These scientists want to put a massive 'sunshade' in orbit to help fight climate change
These scientists want to put a massive 'sunshade' in orbit to help fight climate change
A group has been formed to study and promote a space-based sunshade as a method to help fend off global climate change.
Or. Crazy concept. We actually stop buying plastic. Stop burning fossil fuels. You know just general common sense kinda stuff.
No, no we wont allow our way of life to be impacted at all. Require the planet to be destroyed so we can drive luxury SUVs to pickup our plastic coating everything. Complain on our brand new smartphone sitting watching the newest tv, in our climate controlled room with every single light on in the house garden basement roof
Woe is me
42OR! How about we blot out the sky?
8It's a good idea. Could ground up all the poor's and make a worldwide sun umbrella. Solved.
8
The classic "here is a magic solution that 'scientists' came up with that is totally doable and not at all meant to just distract you from the real solution that reduces consumrism"
38Woah woah, hold on there. We cant just consume less that would mean the line going downwards and we cant have that. The only solution to this problem is infinite growth and a giant space mirror
16Yes!
5
Reducing consumerism is pretty meaningless at this point in the game.
0
The big problem with a sunshade is that it would be an engineering project on a scale that we have never seen, and we're not really entirely sure it would work. It would cost at least $10 trillion USD and require launching nearly 200 billion small vessels and moving them into the L1 Lagrange point between us and the Sun. Each vessel would have a shade that covers 2500 m^2 with a total mass of ships and shades being 34 billion metric tonnes.
A sunshade just isn't feasible and all of those rocket launches to get it into position would just exacerbate the already pretty awful situation here on Earth, not to mention mining all of that material and building the rockets causing greenhouse gas emissions, and is there even 34 billion metric tonnes of material on Earth with which to make effective sunshades out of?
It would be a MASSIVE, MAAAASSIIIIIVE undertaking the scale of which Humanity has never seen to get it done, and we're not even sure if it would work. We're much better off focusing on solutions here on Earth, I think.
For those curious, here's a scientific paper looking into the subject that I used for reference on the numbers I used: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521001995
27Above and beyond what you've said: we would need to maintain that sunshade for hundreds of thousands of years.
Civilizations don't tend to last that long. The odds of our being able to actually maintain technical infrastructure like that for the required amount of time are low.
13immediately transitioning to zero emission and planting a shit tonne of trees would probs be cheaper.
10
Didn't the Simpsons do this already?
23And futurama
8Mt Burns did it for purely evil reasons, yes.
1This anti-Burns slander will not stand, man.
2
We are pursuing both options, and think that if a planetary sunshade is built, the initial phases of construction will be an Earth-launched architecture while the later phases will use space resources and in-space construction
Great, so it's a 50 years plan then. Too bad we can't do anything right now I guess.
20Well we could, but it would reduce short-term profits for the wealthiest few hundred sociopaths, so we can't.
7
Wernstrom!
8Imagine how much they'll charge for the ads displayed on that thing.
8I think we can all agree this is not a practical, short-term solution. Even the scientists say it would take 50 years. But this isn't going to blot out the sky, and it isn't going to be much of a platform for displaying ads.
From a practical standpoint, from earth, this thing will be slightly larger than the sun (so it reduces light from the sun over the entire earth). Just like with the sun or the moon, holding your thumb up at arms length will block most or all of it. It will also be fairly transparent, otherwise we would be getting far too little visible light, which would cause other problems. This means actually trying to look at it would be (almost) as inadvisable as looking at the sun. The visual advertising medium you can't look at, can't see details on if you're foolish enough to try, and is the size of your thumb at arms length is neither the sky-blotting structure nor the advertising platform you seem to think it would be.
1
...ONCE AND FOR ALL!
5the simpsons did it
4Or we could do Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, SAI, since we'd have already geoengineered our climate, might just go and engineer it so that the damage can be less. Yeah it's not great since it does not solve the root cause, but it might avert the worst case scenario. The world might one day stop using oil like a junkie, even faster if we globally started to tax carbon emissions, but clearly the world has been kicking the can down the road about meaningful change. Lets accept we have already done way to little already, accept the shit we already are in and make emergency repairs before even more things break down
3Once we get the world carbon neutral or negative to deal with ocean acidification, a sunshine might genuinely buy us some time and make up a bit for the lost polar albedo. But cloud seeding would probably be cheaper.
1Good.
1They prefer to create unrealistic "solutions" that look like they came out of a cartoon instead of reforesting and stopping the last stage of savage Capitalism. The only solution is politics
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