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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Luckily, high temperatures correlate very highly with high solar power availability.

They should open some warehouses with great insulation and some solar panels and AC. Maybe some stores too. :p

I did some math once and it might be possible, given some fancy material science, to create a suit with its own AC that’s powered by a 5x2ft foldable solar panel.

The only issue is that this is entirely theoretical and no one makes a sufficiently small AC. I think you only needed about half a BTU or so

If it weren’t for cultural issues it would be more popular and cheaper to simply wear a climate controlled suit rather than have AC. There are also some comfort issues that would need to be resolved I suppose.

(For the curious the actual AC portion, fan and coolant would be in a backpack would be in a backpack like device)

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> If it weren’t for cultural issues it would be more popular and cheaper to simply wear a climate controlled suit rather than have AC. There are also some comfort issues that would need to be resolved I suppose.

Yay! Now we need space suits to survive on our own planet. Go Humanity!

> Now we need space suits to survive on our own planet.

Well, coats kind of already were...

One would die without 'space suit' outdoors in Montreal in January. That was the case before industrialization as well.

Talk about false analogies. The "space suit" you needed to survive outside in Montreal in January can be basically home-made from cheap, abundant material. Our ancestors figured that out with no tech. In comparison, if it's too hot, only expensive technology can save you, which is out of reach of billions of poor people.

Our ancestor figured out air climatisation as well https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180926-an-ancient-engin...

Point is that way more people die from cold than from heat.

https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/hot-cold-and-deadl....

> Our ancestor figured out air climatisation as well

This is a large, expensive structure, proving my point. You can't just wear more free animal skins and be fine.

> Point is that way more people die from cold than from heat.

That is the point in Montreal, but that is not the point in Vietnam. Their climate is precariously hot already (with high wet bulb temperatures, unlike in Iran), so a small imbalance in the upper extremes can kill a lot of poor people who don't have access to A/C. That should be no problem in 30 years if they are allowed to migrate to cooler countries, but the conservatives inside those colder countries have and will effectively ban that possibility for the large majority of them due to xenophobic attitudes. It's a rather disgusting situation given that these are the same people that lobbied for the pro-fossil fuel policies that will have put these people in the hot Global South in that predicament to begin with.

Neal Stephenson calls them earthsuits in Termination Shock.

Are you serious? Cultural issues like people not wanting to wear a heavy thick noisy suit completely isolating them from the world at all times. Comfort issues like wearing a heavy thick noisy suit isolating you from the world at all times. The fuck.

I'd say it's more a character issue, but I can see how someone who either speaks English as a second language or is part of some subculture who likes wearing isolation suits a la furries would call it "culture"

More of a counterculture really.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be uncomfortable

To be clear, the Fremen should not be an aspirational goal.

They, at least, got to have spice, and potentially prescient powers.

But we're not ruining the globe for interstellar travel, it's to keep some companies stock price high.

This can help places that used to be cloudier, but also, a good % of the world already was mostly bright sunny days. The people already hot, my guess would be, will not see a big amount of upside here.

Places decreasingly temperate will see some real benefits to solar energy availability.

I don't think we have a good idea what happens to wind, as we heat. It's anyone's guess. But we are seeing constant ocean current slow down & change. That feels the the silent prime mover here, the real impact of climate on the ocean, which begets so many climactic cycles.

I do think personal cooling is a somewhat neat possibility. The thermo acoustic heat pumps on particular seem miniaturizable in interesting ways. But right now this is a fairly dystopian sci fi, one where personal cooling is a battlesuit against the awful overshot arrived-bad-future.

Adam Savage built such a suit though it was not solar powered. He used it for cosplaying in oppressive heat and the AC was an upgrade over using ice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Ti4GP0ntE

they make these for race cars

https://www.advanced-autosports.com/collections/drive-gear

there are other companies that do airflow-based solutions as well.

making your own wouldn't be that hard, plenty of amateur racers have done it.

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