[mncharity]

> In a thick atmosphere like earth, heat radiation comes from all sides, so no chance at radiating off very much heat.

Desert nights, without the thermal mass of clouds and wet ground, cool quickly.

Earth is doing "barbeque roll" thermal management. Sitting between bright hot Sun, too hot, and dark cold deep-space sky, too cold, Earth spins, mixing too hot with too cold into not too bad. There seems an opportunity to improve the clarity of science education explanations, down to kindergarten, as the cooling half of that balance is pervasively left unmentioned. I wish I could find a forum where opportunities like this were discussed.

Also fun is using photonic structures to engineer your thermal emission spectrum to concentrate energy at frequencies where the atmosphere is more transparent.[1] So you couple more directly than usual with the deep-space sky.

[1] https://news.stanford.edu/2017/09/04/sending-excess-heat-sky... https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12/cooling-by-radiating-h...