2 ms·

1) That assumes complexity not accounted for in cost, weight, or deployability. It's one thing to deploy a bunch of dumb disks. It's entirely another to deploy

1) That assumes complexity not accounted for in cost, weight, or deployability. It's one thing to deploy a bunch of dumb disks. It's entirely another to deploy trillions of steerable drones. It's several orders of magnitude beyond what was suggested. 2) It sort of misses the point- that might address the known-unknowns of the primary effect (solar radiation hitting Earth). It does nothing to address unknown-unknowns or even secondary or tertiary effects. The mere presence of the shields might block solar wind, distort Earth's magnetic field, reflect / refocus cosmic radiation, amplify affect of solar flares, interfere with radio or satellite communication... We just don't know. And the stakes are too big, even compared to worst case global warming. The bigger the potential impact a project has, the better prepared you should be to undo or mitigate it, before it causes problems worse than the ones it's meant to fix. I don't see that here.

DennisP 7y ago
If you look at the link in the original comment, you'll see the whole thing doesn't work at all unless the individual elements are steerable. So that is in fact what was suggested. All the "mights" you mention can be easily evaluated by straightforward physics.
- beerandt 7y ago
  I did, but it's not realistic. Maybe passively "aimed", but not actively steered, and not commandable. And even passive aiming is unrealistic at that price, active steering increases costs by several orders of magnitude. You can't possibly think that it's straightforward to model all those physical aspects for 16 trillion objects. We don't even have the 3-body solution solved; just predicting the gravitational behavior is unbelievably complex and chaotic. That many degrees of freedom is simply unsolvable (without quantum computing). It's hubris to believe we can predict even basic behavior and interference of such a project, let alone intended or unintended side effects, whether known or unknown.

DennisP 7y ago

If you look at the link in the original comment, you'll see the whole thing doesn't work at all unless the individual elements are steerable. So that is in fact what was suggested. All the "mights" you mention can be easily evaluated by straightforward physics.

beerandt 7y ago
I did, but it's not realistic. Maybe passively "aimed", but not actively steered, and not commandable. And even passive aiming is unrealistic at that price, active steering increases costs by several orders of magnitude. You can't possibly think that it's straightforward to model all those physical aspects for 16 trillion objects. We don't even have the 3-body solution solved; just predicting the gravitational behavior is unbelievably complex and chaotic. That many degrees of freedom is simply unsolvable (without quantum computing). It's hubris to believe we can predict even basic behavior and interference of such a project, let alone intended or unintended side effects, whether known or unknown.