Is it possible to calculate from that data the total surface area of all roofs? I think there is paint that converts solar energy into radiation that goes straight back into space. I wonder if using that paint on a significant percentage of buildings would matter.
Llamamoe 1 hours ago [-]
Are you perhaps thinking of radiative cooling, e.g. paint that reflects close to 100% of all light, excluding the spectrum at which room-temperature objects radiate heat, resulting in a net cooling effect?
They reflect almost all sunlight, so the surface doesn’t heat up.
At the same time, they emit thermal radiation in a specific infrared range (around 8–13 micrometers) that can pass through the Earth’s atmosphere and escape into space.
Such paint can make surfaces cooler than the surrounding air, even in sunlight.
So it doesn’t convert solar energy into another form — it selectively reflects and emits infrared radiation that sends heat directly into space.
chasing0entropy 5 days ago [-]
AI is responsible for 60% of all internet traffic this morning, OP is the other 40%.
But on a serious note this is an interesting project highlighting the sheer volume of power usage across the world. .. I'm also curious given the data and power usage, if AI assisted heatmap is actually more accurate than one developed by downloading a single dataset of high resolution satellite imagery at night, performing algorithmic analysis to draw heatmap based on light output or !maybe even simple image processing downsampling the image and shifting white-blue to red?
marklit 5 days ago [-]
70% of daytime RGB sat imagery is covered by clouds. I'm not sure how easy it would be to spot if clouds were covering a city's lights at night.
I've only seen Maxar publish one night time image and that was of Dubai. I suspect smaller buildings in not so well lit areas could end up getting missed out.
SAR imagery would work well for seeing at night and through clouds but I'm not sure what the state of AI building footprint detection is with SAR atm.
chasing0entropy 4 days ago [-]
Fascinating. So no such satellite data exists. Thanks for the insight, makes the linked write up much more satisfying.
Qem 7 hours ago [-]
> The United Nations (UN) believes there are 4B buildings on Earth. This week, a dataset called "GlobalBuildingAtlas" (GBA) was published by researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) that attempts to estimate this number at being closer to 2.75B.
If we painted the roofs on all of them white, by how much would the temperature of the planet drop?
jl6 3 hours ago [-]
Probably not as much as if we “painted” them black with solar panels and used the resulting electricity to displace fossil fuel burning.
I would love to have an air conditioning / cooling solution that is directly linked to solar panels with no batteries involved. Like the sun shines, we get electricity, we do the work. My main goal for this thought experiment is to come up with uses of solar electricity that is resilient to the unpredictable and unreliable energy generation from solar. Thoughts?
taskforcegemini 2 hours ago [-]
I think we should do more albedo engineering. like white roads and car roofs.
Llamamoe 1 hours ago [-]
White roads could potentially be blinding, but yeah something lighter than what we do currently could be very worthwhile. It'd have much higher nighttime visibility too.
Razengan 44 minutes ago [-]
> White roads could potentially be blinding
Hell I was just walking down the street a minute ago and thinking the same! It's October ffs! (It IS October right?)
antonvs 3 hours ago [-]
I would guess not that much - certainly fractions of a degree - because the proportion of the planet's surface is still relatively low, and as much as 60% of that reflected light would be scattered and absorbed by the atmosphere.
It'd have a much bigger impact if all those roofs had solar panels, and the resulting electricity was used to replace carbon-emitting energy sources.
john01dav 2 hours ago [-]
Paris and other climate accords have much ado about fractions of a degree, leading me to believe that that's highly consequential.
jtwaleson 3 hours ago [-]
Ok a bit off topic but isn't a 1200W PSU overkill for this system? For a 9950X and 1080, 500W seems plenty.
marklit 43 minutes ago [-]
I'm hoping to use most of this system for the next 10 years. At some point, I want to add some beefy GPUs to it when I get back into 3D again.
nixass 3 hours ago [-]
I see it says Corsair so cannot tell what exact model it is but I did relatively similar thing.
Reason being if you keep the load under certain wattage the PSU will run in passive cooling mode. My rig will never reach 50% of what Corsair SF750 Platinum can deliver and not mention in normal light load circumstances. It spins up its fans only when the load reaches ~300W or so.
Some people are very anal about any kind of noise coming out of their rigs. I personally undervolt everything to keep the fans at bay/minimum and having extra legroom in PSU department helps a lot
Razengan 36 minutes ago [-]
I remember reading something interesting, in a good way, but I'm not sure whether it's fully accurate: That the majority of the planet (land, not counting water) is still unpopulated by people.
Can someone verify?
jongjong 3 hours ago [-]
Kind of crazy to think that there are almost half as many buildings as people and yet me and my wife can't even afford the deposit to buy a single one on a mortgage after 10 years of saving, hustling hard, taught myself to code, got a university degree, worked in the tech sector, near the forefront of all the hot tech tends... Meanwhile, all this time, I'm told I'm privileged. I must be the victim of some kind of massive PsyOp conspiracy.
dyauspitr 2 hours ago [-]
You can buy a small house in rural America for $25,000
trallnag 2 hours ago [-]
Rural Russia as well. But you will probably have to get your water from a well and poop into a latrine.
Rendered at 10:32:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
E.g. [Revolutionary Paint: How to Make Surfaces Stay Cool in the Sun](https://youtu.be/dNs_kNilSjk)
Yes, from chatgpt:
These are so-called “radiative cooling paints.”
Here’s how they work:
They reflect almost all sunlight, so the surface doesn’t heat up.
At the same time, they emit thermal radiation in a specific infrared range (around 8–13 micrometers) that can pass through the Earth’s atmosphere and escape into space.
Such paint can make surfaces cooler than the surrounding air, even in sunlight.
So it doesn’t convert solar energy into another form — it selectively reflects and emits infrared radiation that sends heat directly into space.
But on a serious note this is an interesting project highlighting the sheer volume of power usage across the world. .. I'm also curious given the data and power usage, if AI assisted heatmap is actually more accurate than one developed by downloading a single dataset of high resolution satellite imagery at night, performing algorithmic analysis to draw heatmap based on light output or !maybe even simple image processing downsampling the image and shifting white-blue to red?
I've only seen Maxar publish one night time image and that was of Dubai. I suspect smaller buildings in not so well lit areas could end up getting missed out.
SAR imagery would work well for seeing at night and through clouds but I'm not sure what the state of AI building footprint detection is with SAR atm.
If we painted the roofs on all of them white, by how much would the temperature of the planet drop?
Hell I was just walking down the street a minute ago and thinking the same! It's October ffs! (It IS October right?)
It'd have a much bigger impact if all those roofs had solar panels, and the resulting electricity was used to replace carbon-emitting energy sources.
Some people are very anal about any kind of noise coming out of their rigs. I personally undervolt everything to keep the fans at bay/minimum and having extra legroom in PSU department helps a lot
Can someone verify?