A Startup's Bid to Dim the Sun | Hacker News Reader

A Startup's Bid to Dim the Sun

newyorker.com

15 pointsmitchbob22 comments

If you really want to read how horrible and scary the idea of geo-engineering can get, read these two papers:

https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/30/4/article-p3_1.xml?l...

https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/31/1/article-p3_1.xml?l...

It's a wild read, that not only explains how this idea is technically horrible - he also analyzes the social and psychological effects this would have on humanity, and it's harrowing:

- We will be unable to see blue skies anymore, it will simply become white. This will be a traumatic event for humanity, and would have consequences beyond our understanding. Also, sunsets will be much more bloody-red, and we wouldn't be able to see the stars as clearly as before.

- The nature of aerosol deployments is that once we start this to combat global warming, corporations and governments will just rely on this instead of also reducing CO2 emissions. So as time passes, an exponentially larger amount of aerosols would be needed to block out the sun at every year, which makes the side-effects of geo-engineering grow immensely over time.

- Once aerosols hit a limit, then there lies the termination shock - once we "give" up on emitting aerosols due to it becoming exponentially expensive to maintain over time, the Earth's temperature will suddenly shoot up at unprecedented rates, quick rendering the planet inhabitable for humanity. His analogies to Freud's theory of repression is apt - we constantly repress our traumatic thoughts with stopgap measures, until the fantasy becomes too expensive to maintain and enter into the fully destructive phase.

If you want to read how horrible and scary the status quo is, just look at any scientific projection of current trends in 10 or 50 years.

> corporations and governments will just rely on this instead of also reducing CO2 emissions

They already rely on people wanting cheap gasoline and cheap beef and high profits to the companies that give generous political donations. So, no change in actual behavior.

Geo-engineering is already happening and has been for decades. It's just been as a side effect of industry. Doing a little bit of intentional work to counteract that is a reasonable response. Hoping that tomorrow everyone wakes up and decides to do the right thing about emissions is a fantasy.

Volcanic sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere is not the only known factor that can reduce global average temperatures. Another well known phenomenon is that during the ice ages, the sprawling white ice sheets tended to reflect a lot of the solar radiation back into space, causing a positive feedback loop that cooled the planet down even further. The fundamental idea here in both cases, is that the global warming is caused by the blocking of the warm Earth's long-wavelength black body radiation by the greenhouse gases. But the same greenhouse gases aren't as effective at blocking the short-wavelength radiations coming off of the reflective surfaces.

If you're going take the absurd route of a planet-wide ecosystem engineering project, why not increase the albedo of the planet instead by covering a portion of its surface with thin, light, semi-transparent, semi-reflective films that we already know how to make? We already cover huge areas with artificial materials like cement, asphalt and paints. Since they just lie around motionless on the ground, they're easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and easy to modify or remove if something doesn't go according to plans. Why instead throw aerosols at huge logistic costs into the stratosphere where the air currents and aerosol dispersion patterns are difficult to predict and even more difficult to manage if something goes wrong?

Why do people promote these sorts of unwieldy sci-fi fantasies (high-speed rail vs hyperloop, anyone?), instead of addressing the fundamental cause at the least cost possible? You know, may be convince everyone that dumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere is not a good idea? Climate change is primarily rooted in politics and greed. That would be a good place to start. And if possible at all, find a way to absorb some of the CO2 back? Nature actually has some mechanisms that can absorb and sink CO2 in huge quantities. Getting them to work for us is a challenge. But I don't think it's worse than the hubris of imagining being powerful enough to control the planet altogether.

"You know, may be convince everyone that dumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere is not a good idea? "

Compared to this, a planet-wide engineering project might be less absurd and more doable.

Even the EU is under strong internal pressure to water down its decarbonization project, because local effects have proven too inconvenient to voters. Green vote has gone down all across Europe, and that translates to reduced political influence of the ideas you are speaking about.

> because local effects have proven too inconvenient to voters.

I don't think you need a reminder that their inconvenience is about to get a whole lot worse. When I said they should convince everyone, I meant the voters too. A renewed awareness campaign at this point is not such a bad idea. It's definitely not as costly as the fantasies as these people are proposing.

I had to look twice, to confirm that this article was not about Dim Sum.

Now I've got a craving...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dim_sum

I still think a slew of independent satellites is the best idea.

Worst case, just send up a shuttle and sweep them all up.

You can’t undo a volcanic explosion.

> Worst case, just send up a shuttle and sweep them all up.

Not necessarily. All the junk could kickstart Kessler Syndrome[1] and make earth’s orbit completely impossible to traverse. Then when you want to sweep them up, your shuttle would just get shredded by debris.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

> However, even a catastrophic Kessler scenario at LEO would pose minimal risk for launches continuing past LEO, or satellites travelling at medium Earth orbit (MEO) or geosynchronous orbit (GEO). The catastrophic scenarios predict an increase in the number of collisions per year, as opposed to a physically impassable barrier to space exploration that occurs in higher orbits.

Kessler Syndrome has always struck me as a problem that, should it become an actual issue, we should be able to solve. There is even mention of a couple potential solutions on the Wikipedia page.

How does that work? You need a combined reflective area equivalent to the amount of radiative power you want block. So let's say that you want to block just 0.001% of the Sun's incident power on Earth. According to my calculations, that represents a total reflective area of approximately 1275 km^2. And those have to be directly in between the Sun and Earth at any given time. If you're on an orbit around Earth, the best that you'll get is in the LEO, where only half of those satellites will be in that condition on average at any given time. So, how many satellites (of any size class) will you need for that?

> The gloomy arguments in favor of solar geoengineering are compelling; so are the even gloomier counter-arguments.

https://archive.ph/3RgfQ

Basically Neal Stephenson's "Termination Shock" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)

Since the beginning of time, Man has yearned to destroy the Sun.

This always seems like "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure" type situations to me...

But I guess the prevention is too costly for the big oil money interests.

From the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun.

Just stop the daily sacrifices? Has anyone tried that?

solar geoengineering - It's the dumbest idea I ever put forward by any supposed human being. There's no compelling arguments in favor. Period.

That nearby star has oppressed us for long enough. Look at what happened to Venus!

Exactly. Photosynthesis is vastly overrated.

Snowpiercer was pretty good.

Very terrible idea. Downvote me.

I agree very much with you. Should I downvote you? Is this some sort of ritual?

Jokes aside, even if the technology works as intended (and that's a big if), the opportunities to abuse it are plenty and absolutely scary. I know that 'government weather control' is currently a realm of fantasy and conspiracy theories. But sunlight is the driver of climate and weather on Earth. Changing the incident solar power over a large enough region even by a little bit with respect to the rest of the world can bring about massive differences in weather patterns. While these particles are meant to spread around the world, it can bring about this effect if its degradation/dispersal times and release point into upper atmospheric winds can be engineered. It isn't as difficult as it sounds. And given that these people aren't willing to address the primary drivers of global warming - massive production of CO2 and the ever-increasing wealth inequity, there is absolutely no reason to believe that they won't misuse and abuse it to their own financial advantage. In some ways, it's actually worse than nuclear weapons, because there are a bunch of weather calamities that have very high costs in terms of lives.

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