A platform is floated to the open sea, which extracts energy from the passing waves, sunlight and the wind, and uses it to shoot frozen sea water to the moon.

A linear accelerator with a really long barrel (built out of carbon nanotubes) extending to the outer atmosphere would be needed.

The chunks of ice are put into a trajectory where they encounter and deposit on the surface of the moon, to be stored safely there should we ever want to ship it back.

As the sea level comes down, more of the coast gets exposed and we would be able to better compensage for the melting of the polar icecaps. The resulting higher elevation of the land would make them less liable to damage from the occasional tsunamis as well, which might be expected to become more numerous as the sea bed gets relieved of the pressure of all that water.
-- neelandan, Mar 21 2011

Wouldn't it be more reasonable to use that energy to break water into its constituents? Then the hydrogen would leave the earth on its own. (Of course, with the extra oxygen, flies would grow to the size of buzzards and great conflagrations would sweep the globe.)
-- ldischler, Mar 21 2011


I just recently had a daydream about expelling substances from the Earth, as if the Earth suddenly became contagious of what it has been afflicted with.
-- rcarty, Mar 21 2011


Has somebody worked out the relative energy ratio between launching a kg of ice to the moon versus breaking up a kg of water into oxygen and hydrogen?

It would generate about 111 grams of hydrogen and 889 grams of oxygen per kilo of water dissociated. About 1480 litres of hydrogen, and 740 litres of oxygen would be produced.
-- neelandan, Mar 22 2011



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