Weirdly, I’m not completely opposed to this. Solar sail technology is a promising avenue for interplanetary travel/exploration, and we’d want to test the technology for giant solar sails somewhere near the Earth, so why not?
Besides the fact that “block the sun” is a traditional supervillain master plan, I guess.
This sort of plan is not being proposed as a alternative to carbon reductions. It would take decades to build up the lumar or asteroid based infrastructure at minimum, and thouse manufacturing lines would need to run for decades to build up the array to the point it starts making an impact. It’s a plan that would at best start to have an effect around 2075, and that’s presuming sustained hundreds of billions of dollars investment. If we are not already close to achieving net zero by then, then we never will be.
The point is that it provides a possible pathway to reverse temperatures, and related things like storm intensity, agricultural area, and sea levels, back down to preindustrial levels, hence reducing the sustained human death toll being continually exacted for emissions done generations before. It is living with what was already done, not an excuse to pollute more.
It’s difficult, but your unlikely to run into any unexpected problems after you get your first satellites placed beyond thouse that come with scalding up. In raw scale, this is a project on terms with building and maintaining the international highway or rail systems, or for a more topical example the solar buildout we need to do to reach net zero in the first place. Vast yes, but hardly unprecedented.
Humans don’t have a track record of failing to do so either. Most civilization collapses are localized, and rather hyperbolic. The collapse of the Roman Empire for example is much closer to the collapse of the British Empire into the modern day UK than the ideas of abandoned long lost cites and technologies pop culture likes to portray it as for instance.
Moreover, unlike a lot of other geoengineering proposals, there are no significant snapback effects from stoping maintenance, just a slow return over fifty to a hundred years to the point you were already at before starting.
An L1 array wouldn’t have that drawback from my understanding, and an earth orbital array would allow you to vary the intensity being let through simply by haveing the satellites turn sideways, or enter a slow constant rotation if your worried about RCS system wear. You could also actively plan the luminosity over a given region to destructively interfere with major storm events, once again saving lives on the ground.
This sort of plan is not being proposed as a alternative to carbon reductions.
That was the whole point of introducing solar radiation management into the discourse; creating social permission for the fossil fuels industry to keep on extracting and burning.
Weirdly, I’m not completely opposed to this. Solar sail technology is a promising avenue for interplanetary travel/exploration, and we’d want to test the technology for giant solar sails somewhere near the Earth, so why not?
Besides the fact that “block the sun” is a traditional supervillain master plan, I guess.
A bunch of reasons:
The point is that it provides a possible pathway to reverse temperatures, and related things like storm intensity, agricultural area, and sea levels, back down to preindustrial levels, hence reducing the sustained human death toll being continually exacted for emissions done generations before. It is living with what was already done, not an excuse to pollute more.
It’s difficult, but your unlikely to run into any unexpected problems after you get your first satellites placed beyond thouse that come with scalding up. In raw scale, this is a project on terms with building and maintaining the international highway or rail systems, or for a more topical example the solar buildout we need to do to reach net zero in the first place. Vast yes, but hardly unprecedented.
Humans don’t have a track record of failing to do so either. Most civilization collapses are localized, and rather hyperbolic. The collapse of the Roman Empire for example is much closer to the collapse of the British Empire into the modern day UK than the ideas of abandoned long lost cites and technologies pop culture likes to portray it as for instance.
Moreover, unlike a lot of other geoengineering proposals, there are no significant snapback effects from stoping maintenance, just a slow return over fifty to a hundred years to the point you were already at before starting.
That was the whole point of introducing solar radiation management into the discourse; creating social permission for the fossil fuels industry to keep on extracting and burning.