Day 5

Today was eventful.

The day mostly was doing hands on testing of the ROV thrusters to see how hard I could push them before they exploded. Even though I was deliberately pushing things to the point where they might explode, burn out, light on fire (maybe not that), I still got startled. Stress testing is like an adult jack-in-the-box except it makes a loud boom and smells like burnt out capacitors (they actually smell like shit. 2/10 inhalation experience).

We’re running the motors out of spec so I needed to find their new limits using our setup. I managed to push a motor all the way to 580ish watts of power consumption before I fried the voltage regulator. At least I hope I only fried the voltage regulator.

The other project I’m working on is trying to come up with a way to protect the thrusters from getting jammed with seaweed. And to be totally honest I think I’m over my head. I know very little about fluid dynamics but from what I have surmised I am stuck with two diametrically opposed objectives. On the one hand we want to “filter” the water from any seaweed before it reaches the thruster. However the more we filter the water, the less thrust we have. I have a ridiculous idea that I want to try but it’s probably a dead end. Honestly I’m fighting the laws of physics and don’t think there’s much I can do. So I’ll have to make something that doesn’t work that great.

Okay but the crazy thing that happened today. I was having lunch in the break room and a guy sitting at the table was telling how he launched balloons with sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to slow climate change. This is a form of geoengineering where the SO2 aerosol (I learned this means a bunch of fine particles suspended in air) basically reflects sunlight back into space, thereby cooling the earth. So I knew this was an idea that existed for awhile, but people are genuinely you know, afraid of destroying life on earth as we know it. It sounds like that start of a science horror film where a scientist releases gas into the atmosphere that ends up destroying life as we know it. But it is nowhere close that dangerous, and to my surprise, I learned that the process is temporary so at least there’s no permanent damage done. Anyways so I thought this was on of those things that would forever just be an idea that collects dust.

Until a few months ago, back home in Connecticut, I read in Make Magazine about this guy who was taking matters into his own hands and releasing the aerosol. Now the surprising thing about this aerosol is that you only need a few million dollars worth of it every few years in order to undo the effects of man made global warming. And would you believe the look on my face when by complete coincidence, the guy who wrote that article, a recent college grad, was eating his lunch directly in front of me. By his own words, there are only “about three geoengineers in the entire world”. First of all, this magazine is not that popular. The chances that I met this guy at my workplace and also read this article feel astronomically small. I mean I’m right next to silicon valley, so maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, but it still feels unlikely if you consider that he is 1 out of 7 billion people on earth. An even crazier coincidence is that he also went to college in Connecticut, so at some point the distance between us was less than 100 miles. Better yet he’s going to be visiting my workplace frequently over the next month.