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They don’t even offset themselves, but SpaceX rockets would likely be a key part in deploying solar shades if necessary
by willy_k 2y ago
They don’t even offset themselves, but SpaceX rockets would likely be a key part in deploying solar shades if necessary
- ainoobler 2y agoHow does that solve the problem of fossil fuel emissions?
- willy_k 2y agoIt can decrease the solar exposure of the earth and potentially decrease temperature, doesn’t address fossil fuel pollution but it does mitigate the impacts of fossil fuel CO2.
- ainoobler 2y agoWhat are the material requirements for this proposal?
- willy_k 2y agoI am not well versed but my impression is it’s essentially a bunch of tin foil and the main impediment are geopolitical reasons and cost to orbit, which SpaceX has been and continues to improve.
- knappe 2y agoOkay, so having gone down this path I can tell you it is impossible. To reduce the output of the sun by 2% at L1 would require 20 MM tons of metal. In order to launch that much tonnage we would have needed to start launching mass 500 years ago. And that assumes no loss of material over time, which would mean even more launches. It is not feasible.
- stragies 2y agoThank you for adding some numbers regarding the feasibility of launching the required materials into space. Do you have any thoughts/numbers about how "mining/construction" in-situ in space might affect those outcomes? E.g. Might we soon be able to "recycle" old in-orbit objects (trash/old_sats) into a slowly growing space mirror? Or several smaller ones over (richer/more_affected) areas?
- knappe 2y agoSo not really. Space mining is a very attractive idea but just not really feasible at the moment. I wrote a paper on attempting to capture the asteroid 433 Eros (a very attractive asteroid due to it's composition of rare metals [Data from the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft collected on Eros in December 1998 suggests that it could contain 20 billion tonnes of aluminum and similar amounts of metals that are rare on Earth, such as gold and platinum.]) and found that in order to knock it into an orbit around the moon we'd need something on the order of 1 THOUSAND or 10 THOUSAND (I could be off by even another magnitude, the numbers are fuzzy after all this time) tsar bomba grade weapons to effectively knock it out of the current orbit and back into one around the moon. Why the moon? Because throwing a planet killer sized object at the Earth just didn't seem reasonable. I situ mining might make this more feasible, but that has all of its own complications. None of which I would feel confident in saying are feasible. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/433_Eros https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/433_Eros https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
- FeepingCreature 2y agoWikipedia says: > A more recent design has been proposed by Olivia Borgue and Andreas M. Hein in 2022, proposing a distributed sunshade with a mass on the order of 100,000 tons, composed of ultra-thin polymeric films and SiO2 nanotubes.[7] The author estimated that launching such mass would require 399 yearly launches of a vehicle such as SpaceX Starship for 10 years.[7] That seems very feasible to me.
- knappe 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]