Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbrueck | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see a sci-fi writer use this as a premise and explore the unintended consequences. Or maybe a story about this where there was a seemingly minor miscalculation somewhere or some overlooked factor that ended up being catastrophic.

View on HN

I recall Snowpiercer had a similar premise, or at least the animated prequel thing did. They tried to reverse global warming by using some sort of aerosol substance to block sunlight, and ended up casting the Earth into a massive ice age instead.

Thank you, I'll check it out!

Ever seen the movie Snowpiercer? It was based on a comic called Le Transperceneige and they also more recently made a TV series about it, but I've only seen the movie and highly recommend it. It takes place on an Earth stuck in a planet-wide heavy winter due to an anti-global-warming scheme gone wrong. It's the first thing I think of whenever I hear of space umbrellas or these sorts of anti-warming ideas.

EDIT: Ah, someone sniped me.

There has to be a book or two that explores this! The closest thing I can recall is the Animatrix/Matrix series exploring the concept of blotting the sun out with some sort of artificial clouds.

The nice thing about using the L1 Lagrange point is that it is unstable, so eventually the sunshades will disperse. Even with station keeping, the satellites will eventually break.

Highlander 2. I don't recommend it though heh

Reply on news.ycombinator.com