Comment Re:You could have just said 50 quadrillion (Score 1) 34
Or 8500 light years, to use a meaningful unit for this scale.
Or 8500 light years, to use a meaningful unit for this scale.
Some answers:
I suggest you do some read up on solar sails before you claim impossibility. Most of the stuff you mention has been discussed for decades.
I don't claim that a slashdot post can solve all technical problems, but you should come up with something better than first claiming a 1mm shield and then claiming a 10000% mass overhead.
Be that as it may, the whole concept is certainly much more realistic than installing and enforcing what amounts to an economic dictatorship over 8 billion people. And it would directly reduce energy entry and nor depend on arbitrary climate models which may or may not be accurate.
1 Millimeter??? Even standard household aluminium foil is 1/6 of that.
For solar sails, 10 g/m^2 is not very ambitious. Such materials are readily available and usually based on an organic polymer such as Mylar or Kapton with a metal coating for reflection. And other than a solar sails, for a simple sunshade, the strength and optical requirements are much lower.
My estimate is kind of a worst-case figure base on readily available launch and material technology with much room for optimization esp. when in-situ production comes into play.
You would not recognize a century long "major extinction event" even if you would be living right through it (which we might in fact do). Those are the things you need scientists and research grants to detect long after the fact and would not be aware of without some media telling you.
Nothing to be overly concerned about and certainly no catastrophe, just evolution at work.
Yes. And other neighborhoods will be gentrified in their place. So the same stuff that has been ongoing everywhere in the world ever since humans built their first settlements. Nothing new under the sun.
As of 2017 according to the World Bank: Niger, Somalia, Congo, Mali, Chad, Angola, Burundi, Nigeria, Gambia, Burkina Faso, Uganda and Tanzania.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate
To paraphrase Voltaire (and despite this being slashdot): A car analogy proves nothing.
Nature will cope just fine as it always does - and so will we, the most adaptable species on the planet. I for one am pretty sure that longer pool and barbecue seasons won't kill us, I am not afraid and I am unwilling to pay for your fears.
That they will have to build houses with proper grounding like everybody else does? That the likes of you who are afraid of cow farts will switch to worrying about swamp gas and once again proclaim the end of the world?
You know that most of the time since the cambrian explosion and the beginning of land based life, nature did just fine without permafrost (and without polar ice caps for the matter). Ice ages like that we are currently living in are the exception, not the rule.
Culture shock brought about by
And sure, the massacre brought about by overpopulation is ongoing and unavoidable (at least by us in the West where the indigenous population is shrinking anyway) - no climate can support 5+ children per woman for decades let alone centuries. But having more useable land in the long run will improve overall carrying capacity and not reduce it.
sounds link an excellent plan. It's called evolution and it has worked just fine for the last 4.5 billion years. And it worked especially well for the human species. I suggest we do just that.
As Roosevelt put it: The only thing to fear is fear itself.
Current oil consumption is 100 million barrels per day. A 10 Mio. km^2 sunshade might weigh about 100 Mio. tons. So were talking about maybe 3 months worth of production for a project of a least a decade (iff we shoot everything up and don't do any in-situ production). This is not too big of a deal.
You don't need to relocate and you don't need a plan. Cities are constantly rebuilt and the lifetime of your average new building nowadays is much less than timescale we are talking about here, as is the time until maintaining a building costs more than erecting it. In fact, in 100 years you will probably need to ask a historian to find out where the coastline used to be.
So simply leave this to the free market and let the climate concerned put their money where their mouth is. I doubt that coastal real estate prices will collapse anytime soon. As with any forced hype, people are willing to pay lip service and spend other people's money, but with their own cash, everyone is a climate sceptic.
During most of earths history since the Cambric explosion when land-based life started in earnest, temperatures have been higher, the pole were ice free and CO2 concentration 5 to 10 times higher than today.
What we are used to is the anomaly, what you depict as a doomsday scenario is in fact the normal climatic state of the earth. And we better get used to it if we intend to live here for any geologically significant amount of time.
If you live in Greenland and have children, why would you want most of your country to remain buried under an ice shield?
This is part of a bigger picture: In the long term, countries like Canada and Russia tend to gain huge areas of arable land if global temperatures rise. In fact a look at the globe and the land mass distribution suggests that even in the face of rising sea levels, mankind will eventually have more usable land available.
It is high time that we also investigate the potential upsides of a possible climate change and how we can take advantage of it. Adaption is much more realistic (and cheaper) than any (expensive and probably futile) attempts at controlling the climate with our current technology.
Sounds good that after the "code of conduct" fiasco, Linus seems to return to his normal self again.
Remember to say hello to your bank teller.
