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I think this is the new phase of the bad-faith propaganda. Promote weird, outlandishly expensive but vaguely-plausible-sounding solutions to get people away from talking about the things we can actually do (but which would lead to someone making less money and so, unacceptable.)
No you don’t understand. We just need to build a dyson sphere and we are ser in energy for ever.
This will be cheaper than anything we can do. For only 1$ per kW we can build it eeehm next year.
/s
It’s not a bad idea if we had the technology to mass-produce film in the quantity required, the ability to easily and consistently place them where needed, and could maintain the array. None of those are true right now. If they were, it would be viable.
Yeah. If we could do it, someone could run the numbers and find out that it’s about ten to a hundred times cheaper to just build a bunch of non-coal power plants, or find and eliminate methane sources, or, hell, I don’t know. I’m not an expert. But I definitely know that they’re not talking about this because it’s the easiest way.
Anything to avoid change
Weirdly, I’m not completely opposed to this. Solar sail technology is a promising avenue for interplanetary travel/exploration, and we’d want to test the technology for giant solar sails somewhere near the Earth, so why not?
Besides the fact that “block the sun” is a traditional supervillain master plan, I guess.
A bunch of reasons:
- as we dump co2 in the atmosphere, much is absorbed in the oceans, acidifying them. This will kill off a big chunk of marine life
- it’s tough, and not particularly likely to succeed at the needed scale
- we will need to maintain this system for a few hundred thousand years. Humans don’t have a track record of maintaining civilization for that long
- we will end up with substantially different weather patterns due to a reduced pole-to-equator temperature gradient.
- This sort of plan is not being proposed as a alternative to carbon reductions. It would take decades to build up the lumar or asteroid based infrastructure at minimum, and thouse manufacturing lines would need to run for decades to build up the array to the point it starts making an impact. It’s a plan that would at best start to have an effect around 2075, and that’s presuming sustained hundreds of billions of dollars investment. If we are not already close to achieving net zero by then, then we never will be.
The point is that it provides a possible pathway to reverse temperatures, and related things like storm intensity, agricultural area, and sea levels, back down to preindustrial levels, hence reducing the sustained human death toll being continually exacted for emissions done generations before. It is living with what was already done, not an excuse to pollute more.
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It’s difficult, but your unlikely to run into any unexpected problems after you get your first satellites placed beyond thouse that come with scalding up. In raw scale, this is a project on terms with building and maintaining the international highway or rail systems, or for a more topical example the solar buildout we need to do to reach net zero in the first place. Vast yes, but hardly unprecedented.
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Humans don’t have a track record of failing to do so either. Most civilization collapses are localized, and rather hyperbolic. The collapse of the Roman Empire for example is much closer to the collapse of the British Empire into the modern day UK than the ideas of abandoned long lost cites and technologies pop culture likes to portray it as for instance.
Moreover, unlike a lot of other geoengineering proposals, there are no significant snapback effects from stoping maintenance, just a slow return over fifty to a hundred years to the point you were already at before starting.
- An L1 array wouldn’t have that drawback from my understanding, and an earth orbital array would allow you to vary the intensity being let through simply by haveing the satellites turn sideways, or enter a slow constant rotation if your worried about RCS system wear. You could also actively plan the luminosity over a given region to destructively interfere with major storm events, once again saving lives on the ground.
This sort of plan is not being proposed as a alternative to carbon reductions.
That was the whole point of introducing solar radiation management into the discourse; creating social permission for the fossil fuels industry to keep on extracting and burning.
I feel like if that was the point then the foucus would have been on something that the layperson might think was cheaper and easier than lowering emissions like carbon capture, not something which most people outright reject as impossible like orbital shades and mirrors, which generally come up more in discussions of terraforming Venus and Mars then the context of gobal warming.
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Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a yes/no question can be answered “no.”
It could work (ignoring cost), except that tiny meteors flying around space would rip holes in such an expansive object. Just look at what happened to the JWST, and it’s much smaller than this would need to be.
I’m sure the next big brain idea will be to cover the world in sunscreen or change the Earth’s orbit with a giant rocket.
The JWST is still functioning at a very high level. It’s a poor comparison if you’re trying to argue against putting expensive stuff in space.
The point was that it got hit, despite being smaller than this would need to be. That’s where the analogy ends, because its purpose is very different from a giant umbrella.
The idea is less umbrella and more parasol. Tiny holes would be just fine.
To add on to that, in more serious proposals, the idea is to mass manufacture a lot of small satellites you could hold in your hand, attached to about a km or so of hyper thin foil. At obital velocity, any micrometeorites or other object will flash vaporize an equal sized hole on contact, and indeed this is how we do modern micrometeorite shielding for spacecraft today.
We just care about blocking a tiny fraction of relevant sunlight, holes don’t really effect the outcome compared to the negative space around the satellite.
Even in the “just reflect sunlight” camp… clouds. Make more clouds.
Hmm clouds are water vapor.
Wernstrom…
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I think Futuramas episode on this was awesome Diamondillium for the win!
You’re confusing the giant space mirror with the impenetrable shield to protect from tentacles.
