Fit all greenhouse-gas producing processes with a time-dislocator.
Send the exhaust back 3 billion years, and from the resultant alternate timeline take air from 500 million years ago when the atmospheric content was 35pct. This should last until we run out of oil deposits by which time we'll have moved on to a different power source.
When the timecops show up, we feign ignorance and register a complaint that all our petroleum deposits have been stolen and that somebody keeps dumping used cars into our continuum.-- FlyingToaster, Mar 11 2009 you know the butterfly that flapped it's wings... This could really alter history. Better to send it to the future. At least 50 years so it doesn't affect me :)-- knowtion, Mar 11 2009 ...true, we could all transmogrify into dinosaurs... and that's a bad thing ?-- FlyingToaster, Mar 11 2009 Just send it forward/back 3 months or so. Earth'll be a couple million kilometers further around our sun orbit, no worries at all. Furthermore, the Sun'll be a [insert arbitrary distance here, dependent on which reference plane you choose to use today, I mean arguably the milky way is moving at .25c or whatever it is, given expansion of the universe and all] further away, no problemo.
What is the plural for paradox[es], anyway? Is it a confusion of paradoxes? A quandry? Anyhoo, you've got a clusterfuck of paradoxes to deal with here.-- Custardguts, Mar 11 2009 [Cg], [knowtion]: post massively edited to appease the SPCB.-- FlyingToaster, Mar 11 2009 The problem with this is that when/haven't/now the gasses are all gone you are/would not/have left with nothing to breath.
(Dyslexia helps with non standard temporal reference language.)-- eight_nine_tortoise, Mar 11 2009 by no means: we've created a parallel-universe and replaced some of their prehistoric oxygen with carbon-dioxide... think they'll notice ?-- FlyingToaster, Mar 11 2009 [Custardguts] that sortof assumes that moving through time is completely separate from other influences like gravity or affinity or momentum.-- FlyingToaster, Mar 11 2009 Sending things a few days back in time, and therefore into space, was an old effect produced by "timebombs" used in the Strontium Dog comic strip from Warlord, 2000AD/Warlord and 2000AD.
As for the main idea I'd be a bit upset by loosing so much oxygen bound up in the compons expelled by those exhausts. If we had time travel devices, that could fit on engines, then I'd instead try them to use to accellerate some steady-but-slow process to make the exhaust less harmful.-- Aristotle, Mar 11 2009 [Aristotle] the idea is not only to displace CO2 but to *emplace* O2.-- FlyingToaster, Aug 22 2009 The O2 question raised is a good one. If you did a serious gedanken experiment and burned all know hydrocarbons on earth in an instant, what would be your limiting reagent, the hydrocarbons on earth or the available oxygen?
You could do this calculation on the back of an envelope. Oil/gas/coal reserves must be available somewhere. As to the oxygen piece of the equation, figure there to be about 14 miles of air above the earth, air being about 20% oxygen – with the earth’s radius of about 24K miles.-- halb gekocht, Feb 06 2010 I've read somewhere where there's enough O2 in the atmosphere to keep HC burning at the current rate going for 10K years... though I doubt the pp would be enough to keep people alive that long, and the CO2 concentration would/will kill us long before then anyways.-- FlyingToaster, Feb 06 2010 But "at the current rate" interjects kinetics as oxygen is being made all the time. Take that out of the equation and "burn" all the coal/gas/liquids in an instant - - - I bet your run out of oxygen before you do the hydrocarbons.-- halb gekocht, Feb 06 2010 I bet you'd run out of life when the O2 content of the atmosphere dropped a few %.-- Twizz, Feb 11 2010 You'd be surprised Twizz - plants actually prefer a low O² environment and their growth rates have been shown to increase with temperature and CO² concentrations.-- zen_tom, Feb 11 2010 //What is the plural for paradox[es], anyway?//
One paradox. Two pairs of dox.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 11 2010 random, halfbakery