We get free coffee in the offices but it sucks and you have to pay for everything else (including good coffee).

This looks like it could have been caused by water penetrating a softer substance, causing it to harden, and then the surrounding material was removed by erosion.

still very cool but yeah I doubt its a biological.

Yes, but it will be orders of magnitude less than the sum total energy of solar energy across the total surface of the earth.

Yeah. All civilization consumes around 17 TW of energy while the sun is constantly bombarding the Earth with 173,000 TW.

We could rebase all of civilization on geothermal and the extra heat in the atmosphere would be a rounding error to the sun's energy.

I don't think "it's a rounding error" is enough analysis here. A couple of meters of sea level rise, a couple of degrees temperature rise; these could be termed rounding errors.

Not degrees, thousandths of a degree, so possibly something like a centimeter if sea level rise.

Considering nuclear and fossil fuels directly release stored energy and solar increase albido this isn’t a 1:1 increase in energy. Further the earth radiates more energy from hot places than cool, still you can approximate it as something like:

Black body radiation is temperature in kelvin to the 4th power. (285 * (170,017^0.25 / 170,000^0.25) - 285) is an increase of ~0.007 C / (whatever our current percentage of energy from fossil fuels, nuclear, or solar).

It's far less than the variance of direct solar irradiation hitting the Earth given varying differences in distance from the sun in the Earth's orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant#Solar_irradianc...

It looks like direct solar radiance is actually 173,000 TW plus or minus 6,000 TW.

So if our energy consumption increases by 4% per year (current global average) for ~110 years, we'd need to capture / produce as much energy as the Sun hits us with. Crazy!

That would also mean going from kilowatts per person to megawatts per person, so yeah that's pretty crazy.

Similarly:

Nuclear power plants, as nearly all power plants, work by heating water. That heat has to go somewhere eventually.

But the amounts you'd need to make any difference to the atmosphere (compared to solar radiation) would be truly humongous.

I don't know if this would be any extra heat, because the radioactive material would already be decaying anyway if it was left in its natural state. Maybe the same problem where radioactive material would be left mostly underground and insulated where its heat would leak slowly.

Then again, part of the Earth's core heat comes form radioactive decay. So in a way, geothermal is an indirect form of nuclear fission.

Nuclear power plants don't just capture the energy from natural decay.

Though the precise mechanism doesn't matter too much for my comment. Just assume I'm talking about fusion plants.

burner-inserter loops aren't a bad way to dispose of wooden power poles after refactoring your early base. I usually just set up a logistics chest to request some and then feed them into the burner inserter loop.

I built a python library warhammer-stats for the Warhammer 40k tabletop game because all the other tools sucked. It is still the only 40k stats tool that can deterministically calculate the entire probability mass function for attack damage.

I then wrote an iOS app, Stats Hammer, because I wanted to use it on my phone and wanted to learn some swift.

Both are free for anybody to use and it warms my heart to see people using them, but I don't really care if either succeeds because I got what I wanted out of them