> because new technology will magically solve all our problems.
Well, if you call putting 10 million tons of diffractive moondust into orbit at L1 “magical”, then he’ll probably turn out to be right.
Well, if you call putting 10 million tons of diffractive moondust into orbit at L1 “magical”, then he’ll probably turn out to be right.
On top of that, you have Poynting–Robertson drag stopping you from putting dust into stable solar orbit in the first place.
And you can start out at whatever scale you feel comfortable with. E.g. If 1 million tons of material had an overall effect of 0.1% reduction in TSI.
The sun’s output isn’t perfectly constant over time naturally. On average we get about 1361W/m2 (TSI). But sunspots can show short-term variance up to 0.3%, overall TSI has been varying about 0.04% per decade based on modern measurements, and TSI is believed to have increased about 40% overall over the last few billions of years.
Estimates are that reducing TSI by 1% would reduce global average temperatures somewhere between 0.6°C to 1.6°C.
I think the most interesting impact of being able to set the world’s temperature would be countries arguing over the thermostat at a global scale. It’s bad enough when my wife and I can’t agree in our own house!
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2659/four-decades-and-counting...
Sounds magical to me!
A million tons a year to orbit (10,000 launches) equates to 600 billion cubic feet of methane, or about 2% of total US annual production.
But the actual plan would involve manufacturing the “mirrors” from moondust and propelling them to L1 using railguns powered by lunar solar panels. So you don’t need nearly so much methane.