Not sure how serious or technologically feasible your proposal is, but it would always end up... on ice due to ecological and environmental impacts.
Oh, and the shipping industry emits roughly 1 Billion tons of CO2 per year, which ice-sailing eliminates... Pretty sure that helps the climate more than "protecting 5 miles of barren rock out of 500 miles, that grows grass for two months a year, and is covered in ice anyway for the whole remainder of the year - gotta keep that safe!"
ChatGPT's top two environmental objections:
Impact on wildlife: The construction and operation of an ice highway could have an impact on the wildlife in the Arctic region, including marine animals such as whales, seals, and polar bears, as well as birds that migrate through the region.
Impact on indigenous communities: The construction and operation of an ice highway could have an impact on the traditional way of life of indigenous communities living in the Arctic region.
Ok. So ignoring possible problems with the ice + ship directly.
How much coverage of the global cargo volume do you cover this way? Obviously there is the middle east -> world, China -> world, and australia -> china routes that are some of the top volumes you might think of when you consider international tonnage.
Your second possible issue is it imposes cost to transfer between transportation modes. For example, transfering from ship -> ship for the great lakes route, or from ship -> train to reach China or the middle east, etc .
The cost of the international train could be more expensive than the entire cost to transport a load via container ship directly from the source port to the destination port.
That's another issue that gives ships such a large advantage : the only tariffs are being imposed by the source and destination countries. The routes are all through international waters.
Your ice train proposal sends good through nations that are not the end or start of the route - such as Russia, Finland, Canada etc. Those nations will impose taxes and duties which may exceed the cost of container freight. (even 1% of the cost of the goods)
There are other problems. In general, a technology that has a very large market size even if it is inferior in a smaller niche market ends up taking over. For example, a technology that made container ships cheaper or more efficient makes all the ships cheaper/more efficient. This is an entire tech base just to support ships on the routes that can support sufficient levels of ice.
If you are looking for a more robust solution, look at : "Batteries could help container ships sail to a greener future". This is simply proposing to fill the engine and fuel spaces of existing container ship designs with rack after rack of currently available LFP batteries. Surprisingly this is economical for shorter routes, and cheaper batteries make it work for longer routes.
This decarbonizes the industry, works everywhere, doesn't require inventing anything new, just refines what we already have. (by making the batteries cheaper by optimizing the process, and installing the incredible charger infrastructure in ports)
[[Tangent inspired by your mention of ship batteries: I had been running the numbers, back when Europe was first looking at undersea power cables from North African solar farms - and it seemed reasonable to manufacture immense floating bulbs... just, big hollow, rigid-shelled floaties, for vacuum capacitors of immense scale, able to deliver power to various locations flexibly, without using rare materials. It's a vacuum inside, so it's perfect at sea! Spain was looking at cables on the order of a hundred billion bucks, to power Europe properly - when we could just make giant plastic hamster balls, and roll them across the Med.]]
So it's a pressure vessel storing energy by the difference between pressure at sea level and inside?
Why not use compressed air batteries, which can have many times atmospheric pressure inside. More storage for volume and your money invested. (Though all these variants of energy storage are inefficient and probably doomed to be never built at scale in favor of sodium or flow batteries)
Erm, no not a pressure vessel. A vacuum capacitor. They hold electrons, and they are able to charge and discharge in a fraction of a second, which is essential so that your floating power-bulb is able to haul-into port, discharge, and leave quickly. Batteries on a ship would take immense amounts of time, or immense amounts of copper; you pick. Vacuum capacitors are also empty, with a surfacing of Teflon for high electrical insulation, resulting in minimal capital; they are cheap, light, easy to mass-produce, and simple enough to automate their routes.
Vacuum dielectric strength: https://eepower.com/capacitor-guide/fundamentals/dielectric-materials/
Doesn't look viable. Capacitors aren't good enough for energy storage as it is and known dielectrics are thousands of times better than vacuum.
The actual solution is way more boring. It's possible that even flow batteries will be too expensive and we'll just spam the sodium version of server rack batteries.
Thank you for getting into details :)
Large segments of international shipping would be completely untouched by ice-highways; Australia and Brazil would still be sending their Iron Ore the same ways, and Saudi Oil likewise. Out of 10Gt a year, even with ice conjoining Russia and Canada, then down to the Hudson, I don't see even half of that on the ice, which was why I mentioned originally that 'I would consider it complete with only ten lanes in each direction'. There are still immense volumes of refrigerated cargo and time-sensitive goods which would benefit from fast, cold transport. And, those goods earn higher premiums; I expect the ice-highway's margins would punch above their market share.
In terms of load-transfer, I would love it if global deep water ports were some genius of efficiency - a few huge or wealthy ports are such marvels. But, in contrast, the bottleneck at most major ports was just recently a year-long global boondoggle. I'm not sure you want to argue that it was somehow the best possible solution; the real solution to transferring loads involves replacing union labor with robots. And THAT is much easier to do at a new transfer-location, which can connect to one of the more numerous small ports, for the shorter, local hop that would be needed. Giant ports are only necessary for giant ships, and those are only necessary for long voyages. By switching to 'last-mile' boats, you can go small, which lets you utilize those hundreds of under-utilized small ports, closer to their destination. That sounds like efficiency, not loss.
In regards to your concern for "an entire tech base..." being needed; yes, it is a different tech-set. And, I don't see that as a limitation; the tech required is minimal capital cost, mass, operating labor, and it provides an immense multiple of capital-into-capital, as well as energy-into-energy. (A few hundred kg to lay 200,000 tons of ice each winter is not an 'overwhelmingly exorbitant tech base' that would prevent feasibility. Similarly, spending 1 joule to pump and spray water that transfers 3,200 joules of heat is a simple device with insane energy-yields, not an insurmountable tech-hurdle.)
The construction, the crews, the control systems, the navigation, the onboard power systems, the structure of the ship: all different.
If you want to see what a modern cargo ship looks like and how it operates, Chief Makoi on YouTube has many videos.
Long story short: what you see on commercial cargo ships is the cheapest most reliable technology available. It has been incrementally refined over more than a century.
You are basically proposing to start over, and your idea has some activation threshold issues.
- Without the ice way going far enough there's no flow
- Without ships able to sail it reliably, probably with heavy automation, there's no flow
- Without massive scale it's more expensive - there's no upfront initial profitablity
The current regime is evolved. Mostly it was small, modest improvements that pay off immediately. This is how the industry evolved to it's current form. It means it is suboptimal but "trapped" at a cost minimum.
Thank you for getting into details :)
Large segments of international shipping would be completely untouched by ice-highways; Australia and Brazil would still be sending their Iron Ore the same ways, and Saudi Oil likewise. Out of 10Gt a year, even with ice conjoining Russia and Canada, then down to the Hudson, I don't see even half of that on the ice, which was why I mentioned originally that 'I would consider it complete with only ten lanes in each direction'. There are still immense volumes of refrigerated cargo and time-sensitive goods which would benefit from fast, cold transport. And, those goods earn higher premiums; I expect the ice-highway's margins would punch above their market share.
In terms of load-transfer, I would love it if global deep water ports were some genius of efficiency - a few huge or wealthy ports are such marvels. But, in contrast, the bottleneck at most major ports was just recently a year-long global boondoggle. I'm not sure you want to argue that it was somehow the best possible solution; the real solution to transferring loads involves replacing union labor with robots. And THAT is much easier to do at a new transfer-location, which can connect to one of the more numerous small ports, for the shorter, local hop that would be needed. Giant ports are only necessary for giant ships, and those are only necessary for long voyages. By switching to 'last-mile' boats, you can go small, which lets you utilize those hundreds of under-utilized small ports, closer to their destination. That sounds like efficiency, not loss.
In regards to your concern for "an entire tech base..." being needed; yes, it is a different tech-set. And, I don't see that as a limitation; the tech required is minimal capital cost, mass, operating labor, and it provides an immense multiple of capital-into-capital, as well as energy-into-energy. (A few hundred kg to lay 200,000 tons of ice each winter is not an 'overwhelmingly exorbitant tech base' that would prevent feasibility. Similarly, spending 1 joule to pump and spray water that transfers 3,200 joules of heat is a simple device with insane energy-yields, not an insurmountable tech-hurdle.)
I like batteries, and I also fear that competing sectors' demand for them will slow our transition; already, California's solar abundance creates perverse daytime rates, driving-out the incentive for more capacity.
It's easier to replace workers with robots in existing ports. There already use automatable heavy machinery for most of the work.
New ports are unlikely to happen with pre-singularity technology - the port is there because a city is there, and the city is there because the port is there. There is an activation threshold to start fresh anywhere else, and a period of time where the competition with existing infrastructure is cheaper.
(Post singularity you probably would just skip right to vacuum trains)
See CATL sodium ion batteries for something that scales arbitrarily where sufficient batteries for all users could be produced.
I agree, pre-existing infrastructure and coagulation of agglomerated capital are a huge inertia to change; that doesn't make the idea itself a bad one. If I had a junker car that was so horrible, it was unable to drive me to the dealership where I could buy a new one, then that does not cause "the car at the dealership isn't worth it." The car at the dealership is still worth-it; I just have a junker that prevents me from attaining that desirable. So, considering that it is the junker which stands in the way, then the fact that "the junker can't get us to the optimum" is actually a good argument against the junker.
This is true in other scenarios, where others often abuse the mistake in reasoning. The stereotypical case is when someone say "We could improve the economy/politics with XYZ" and the responded dismisses the new alternative by saying "But the current system would never let us get to that new alternative - therefore, the new alternative is unattainable, and 'sour grapes' - the new alternative must not be any good."
That line of reasoning is false; in fact, if the current system prevents improvement, that is a strike against the current system, NOT a strike against the improvement.
So, yes, I agree: there is immense inertia in our current system, making Arctic Ice Highways very unlikely - yet that inertia is a sign of the current system's limitations, and those limitations don't "make the ice highway fail to function". I hope we can be clear about those two different claims: "Ice Highway can't work," vs. "Ice Highway would likely never be done in our particular path-dependent timeline ."
"Ice Highway can't work," vs. "Ice Highway would likely never be done in our particular path-dependent timeline ."
Either way they have no utility to any reader here. An article about the theory of a particular class of restrictions on AI, or how to outsmart EMH and potentially earn alpha gets a lot more traction here on lesswrong and engagement. This is because AI obviously isn't an unreachable outcome, it's very reachable and dangerous AGIs may be a real future possibility. Similarly, while beating EMH is hard, you can try right now if you have some money.
As for inertia to change : so there are arguments either way on this. Main thing is that cost isn't just a nominal number, it's reflected in real blood sweat and tears by humans. So picking the investment that has the lowest cost for the return is quite rational.
Now, for certain technologies that we are pretty sure do work, but they are far away in development-space, it is worth massive investments to overcome the barriers in the way.
The thing is, if you write down some of the things that get such massive investments, you will notice a common factor. They promise immense gain. Like not saving 30% of the cost of freight which is a small cost of the cost of a manufactured good, but "increase national GDP 10,000%" (AGI) or "tell our enemies in the middle east to take a hike" (fusion power's promise) or "free energy from the sky" (solar power and the associated batteries).
And that's the issue with your proposal. It's not, in real world terms, enough of a factor. A quick google seemed to say that the percentage cost of freight for all imports to a developed country (so it's the average, obviously the freight cost for a container full of game consoles is a much smaller percentage than for a bulk transport of sand) is about 5%.
Not sure if that includes the port costs.
So even a project to research stable wormholes - if somehow we knew a plausible way to make them - at most makes things 5% cheaper. (If you were trying to make a business case to make money solely with freight. Obviously wormholes would be a game changer and worth almost any cost to develop if we knew they were possible)
If we have singularity level technology and could go for any tech we know about now, obviously robotic mag-lev vacuum trains would be how you do it.
"Either way they have no utility to any reader here."
Inspiration and first drafts are valuable and valid, without needing to be a polished, market-ready, 'perfect' solution. And, the exploration of failure-modes is valuable for generating new ideas which avoid those pitfalls. Discussion of potential options expands the view; the 'Bohmic' dialogues were based on a principle: that we'll need to say "No, because..." to a lot of ideas, and we also need to say "Yes, and..." to create those ideas. The key insight of David Bohm was to do "Yes, and..." FIRST, and "No, because..." SECOND. You want to generate a panoply, then narrow things down. Reversing that order leads to creative stagnation; we end-up begrudging imperfections, without innovating on our own.
I mentioned the strategy for idea-generation in another thread on LessWrong, involving first 'exploration of the design space' to understand what is possible; at that point, none of the ideas need be perfect or best, and you include the bad ones, because of Step Two. Step Two: find the pattern between bad ideas which causes those disparate solutions to suffer from a similar failure. Now, you can better identify the patterns of failure... and there are two other steps, before you might find a good solution! Those are explained here, if you're curious: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mfPHTWsFhzmcXw8ta/?commentId=so7DDoMannPAYDHWb
The point of that process is to include bad ideas, and find patterns, to direct you toward good ones.
For your other point, that "It's not, in real world terms, enough of a factor." A problem is not deemed worthy by the total addressable market; you have to look at the ratio of capital sunk and the rate of return, regardless of total scale. So, while AGI offers +10,000%, and ice-highways might only save 30%, that 30% can be valuable enough if it is afforded at a good rate - that's the real economic constraint. And, that only comes from accounting for all the gains and losses, not 'pointing to a single source of loss to claim that the gains are gone.'
[[Side-Note: it would also be weird if LessWrong refused all the posts which are "not... enough of a factor" compared to AGI, as you do. That's kinda the highest bar imaginable... and most posts are about cute, nuanced little tid-bits, of significantly lower market-value than "5% of total commercial goods' prices"]]
Your lanes are 200m wide, but you'll have trouble with wind direction. If the wind is blowing from directly ahead, or up to about 45deg on either side of that depending on your ship design, you can't sail forward. That's ~25% of wind directions. If your lanes are perfectly straight and the wind is perfectly consistent within a day then that rules out 25% of days, but with a realistic path and variable winds it gets much worse.
This is why you see sailboats tack, and why they're not a good fit for rivers.
My 'lane' was only to estimate density of vessels, to show that they would be very far apart - two minutes until you approach a stopped vessel ahead of you. At 5km wide, the entire plateau would be wide enough to tack. And, the Polar Vortex is persistent; check the weather where it'd happen, instead of assuming an evenly-distributed, equal probability of all orientations.
Tacking seems like it dramatically reduces the capacity of the plateau in practice? Unless you can ensure that all vehicles are moving exactly the same speed avoiding collisions is going to be a lot of work.
Um, check the numbers, again - I gave each ship a 2km by 200m 'zone' around itself, at my measure of full capacity. That's not going to lead to them bumping together; it's a hundred acres per ship. Stopping/maneuvering before you speed past a ship ahead of you? You have 2 and a half minutes to do so, even when they are at a dead-halt. And, you have hundreds of meters to either side. It's bizarre that claims of 'too close' are made, when you don't give pause to the actual measurements involved. It shows a lack of real effort.
Sorry, I'm not saying that ships are going to hit ones on a parallel track, the problem is that once you add tacking ships are interacting with others on perpendicular tracks which is a lot trickier
You're welcome to check the numbers, again - I mentioned "5km wide should be plenty" as an illustration. If tacking led to disruptions, you could easily multiply the width of the ice-lane manifold; as mentioned, a spray-wall 10m tall with a 10m/sec arctic wind (the Polar Vortex there) would produce enough ice to cover a mile wide, 400 feet deep, when compacted... each year. You want it ten miles wide, 100m deep? That'll only take 2.5 years. And, again, the amount of capital required is minimal - a hundred kilos per meter of shoreline, while the amount of ice produced is immense - hundreds of thousands of tons per winter. Similarly, for every 1 joule of energy that you spend spraying water, you are transferring 3,200 joules of heat to the air, as that water freezes. 3,200x inputs is not magically 'too expensive, too hard' just because ships zig-zag as they tack. You could claim that I would need 10x more ice, and that still wouldn't make the design 'impossible' let alone unprofitable.
This also might help:
Given the dimensions of ship and 'lane' I described, then so long as ships turned-about at the edge of the plateau, then they could literally tack back-and-forth more than a HUNDRED times, blindfold, before the average collision. There is an immense amount of space between each vessel, and it's a shame that the commenters on this site don't realize such simple metrics when they claim "you'd crash into each other" - you show a lack of comprehension for the scale involved. Your claim does not stand-up when scrutinized in detail.
Will any of them admit that they were wrong, sans rebuttal? So many commenters here ghost as soon as the flaws in their argument are illuminated... It's a demonstration of their unwillingness to admit fault, which might be related to why they like to frequent a website claiming to absolve them of error - "I must be correct, when I give hand-waving dismissals and I don't account for the details, because I'm a regular of LessWrong." Your site does a worse job of catching fallacious reasoning than the philosophy site I moderated 25 years ago, as a middle-schooler. You're not less wrong than we were; you're a huge step down in quality.
For those who don't want to do the mental math:
With only 2 tons per m2 loading (no stacking) a 500t cargo needs 25m x 10m footprint, which, compared to the 'lane' I gave each vessel, is only 1/20th the width of that lane and only 1/80th the length until the next unit of 'lane'; literally only 1/1,600th of each lane is occupied by vessels, as the 'full capacity' I listed. It's bizarre that tacking would magically absorb so much space that vessels occupying 1/1,600th of the available area would somehow collide.
Realistically, you can stack many tons on each m2 of ice - it can hold a hundred tons reliably. So, if you didn't mind a really tall stack, your 500t ship could occupy a much smaller footprint.
Further, 500t was an easy value to plug-in, for estimates of total annual tonnage delivered. I don't assume that 500t is the optimal scale; doubling each dimension of the ship would only increase its footprint by 4x while providing it with 8x as much room on the ice, 2.8x longer to respond to any disruption or potential collision.
I also have a feeling that "make sure you all don't collide" is a pretty simple math problem for autonomous sailboats. Especially considering that you can geo-fence the track. Rio Tinto has been using autonomous vehicles on their mining sites, precisely because you're unlikely to run over somebody's dog there. Same reasoning applies to a hundred-foot-tall wall of ice at the top of the world; autonomy would allow dense traffic at low capital, again.
I have yet to hear a realistic critique; all these responses stem from the readers' erroneous assumptions, or lack of digesting the scale described. In contrast, I'm scraping my brain for the best ways to solve the real engineering hurdles, like de-crusting the spray nozzles, because particulates exiting the stream would become seeds for ice-crystallization. You know, the actual problems that would happen, if we did it... not imaginary hyperbole like "you'd run into each other, even though there's a mile and a half to maneuver between every ship". The critique I receive on this site is full of fallacies and errors; its commenters are not a reliable source of insight.
It's interesting to see the results of your experiment! It seems that despite the electric kettle being more efficient, the pot on the stove was still able to boil water relatively quickly, although it did use more energy.
As for your question about dedicated 240V outlets in American kitchens for European kettles, it's not very common for homes to have those outlets. In the US, most homes have a 120V system, and higher voltage circuits are typically reserved for heavy-duty appliances like electric stoves, dryers, and air conditioners. It's possible to install a dedicated 240V outlet in a kitchen, but it would require an electrician and would likely be expensive.
Overall, it's good to consider both efficiency and practicality when choosing between an electric kettle and a pot on the stove. Depending on your needs, either option could be a good choice.
regards
revida marcos
This definitely wins in "ignore politics" nomination.
Technical reasons why it is not feasible:
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Ice ships need flat surface, and land is not flat at all. First, you need to build a really wide road, and only then you can cover it with ice. The cost would be astronomical.
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There is no reason to assume ice ships that big are possible. Biggest ice yachts ever build could carry less than 1/100 of this cargo weight, and due to square-cube law, the basic three-skates design cannot be scaled up. "Lots of skates" design was never tried.
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Even if the ice road was free, this would be economically unfeasible due to crew pay. Each ice ship that can carry 500 tonns of cargo would need about the same crew size as container ship that carries 100000 tonns.
Your reasoning is erroneous:
Ice can be accumulated on rugged surfaces, without prior paving. That's how it happens in nature, which is a proof by contradiction. I hope you can admit your claim that "First, you need to build a really wide road, and only then you can cover it with ice" is false.
The structural limits to supporting weight upon solid ice, and supporting weight upon skates, are not magic numbers that no-one could guess. We have charts of material strengths, so you are again wrong when you claim that "Biggest ice yachts ever build could carry less than 1/100 of this cargo weight" - further, "1/100th of this cargo weight" would be only 5 tons. You might want to check your facts on yachts' cargo capacity.
Finally, crew pay is only a tiny fraction of a ship's cost; it's an immense piece of capital, has unfathomably difficult maintenance, and fuel, fuel, fuel. Increasing the crew costs is off-set by eliminating fuel costs, as well as reduced capital-cost per unit payload delivered due to higher velocities along a shorter route. If you actually want to criticize the cost-structure, you have to include the changes to ALL the costs, not just the cherry-pick that says you win. It's embarrassing to have to point this out, when I made all these things explicit in the original.
So we usually don't tone police on LessWrong, but this is such an extreme case that I'm going to break that norm.
Your tone is needlessly rude, and the emphasis here is on "needless". Your rudeness doesn't achieve anything useful.
I think the mistake (at least this is the one I used to make) is to think that being aggressive is bad if you're wrong, but good if you're right. That is not true. Being rude (at least in this context) is bad if you're wrong and bad if you're right. This isn't some kind of washy feel-good message, it's a factual claim about how the world works. Assuming you are 100% correct about every factual item, you will convince fewer people due to your tone.
The reason why rudeness is bad is that you're increasing the social cost for the other person to admit they're wrong. If you're polite, they have to admit they're wrong; if you're rude, they have to admit they're wrong and stupid; admitting wrongness and stupidity is harder than admitting wrongness, hence it's less likely to happen. (Scott Alexander talks about this here.) Hence fewer people will believe your factual points. To the extent that your post would have increased the usage of Ice Ships, your tone will decrease the usage of Ice Ships.
This is even partially justified! Your being needlessly rude shows that you have not figured out truths about persuasion, which, because there is such a thing as general problem solving ability, is evidence about your ability to figure out other things, such as the usability of Ice Ships.
What's beautiful about your comment is how clear-cut all this is. It's like something you could have put into a text book about how not to argue. In your case, your comment can be made way better by only taking out parts of it -- like, literally, you don't need to add a single word. To demonstrate this, I've copied it into paint.net and struck through all the passages that you could have omitted without hurting the substance of your arguments. Here's the result:
Some of these are obvious, others less so. There's real art to not being needlessly offensive because some words like the "unfathomably" just sneak in. But this word is terrible there; it adds nothing and antagonizes the person you're replying to. You really have to train looking over your writing and cutting them out. Or at least I really needed to train this, maybe other people do it naturally.
Don't get me wrong, the comment you're replying to isn't great either; I'd maybe give it a 4/10 on the "avoid needless aggression" metric. But your comment is a 0. And if you want to convince anyone ever, that is a massive problem.
I'm surprised that rudeness is the issue, when fallacies are not; it displays your priorities. If I follow your line of thinking, then I should present myself in whatever way would best manipulate my audience for my own desires. It sounds really icky, and I don't want to follow your norms. Other cultures have been more interested in the fallacies than the rude words, and they did a better job of keeping solid epistemology. When you walk-past fallacies without comment, you are accomplice to them, says Tom Moore. I agree, and I'll point-out a fallacy the same way Voltaire approved: defending your right to say it, without a tone-police to silence you.
Key Concept Note: Strategy vs. Epistemology
:: If LessWrong members walk-past fallacies and errors, unmentioned
:: And LessWrong members enfore tone-police to coerce greater agreement and satisfaction
:: Then - enforcing tone-police is evidenced to NOT bring LessWrong closer to the truth, by the fact that fallacies and errors go unmentioned.
So, you do not become less wrong by enforcing tone; you are not describing an epistemological method for truth. You are asking me to follow a recent, regional culture of extra-polite, as a strategy, by saying "we all ignore whoever isn't polite, so it's in your best interests to obey and sugar-coat." That's a threat of dismissing the speaker regardless of their arguments, which is an ad hominem attack (attacking the speaker, instead of the argument). To insist that I follow your standard of politeness, or else I am ignored, is a hostage scenario. I wasn't running around shouting obscenities; and I won't cow to sugar-coat my words, just to coerce more listeners. The listeners who are swayed by sugar-coating, instead of being swayed by the arguments themselves, are a dubious audience.
it displays your priorities
No it doesn't. I know nothing about the factual question (and I don't intend to change this because I don't care). So I have opinion about the subject matter that could interfere one way or another.
When you walk-past fallacies without comment, you are accomplice to them, says Tom Moore. I agree, and I'll point-out a fallacy the same way Voltaire approved: defending your right to say it, without a tone-police to silence you.
This is a nonsequitor; nothing I said entails changing your factual comments.
If I follow your line of thinking, then I should present myself in whatever way would best manipulate my audience for my own desires. It sounds really icky, and I don't want to follow your norms.
That's very noble. It's also a legitimately interesting dilemma, sort of. Specifically for rationalists, trying to be actively persuasive is considered taboo. Scott Alexander even says this in the post I linked; he draws a distinction between [being manipulative] and [not actively squashing any chance to convince the other person]. Sort of optimize for sounding at least neutral but then stop there.
I don't really have a reason to try to convince you either way though, so ... (shrugs).
"optimize for sounding at least neutral but then stop there."
That's a strategy, not an epistemology. That is the priority which you did, in fact, display. You focus on tone, which shows you value that issue more. I'm not sure how you side-stepped that, by turning what I said into a claim of "nothing I said entails changing your factual comments." I was actually pointing-out that you were trying to coerce a bargain: "We'll ignore you unless you follow our edits, such as calling crew-costs 'tiny' when they are only 5% of expenses." That's not a "dilemma" - it's just unethical. And, you keep pointing to Scott Alexander as an appeal to authority? Or, do you think I'm just unaware of the reasons for extra-polite wording?
I was actually pointing-out that you were trying to coerce a bargain: We'll ignore you unless you follow our edits
... What do you think this site is? There is no "we" or "our". Not a single person on this site will particularly care about what I think on this. And it goes against my honor to downvote you out of spite, which means I have zero leverage over you.
I was giving you advice because I saw you doing something that I know is self-desctructive. But you've exhausted my good will with this comment so I'm no longer going to do this conversation.
I don't appreciate unsolitced advice on how you'd prefer I communicate; as I mentioned, your norms of politeness are a recent, regional change, where you consider it "self-destructive" that I referred to the 5% spending on ship's crew as "tiny". That's bizarre.
You then conveniently ignore the core of my point, again: you hoped to coerce the bargain, by saying I should be ignored if I don't meet your standards of communications, regardless of the merits of my arguments. You specifically said "Hence fewer people will believe your factual points." Yet, if there is some person Bob, who ignores the factual points, then I know I don't need to convince him; he is fooled by appearances, and fails to appreciate the facts. Bob won't be able to provide any valuable insight or substantive critique of the concept itself. I notice you won't be able to provide any valuable insight into the factual points and concept, either. I hope to avoid such people, so I am glad that you take your unsolicited advice away! :)
"A British person would see hedging around a difficult issue as politeness and civility, whereas a Dutch person might see the same thing as actually dishonest." - BBC's recent explainer clip "Why the Dutch Always Say What They Mean"
What Rafael referred to as "self-destructive" is considered appropriate in other cultures, and has absolutely nothing to do with epistemology. It belongs on LessRude, not LessWrong.
A great explainer on this concept of "unsolicited advice on a tangent I don't value, which is then a reason to throw-up-hands in disgust" is Theramintrees' video on the Martyr, "When Saviors Go Bad"
The concept Theramintrees discusses which is relevant is this:
The Savior-Complex rushes-in, offering help which that recipient did NOT ask for (in this case, I did not ask for "advice on the tone and presentation" - Rafael decided on his own that my tone "needs saving!"). Then, when the recipient is not gracious and fawning for the Savior's help, that Savior declares their target 'the problem' and the Savior rushes-off in anger, to target another person with their unsolicited and irrelevant 'help'.
[[Personal Examples of The Strategy of Politeness being Counter-Productive to Valuable Critique of a Concept: When I would dress-up, and say only polite things, going to the Innovation Oakland meet-ups to hob-nob with the Mayor and all the local techies, I quickly learned something - dress down. When you dress-up, every money-hunting idiot flocks to you, and believes any crazy idea you make-up on the spot, because they are gullible and uninformed. They will never provide you with valuable insight into your work. They suck-up your time and attention, and you end-up NOT talking to the scruffy engineer who would tell you why, specifically, your design sucks. You need to hear that engineer's critique - and the only way to get it is by dressing down . Now, you scare-away all the folks who can only read a book by its cover! ONLY the scruffy engineer will talk to you, because she doesn't care about appearances - she wants to hear your details, and tear you apart. :)
Similarly, if there are two people in an audience, Alice and Bob, and Alice will focus on the reasoning and evidence, while Bob focuses on tone. In 25 years of experience, I have never heard valuable critique of the concept from any of the Bobs - tell me if you've heard one! They complain about tone and presentation, without insights into the design; I have to meet their standards, or I should be ignored, regardless of the merits of my arguments. Alice is actually the only person I WANT to talk to. So, when you claim that "Being extra polite will win Bob to your side..." well, I don't want Bob on my side; those guys clutter things up and get in the way, without providing valuable insight into the problem itself. I ONLY want to appeal to Alice, who as stated originally is not focused on tone.]]
All of these are simply wrong.
First, ice accumulated over terrain would not be flat. You can search how Alaskan glaciers look like, no way an ice ship can move on that. It is not necessary to pave the road - the problem is that to make an even surface, huge amount of ground has to be moved.
Second, yes, no recorded iceboat carried more than few tons of cargo, including crew.
Third, crew pay is around 5% of operating cost of a container ship. Even if it takes 50 iceships to replace it (due to higher speed and shorter way), then crew pay alone would more than double total operating cost. As for capital cost, lots of small ships are more expensive than one big ship.
You originally claimed that "First, you need to build a really wide road, and only then you can cover it with ice." Then, you switch to saying "It is not necessary to pave the road - the problem is that to make an even surface, huge amount of ground has to be moved." Both are still strange claims; when ice is accumulated hundreds of feet thick, the surface texture beneath it is irrelevant.
You also insisted, strangely, that "ice accumulated over terrain would not be flat. You can search how Alaskan glaciers look like, no way an ice ship can move on that." Why would an ice highway accumulated in the way I described necessarily have a surface identical to natural, untended glaciers? You never explained what would prevent flattening the ice as I had originally described. Your claim lacks any support... at all.
And, you said originally that "There is no reason to assume ice ships that big are possible." You seem to be confusing the limitations of a ship on lake ice, which can crack under heavy loads, compared to what I described - ice on land, a hundred feet thick. There is, in fact, no metric of materials strength which implies failure at 500 tons; it is wrong to assume that the skates, or the frame, or the ice, would magically fail at hundreds of times less than their ultimate compressive strength. It is, by metrics of material strength, entirely reasonable to assume ships that large are possible. Check the numbers; your claim of "no reason" has no merit.
Let's also assess crew pay, because you multiply the entire crew, which includes engineers, etc. A TEU costs $500 to send between Germany and South Korea, and weighs 25 tons; $20 per ton. So, a five-day haul across the Arctic, with 500 tons aboard, would be priced competitively with a revenue of 500*20 = $10,000. In five days. For shifts of pilots, each paid $60K annually, or $30/hr (which is good pay in Russia! Multiple times average...) in 120 hours cost $3,600, which is only 36% of the revenue. Consider, also, that folks pay a premium for higher velocities - not just for perishables; being able to get-ahead-of their competitors, especially. Further, refrigerated cargo pays a premium, too! So, the rates that an Arctic line could charge would naturally be a higher average, even if a portion of their cargo didn't need speed or freeze (because you still want to operate at maximum capacity). That'd push the crew-members' cost percentage down further.
You've made repeatedly false claims, unsupported, and you ignore the numbers. I'd hoped for intelligent critique on a forum calling itself 'Less' wrong; I'll have to go back to talking to real engineers.
I assumed that ice layer is supposed to be a few feet thick, and given figures are just for illustration that that amount of ice is trivial to make. If the plan really is to build an artificial glacier hundreds of feet thick, that creates a different set of problems, the first being that described structure wouldn't do it. Depending on temperature and wind speed, ice will either be carried away by wind, form an ice hill that would grow until it blocks nozzles, or accumulate on scaffolding until it collapses under its weight.
The problem with heavy iceboat is that its weight has to be distributed evenly on numerous skates, because otherwise skates that are more heavily loaded dig deeper and friction increases drastically. Such design was never built.
Your calculation of expenses relies on three assumptions: that this is an end-to-end route, that it takes 120 hours, and that it takes one pilot to drive an iceship (of this size and in these conditions). All of these are wrong. As for refrigeration - a much larger fraction of cargo types doesn't tolerate freezing.
"I assumed that ice layer is supposed to be a few feet thick, and given figures are just for illustration that that amount of ice is trivial to make."
Um, if I have illustrated that "the amount of ice is trivial to make," then you are agreeing that it would be trivial to add more, which negates the original argument you made. So, it seems like you've just picked-up your goal posts and started walking away with them.
"Depending on temperature and wind speed, ice will either be carried away by wind, form an ice hill that would grow until it blocks nozzles, or accumulate on scaffolding until it collapses under its weight."
You may not have noticed, in my original post, that I pointed to exactly why the Polar Vortex, blowing continual sub-zero winds off the Arctic waters, onto the land, would be exactly what is needed to "be carried away be the wind" and "form an ice hill". Yes! That is exactly the natural process which constructs the necessary mound, and as the mound grows in size, there is what is called a "Cliff-Effect" that accelerates that wind (it's really just Venturi Effect and a change in orientation), causing the ice to be carried to the far side, widening AWAY from you - THAT is what prevents the scaffold from being covered, and prevents the ice from blocking the nozzles. The wind carries the ice away from nozzles, NOT toward the nozzles. I hope you can visualize that process: there is no physical way for 'straight-line winds' to blow the newly-formed ice onto the scaffold or nozzles. And, as the ice downwind accrues, then velocities over the top will increase, carrying the new ice to the FAR side, such that it does not obstruct your spray. This is actual engineering; I hope you can see how it works.
"heavily loaded dig deeper and friction increases drastically."
That is incorrect. When ice is pressed-upon by skates "digging deeper", their pressure causes momentary melting, and that melt-water is precisely what LOWERS friction. If you fail to press-down upon the ice firmly enough, you cannot form a hydroplane.
Further, you can observe the depth dug in passage of a ship, with a given load per cm2 footprint. For the "500t vessel" I described, as I mentioned in other areas of the comments, you could fit all that on a 10m x 25m vessel at only 2 tons per m2. That is not such an immense increase in weight that it would somehow get the vessels "stuck", and yes, many skates can be placed along the bottom in parallel. And, because no one has built an ice boat so large (which is due to lake ice constraints, NOT material-strength constraints) no one needed to try extra skates. You have yet to present a plausible situation where 'more skates' leads to impossible-to-surmount design-failure. You only claim that more skates is a failure, without saying what would make it fail; a claim without support or explanation. "All of these are wrong" you say, without a word to what makes me wrong. You are not providing insight or valuable critique; you are making unsupported claims.
Run the numbers, like I did; this produces many hundreds of times more infrastructure, per unit equipment. It's more capital-efficient. Do you understand that concept? Because if you do, you can check the numbers: that will answer your question.
For those who don't want to do the mental math:
With only 2 tons per m2 loading (no stacking) a 500t cargo needs 25m x 10m footprint, which, compared to the 'lane' I gave each vessel, is only 1/20th the width of that lane and only 1/80th the length until the next unit of 'lane'; literally only 1/1,600th of each lane is occupied by vessels, as the 'full capacity' I listed. It's bizarre that tacking would magically absorb so much space that vessels occupying 1/1,600th of the available area would somehow collide.
Realistically, you can stack many tons on each m2 of ice - it can hold a hundred tons reliably. So, if you didn't mind a really tall stack, your 500t ship could occupy a much smaller footprint.
Further, 500t was an easy value to plug-in, for estimates of total annual tonnage delivered. I don't assume that 500t is the optimal scale; doubling each dimension of the ship would only increase its footprint by 4x while providing it with 8x as much room on the ice, 2.8x longer to respond to any disruption or potential collision.
I also have a feeling that "make sure you all don't collide" is a pretty simple math problem for autonomous sailboats. Especially considering that you can geo-fence the track. Rio Tinto has been using autonomous vehicles on their mining sites, precisely because you're unlikely to run over somebody's dog there. Same reasoning applies to a hundred-foot-tall wall of ice at the top of the world; autonomy would allow dense traffic at low capital, again.
I have yet to hear a realistic critique; all these responses stem from the readers' erroneous assumptions, or lack of digesting the scale described. In contrast, I'm scraping my brain for the best ways to solve the real engineering hurdles, like de-crusting the spray nozzles, because particulates exiting the stream would become seeds for ice-crystallization. You know, the actual problems that would happen, if we did it... not imaginary hyperbole like "you'd run into each other, even though there's a mile and a half to maneuver between every ship". The critique I receive on this site is full of fallacies and errors; its commenters are not a reliable source of insight.
~ constant winds carry ships FAST on Arctic ice-highways, easily made! ~
TL;DR — Ice Ships are frickin’ insane. With a mast and sail, a wide flat body, and innumerable skates, these sailboats are able to haul tonnage across frozen lakes and glaciers at up to 85 miles per hour! They regularly attain 5x wind-speeds; an 8mph breeze across the North shores of Canada and Russia would propel huge fleets 40mph with NO FUEL. An Ice-HIGHWAY covering the beaches of the Arctic shores could replace much of international shipping! Get rid of that huge fuel-cost, AND go carbon-neutral. All while traveling more than TWICE the speed of normal container ships, along a route from Finland to just north of Japan in less than five days — a SHORTER distance than the Suez circuit! So, how do you pile all that ice onto the land? Enough ice to sail over the TOP of a mountain in Siberia? Easy:
Reflect the sunlight of summer with thin Mylar tarps to bake limestone, and add a little water to that lime powder in the winter (infinitely re-useable ‘quicklime’!), to power spray-nozzles held high on aluminum frames. A single square yard of Mylar, in one summer, can power enough pumping and spray to lay Hundreds of TONS of ice, EACH winter. In less than a decade, a few tens of thousands crewmembers could build and operate transit from northern Norway and Finland across all of Russia, inland to Yakutsk, down the coastline of the Sea of Okhotsk toward Japan, as well as across the Bering Strait to Alaska and then down the side of Hudson Bay to connect with the Great Lakes/Mississippi canal systems. Europe, Asia, and North America, with their Gigatons of shipping per year, would only need an ice-highway a few miles wide, a couple years to build at each site. That’s the bulk of international shipping, which is a BIG slice of the Carbon-Pie. And speeding-up those routes increases their value, while allowing the same number of ships and crew to deliver MORE goods, making more money and offering lower shipping rates, which help everyone. Details, next…
Ice Sailing
Ice Boats began popping-up in the Great Lakes more than a century ago; at the time, they were the fastest vehicles on earth. Huge ships were built, to haul tonnage between the major ports of the northern States and Canada, efficient to operate and able to carry heavier loads in proportion to their structural demands — the load is carried by the skates on the ice, and the wide, low frame. In contrast, a ship in water feels the continual surface-pressures everywhere, being submerged in water, which require all sorts of cross-members to prevent the walls from folding-inwards! Ice-boats are more ‘capital-efficient’ — they pay for themselves faster. Especially by traveling twice as fast, at minimum! Consider this: if your shipping company does $1,000 in business, at ‘5% margins’, meaning you had to spend $950 on operations & fuel, then your profits were only $50. Yet, you switch to ice-ships, delivering TWICE as many loads, WITHOUT fuel — you earn $2,000. If you still spend $950, then your profits are now $1,050… that’s a lot better than $50. You’re doing twice the volume of business, but earning 21x as much profits!
The main draw-backs of ice-sailing are — poor conditions (ice-surface AND wind) and a lack of ice *connecting* important locations. Well, we can solve those with good engineering and design. By manufacturing smooth-surface ice on *land*, instead of waiting for the lakes to freeze, we can connect the high Arctic… which is *constantly* windy, due to the ‘Polar Vortex’. If we build the ice along ‘narrow’ paths to connect with major oceanic ports and rail networks, keeping the surface clear and smooth, then international shipping can go green, cut costs, and re-build a few glaciers all at once.
Making Ice
You’ve probably seen videos of people pouring water outside when it’s really cold. That’s the gist of it. But bigger. You can pump water just a short distance from shores and rivers, lakes, spraying it into the air to mix with the sub-zero chill quickly. How much ice are we talking about? Let’s check: there’s 1.2kg of air per m3 volume, so in a 10m/sec wind, spraying to an elevation of 10m, then EACH single meter-wide stretch of spray-wall is able to interact with 100m3 of air per second (because 10m tall sees 10m pass through it per second, the wind speed), which is 120kg of air. If the air temperature is -10c then that’s >40kJ/kg of heat it can absorb, even from near-freezing waters. 40kJ/kg… multiplied by 120kg/sec… is 4.8 MEGAjoules of heat-absorption per SECOND. And that’s just from a 1-meter long stretch of a spray-wall covering the shoreline.
But, how much energy would we be *using* to pump that spray? The air steals-away 4.8 MegaWatts for us, but if we have to *spend* megawatts to do it, it’s no benefit. Well, 4.8 Megajoules is enough to freeze 15kg of water… so a single meter length of spray-wall would need to pump 15kg every second, during the windy winter. Spraying to a height of 10m requires 100joules/kg… so 15kg/sec spray needs only 1.5kW — that’s a 2 horsepower pump. Dinky!
Recap for a moment, before we tally up the big numbers: We use a 2 horsepower pump to spray 15kg of water every second, up to 10m into the air, which absorbs 4.8 Megajoules of heat into the air every second. And that is from a 1 meter-wide section of aluminum-scaffold spray-wall. Spending 1,500 joules every second, we freeze 4,800,000 joules every second; that is, for every ONE unit of energy we spend, we receive 3,200 units of energy toward ice-formation. 3,200-times more is a pretty good energy ratio. :)
So, if that 1 meter wide section of aluminum spray-wall is pumping 15kg a second, for the long 6 months of cold above the Arctic Circle, then that’s 15,000,000 seconds, for 225,000 TONS of ice, in ONE winter. You could let the wind lay the drift of frozen droplets a mile-wide, and it would still stack, compressed, 400 feet DEEP. From a sprayer & frame only three feet wide.
There are around 10,000km of coastlines, scoured by glaciers, with sparse vegetation that grows only 80 days a year, minimal diversity, barren. We should put those glaciers BACK, in a way that gets rid of a chunk of global carbon exhaust! 10,000km of spray-nozzles and aluminum frames, weighing perhaps a few hundred kg per meter of distance traveled, would weigh an entire Megaton in total. That is actually small, compared to global construction — the Three Gorges Dam was FIFTY Megatons of concrete. This spray-wall equipment would be small-potatoes, in terms of infrastructure demands, while they would *create* a massive ice-infrastructure at low cost. 225,000 Tons of ice EACH year, from a few pounds of Mylar and framing.
To avoid hauling-in fuel for the pumps, we need to *re-use* limestone. Once you bring enough tons of limestone to the site, you NEVER need to bring more fuel. Each summer, Mylar reflectors gently bake the limestone, causing a chemical reaction that converts it into ‘quicklime’. This can be stored safely, without LOSING any energy, until deep in winter. When you add water to the quicklime, the chemical reaction reverses, releasing HEAT to power an electric generator. Once the quicklime has absorbed all the water, it has converted back into hydrated lime. Just bake it next summer, and you can use it all over again, a stable thermal battery at ultra-low cost. Limestone is also found in huge deposits scattered all over the place, so you don’t have to ship supplies from far away, and there won’t be any shortages. (Entire regions of continents are covered hundreds of feet deep, and you never need to get MORE because you keep re-using the original lime you brought.) Quicklime is NOT an efficient fuel — but it’s scalable, local, stupefyingly cheap, and Mylar makes the summer sun an efficient *local* source of power. In the summer, the sun is out extra-long, so tilting arrays of Mylar works even better than normal!
Sergei Yurko has been testing innumerable innovative designs for cheap, simple Mylar power systems — and he has costs down to less than a dollar per square meter. To power the 1.5kW spray mentioned earlier, we would need 150 meters depth of mylar reflectors, running parallel to the ice-highway initially. Once the ice has been laid, move the solar reflectors on TOP of the ice, during the summer, to keep the ice shaded and cool. The amount of sunlight reflected equals ‘energy that you DON’T need to spend re-freezing the next winter’; Mylar reflectors count *double* as fuel AND shade that prevents melting. For the 10,000km of ice-highway, that’s 1.5 billion m2 of Mylar, at Sergei’s price of $1 per m2: $1.5 Billion, to power the creation and maintenance of 6,000 miles of super-highway. That is dirt-cheap infrastructure! Boston’s big tunnel cost $14 Billion, nearly TEN times more expensive than Sergei’s solar reflectors for the entire ice-highway I propose. The spray-equipment for making the ice will cost a bit more, but that still puts the project well below the cost of Texas’ new sea-wall upgrade billed at $30 Billion, to protect some portions of their coastline.
Volumes of Traffic and Efficiencies
If a ship hauls 500 tons at 50km/hr from North of St. Petersburg across some 10,000km of ice to Yakutsk, then over the mountains to Okhotsk, it will take them 200 hours to cover the distance — just four days and four hours. So, if ships are ‘crowded’ in their lane at a distance of 2km highway per ship (a stopping-distance of 2km would give them more than two minutes to maneuver or halt)… then we have 5,000 ships x2 directions, each hauling 500 tons every five days. (10,000 ships x 500 tons x 70 trips/yr) = 350 Megatons/yr delivered. And, that’s per *lane* of shipping. An ice highway can be miles wide, quickly, providing DOZENS of lanes, frequent rest stops, etc. If most of the materials moving between Asia, Europe, and North America are upon ice-floes, that immense volume of traffic will be worth providing services en-route. With a bit more than 10 billion tons of goods loaded on ships every year, globally, we can split those between the Russian and Canadian lines — then, each ice-highway needs only 15 lanes to carry everything we currently carry on the seas! Of course, a large portion of global shipping is still necessary for everywhere ELSE, so I would consider the ice-highway ‘completed’ with just ten lanes in each direction. If each lane is 200m wide, that’s 4km. Add the slopes on either side, which melt more in the summer — a 3-mile wide glacier-highway is plenty for the whole world.
That’s 50,000 km2 of surface to maintain, across the Finland-to-Yakutsk route alone. But, you can plant enormous Zambonis on such thick solid ice, packed onto the frozen ground. If you Zamboni 5 square meters per second, then in a 2,000hr worker-year (7.2 million seconds) you’ll have touched-up 36 square kilometers — about 14 square miles per driver, each year. So, the entire highway’s maintenance needs 3,500 Zamboni-drivers, to sustain 10 Gigatons of shipping… an average of 1 driver-year’s salary and mech, for every 3 Million TONS of cargo. That’s cheap maintenance! And, every year the sun bakes more limestone, to pump more water, to make the ice that much thicker. Scaling is easy.
[[Oh, and while we’re at it: can we please put massive arrays of Nuclear Reactors in the center of Greenland? Out on top of 2 miles of ice, any melt-down will become frozen, held safe. So, we don’t have to over-engineer for safety as much, which brings costs down *dramatically*. We could cheaply build dozens of Gigawatts of power out there, and use that energy, plus air and water on-site, to produce AMMONIA — the production of ammonia for fertilizers globally uses a big chunk of our energy, carbon emissions! Denmark owns Greenland, and I hear they like green energy… if you know of any Danes, I’d love to nudge their brains in that direction!]]