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> One proposed sunshade would be composed of 16 trillion small disks at the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrangian point, 1.5 million kilometers above Earth. Each disk is prop
by ForHackernews 8y ago
> One proposed sunshade would be composed of 16 trillion small disks at the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrangian point, 1.5 million kilometers above Earth. Each disk is proposed to have a 0.6-meter diameter and a thickness of about 5 micrometers. The mass of each disk would be about a gram, adding up to a total of almost 20 million tonnes.
> Such a group of sunshades would need to occupy an area of about 3.8 million square kilometers if placed at the L1 point. The deployment of the flyers is an issue that requires new technology. Large railguns or coilguns are proposed to fire a capsule containing a million shades into space every 5 minutes for 10 years using 20 separate launch sites.
This is science fiction.
- d0lph 8y agoPerhaps, but that is the 5T one, the "one fresnel lens" option or "one diffraction grating" option are cheaper and seem more feasible. That said, if scientists believe that all they lack is money, who are you to tell them otherwise.
- ForHackernews 8y agoOops: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/solar-geo-engineering-cant-save-the-worlds-crops/567017/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/solar-ge... (Not space lenses, but another risky, poorly-understood geo-engineering proposal)
- d0lph 8y agoSeems unrelated, but I'm glad that idea went through scientific review.