Giant space umbrella tethered to asteroid could protect Earth from climate crisis, study says
Giant space umbrella tethered to asteroid could protect Earth from climate crisis, study says
Research estimates type of ’umbrella’ needed to achieve solar radiation reduction by about 1.7 per cent
Everything to avoid doing the most obvious.
Nuclear?
- Find asteroid at L1 Lagrange point, which is unstable, meaning objects need to burn fuel to stay there for prolonged periods of time
- Put giant sunshade on it directly facing the Earth
- Sunshade acts like the largest solar sail in existence, making station-keeping useless
- Because L1 is an unstable equilibrium, solar radiation immediately blows asteroid away from the Lagrange point and directly into Earth's gravity well
I'm sure nothing can possibly go wrong with this plan.
While this is still obviously not a realistic solution to the damage we're doing to our climate because it still involves launching 35,000 tonnes of material in to space and moving 100 times that much to the right location, the solar sail thing has been accounted for in the paper. Basically you stick it slightly closer to the sun than the actual L1 point, where the force from solar radiation balances out the slightly higher pull of the sun's gravity
We keep stuff in unstable orbit all the time using thrusters.
We can easily counteract the solar wind with a reasonable amount of thruster fuel.
And remember kids: when the fuel isn't being burnt on earth, and it's being burnt outside our planets stuff. Pollution is no longer our problem.
It's a technological antisolution.
Thank you for sharing this!
You're very welcome! I'm so glad you enjoyed it.
This line represents one of my biggest peeves with political thinking in general:
A Technological Antisolution is a product that attempts to replace a boring but solvable political or social problem with a much sexier technological one that won’t work.
The assumption that because there’s a “political or social” problem, then it must be solvable.
Why? “Because if everyone just did X …”
People skip over political problems. They model humanity’s political and behavioral inertia as zero, and they don’t treat it as an ecosystem.
So many “political or social” solutions are assumed to take zero energy. The only reason a “political or social” problem won’t work is those “durned right wingers”.
What this implicitly fails to realize is that building an enormous solar sail is many orders of magnitude easier than changing the behavior of every human.
We need to stop thinking of things as “practically solved” just because “all” that would have to happen is some huge shift in the behavior and organization of human society.
I also created lots of solutions to the worlds problems sitting around getting high
I know man. We’ll just accelerate the planet and move it into a higher orbit!
Giant space umbrella tethered to asteroids could also be a super weapon capable of melting enormous swathes of enemy territory.
In fact, any technology capable of stopping global warming can be turned into a super weapon. Including whatever techniques might be used to alter human behavior to reduce footprint.
Or, we could go to the other side of the sun and turn off the enormous fan, thereby stopping the hot solar wind.
SIR, the fancy word is parasol. A World Parasol. Maybe with some nice lace.