3 ms·

Nice. Thinking big. And long. It’s going to take about a thousand years, but it’ll be worth it.

• credit_guy 4y ago
  It might not be one thousand years. It will probably be more than 100 years. Of course, 100 vs 1000 is an unverifiable dichotomy. But hear me out. A sunshade big enough to make a difference for Venus would be of the order of 1 billion tons (why? I'm using the sunshield of James Webb, which is about 25 microns thick, and is made of a material called Kepton, which has a density similar to plastic; the rest is just multiplications). Moving a billion tons in space is not easy, thanks to the tyranny of the rocket equation. But if you are at the technological level of building a planet side sunshade, then you can probably build a parabolic mirror (made of the same mylar-like material like JWST's sunshield) []6781