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I respect your position but I completely disagree. We are so far off from needing to worry about the sun dying out. We should be focused on stopping and reversi

I respect your position but I completely disagree. We are so far off from needing to worry about the sun dying out. We should be focused on stopping and reversing climate change.

shkkmo 5y ago
There is an argument that advancing orbital launch capacity can help with the scientific research and geo-engineering needed to control global warming. There is even an argument that the technology needed to make living on Mars feasible could be beneficial in combating the adverse effecta of global warming and the resulting ecological collapses. I don't think that working to towards colonization of mars and working to counteract global warming are antithetical or even orthogonal.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  I mean, the scale of a sun-shield is insane but not impossible. You need to block about 0.3% of the sunlight hitting the Earth to counteract global warming. About 80,000 km of mylar at L1 would do it. On Amazon, that much mylar would cost you on the order of $100B and weigh 7 million metric tons; SpaceX would charge around $40T at today's prices to lift it to orbit. Obviously it's more complicated than that, and that solution is potentially unworkable for a variety of reasons, but that's roughly the scale of the problem.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    The scales of most (if not all) geoenineering solutions to global warming are pretty mind boggling. There are all sorts of ways that the resources and energy available in space can make the scale of these challenges more feasible. I don't expect that is we will see those benefits for several decades at a minimum as we are a long way from industrializing space at the scale necessary for it to matter. In the short term the only practical benefits we can expect to see is cheaper satellites that will help use understand how the planet is changing as it heats up.
fighterpilot 5y ago
It's not just about the sun dying out. A large asteroid could strike at any time and wipe us out. If that is going to happen on Earth with probability p and we make it to Mars then our chances of going extinct due to that cause shrinks to less than p-squared (it's less than p-squared because Mars is smaller than Earth), which is many orders of magnitude smaller than p. Diversification is extremely important to our long term survival as a species.
- WA 5y ago
  Still, it makes sense to take the chances for another 500 years, work on making our lives on planet Earth more habitable and sustainable and then invest in space faring tech. The chances of being wiped out by a super volcano or asteroid impact over the next 500 years until we solved the sustainable energy problem and a stable ecosystem are rather small.
  - m4rtink 5y ago
    This is very dangerous thinking - we have the technological window of opportunity now and we need to use it NOW to get space infrastructure working. We might not have the option in 500 years, even if nothing big wipes us out till then, there could be less serious catastrophes destroying our ability to do spaceflight damning our descendants to inescapable destruction.

I respect your position but I completely disagree. We are so far off from needing to worry about the sun dying out. We should be focused on stopping and reversing climate change.

shkkmo 5y ago

There is an argument that advancing orbital launch capacity can help with the scientific research and geo-engineering needed to control global warming. There is even an argument that the technology needed to make living on Mars feasible could be beneficial in combating the adverse effecta of global warming and the resulting ecological collapses. I don't think that working to towards colonization of mars and working to counteract global warming are antithetical or even orthogonal.

saalweachter 5y ago
I mean, the scale of a sun-shield is insane but not impossible. You need to block about 0.3% of the sunlight hitting the Earth to counteract global warming. About 80,000 km of mylar at L1 would do it. On Amazon, that much mylar would cost you on the order of $100B and weigh 7 million metric tons; SpaceX would charge around $40T at today's prices to lift it to orbit. Obviously it's more complicated than that, and that solution is potentially unworkable for a variety of reasons, but that's roughly the scale of the problem.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  The scales of most (if not all) geoenineering solutions to global warming are pretty mind boggling. There are all sorts of ways that the resources and energy available in space can make the scale of these challenges more feasible. I don't expect that is we will see those benefits for several decades at a minimum as we are a long way from industrializing space at the scale necessary for it to matter. In the short term the only practical benefits we can expect to see is cheaper satellites that will help use understand how the planet is changing as it heats up.

fighterpilot 5y ago

It's not just about the sun dying out. A large asteroid could strike at any time and wipe us out. If that is going to happen on Earth with probability p and we make it to Mars then our chances of going extinct due to that cause shrinks to less than p-squared (it's less than p-squared because Mars is smaller than Earth), which is many orders of magnitude smaller than p. Diversification is extremely important to our long term survival as a species.

WA 5y ago
Still, it makes sense to take the chances for another 500 years, work on making our lives on planet Earth more habitable and sustainable and then invest in space faring tech. The chances of being wiped out by a super volcano or asteroid impact over the next 500 years until we solved the sustainable energy problem and a stable ecosystem are rather small.
- m4rtink 5y ago
  This is very dangerous thinking - we have the technological window of opportunity now and we need to use it NOW to get space infrastructure working. We might not have the option in 500 years, even if nothing big wipes us out till then, there could be less serious catastrophes destroying our ability to do spaceflight damning our descendants to inescapable destruction.