Earlier this week, Y Combinator, which has backed companies like Airbnb and Reddit, put out a request for startups working on technology that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
"It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions to this problem — including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to work," Y Combinator's website says.
Y Combinator is looking for startups working on four approaches that they acknowledge "straddle the border between very difficult to science fiction" — genetically engineering phytoplankton to turn CO2 into a storage-ready form of carbon, speeding up a natural process in which rocks react with CO2, creating cell-free enzymes that can process carbon, and flooding Earth's deserts to create oases.
Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, acknowledged that these ideas are "moonshots," but said that he wants to take an expansive approach to the issue.
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(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:54AM (2 children)
Those happened in 2014.
If no progress was visible by today, either:
- they were successful beyond their dreams (and the tech is used by NSA to crack encryption at Terahertz clock speed) or
- there's nothing there, the technology failed to deliver the promises
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 30 2018, @05:23PM (1 child)
Those ITRS roadmaps that looked at stuff like Silicon-germanium, carbon nanotubes, etc. predicted that many of those technologies were 10-15 years from being realized. 4 years is fine. Tack on some extra time to account for people laughing at the idea of a return to "vacuum tubes".
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 30 2018, @09:33PM
So [xkcd.com], between 'we haven't finished inventing it yet' and 'It hasn't been conclusively proven it is impossible'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford