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Right, putting many small mirrors or small spacecraft at L1 seems entirely plausible to me. Especially if we're talking seriously about doing things like coloni

by Dig1t 5y ago

Right, putting many small mirrors or small spacecraft at L1 seems entirely plausible to me. Especially if we're talking seriously about doing things like colonizing Mars, this is in fact much easier to do than colonizing another planet. From the Wikipedia article: "Creating this sunshade in space was estimated to cost in excess of US$130 billion over 20 years" Honestly that's not very expensive at all when both compared with things like the current infrastructure bill that the US is trying to pass and also considering the impact something like that could have. Yes its expensive, but it seems to me that that this is something that the governments of the world could afford to do. Engineering and launching a bunch of spacecraft seems considerably easier than changing the behavior of most people on the planet.

WorldMaker 5y ago
We don't need to change the behavior of most people on the planet: we need to change the behavior of the wealthiest people (and corporations) on the planet. It should be a smaller project than directing a lot mass towards L1. One of the problems is the wealthy misdirecting the blame to "average people" and that we all just need LED bulbs or EV cars or what not. Those are drops in the bucket of industrial carbon waste and always have been. All the finger pointing "it's the consumers' faults, we just need them to buy the right things" is marketing/propaganda at its finest. (Well and also bitcoin/cryptocurrencies have managed to claw back every individual gain anyway in LED efficiency or hybrid/EV gas mileage, so it may take a few more people to convince to stop investing in those schemes. Though there again it is rarely the "I own a couple Satoshi" masses that need to stop it's the biggest and wealthiest miners. And yeah stopping the wealthiest miners would destabilize the currencies because of the Ponzi scheme effects they are built on top of, but that's why it's a lousy investment and, uh, too bad? I'd rather keep the planet than the silly digital money, don't know about y'all.) Convincing a couple hundred billionaires and couple hundred massive crpyto mining farms to stop should be a much easier problem to solve than the orbital mechanics of a massive L1 project. The fact that we don't think that it is probably says a lot more sad things about our sociopolitics in this age than we'd like it to. (ETA: That's assuming of course we aren't already on the wrong side of snowball effects and stopping entirely now would hit a hysteresis effect. Pessimistically, sure, it may be too late. But if we are past that "point of no return" a sunshade can't help us either because the snowball effects likely happen even if we lessen the additional energy pouring in from the sun.)

by Dig1t 5y ago

WorldMaker 5y ago

We don't need to change the behavior of most people on the planet: we need to change the behavior of the wealthiest people (and corporations) on the planet. It should be a smaller project than directing a lot mass towards L1. One of the problems is the wealthy misdirecting the blame to "average people" and that we all just need LED bulbs or EV cars or what not. Those are drops in the bucket of industrial carbon waste and always have been. All the finger pointing "it's the consumers' faults, we just need them to buy the right things" is marketing/propaganda at its finest. (Well and also bitcoin/cryptocurrencies have managed to claw back every individual gain anyway in LED efficiency or hybrid/EV gas mileage, so it may take a few more people to convince to stop investing in those schemes. Though there again it is rarely the "I own a couple Satoshi" masses that need to stop it's the biggest and wealthiest miners. And yeah stopping the wealthiest miners would destabilize the currencies because of the Ponzi scheme effects they are built on top of, but that's why it's a lousy investment and, uh, too bad? I'd rather keep the planet than the silly digital money, don't know about y'all.) Convincing a couple hundred billionaires and couple hundred massive crpyto mining farms to stop should be a much easier problem to solve than the orbital mechanics of a massive L1 project. The fact that we don't think that it is probably says a lot more sad things about our sociopolitics in this age than we'd like it to. (ETA: That's assuming of course we aren't already on the wrong side of snowball effects and stopping entirely now would hit a hysteresis effect. Pessimistically, sure, it may be too late. But if we are past that "point of no return" a sunshade can't help us either because the snowball effects likely happen even if we lessen the additional energy pouring in from the sun.)