I had thought you meant sponges at the bottom of the ocean.
Not sure what you mean by storing heat.
You could store energy obtained from (the smoothing-out of) a temperature gradient, but that isn’t storing the heat, just the energy extracted as the temperature gradient goes away. It doesn’t decrease the amount of heat?
And I suppose if you have some endothermic reaction (like melting ice) you can decrease the amount of heat around, (and then if you freeze it again, you release the heat), which is sort of like storing heat, but it isn’t like you can store arbitrarily large amounts of heat this way. You would need arbitrarily large amounts of stuff to have react.
I’m still fairly sure you cannot “transform heat into kinetic or chemical energy”, but rather, you can transform a difference in temperatures, and a potential for heat to be exchanged, into kinetic or chemical or whatever energy?
In the example of that mechanism for converting a temperature gradient into electricity, suppose you had two regions with particular and different initial temperatures , which are in contact with opposite sides of the mechanism. The two regions have the same mass and are made of the same material. How do you expect the temperature of all the parts after reaching equilibrium to depend on the initial temperature? I expect that the total heat will remain the same (even though you did extract some energy as the difference in temperatures went away).
Also, pumping heat around costs energy. To move things against the tendency for temperatures to equalize, costs energy, right?
I don’t understand why the fact that earth is not homogeneous would be a reason to not call it a system?
I don’t see how the specifics of geology and such are relevant here. The question is: under what circumstances can we keep the part of a system that we care about to stay at a low temperature while waste heat is being added to the system at an arbitrarily fast rate, and the only way we have for heat to leave the system is blackbody radiation?
(Assuming the system is connected/contiguous and stuff)
Now it sounds like you are suggesting that we just make the inside of the earth hotter while keeping our part cool?
Not sure what you mean by storing heat.
You could store energy obtained from (the smoothing-out of) a temperature gradient, but that isn’t storing the heat, just the energy extracted as the temperature gradient goes away. It doesn’t decrease the amount of heat?
And I suppose if you have some endothermic reaction (like melting ice) you can decrease the amount of heat around, (and then if you freeze it again, you release the heat), which is sort of like storing heat, but it isn’t like you can store arbitrarily large amounts of heat this way. You would need arbitrarily large amounts of stuff to have react.
I’m still fairly sure you cannot “transform heat into kinetic or chemical energy”, but rather, you can transform a difference in temperatures, and a potential for heat to be exchanged, into kinetic or chemical or whatever energy?
In the example of that mechanism for converting a temperature gradient into electricity, suppose you had two regions with particular and different initial temperatures , which are in contact with opposite sides of the mechanism. The two regions have the same mass and are made of the same material. How do you expect the temperature of all the parts after reaching equilibrium to depend on the initial temperature? I expect that the total heat will remain the same (even though you did extract some energy as the difference in temperatures went away).
Also, pumping heat around costs energy. To move things against the tendency for temperatures to equalize, costs energy, right?
I don’t understand why the fact that earth is not homogeneous would be a reason to not call it a system?
I don’t see how the specifics of geology and such are relevant here. The question is: under what circumstances can we keep the part of a system that we care about to stay at a low temperature while waste heat is being added to the system at an arbitrarily fast rate, and the only way we have for heat to leave the system is blackbody radiation? (Assuming the system is connected/contiguous and stuff)
Now it sounds like you are suggesting that we just make the inside of the earth hotter while keeping our part cool?