A Sunshade In Space To Combat Global Warming 496
ultracool writes, "While the only permanent solution for human-driven global warming is developing renewable energy, a temporary hack to counteract possible abrupt climate change is to build a giant sunshade in space. The sunshade would be launched in small pieces by electromagnetic launchers, conventional chemical rockets being far too expensive. The sunshade could be developed and deployed in 25 years, would last about 50 years, and would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by 2% — enough to balance heating due to a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." From the article: "The [trillions of] spacecraft would form a long, cylindrical cloud with a diameter about half that of Earth, and about 10 times longer... Sunlight passing through the 60,000-mile length of the cloud, pointing lengthwise between the Earth and the sun [at L-1], would be diverted away from our planet... The sunshade could be deployed by a total 20 electromagnetic launchers [collectively] launching a stack of [a million] fliers every 5 minutes for 10 years."
Didn't Mr Burns try this allready. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds bad, but cool 1rst step to Dyson sphere (Score:2)
Blocking/decreasing photosynthesis would be bad, since it's one of only ways to decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
We need to plant more trees to replace the devastation going on in South America, limit our CO2 production. America would be smart and try to help polish it's now tarnished reputation by taking a lead in this, and start by decreasing the amount of SUVs on the road.
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They would either have to invent a way to transmit power wirelessly, or make the world's longest extension cord.
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Power transmission in space via microwave is an old concept, been around since at least the 80s. You have a beam emitter on your power generating satellite, and a receiver station on the ground. The losses in transmission from orbit to ground are offset by the lack of atmospheric interference at the generating satellite. In space, there are no cloudy days, and no kilometers of air filtering your sunlight. It's like a hydroelectric dam, b
Re:Sounds bad, but cool 1rst step to Dyson sphere (Score:4, Informative)
L1 one of the Lagrange points [wikipedia.org], i.e. points in space where the gravity of the sun and the earth cancel each other out. Objects stationed at these points do not fall towards either the earth or the sun.
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Objects stationed at these points do not fall towards either the earth or the sun.
That is only true of the L4 and L5 points. The others are unstable and require station keeping. Specifically, I remember (it's not in the wikipedia page) that the solar L3 point has a stability of about 180 days. Fortunately you can orbit the L1/L2/L3 points.
Another problem that others have brought up here is the solar wind. For a solar monitoring mission, it's not much of a problem, but once you "spread your wings" to
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I don't know where L1 is but I doubt that thing would last a few years without being torn apart by small rocks and space debris.
I don't know who you are, but I doubt that you would be smarter than this professor and the people at NASA together (insert smiley). Anyway (RTFA), this "thing" consists of a large number of small objects just floating around in space. It can not be torn down, since the components are not interconnected. And if a particle hits one of the shades it just creates a small hole. Big
Re:Sounds bad, but cool 1rst step to Dyson sphere (Score:5, Insightful)
The weather system of the planet is about as far from "simple" as you can get. We have no clue about how the ecosystem of our world actually works. All this rancor about the "problem" of global warming and possible "solutions" are built upon an alter of such vast ignorance that I often find the discussion and "debate" of the topic to be the epitome of absurdity. The one prevailing predicate of almost every discourse about global warning and/or global climate change, is an unspoken implication that we (the human race) understand how the environment we live in works. WE DO NOT. And there exists a vast amount of historical evidence demonstrating that very notion.So the proposal of building a "shade" system for the planet to "cool it down" is so laughable due to the vast amount of hubris required to give it any consideration at all.
Perhaps we should work first on understanding the problem before coming up with solutions. Yeah, that means that the "I said it first" mentality will be hamstrung, but that, in my opinion, would be a good thing.
Or.. (Score:2, Insightful)
But hey, that would involve personal effort and we can't have that, can we.
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About doing "enough harm", I would be worried after seeing what be managed with just a few years of CFCs. Unfortunately, the "more research is needed" line would be good... if there wasn't s
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You forgot to mention that the different species didn't just do this a billion years ago, it also took them a couple million years.
Humans doing even a couple ppm in just a few hundred years is pretty remarkable.
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We might be changing the environment, but it's still on a much smaller scale (a couple of PPM) than what a different species did billions of years ago (around 90%)
Be that as it may, those changes resulted in catastrophic changes. Life did survive but a sea level change of a mere meter would have catastrophic effects on society as we know it. Considering the fact that most of our population concentrations live near the sea it's not just Bangladesh who'd be in big trouble.
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The difference is that I'm living here now. Big extinction events in the past are all fine and dandy, but a big extinction event in the near future is suddenly a lot more personal. And if it's not me being theatened, it's my children or grandchildren (assuming I'll ever procreate -- no signs of that so far).
Re:Or..BRAVO (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that global warming is not happening. I'm saying that I don't know. If I did know, there wouldn't be a damn thing I could do about it and certainly nothing at all that I should do.
You see, about 10,000 years ago, the world was very cold. Today, we call it the "ICE AGE" (Austin Powers Finger-Quotes here). It was much colder during this "ICE AGE" than it is today. However, sometime between now and then, the earth warmed up and the "ICE AGE" ended. So if we
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learn something about what you're talking about or shut the fuck up.
the opinion on global warming of someone who doesn't even know the definitions of "weather" and "climate" (Austin...) is not just worthless, but actually causes a noticable drop in your country's GDP.
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I love this logic:
1. The climate has always been variable.
2. Therefore, man is not having an impact on today's climate!
QED, right?
Here's an exercise: Explain to me how increased levels of CO2 (which are rising due to humans- I challenge you to find an explanation that has not been debunked from here to Shanghai and back), which Arrhenius demonstrated over 100 years ago [nasa.gov] could cause climate change, can't possibly be causing climate change?
Hey, climate science is uncertain, and question
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Also, replace the shades with solar panels, and you'd have a huge electric grid that could be used for extraterrestrial mining and ore refinement. Of course, then you have to steer asteroids towards Earth to run them through the process, which sounds like another screwed up idea.
We should
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If our energy came entirely from solar energy, we could use almost any amount of energy we wish (within reason) with negligible detrimental effects.
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Ditto for nuclear energy, but then we'd all be going to hell.
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AOL cd's (Score:2)
More likely he's the mod with 187 trillion AOL cd's, muttering about how NASA are going to launch them to build this thing. Seriously though, this has been on
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But, the green house gases have been building up for a long time. Even if we reduced our current green house gas emissions, how long would it take for the build up to dissipate?
This idea might be useful if this is going to be a problem.
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The ISS is a useless status symbol. This actually has a purpose, and the need is becoming more apparent every year. On the upside, an enormous project like this would have many spinoffs. Maybe the launchers could also send up units to convert solar energy to microwaves and beam them back.
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A giant sunshade in space is expensive and difficult, but means we can go on polluting our atmosphere and spunking energy away, and don't have to do any of that boring, annoying growing up and taking responsibility for our actions.
I forsee a great future for
At least... (Score:2)
of course he wood (Score:2)
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Band aid fix? (Score:3, Insightful)
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So if you support the idea of global warming and that humanity is by far the largest contributor to the phenomenon then you believe that through our own naive actions we have potentially created a dire set of consequences for humanity and many other species on Earth. Now you want to actively cool the Earth by changing it's albedo even though we are still ignorant to how the climate actually work
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With all due respect to our lupine friends, it's different to me. Also, like it or not, we are above nature. We are operating on a fundamentally different moral level to the rest of known nature because we can foresee the consequences of our actions to a certain degree, or at least we can know that t
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Knowing this and knowing that a global effort of 2 billion people is not that feasible, it makes sense to me that action towards a healthier Earth is required and has to start l
Biofuel (Score:2)
Yes. And biofuel is a good start. As I've said [slashdot.org] before [slashdot.org], biofuel is carbon-neutral, cheap to produce, does not create a dependency on foreign countries, and we can produce enough of it to power the whole USA using just a fraction of all the desert land there. It probably also doesn't produce as much nuclear waste as nuclear fission does (but I don't have any data for that).
It'll never happen anyway... (Score:2)
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This is very, very scary.
Yes, global warming may or may not be a problem. Yes, I know that ice is melting. Yes, I know that SUVs pollute.
But seriously, when has playing God ever worked for mankind? To try to directly alter the climate of earth in a one-step non-retractable manner just seems like.. say.. solving world hunger by creating genetically altered corn that grows in sand with almost no water. It sounds good, that's not how it's meant to be.
I don't k
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The real fix is that we start living sustainably.
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Very few people who say this actually understand what the implications of that statement are.
Cause and effect (Score:3, Interesting)
Pollution = Greenhouse gases.
Greenhouse gases cause global warming.
Humankind puts up giant sunshade.
Earth gets less light.
Less light means solar power becomes obsolete.
People need to burn more fossil fuels to get more power.
Global warming picks up.
Humankind builds a bigger sunshade.
Okay, that is a big exaggerated, but my point is that we need to invest in solar power and stop using fossil fuels which are just so obsolete. Maybe we should work on fission.
I don't care if I get modded down for this. I want to bring up this subject to discuss intelligently when I have time to reply.
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For added trollerization, the line
Plant billions of trees (Score:2)
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Ironically (Score:2)
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We already receive far more solar energy that what we use from any energy source, and the only hard part about solar power is to produce the pannels in a way that is neither too expensive nor too poluting.
Really? (Score:2)
But along similar lines I was thinking about using hydrogen for fuel. There is a serious by product of creating hydrogen from oceans: oxygen. Oxygen is poisonous in high concentrations, but perhaps more worryingly its also a catalyst for fire. Isn't there a real chance that creating that much oxygen and pumping it into the atmosphere is going to take us from the re
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I don't know where you got your numbers from, but they are incorrect by a large margin. The earth's atmosphere contains 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen and about 1% other gases.
Besides, I don't buy your "fireball of death" scenario. First, oxxygen will be used to burn the hydrogen produced (either literally in combusti
This is dumb (Score:2)
Where are they going to get it from? Oil so it creates more emmissions? Sun maybe, nope sorry we'll be blocking that too!
The trillions this would potentially cost would be better served as investments in renewable energies.
How about some long term solutions rather than band-aids?
Artificial photosynthesis (Score:2)
Isn't there a way we can do this on a massive scale and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? And I don't mean plant forests because that isn't likely to happen due to the space they require. Synthesize our own chlorophyll and do it much more efficiently than plants can? Or perhaps skip chlorophyll altogether and go with some other means of using light (or even use nuclear power if some other energy source would be more efficient) to implem
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And die from the sugar shock instead?
On a more serious note, there is a way to store CO2. Currently, a lot of old creatures are storing it way below the earth crust. We call it oil and coal.
If you look down the climate history of our planet, you'll see that we had COx levels way above the current, up to about 5% (nothing you'd enjoy living in... at least not for long). Since COx tends to be "heavy" (at least
Picture (Score:3, Funny)
If so, I think I have enough AOL CDs in my drawer for the mission to go ahead right now.
Modify earth albedo instead? (Score:2)
Man has modified albedo in two directions: polar caps are shrinking, decreasing albedo, and forest is shrinking also, increasing albedo.
But by actively modifying the albedo of part of the sahara and the other big deserts, for example, you could feasibly dump into space the few percent required to equilibrate earth's climate.
A combination of controled deforestation with desert "painting" could also do the trick.
All this seems far more plausible than sun
Oh well (Score:2)
Guess there's no limit to imagination when it comes to thinking of alternatives to building more nuke plants to replace coal/oil.
Welcome to the Church... (Score:2)
Before we go do a really stupid thing and imperil everyone on the planet, perhaps we should do a little checking [climateaudit.org]? Just to make sure that we haven't been misled?
Sooo many clusterboinks in this idea: (Score:2)
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Because, of course, we could not fold the objects into something smaller and have the sucker unfold in outer space...
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And how to rbing it back down? (Score:2)
"Since the beginning of time... (Score:2)
Speaking of solar... (Score:2)
Fatal flaw... (Score:2)
Despite good intentions most electricity production still kicks out a load of CO2 and other gasses. I would imagine the energy demands on the magnets to launch the payloads over 10 years would consume a fair bit of electricity consumption so increasing the problem the shield is trying to solve in the fist place.
Let just assume global warming doesn't exist... (Score:2)
Blantant rip-off... (Score:2)
Before they start fscking up Earth with this ... (Score:2)
You mean to counteract the REAL cause .. (Score:3, Informative)
Why look for a scientific explanation when you can make it a political issue?
Giant shade...? (Score:2)
Collect some of the energy while you're at it. (Score:2)
Solar shade is $$$. Dust is cheaper. (Score:2)
Where does the energy come from? (Score:2)
They both did it (Score:2, Informative)
In Futurama, a giant mirror is launched into space to block the rays of the sun, and reduce global warming. A small meteor hits it, causing it to turn, focus the light on the surface of the Earth, and cut a swathe through the arena from which the scientists (and Nixon's head) look on.
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According to TFA:
Even if
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That doesn't make it impossible, that just means that people would be unwilling to do it. If you could somehow persuade or coerce them into doing it, it could be done. You just wouldn't be able to pay for it.
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No shit! The Delta 4 Heavy launch vehicle has a payload capacity of 9306 kg to escape velocity according to the Wikipedia article on the subject. That would mean slightly more than two million launches. I wonder how many rockets have been fired in total (fireworks and military missiles excluded) thoughout modern history. My guess would be a few thousands.
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What did Bush say about Kyoto? He wouldn't sign up to anything that hurt the US economy? Well, dude, debating about the value of Kyoto apart, it's going to hurt a whole lot more if you don't do something pretty damned radical.
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On the other hand, it's pretty stupid to launch the sun-shield thing with chemical combustion engines, the very source of the problem in the first place.
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I agree. One problem is called global dimming, and means that our earlier pollutants (such as soot) have been reflecting sunlight out of the atmosphere and thus hiding the effect of the greenhouse gases. When we move to cleaner energy systems (not in terms of CO2, but other light-reflecting pollutants) the hidden effects due to global dimming might accelerate global warming faster than our current CO2 emissions can account for.
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What do you plan to do when space for trees runs out?
No, it's Angel, what do you expect (Score:2)
No, it's modern journalism (Score:2)
If there are 2 proposed solutions to a problem - one boring and sensible (e.g. "let's stop wasting so much energy") and one that sounds as though it's the brainchild of a 12-year-old on crack - the media will emphasize the second one.
The goal of today's journalist isn't to inform; it's to attract attention and get a response. Because that's what pleases the advertisers, who are the customers who count.
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Any objects which are light enough to be put in orbit in such quantities will be blown to hell and gone off orbit by the light itself in 2-3 months. Nasa already did the experiment 20+ years back with an inflatable aluminium foil sphere and there was a si
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And you European
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Since this is /. and no one reads the article let me explain. These are suppose to be more like lenses than mirrors, the idea being to defocus t
Re:less photosythesis = lower oxygen (Score:4, Interesting)
1. I'm pretty sure that I read (on
2. Life forms are surprisingly adaptive. You act as if plants are completely helpless in the face of a minor 2% change. I'm not saying there wouldn't be some long-term consequences (more to do with specific species thriving/suffering as opposed to planet-wide climate change) , but a permanent, perfectly linear/proportional drop in oxygen output is unrealistic.
3. Sunlight is only the energy source--plenty of other factors are involved in oxygen production.
4. I'm not at all sure that the greenhouse effect depends on gas proportions. You imply that the overall level of greenhouse gases could stay the same but if the relative amounts of other gases dropped, we would warm up. That's entirely possible, but that's not how I assumed it worked. Mars is pretty cold, and its thin atmosphere is composed (IIRC) mostly of CO2, so that seems to be another dent in your theory. Venus, on the other hand, has an extremely thick atmosphere of C02 and it's hotter than Mercury. From this, I would hazard a guess that raw quantities of greenhouse gasses are more important than percentages.
5. Even if greenhouse gases did have a proportional effect, the missing oxygen might very well be replaced by other inert gases. Plants aren't simple oxygen machines; they give and take in ways that I simply cannot recall (nor be bothered to Google) at 5:30 AM.
Oh, and personal responsibility doesn't work. Sorry. Wish it did... but it doesn't, so let's not completely neglect the worst-case-scenario plans, eh?
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Right. They generate oxygen during the day (photosynthesis) and consume it at night (respiration just like every other creature). The net effect on the planet's oxygen is quite small.
The carbon-dioxide/oxygen ratio in the atmosphere is not determined by plants at all. It is regulated by blue-green algae [wikipedia.org] in the oceans in a rather cool negative-feedback loop - if the carbon dioxide level rises, the algae increase their
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It tell you, send them to space, tie them together and the shield's done. And we're better off too. It's just win-win.
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Basically, while the corporations are pulling the strings, america is screwed, and yet it still tries to get all uppity at other countries about pollution.
Particle pollution (Score:2)
Of course, most people (dying of lung diseases) would probably consider the cure worse than the disease.