MIT Proposes Brazil-Sized Fleet of 'Space Bubbles' To Cool the Earth (freethink.com) 139
A group of MIT researchers is exploring a radical idea for reversing global warming: using a raft of "space bubbles" to reflect sunlight away from our planet. Freethink reports: The copious amounts of greenhouse gasses humans have been releasing into the air ever since the Industrial Revolution are forming a sort of blanket around our planet, trapping heat in the atmosphere and causing global temperatures to creep ever higher. [...] Instead of injecting particles into Earth's atmosphere to cool the planet, an interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers proposes we take solar geoengineering to space. Specifically, the group is investigating what might happen if we positioned a shield made of bubbles at Lagrangian Point 1 -- a point in space where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and the sun form a sort of equilibrium that would keep the shield in orbit there indefinitely.
The proposed shield would be about the size of Brazil, and the bubbles for it could be manufactured and deployed in space, possibly out of silicon -- the group has already experimented with creating these "space bubbles" in the lab. "In our preliminary experiments, we succeeded at inflating a thin-film bubble at a pressure of 0.0028 atm, and maintaining it at around -50C (to approximate space conditions of zero pressure and near-zero temperature)," they said in a press release. Because the bubbles would be almost a million miles away from Earth, the MIT team says this approach to solar geoengineering wouldn't be as risky as methods that directly involve Earth's atmosphere. [...] This isn't the first time someone has proposed placing a solar shield in space to cool the planet, but creating it out of bubbles would give us a relatively straightforward way to abort the mission if it went awry: just pop the bubbles.
The proposed shield would be about the size of Brazil, and the bubbles for it could be manufactured and deployed in space, possibly out of silicon -- the group has already experimented with creating these "space bubbles" in the lab. "In our preliminary experiments, we succeeded at inflating a thin-film bubble at a pressure of 0.0028 atm, and maintaining it at around -50C (to approximate space conditions of zero pressure and near-zero temperature)," they said in a press release. Because the bubbles would be almost a million miles away from Earth, the MIT team says this approach to solar geoengineering wouldn't be as risky as methods that directly involve Earth's atmosphere. [...] This isn't the first time someone has proposed placing a solar shield in space to cool the planet, but creating it out of bubbles would give us a relatively straightforward way to abort the mission if it went awry: just pop the bubbles.
Finally, viable solution (Score:1)
Pay Musk and Bezos bazillion dollars to do it. Giving the rich even more money to save the planet is the only way. They will block any solution that would cost them even a single dollar.
Re: Finally, viable solution (Score:3, Interesting)
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Catapult technology is pretty primitive so it should barely cost a dime to anybody.
While true, it may be tricky to trick Musk and Bezos to climb into it.
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Launch them one at a time. Just tell Bezos that Musk is already in there. He'll want to know why and how much he's making and won't be able to resist. It will probably work on Branson as well.
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Umm, no.
As much as I like the work SpaceX is doing (Musk himself I'm more ambivalent about), Mars is NOT a "viable solution" to environmental damage on Earth. Nothing we can do to Earth will make it even a tiny fraction as inhospitable as Mars. Worst-plausible case global warming combined with global thermonuclear war that contaminates the entire surface of Earth dangerously radioactive? Still a far nicer and safer place to live than Mars.
Mars is a big step towards getting humanity into space permanently
Reduced photosynthesis (Score:5, Insightful)
One problem with this scheme is it would reduce sunlight, thus inhibiting photosynthesis and lowering the efficiency of solar panels. It would do nothing to fix ocean acidification.
The money to launch these "bubbles" to L1 is likely better spent installing wind turbines and solar panels here on earth.
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very selective refraction might be possible with meta materials, but that just makes it more expensive.
(that is to say, keeps the yellow centered portions of the spectrum needed for photosynthesis, while refracting or blocking IR. Silicon would be a reasonable choice for this, until the bubbles started to re-radiate after getting hot.)
I am dubious of any geo-entineering idea. Especially one that's sole focus is fucking with the planetary energy budget.
Re:Reduced photosynthesis (Score:5, Insightful)
I am dubious of any geo-entineering idea. Especially one that's sole focus is fucking with the planetary energy budget.
Geo-engineering comes with a) we have never done anything remotely this size b) we do not know what it would really do c) basically the tech is not there. All in all a pretty bad idea. These are fantasies that allow the assholes to go on with their greed-fueled destruction a little longer, nothing else.
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I am dubious of any geo-entineering idea. Especially one that's sole focus is fucking with the planetary energy budget.
Geo-engineering comes with a) we have never done anything remotely this size b) we do not know what it would really do c) basically the tech is not there. All in all a pretty bad idea. These are fantasies that allow the assholes to go on with their greed-fueled destruction a little longer, nothing else.
What? What do you mean? To reach L1 (which is unstable and would need additional fuel to station keep beyond this amount) I’m getting about 36units of mass in fuel for each unit of mass put up. A napkin calculation shows that the bubbles would be on the order of 10 million metric tons so would require something like a hundred million metric tons to a billion metric tons of fuel. Considering the environmental impact of burning a billion metric tons (about a planet wide increase of fossil fuel burn
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If launched with LH2/O2 rockets the fossil fuel consumption for launching something like this could be zero.
no guarantee it will even stay in the right place or work
Its called "orbital mechanics" and "engineering". The first is guaranteed to work, and the second is something we do to make things work. This "bubble in the sky" scheme has little chance of ever being developed or deployed, but it it did they would do tests and smaller scale projects to verify that it did indeed work.
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If launched with LH2/O2 rockets the fossil fuel consumption for launching something like this could be zero.
Yea right, producing hydrogen from fossil fuels (which is the only economical and thus only way it happens in reality) generates quite a bit of CO2 released into the atmosphere to the point it’s just the same BS as trying to paste over releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere by turning off the sun. Heisenberg uncertainty means there is a chance monkeys could fly outta my ass, but we call a chance that small pure BS and the definition of impossible.
Its called "orbital mechanics" and "engineering". The first is guaranteed to work, and the second is something we do to make things work. This "bubble in the sky" scheme has little chance of ever being developed or deployed, but it it did they would do tests and smaller scale projects to verify that it did indeed work.
No, it’s called a child like fantasy.
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A napkin calculation shows that the bubbles would be on the order of 10 million metric tons so would require something like a hundred million metric tons to a billion metric tons of fuel. Considering the environmental impact of burning a billion metric tons (about a planet wide increase of fossil fuel burning by 14%) and no guarantee it will even stay in the right place or work, what could possibly go wrong?
Time to go nuclear [wikipedia.org]. At 8 million tons per launch, you only need 2 launches.
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I'm only half joking. The radiation from thermal nuclear bombs exploding in the air is nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl, which is fission-only and had a series of hydrogen explosions to spew unspent fuel into the surroundings. Fusion bombs can't do that since there isn't much fuel in them and once triggered, most of it is used up instantly. There's been ~2000 nuclear bomb tests since they were first invented and we haven't all grew a third arm.
Also I'm not sure how the Russian nuclear cruise missile is rele
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I'm only half joking. The radiation from thermal nuclear bombs exploding in the air is nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl, which is fission-only and had a series of hydrogen explosions to spew unspent fuel into the surroundings. Fusion bombs can't do that since there isn't much fuel in them and once triggered, most of it is used up instantly. There's been ~2000 nuclear bomb tests since they were first invented and we haven't all grew a third arm.
Holy crap this is ignorant. Roughly 19% of background radiation is already man made [wa.gov]
. With differing decay rates, it’s still decades to centuries for many of the most harmful products to mostly decay. Currently it is accepted that about 10mSv causes a 1/2000 increased risk of cancer, with humans already causing an additional 1.2mSv in general annually, in other areas it’s already hundreds, even thousands of times higher causing vast fatalities already. Sounds like your logic is if it only kil
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Currently it is accepted that about 10mSv causes a 1/2000 increased risk of cancer, with humans already causing an additional 1.2mSv in general annually, in other areas it’s already hundreds, even thousands of times higher causing vast fatalities already. Sounds like your logic is if it only kills one in ten thousand that’s OK,
First of all, do you have a source for any of those numbers?
Second, what are the alternatives? How many people are going to die because of global warming? How many will die using other approaches to solving global warming? How many will die if those other options don't pan out?
If you only accept perfect solutions, then nothing will ever be done, because there aren't any perfect solutions. You might think solar or wind is perfectly safe, but they aren't. People die when installing solar panels because they a
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First of all, do you have a source for any of those numbers?
Where is your source that detonating thermonuclear bombs for general propulsion is a green alternative to fossil fuels?
Second, what are the alternatives?
literally using nuclear rockets to put bubbles in space to dim the sun does not make the top ten million sane choices. It is an infantile fantasy. We are already using less fossil fuels in developed nations, they are becoming outdated technology that cannot compete financially with newer cheaper production methods like wind and solar. Once grid battery technology and long distance transmission is matured it will become cost prohibitive to even use fossil fuels anymore.
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Where is your source that detonating thermonuclear bombs for general propulsion is a green alternative to fossil fuels?
Thermonuclear bombs create zero CO2 :)
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Well, it is one of the better proposals, no argument. Still entirely impossible to do in the time-frame it would have to be done in. Engineering is hard. Engineering thing we have never done is much harder. Engineering very large things we have never done is again much, much harder.
On this scale, realistically, if we assume emergency speeds, 50...100 years to get this done. Far, far too late. And it may still fail or take longer.
Re:Reduced photosynthesis (Score:4, Insightful)
I am dubious of any geo-entineering idea. Especially one that's sole focus is fucking with the planetary energy budget.
Me too, but you know it's going to happen. No politician is ever going to make the necessary changes to change the curve in time.
That said: Making something the size of Brazil in space is the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time. It's almost as bad as thinking that a fleet of boats can pick all the trash out of the ocean.
(And "just pop the bubbles"? Have any of those people ever been to Brazil?)
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We may need to end up doing some sort of large scale project like this or some other geoengineering idea. I agree that at this point that looks unfortunately really likely. However, we still might not. And every little bit of CO2 we don't put out now means we have more time to figure out an actually safe and practical way of doing that sort of thing, and that it can be done on a slightly smaller scale, making it more likely to not be as so insanely expensive.
The real problem with "movie plot" ideas like this one is that people watch too many movies and will believe it can be done.
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There shouldn't be any debris[*] - at least not in Earth orbit where it matters. These things are going to be blocking sunlight (and the solar wind), which means they're solar (-wind) sails that being constantly pushed away from the sun, and will actually have to be slightly closer to the sun than the L1 point in order to not just get pushed back into Earth space.
Deflate them and they lose that surface area and constant thrust, which means they fall away from the L1 point towards the sun. They will remain
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When will that happen?
This problem has a time limit.
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Well, world crude production seems to have peaked around 2005
Source? Because that's not what [enerdata.net] I'm seeing [worldometers.info].
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More barrels can be produced, but at increased cost for both drilling and refining (requires more energy to refine heavy sour crude or tar sands vice light sweet):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
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Also naive.
New technology keeps pushing peak oil further into the future as raising prices make profitable things like the enormously destructive tar-sand mining in Canada, that's turning untold miles of lush forest into toxic moonscape.
Plus, even if the oil runs out, we've got coal to last for centuries - and when we start talking about burning all that as well, that's when runaway "Venus-style" warming starts to become a possibility.
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It doesn't really matter to an order-of-magnitude estimation like "hundreds".
The difference between the highest energy content coal and the lowest is only about a factor of two. If you've got hundreds of years assuming the highest energy content - even replacing most of it with the lowest energy content will still provide hundreds of years worth. Fewer hundreds, but still the same order off magnitude.
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>And "just pop the bubbles"? Have any of those people ever been to Brazil?
What's the problem? Doesn't matter how big a bubble (or more accurately, a balloon) is - once you punch a small hole in it it *will* deflate with no further effort from you.
In fact, that seems to me the biggest problem with this plan - you'd presumably need to put these near the L1 point, which is also a focal point for passing near-Earth space debris. It hasn't been much of a problem for our current satellites, but you put a bun
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I am dubious of any geo-entineering idea. Especially one that's sole focus is fucking with the planetary energy budget.
Me too, but you know it's going to happen.
If there's some kind of heat-induced mass mortality event somewhere like India, I would be genuinely surprised if the affected nation(s) don't try some kind of large-scale geoengineering project. Aerosol injection looks like it's easily in the realm of possibility for a moderately-sized nation to try with minimal technology development. And I don't know that any other country would do anything to stop them. Would we go to war over this? I don't think so.
So I think it's maybe good that people are thinking of
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You don't need metamaterials. You can make dichromic coatings in your garage if you're reasonably motivated. If you wear glasses, you probably have a couple on your face right now. If you've ever used soap you've seen some.
Or you could just go with the non-fancy version: dye.
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Indeed. My take with all these pipe-drams is that it is basically just people desperate to not have to change anything in their destructive and wasteful lifestyles.
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My take with all these pipe-drams is that it is basically just people desperate to not have to change anything in their destructive and wasteful lifestyles.
The pipe-dreams are coming from ivory tower academics who have relatively modest lifestyles.
The destructive and wasteful lifestyle people simply deny there is a problem.
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Unless you want to introduce authoritarian measures the likes we've seen in certain novels and certain states during certain decades of the last century, getting billions of people on board with changing their lifestyles seems a herculean effort.
You can lament this all you want but it's no less a pipe-dream than fusion is right now. Yes, would be grand if we had it. But we don't. So let's stop acting like we did.
You will NEVER get a majority of people to give up creature comforts, not as long as there is an
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Sure. People will need to experience a massive die-off to understand (well, some will understand then) and that is certainly coming. I am merely pointing out that these "proposals" are fantasies.
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it is basically just people desperate to not have to change anything in their destructive and wasteful lifestyles.
OR it might simply be a way to buy more time so that we can get fusion power up and running in 70 years because people/corporations refuse to change anything in their destructive and wasteful lifestyles.
I do ponder, are one of those people with a destructive and wasteful lifestyle?
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It would be a way to buy more time if it had a realistic change of working. It does not.
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Why should regular people not seek to be able to take private jets when the cream of the environment industry are taking private jets?
The fact that Leonardo DiCaprio and Angelina Jolie are shallow hypocrites is irrelevant to the validity of climate change.
Association fallacy [wikipedia.org]
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The money to launch these "bubbles" to L1 is likely better spent installing wind turbines and solar panels here on earth.
Not to mention reducing use - e.g. ensuring that buildings are better insulated, roads are made safe enough to cycle on, etc.
Not so technologically exciting. But something we could just start now without drama at low risk.
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Re: Reduced photosynthesis (Score:2)
Lol, you think getting residential density up, mixed use areas, and more grid like structure to our developments is low drama?
(All of these are required to get things close enough together that enough people would bike to have an impact)
That's before the consideration of giving up parking space or lane space for the bikes.
I really wish it was simple, but much of the country needs far more than safer roads for biking to be particularly useful for much of the country.
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We can do both. In the (likely, IMHO) event that we fail to get emissions under control fast enough, we can have space bubbles at an advanced-enought state of development that a final push is feasible. All we need is a few proof-of-concept trials, then we can pause and wait to see if we ever really need it.
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We can do both.
Resources are limited. Money spent on a factory to make space bubbles and launchers is money NOT spent on a factory to build more wind turbines.
We should invest available capital wherever it will be most cost-effective.
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In a world where you can't control everything, doing the most cost-effective thing may still fail. If the USA spends every last available penny on wind turbines, but India spends them on coal plants, it might've been better to spend some USA money on space bubbles, just in case.
There are no silver bullets; everything we do on climate has a measure of risk, and in that scenario, yes prioritise plan A, but I'd say it's wise also to spend a bit on plan B.
Re: Reduced photosynthesis (Score:2)
Only if the space bubbles are cheaper than giving wind turbines to India.
If we commit to spending money for nothing (space bubbles) wouldn't it make more sense to spend less money on something (power for India)?
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Indeed. Let's say that a wind farm costs $1.2B and a coal plant costs $1B.
India installs coal plants for $1B while America replaces existing coal plants with wind turbines for $1.2B each.
But for $1.2B, America could incentivize India to install SIX wind farms instead of coal plants at the $0.2B cost differential.
So it is dumb for America to be replacing coal with wind while India is still building new coal plants.
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India is under no obligation whatsoever to do what you want, and may not do what you consider to be the right thing. What if it's not India but China, and we're at war with them, or they elect someone who decides climate change is a western conspiracy? Or any number of scenarios in which the whole world does not act rationally, at the same time, for the next n decades?
Any plan that starts with "the problem will be solved if we all just..." is not a great plan.
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They're under no obligation, but I sure bet they'd take free power over paying for coal power.
The war thing is a valid point.
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It would be bound to cause unpredictable weather changes. Much smaller scale changes, such as using solar sails and solar mirrors to send energy to Earth and replace fossil fuel sources, seems much safer and more effective. Using the resulting space weaponry reduce human population by 20% instantly is also technologically feasible, though difficult to fund.
Re:Reduced photosynthesis (Score:4, Insightful)
The money to launch these "bubbles" to L1 is likely better spent installing wind turbines and solar panels here on earth.
Not to mention increasing albedo at the surface would be far more simple and though it would take a lot more surface to match a shade, it would be a lot more accessible than L1.
Imagine all those uncovered black parking lots with a white canopy. Buildings with white roofs. Basically if solar isn't going to be deployed over something due to cost, at least make it reflect most of the light back.
Sure, it wouldn't be enough, but you could probably match the performance of this solar shade at least.
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One problem with this scheme is it would reduce sunlight, thus inhibiting photosynthesis and lowering the efficiency ...
Actually, it does not necessarily have these affects - they have to be studied.. It's conceivable a film could be developed which would lessen the total heat transfer into earth but have a negligible affect otherwise. Presumably any affect on photosynthesis would need to be very limited if any for it to be considered successful.. their goal would be reduce global warming - Not accele
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It would intercept 1.8% of solar radiation, so the effect would very slight. Currently the Earth has a 0.7% solar irradiance change due to elliptic orbit its has around the Sun.
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First sensible or relevant response to the topic?
Anyway, my response is that the mirror solution would be better. As regards your specific concern, the sunlight could be redirected rather than reflected away. Just depends how the mirrors are adjusted.
The problem with the hoop-mirror version of an orbital approach is actually the same as with this bubble-based version: We can't predict the weather accurately enough, and I believe that's a fundamental problem. The so-called butterfly effect. However with the
Space Elevator? (Score:2)
A different approach would be massive DACs that pipeline CO2 out past the exosphere. From there, solar wind can catch the molecules of gas and take them away.
Too bad that's really just a "pipe-dream" (get it?) since we don't have any materials strong enough to allow for something as crazy as this.
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I would imagine it being further away helps since it makes the shadow bigger. You'd need an area much larger than brazil if it was close to earth.
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You'd need an area much larger than brazil if it was close to earth.
If it was closer, it would be unstable unless it was in Earth's orbit. In orbit, it would block the sun only a small portion of the time.
L1 is the ONLY place you can put it where it will block sunlight all, or even most, of the time.
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The summary says
Re:Reduced photosynthesis (Score:5, Informative)
The solar pressure on these will be significant, so it will actually be in a so called "artificial Lagrange point" somewhat closer to the sun than L1. These have been investigated before, for example here "Relative Motion around Artificial Lagrange Points" [jst.go.jp].
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I say we let the markets decide, not politicians voting on who gets the most subsidies.
The markets are unable to decide because market forces are just about Always favor of whatever has the greatest short-term Profit and markets barely if ever really care about what happens to the whole planet or anyone other than themself in the long term. CO2 release and global warming are always externalities in the short term with huge gains in the short run for just about any business that makes things - damage come
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The markets will produce AC units, water trucks and hurricane-proof roof tiles. That's the extent to which they can help with solving the global warming problem. Granted, those are useful too, but they don't fix the underlying problem because that's would be a common good and there's no way to profit from that.
You want death-rays? That's how you get death-rays (Score:5, Funny)
Let's hope the space bubble doesn't become a giant space lens!
We'd have a solar cooker the size of Brazil with a wandering death ray drifting across the planet, frying people like ants.
I'd watch that movie - "OMG it's the sunrise!! Fucking run!!"
Re:You want death-rays? That's how you get death-r (Score:5, Informative)
The TV series Into the Night (2020) is basically what you're looking for.
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Ha ha ha! I'd totally forgotten about that! We're officially living post-futurama.
Next thing you know MIT will propose launching a giant trashball into the sun!
Meteor hits (Score:3)
More importantly, would it take all the nearby bubbles with it?
Nope, bad idea. Stop digging first. (Score:2)
Any geoengineering project is going to piss off someone. Someone that might go to great lengths to stop it, like declare war.
Here's an idea that isn't going to piss people off, at least not any more than they are already pissed off, nuclear fission power and hydrocarbon fuel synthesis. We don't have anything better than hydrocarbons for transportation fuels, except nuclear power on really big vehicles like ships at sea. Russia won't like seeing their market for hydrocarbon fuels dry up if that happens, b
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One thing the Ukraine war has demonstrated is that centralised energy sources (however they end up being delivered to consumers) are extremely vulnerable by their nature. One powerful missile scoring a direct hit on a nuclear power station leaves you with, not just a total loss of energy from that source, but also a major environmental disaster. Large hydrocarbon synthesis facilities will be similarly vulnerab
But (Score:1)
I thought that the experts from the Slashdot Half-witted Institute of Technology said that global warming couldn't be reversed. Reference: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
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A reversal would be: if we stop emitting excessive CO2, then after some time the composition of the atmosphere moves back (reverses) to what it was before, and hopefully the climate reverses as well. Apparently, recent calculations say it would not happen because the accumulated effects were beyond certain thresholds.
With this proposal we would keep current atmosphere composition but reduce the light incoming to earth. Not a reversal at all, but further modifications causing other consequences, like decreas
Station keeping? (Score:4, Interesting)
L1 is described not stable, and spacecraft positioned there require periodic correction of their orbit to keep station. I admit I only skimmed the article, but I didn't see any mention of how you would correct the orbit of a raft of thin-film silicon bubbles. Maybe it doesn't matter with something the size of Brazil, depending on the nature of the instability at L1, maybe its orbit can wobble significantly, but it still stays in the right general area and still does its job?
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And that's key - it doesn't need to stay put for all eternity. It would be better if i
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Well, the Lagrange points are where things stay put, relative to the big things exerting gravitational forces on them.
False, a common misconception. L1 has a saddle shape and as such is stable like placing a ball on a saddle. Sure, at one exact point it will stay stable, but any deviation from absolute perfection and it’s going to drift away with more and more force. Maybe some kind of solar sail, and deviation from the point to counteract the solar pressure could be used, but we can barely keep stupid simple small structures from failing (see the impacts already piercing through the James Webb) much less somethi
Would they stay, and survive, at L1? (Score:2)
the group is investigating what might happen if we positioned a shield made of bubbles at Lagrangian Point 1 -- a point in space where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and the sun form a sort of equilibrium that would keep the shield in orbit there indefinitely.
Ya, but would something with that low a mass stay at L1 or would solar winds push them out of position -- like they would a solar sail?
In our preliminary experiments, we succeeded at inflating a thin-film bubble at a pressure of 0.0028 atm, and maintaining it at around -50C (to approximate space conditions of zero pressure and near-zero temperature),"
Wouldn't they eventually get heated by the Sun and expand? If so, how stretchy are these things?
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This would definitely happen. The L1 point is metastable, like balancing a needle on its tip. Any perturbation leads to more perturbations.
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Pie in the Sky projects (Score:2)
Sound somewhat plausible, but have zero change of getting implemented.
A workaround is not a solution (Score:2)
197 other countries will just love it (Score:2)
I bet.
Bubble in a vacuum (Score:2)
Using water and soap would result in the water boiling away quickly, but probably with some other non-volatile liquid ? Which ones ?
Trust Elon (Score:2)
Thousands of Starlink satellites will collide and create a thin layer of debree to block the sun.
Stupid plan from stupid people... (Score:3)
So, to combat trapped heat they propose to dim the freaking sun?
When their house is heated too much in the winter, do they drive down to the power station and install a big fat resistor, reducing the power for everyone connected?
Basically they are not solving the actual problem, which is human CO2 production.
They want to dampen the source of most of the energy on earth.
Meanwhile the hoomans can continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, making the problem bigger.
And then we will need even more bubbles so the sun becomes even more dim.
To put it bluntly, we fucked our atmosphere up by messing with it, and the fix is to mess with the earth on an even more elemental level by basically reducing light for all systems that rely on it. Freaking genius.
Many dynamical systems rely on this energy source.
Plants will get significantly less sunlight for the same temperature.
I'm sure algae won't like it.
The oceans will get less direct sunlight, changing dynamics.
What could go wrong?
Instead of removing carbon we will have to flip to producing oxygen because the plants won't produce it as efficiently anymore.
All in all this reeks of curing cancer with a bandage.
Fuck you, MIT, for thinking so far outside the box that the solution becomes another problem, and then publishing about it as if it's the new sliced bread. Fuck you.
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I think the point is that we are so far gone that it has come to dimming the sun to protect our investment in certain cities such as Phoenix that will otherwise be unhabitable in a few years.
Yeah, and that point is fucking arrogant, egoistical, unethical and quite frankly just sad.
Phoenix is a desert shit hole that shouldn't have existed in the first place and is kept alive by using exorbitant amounts of resources. Phoenix is exactly what is wrong with the world and with the US in particular. So fuck phoenix. Let it burn and be born anew.
The point is that this plan will change the solar power input for the whole world just to save some impossible cities in the US.
And no, we are not that far gon
A possibly better solution (Score:2)
Why not put a giant mirror in space which will simply reflect the Sun's rays from hitting us in the first place? What could possibly go wrong [youtube.com]?
Otherwise, a better option might be to drop some ice into the oceans [youtube.com] to cool things down.
If either of those are too complicated, we could always redirect the venting of greenhouse gases directly upward [youtube.com], thus moving the planet a little further away from the Sun which would, over time, help cool things down.
There are several options to try and cool the planet. It all d
Instead, raise the albedo. (Score:2)
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just paint pavement white and only sell white roof shingles and make automobile glass more heat reflective
And who controls it? (Score:2)
US, Russia, China, Amazon, Tesla, ... or small group of space terrorists?
Gotta love these 'world' solutions, right? Because we are all one happy benevolent family as the UN totally proves.
Geoforming Beta Testing (Score:2)
I realize that it's going to be a while before we can do testing of ideas like this with other celestial bodies, but CAN WE NOT *beta test* using the Earth?! This is kinda our one and only production environment right now. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
I realize that it's going to be a while before we can do testing of ideas like this with other celestial bodies, but CAN WE NOT *beta test* using the Earth?! This is kinda our one and only production environment right now. ;)
Definitely should try this trick out on Venus first.
Pop The Bubbles? (Score:2)
And there's nothing else out there in space to prematurely pop those bubbles?
Fake headline (Score:2)
MIT did not propose anything. Some people who work at MIT proposed something. I don't recall a vote by the MIT Board on this item.
L1 is unstable, all gone after 23 days. (Score:2)
Pop the bubbles, huh?
Something's not right here.
Popping? (Score:2)
What's keeping these bubbles (which I assume are actually silicone, not silicon) from popping when bits of space dust goes zipping through them? Do they self heal? Is there a way to re-build ones that have "popped"? I suppose L1 is advantageous given that it's unstable, so there shouldn't be a buildup of dust there.