Sucking water into space....

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mark T
  • 36 comments
  • 7,887 views
Mark T

Mark T

Puts the sex into Essex
Premium
Messages
3,323
Messages
GTP_Mark
Messages
Mark T33
I was reading an article from Jeremy Clarkson the other day in which he was talking about global warming. He mentioned (not seriously) that if the earth did flood due to melting ice caps that running a pipe into space would be the best option. The vacuum of space could be used to suck any unwanted water into space through a large pipeline.

Now I know that such a project would be huge but could it actually work?

Let's say we managed to get the pipe into space, and stuck the other end into the ocean. Would the vacuum suck any water up or would the force of gravity be too strong against the vacuum.

Would the pipe itself once in space be sucked up?
 
The pressure difference on the two ends of the pipe has to be sufficient to overcome the weight of the water in the pipe - so the smaller the pipe diameter the better. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure that the pressure would be greater with a greater pipe diameter - so the larger the diameter the better.

I seriously doubt there would be a viable pipe diameter that would keep the pressure up enough to overcome the weight - especially when the water freezes and clogs the pipe.

But one would also have to consider what would happen if it worked.... You'd have an ice fountain in space - but where would the ice go?

It would fall back to earth.

So, in summary - no it wouldn't work for the following reasons:

A) it is impossible to construct such a pipe
B) no diameter exists such that the pressure is sufficient to overcome the weight
C) the water would freeze - bursting the pipe and stopping all flow
D) even if it worked the water would just rain back down.
 
Last edited:
It wouldn't work. Otherwise the water would be gone already as the only thing keeping it here is the gravity, why would a pipe change anything?
 
Greycap
It wouldn't work. Otherwise the water would be gone already as the only thing keeping it here is the gravity, why would a pipe change anything?
Click to expand...

Creates a pressure difference - just not enough to lift a column of water into space.
 
The diameter of the pipe has nothing to do with the pressure of the column, just the weight of its contents. 30 inches of mercury is 30 inches of mercury, regardless of the column being 2mm or 2 feet across.

As for the pipe into space, the sea level air pressure is about 15 pounds per square inch, generated by a column of air over a hundred miles high.

Water reaches that pressure in about 33 feet. Not far enough to reach space. Stick a pipe in the ocean, apply perfect vacuum to the pipe, you get 33 feet, more or less, of water up the pipe.

Just for fun, to reach space, your water column would exert about a quarter of a million pounds per square inch. You'll need a good pump system.

The weight of water is one of the problems with tall buildings. People at the top can't exactly sign a bathroom waiver before they're allowed up there.
 
Last edited:
So you could have a pipe a mile in diameter, with water 33 feet higher than the outside? And there'd still be vacuum inside the pipe, above the water, as long as the top of the pipe is well clear of the atmosphere?

Cool! We put spigots about 15 feet from the top, run them through electric turbines, and we have free energy! Hooray for science!
 
Apart from all the physical impracticalities of the idea, surely removing such a large body of water from the Earth would result in a total unbalance of the planet's delicate ecosystem?

What would happen when the polar ice caps start freezing up again, as they naturally do in cycles? - you'd end up with lower sea levels and therefore new land mass.

A typical badly thought through Clarkson brainwave i think. :rolleyes:
 
TheCracker
Apart from all the physical impracticalities of the idea, surely removing such a large body of water from the Earth would result in a total unbalance of the planet's ecosystem?

What would happen when the polar ice caps start freezing up again, as they naturally do in cycles? - you'd end up with lower sea levels and therefore new land mass.

A typical badly thought through Clarkson brainwave i think. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Just found the original quote from Clarkson, bear in mind that if your not used to his writing style it can seem absurd, but it's all very tongue in cheek.

Jeremy Clarkson
The fact is this. Global warming’s coming, so you can don your King Canute hat and stand on the beach waving your Toyota Prius at the advancing heatwave, but it won’t make a ha’p’orth of difference. But don’t worry, because I have a plan. The biggest threat we face, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation, is rising sea levels. Plainly, then, there is too much water in the world, so why don’t we just call Nasa and ask it to take some of it into space? Space is only 75 miles from the surface of the Earth, so why not make a giant hosepipe, dip one end in the sea and take the other end out into the void, where, of course, there is a vacuum. That means the water will be sucked up the pipe without the need for any energy-absorbing pumps.
Click to expand...

Link
 
Does this idea assume that the atmosphere gets pumped out of the pipe? Because the pressure difference at the ends will be the same no matter how big, so the water coming up the pipe should be proportional to the diameter of the pipe.

So then you can assume that currently we have a pipe of infinite diameter extending from the ocean to space, so infinite water should have been sucked up there already if the concept worked for a smaller pipe.

If not then it's a question of gravitational potential energy compared to the potential energy resulting from a vacuum acting on the water.
 
Philly
Does this idea assume that the atmosphere gets pumped out of the pipe?
Click to expand...

That's a really good point. The column of air in the pipe is going to act just like all of the air outside of the pipe (ie: it'll sit there).

The pressure created by the water in the pipe is:

P=pgh

The pressure at 1 atmosphere is 14.696 psi.

We know p, g, and are looking for a very large h to result. You can calculate how high a column of water would need to be to equal 1 atm here:

http://www.lmnoeng.com/Statics/pressure.htm

33 ft, as wfooshee predicted, is the answer. But what if we put the inlet at the bottom of the ocean? Say... in the Mariana trench - which is 35,802 ft down with a pressure of 16,000+ psi. In that case the column of water, once it reaches sea level, is exerting the same amount of pressure as the column of water outside of the pipe. So your pipe fills up to sea level and that's it.

Makes a lot of sense.

So, the bottom line is, if you could build a pipe into space (which you can't), for the purposes of spraying ice into space (which is daft because it'll just fall back down), you'd have a 0 ft column of water because your pipe would be filled with atmosphere that exerts that exact same amount of pressure as the air around it. But supposing you sucked all the air out of the pipe, you'd have only a 33 ft column of water.

Still 327,967 ft to go.


(I retract all stupid comments I made about the radius of the pipe since the trade of increasing diameter exactly cancels out)
 
Wouldn't it just be easier to say that if the vacuum of space were stronger than Earth's gravitational force we wouldn't have an atmosphere, much less climate, to worry about?

I think people understimate Earth's gravitational force because we deal with it on a daily basis and take it for granted.
 
FoolKiller
Wouldn't it just be easier to say that if the vacuum of space were stronger than Earth's gravitational force we wouldn't have an atmosphere, much less climate, to worry about?

I think people understimate Earth's gravitational force because we deal with it on a daily basis and take it for granted.
Click to expand...

Easier, yes... but not quite as fun.
 
mega-maid.jpg


Problem solved.
 
Maybe you could build a giant tube into space, but not a pipe. It would have to be closed off and a vacuum would have to be introduced to pull the water up into the pipe and store it there. Think of it as a giant water jug. This would be easier with many, many small pipes though. This way the pipe is decentralized and won't flood the earth after it breaks-- you know one'll break. Additionally, a giant pipe would create a political nightmare where governments or perhaps one central pipe authority would use it to exploit humanity, and then of course there are the Goreshippers and other ecoterrorist wackos who would undoubtedly plot to break the pipe to punish humanity and make more room for their marine organism friends.
 
Isn't a pipe kind of like a tube? You know, hollow inside so a fluid could flow?

And making it long enough to reach space does apply a vacuum to it, you know, once you manually remove all the air.

And holy cow, you brought up a good point. How do we keept the marine animals from being sucked 33 feet up the pipe? Tube? Whatever? OMG!!!!!!!!!!!1111!

The best solution is one I saw on failblog months ago, but can't find now. Everyone who lives near the ocean take a pan or bucket down to the water, fill it, and take it to the house and pour it down the drain. Dispose of enough water and the sea level won't rise. [Clarkson]How hard can it be?[/Clarkson]
 
^
Everyone who lives near the ocean take a pan or bucket down to the water, fill it, and take it to the house and pour it down the drain. Dispose of enough water and the sea level won't rise.
Click to expand...

facepalm4.jpg
 
Easier than getting all the people in China to jump at noon every day to push the Earth further from the sun... :D
 
Hostile people actually have the easy job for once, just sit back and watch it fail. :p

I love the bucket of sea water down the drain idea, I am going to get all my friends to try it when I go to cornwall, might stop it sinking into the sea during the next few years...
 
Omnis
tube:

test-tube.jpg
Click to expand...

Test tube.

It even says so right on the thing. :)

A tube is like the things all the Internet data flows through.

Of course, there's vacuum tube, picture tube, fallopian tube, inner tube, all kinds of specific applications.

So, if a hostile entity were to put an explosive device on our space pipe, would that be a pipe bomb?
 
The only way we have right now of getting water into space is to launch it up in a rocket. Provided that the rocket reached orbital velocity, we could put the resulting ice in orbit around that planet. Once in a sufficiently high altitude orbit, the ice would stay there for a very very long time. With enough rocket launches we could make an ice ring for our planet.

Of course, it would be an obstacle for satellites. And it would take a incredible (literally, non-credible) number of rocket launches to achieve.


... would be cool though.
 
I'm sure if I look hard enough in Home Depot I can find a nozzle for my water hose to get the job done.
 
It'll be really simple. The rockets, we will make out of ice bonded together with carbon nanotubes and kept cold by the presence of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel inside. The nozzles will be reusable ceramic ones that will be collected at "ice station one" in orbit and sent back down on the regular shuttle flights.

Not only sustainable, but environmentally friendly! We can mold the rockets out of seawater at the north pole! :lol:
 

Latest Posts

Back