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Even if you had a magical fuel plant on the moon to produce infinite fuel for free, what would be the effects of reducing the amount of light earth receives? It
by Causality1 6y ago
Even if you had a magical fuel plant on the moon to produce infinite fuel for free, what would be the effects of reducing the amount of light earth receives? It's not just turning down the AC. It's fundamentally altering a variable that features in almost every biological and meteorological system on earth.
On top of that, you have Poynting–Robertson drag stopping you from putting dust into stable solar orbit in the first place.
- zaroth 6y agoI consider it a feature that whatever you put up there won’t be in a perfectly stable orbit. That means whatever you do will require upkeep one decade to the next or else it will just revert back to normal. And you can start out at whatever scale you feel comfortable with. E.g. If 1 million tons of material had an overall effect of 0.1% reduction in TSI. The sun’s output isn’t perfectly constant over time naturally. On average we get about 1361W/m2 (TSI). But sunspots can show short-term variance up to 0.3%, overall TSI has been varying about 0.04% per decade based on modern measurements, and TSI is believed to have increased about 40% overall over the last few billions of years. Estimates are that reducing TSI by 1% would reduce global average temperatures somewhere between 0.6°C to 1.6°C. I think the most interesting impact of being able to set the world’s temperature would be countries arguing over the thermostat at a global scale. It’s bad enough when my wife and I can’t agree in our own house! https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2659/four-decades-and-counting-new-nasa-instrument-continues-measuring-solar-energy-input-to-earth/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2659/four-decades-and-counting...