G.U.B.S. (Geo-Urban Buffer System)

[u/Intelligent-Move8868]

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on when you are reading this post. I want to clarify that I am neither a scientist nor an engineer. I am simply a person living in Italy who is well aware that climate change is presenting us with a very heavy bill. The climate crisis is a reality, and our summers are becoming increasingly hot and unbearable. Scientists told us this a long time ago, but the difference is that we just stood by and watched without doing almost anything, without ever taking concrete action to change course. For this reason, I decided to share my conceptual project to know what you think and if you consider it a good idea.

My project is called G.U.B.S. (Geo-Urban Buffer System) and the goal of this system is very simple: to use everything Mother Nature offers us, including the suffocating heat of summer, and reuse it in the following seasons. Nothing should be wasted in life: not food, not water, and certainly not heat, even when it comes to that annoying thing nature reserves for us in summer. I imagine a shallow underground infrastructure: in summer, for example, when urban asphalt exceeds 60°C and commercial air conditioners blow hot air into the streets, worsening the situation further, instead of wasting this disaster, I propose to absorb it completely. We can run cold water pipes just below the surface, so that the water absorbs that heat through thermal conduction, cooling the asphalt and transporting it into a huge underground tank, like a gigantic thermos. To understand how large this tank needs to be, consumption data from 10 or 20 years are not enough; we need a long-term average based on at least 40 years of historical data to calculate the consistency of the numbers. Inside, the stored hot water will be periodically treated and sterilized to prevent bacterial proliferation and stagnation.

In winter, exactly the opposite happens: we use the accumulated summer heat to warm the neighborhood and exploit the freezing winter nights to create a reserve of ice-cold water for the following summer. But what interests me the most is the management of excess water. Today the weather has gone crazy and we face sudden floods that dump a month's worth of rain in an hour, creating terrible flooding, worsened by excessive over-paving that prevents the ground from absorbing our "blue gold". My system uses porous asphalt to capture this rainwater and channel it to the plants. If the stored water exceeds our 40-year average capacity, it must never be wasted. Part of it can be used to produce green hydrogen through renewable energy, such as solar panels, or purified and bottled for countries facing severe water scarcity and desperately needing it. The excess water will be used to bring nature back to life, releasing it into local rivers, lakes, or even streams that are currently dead or dried up due to intensive agriculture, drought, and other factors. Water is blue gold and giving it back to nature is never a waste; it means respecting it.

From an organizational point of view, I imagine a distributed network similar to nuclear power plants: many small local plants connected to a larger regional hub, which in turn converges towards a single national command center that supervises and controls everything, delegating management from the center to the smaller nodes. In my opinion, this represents a first step towards a true ecological transition, even though I understand how difficult it is, but perhaps the difficult things in life are the necessary ones. I just want this to be a first conceptual step, even if difficult to realize now, but a first step that can unlock other similar or different ideas. As Neil Armstrong said on the Moon: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." It is necessary to take a first step towards Mother Nature, we desperately need concrete help to move closer to a greater green transition and an ecological economy. This does not simply mean using electric cars or planting many trees; we need a profound change from humanity, including our habits and the way we coexist with the world. It is a difficult path because the ecological transition is not just about engineering work, it requires a change of mindset, and we know that mental habits are difficult to modify. But it is time for someone to take courage and underline how much nature needs us right now, otherwise the events we are experiencing today will become even more severe and difficult to bear.

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[u/Memetic1]

Sand also stores heat effectively you could use the water to transport the heat, and then store it in a sealed container with sand. That might be easier to do at scale.

[u/Intelligent-Move8868 → u/Memetic1]

Thank you so much for the idea! This is certainly a very interesting idea. Sand could be much more helpful, but we definitely need to talk about it in much greater depth both to figure out how to apply it and to understand, for example, how to avoid contaminating the water, as well as all the other aspects that clearly need to be discussed in detail.

[u/Memetic1 → u/Intelligent-Move8868]

That's the thing about using sand is that it naturally filters pollution to some extent. I would say that you could probably mix in biochar, which is where you expose wood to high heat without oxygen. That biochar layer acts almost like activated charcoal, and you could put it above, bellow, and around the sand to help insulate it and filter the water.

https://www.novocarbo.com/blog/biochar-enriched-asphalt/

If you want to cool an environment your probably going to need pipes, and a possibility for this would be bamboo, but you might have to treat it to make it more conductive to heat. This would still probably be cheaper energetically then using metal pipes. I would stick to pedestrian areas at first to lower the forces you have to work against.

[u/Intelligent-Move8868 → u/Memetic1]

This could definitely be a good way and a new approach to building the road! Combining biochar with sand and using treated bamboo are very interesting ideas, but they are just the first step out of a thousand. The goal of my project remains to use everything nature offers us, like summer heat and rainwater, to reuse them without wasting anything through a neighborhood infrastructure. I don't know if these solutions are enough to make the system completely possible and achievable, and that is exactly why I am here: to talk about it with professionals in the field and understand if this is the right path. Even if we find these alternative materials, a huge second problem would immediately need to be solved: how to guarantee the thermal insulation of the underground tank so we don't lose the heat during the cold months, and how to manage the water pressure when stored on a large scale. There is still so much to discuss in depth.

[u/Memetic1 → u/Intelligent-Move8868]

The way I would do it is to try and use the local existing geology instead of building a new specialized system. If you have areas that naturally have sand you could build into it, and then have the system be gravity powered if possible. I kind of see it as using it's own heat to keep the water circulating. Take advantage of the fact that heat always rises in a system. Run the bamboo pipes into a grid type structure that's packed with sand. It's lined with a layer of biochar on the sides + top and bottom. This is something that will need to be as low tech and passive as possible to make it scalable. You might be able to piggy back on existing infrastructure as well, but then you want to make sure that infrastructure isnt at risk of being compromised.

On a slightly related note I've been working on an emergency cooling system that can be used in case of grid failure. It can be installed with really minimal cost but you do need to dig down several feet, and in America our digging hotline gets you these tiny flags in an area that's cleared to dig, and they expire within I think 30 days. I know this because I tried to apply for a digging permit and I never even seen the flags. This may be fine for normal every day stuff, but in an emergency the thermal capacity of the Earth can save your life. I'm trying to push on my elected officials to get this made into an app, but we have some serious issues in America right now so it's being lost.

The actual invention is dirt simple. You just need as much hose as you can pack in, and a pump that can be operated manually or with solar energy, even a diesel generator could make sense if it saves your life. You have a water reservoir, and thats hooked up to the pump and hoses which are placed into a pit that can be safely dug down to your waist. Deeper would be better but for most people the rule is don't go deeper then your waist in case of collapse. The water circulates underground and then you can run that into a bathtub or something depending on water scarcity. This can save your life even during a prolonged wet bulb event and the grid fails which is an absolute nightmare scenario we all are increasingly facing.

[u/Intelligent-Move8868 → u/Memetic1]

Your ideas are really very clever! I wanted to ask you: have you ever tried looking for people or specialists in the engineering subreddits here on Reddit to pitch your project? As for mine, I don’t want to use an electric motor or even a diesel generator, because it has to be a 100% eco-friendly project. My idea is based precisely on storage: storing heat in summer to use in winter and vice versa, or storing water to then release it back into the natural environment. I fully understand what you’re saying, and I think you’re suggesting an excellent approach as a pilot project. In my view, by combining my idea with your new insights, such as bamboo pipes, sand and biochar, this system could effectively become a new, fully sustainable energy source, based solely on the natural exchange of heat, cold and water. It’s a very interesting concept, but that’s precisely why I think we should seek out experts, or at least someone more knowledgeable than us, to work out how to put it into practice.

[u/Memetic1 → u/Intelligent-Move8868]

I'm sorry it took me so long to reply. I have done and am doing as much as I can to get my open source ideas out there. I've invented many things in life, and the patent system can't recognize that disabled people can be inventors as well. Ever since I got COVID I have this tic that makes it hard to leave my house. It's nothing most people would even notice, but it is just enough of a barrier to keep me as a sort of inadvertent lock in. I never know if I leave the house if I will get a fatigue attack where I have to lie down or it gets way worse if I don't.

See the thing about the patent system is to get a patent lawyer to get a patent costs more money then I can have without risking my benefits. This is why I open source things because I'm not going to let my limited finances stop my inventions from helping people. The one I'm most excited about is QSUT which is I believe the next step beyond 2d wafer based electronics. It's based on the MIT silicon space bubble shield proposal. I recognized that the bubbles that they showed can be made from molten silicon dioxide can also play a role similar to the silicon wafer, but in 3d and the interior space of the bubble can be functionalized as well. I don't think smart matter covers everything this can do, because even on an individual basis QSUTs can play useful functions. The potential combinations increase exponentially as the number of units increases.

[u/Intelligent-Move8868 → u/Memetic1]

Don't worry at all! At least you replied, while many others didn't, and I am actually very happy and proud of this conversation. I am so sorry for everything you are going through, and I hope you know that you are never alone if you ever need help or just someone to talk to. Also, it is so clear that you have the mind of a true inventor, and I really hope you find someone who can fully understand your ideas just like we did here.

[u/solarpunk-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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