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Comment by systematical | Hacker News Reader

Changing the economy is too slow. Need to engineer the planet at this point. It's and end user hack, but what are the other options?

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I agree. We've been engineering the atmosphere for hundreds of years by burning fossil fuels. We have to continue engineering it by blocking heat energy or radiating it away from the planet somehow. We'll still have to then sequester the carbon we'll continue to emit in various niche industries, and sequester the massive amount of historical emissions.

I was thinking with the cheapened cost of space flight in the next couple of decades, couldn't we lift a huge solar reflector sail in between our planet's poles and the sun? Just block 1% of the heat energy or so, would that be possible?

Shading 1% of the area of Earth would mean an 'umbrella' of the size of roughly 1.5 million square kilometers. A mylar foil at 10g/m² would weigh 12 million metric tons. With SpaceX' Starship's proposed >100t to low earth orbit, that would mean over 100,000 launches. That's difficult.

There are small scale tests being performed to spray chemicals into the atmosphere that would reflect heat. I hope it works and they can verify there won't be any negative consequences.

I get laughed at when I say this, but I'd dump billions into DARPA for researching this. Since its DARPA, you can call it defense spending to appease the elephants. I'd charge them with finding a way to "scoop" the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Somehow splitting it into carbon and oxygen. I envision thousands of solar powered flyers destroying CO2 some day.

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