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Your point is well made. If all it took was heat, then climate change would probably be the best thing ever. More heat captured from the sun would give us more
by sidewndr46 5y ago
Your point is well made. If all it took was heat, then climate change would probably be the best thing ever. More heat captured from the sun would give us more energy.
- hedora 5y agoOpen challenge: Getting an elected US politician to seriously propose a space heat sink as a solution to climate change. There were some people seriously proposing big convection tubes that'd bootstrap columns of hot air, then passively pull surface air into the upper atmosphere. I can't find a link, but those wouldn't get to low earth orbit, so not a "space" technology.
- sidewndr46 5y agoI've heard of launching some large mirrors into orbit, or a bunch of small mirrors that can link together in orbit. Then you use them to reflect some sunlight off into space. I have no idea how practical this is. The bigger concern would be if something goes wrong, you need to make the mirrors deorbit quickly.
- hedora 5y agoYou could set it so that some of the mirrors formed a parabolic collector and heated a molten salt column, etc on the surface. That'd have the same net effect as the giant heat sink (energy production from a heat engine, net negative flow of energy to the surface). Wasn't there a city builder that'd let you build such a thing, where it would sometimes lose calibration and burn a swath of the city to the ground?
- yissp 5y agoFuturama had a similar joke (with a reflecting mirror, not a heat collector) https://gfycat.com/hatefulvariablekakapo https://gfycat.com/hatefulvariablekakapo
- Ekaros 5y agoSim City 2000 I think. Yeah, getting it back here is not great. And would defeat the purpose of lowering amount of solar radiation...