just the blood of the mountain and now it has enough lava blood flowing to achieve sentience and to access xitter.
Even before twitter introduced these fake verifications, some large landmarks were verified by the managing party (like a national park), so if this were older that could’ve been the explanation.
Now it’s just a dumb musktake.
Must be the mountain. People don’t just pretend to be someone else on the internet.
That lava already has to break through literal kilometres of rock to get there. A few hundred (let’s be generous) extra meters of pourable rock ain’t gonna do shit.
Gonna need to see some credentials buddy. If I don’t see volcanoologist, I’m leaving.
I think we can still work with the spirit of the solution. The main issue is that the lava will break the concrete. The solution is pretty simple. If we take some buckets of water we can pour it into the volcano creating a layer of obsidian. Obsidian is much harder and will easily contain the magma.
Just get a bucket of water, ffs!
Minecraft logic
Or as the guy at bike shop put it “no you can’t put duct tape on your pierced tyre. If a nail got through rubber, its probably gonna also get through tape.”
Not that I want to defend using duct tape for this, but fixing a tyre isn’t about keeping nails out but closing the hole after the last one.
What you mean? Cement stronk!
Not to mention the average normal size of an opening you’d have to plug to begin with. Even if it didn’t just drain down the hole or dissolve the moment it got to lava, it would be a ludicrous amount of concrete just to make a layer a few feet thick. Even if you did manage to make a plug a hundred or more feet deep and it didn’t melt or move, an eruption would likely just blow the mountain apart from around it.
If it’s concrete i think it will just explode upon contact because of the water content.
Concrete does explode upon contact with molten metal…I can’t imagine how this doesn’t end up in an explosion
Yeah, that “even if” of mine was doing some heavy lifting.
I want to see it done just to see how far the concrete cap goes flying when it finally pops off.
All you’d need is ultra fast drying lava-proof concrete. I’m surprised no one has thought of that yet. Then once the crater vent is fully plugged you would just need to coat the rest of the mountain in the same concrete. Voila, problem solved.
I keep thinking about the big job we have ahead of us, paving over Yellowstone Park.
Don’t give them any ideas
But look at the picture, the lava is trapped.
The picture is dumb as hell. The lava would just flow out of the big gaping vertical hole in the front.
I remember reading an article discussing the difficulties of re-directing a lava flow. One thing they mentioned was they tried dropping concrete blocks into or in front of the flow, and the concrete just floated on the lava.
