[HN Gopher] Could a giant parasol in outer space help solve the ...
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Could a giant parasol in outer space help solve the climate crisis?
Author : gmays
Score : 23 points
Date : 2024-02-09 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| eschneider wrote:
| It would be "astronomically expensive", they said. :0
| Log_out_ wrote:
| Actually.. No, if it's on a inner orbit, synchronous to the
| earth, it's just a dust flake throwing a shadow on a peeble.
| Could even shape it and foils or flakes need little structure.
| And as they are lights ails, if you throw them lightly inwards,
| they would automatically disperse. Still problematic approaxh
| to behavioral change, but if the species is not capable of
| that, for now, cause to feral, one could make due.
|
| Ps: this would reduce solar efficiency..
| dylan604 wrote:
| it just needs to have a spider like robot that can patch the
| holes
| huppeldepup wrote:
| It avoids actually solving the very lucrative pollution problem,
| so this is a prime candidate.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I'm convinced we'll do literally any and everything besides
| stopping the root cause.
| goodSteveramos wrote:
| Im skeptical about this solar shield thing but how big of a
| problem is CO2 on its own? (without climatic effects)
| sofixa wrote:
| Well that's easy to imagine because the root cause is so
| deeply rooted and complex, and stopping it would be literally
| a Herculean effort across billions of people in hundred+
| countries, many of which would have to work against their own
| primal surface-level interests (e.g. good luck convincing
| poorer or even affluent countries reliant on oil exports that
| they should decarbonise and coordinate efforts with other
| countries to decarbonise, _even if_ you directly give them
| the money to allow them to decarbonise which nobody is going
| to do).
| TriangleEdge wrote:
| What material would this have to be made of to not melt?
|
| Edit: I'm not that familiar with radiation and its
| parameters/properties. My assumption was that it would accumulate
| heat. I'll go look up if radiation is a function of heat, then I
| suppose it could become stable at some temperature. It's
| surprising to me that you can block out some of the sun from a
| good area on the earth and not have melting bits.
| croisillon wrote:
| i hear it's extremely cold out there
| kvdveer wrote:
| It is both incredibly hot due to solar radiation, and
| extremely cold, due to the lack of atmosphere to transfer
| heat.
|
| The sun-side of this parasol will be all melty, while the
| shade side will be extraordinarily chilly. Whatever it is
| made of, will need to withstand that extreme thermal
| gradient.
| zhirzh wrote:
| There's also the possibility of occasional space debris or
| solar flares striking the parasol
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Very minor possibility though as any space debris that is
| not already in a semi-stable orbit would most likely have
| been filtered out by the planets before making it to any
| location inside of Earths Orbit, and a space parasol
| would be fairly small on an astronomical scale.
| gruez wrote:
| > It is both incredibly hot due to solar radiation, and
| extremely cold, due to the lack of atmosphere to transfer
| heat.
|
| If the temperature of the moon is anything to go by, it's
| hot but not too hot. According to NASA:
|
| >Temperatures near the Moon's equator can spike to 250degF
| (121degC) in daylight, then plummet after nightfall to
| -208degF (-133degC).
|
| https://science.nasa.gov/moon/weather-on-the-moon/
|
| Something like aluminum foil should work fine.
| thsksbd wrote:
| Something with a black back to radiate the heat back out to
| space.
|
| This is (very) stupid.
| morsch wrote:
| Mushroom. What other material would a parasol be?
| itishappy wrote:
| It's not as hot as you'd think. Solar panels (highly absorbing)
| reach slightly over the boiling point of water in direct
| sunlight. Metals work fine, so do a surprising number of
| composites and plastics.
|
| * Aluminum, Magnesium, Titanium, Berylium
|
| * Graphite/epoxy, Aramid/epoxy, Glass/epoxy
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...
| wmf wrote:
| Reflective mylar.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > What material would this have to be made of to not melt?
|
| I would just use a giant array of solar PV panels as screen,
| then build a huge coil gun nearby and use all that energy to
| deflect potential dangerous asteroids by throwing them
| projectiles made of collected and recycled debris from
| decommissioned satellites.
| croisillon wrote:
| https://archive.is/D7pTZ
| codersfocus wrote:
| "To block the necessary amount of solar radiation, the shade
| would have to be about a million square miles, roughly the size
| of Argentina, Dr. Rozen said."
|
| "Dr. Rozen said his team was ready to design a prototype shade of
| 100 square feet and is seeking between $10 million and $20
| million to fund the demonstration."
| spookybones wrote:
| In a better world, if every country agreed not to destroy each
| other for a decade and applied their defense budgets, it's
| doable. Global defense budget is approximately 2.2 trillion as
| of 2022, according to Statista. Granted, that would cause of a
| lot of unemployment.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Unclear whether a crash decarbonization program would be more
| or less expensive than that, though.
| kanisae wrote:
| Looking at it over the long term, it's something we will need to
| do regardless of co2 emissions as the sun heats up over it's
| lifespan. The more interesting part of it is that I've you do
| Earth you have the tech and infrastructure to do the same to
| Venus and do the opposite to Mars. Combine the solar shade with
| some solar panels and you are well on your way to becoming a
| Khardeshev II civilization.
| thsksbd wrote:
| It's a shade the size of _Argentina_.
|
| Argentina is a very big country
| dylan604 wrote:
| This is an odd one though, as Argentina's shape is very long
| an narrow. I doubt that shape is what is needed. So just
| looking up something with the similar sizes based on area
| doesn't really help when the shapes are so different.
| pmontra wrote:
| Indeed. Argentina is only 3.5 times smaller than the USA.
| It's a lot of stuff to send to space.
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| The Kardashev scale is a scale whose smallest unit is our
| current civilization, the scale easily accommodates
| Argentina.
| timeagain wrote:
| Yeah but that scale is fantasy/sci-fi. Baked within it is a
| kind of assumption that it is a scale we should be moving
| up through, which is not a given.
|
| So I guess it is reasonable if you think the destiny of
| life on earth is to "conquer" the "full power" of the sun.
| thsksbd wrote:
| Kardashev scale is a fantasy - a dangerous one because very
| intelligent people spend their talent and societies'
| resources pursuing it.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| If we mitigated just the warming issue through geo engineering,
| how severe are carbon emissions impacts on our environment?
|
| Would we be able to go back to emissions increasing, or is this
| causing loss of other biodiversity?
| throwup238 wrote:
| CO2 dissolves in water to become carbonic acid which causes
| ocean acidification. In the ocean this causes problems with
| most (all?) crustaceans, molluscs, and corrals by interfering
| with their ability to build calcium carbonate structures by
| preferentially binding with carbonate ions. Since many of them
| are keystone species, this will eventually lead to catastrophic
| effects as other species that depend on them either collapse or
| those they prey on grow out of control. The more atmospheric
| CO2 goes up, the more of it dissolves in the ocean and
| acidifies it.
|
| Sooner or later that acidity begins to interfere with
| phytoplankton and other photosynthetic organisms in the oceans,
| which account for two thirds of oxygen production on the
| planet. It just kinda gets worse from there.
| lm28469 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...
| jmclnx wrote:
| That is all well and good, but high CO2 causes other issues than
| just warming. The only real fix is doing the hard thing, limit
| CO2.
|
| For example here os one concerning item:
|
| >when we breathe air with high CO2 levels, the CO2 levels in our
| blood rise, reducing the amount of oxygen that reaches our
| brains. Studies show that this can increase sleepiness and
| anxiety, and impair cognitive function
|
| From https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200421/Atmospheric-
| CO2-l...
| ctoth wrote:
| - Cognitive effects show up well over 1000 ppm.
|
| - Current atmospheric concentration is around 417 ppm.
|
| - The rate at which atmospheric CO2 concentration increases has
| been approximately 2-3 ppm per year over the past decade, as
| observed at monitoring stations like Mauna Loa.
|
| If we hit 600 ppm and don't seem to be slowing down, maybe then
| I would worry about this but probably worry about ocean
| acidification before cognitive decline.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| I have no expertise in this at all. How do they determine if
| cognitive effects only show up well above 1000? Is it
| possible that the testing methodologies aren't capable of
| detecting changes at a lower level?
|
| Edit(
|
| >In fact, at 1400 ppm, CO2 concentrations may cut our basic
| decision-making ability by 25 percent, and complex strategic
| thinking by around 50 percent, the authors found.
|
| If this is a continuous scale, it could be affecting us at
| lower levels already )
|
| Further, isn't it reasonable to assume that regardless of the
| above, there will be 'hotspots' of c02 where the
| concentration may be hundreds of ppm higher than the
| average/background, at least temporarily (e.g. heavy industry
| centres, or cities in valleys)?
|
| Edit: The article mentions indoor levels are ~500 ppm higher
| than outdoor, so if a home is in one of my presumed hotspots,
| some people might be hitting these levels on occasion.
| gravitronic wrote:
| Oh, people hit that level all the time indoors. One person
| sleeping in a bedroom with a closed door overnight reaches
| high CO2 levels. A classroom of students are swimming in
| it.
| ericmcer wrote:
| at that rate of increase (~300 years to reach 1000+) could we
| possibly adapt over time? There are probably already humans
| who are more/less susceptible to high c02 environments.
| bobim wrote:
| Individuals don't adapt, a specie is through selection of
| best individuals. Since humans mostly managed to escape
| from selective pressure we are probably not going anywhere
| in such a short time I guess.
| exe34 wrote:
| We double it every 35 years, so I don't think it's safe to
| assume linear growth.
| russdill wrote:
| Indoor air is going to be at some concentration above
| ambient. Raise the ambient concentration and you raise the
| indoor concentration. There's already many of indoor
| concentrations that are problematic.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I think this is an extremely important and little known
| fact.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > - Cognitive effects show up well over 1000 ppm.
|
| "Well over" is as little as 1500ppm. Definitely at 2500ppm.
| Reaching those numbers in poorly ventilated buildings is
| easy.
|
| > - Current atmospheric concentration is around 417 ppm.
|
| People mostly work indoors, so atmospheric concentration is
| not comparable.
|
| > maybe then I would worry about this but probably worry
| about ocean acidification before cognitive decline.
|
| True, you can always improve individual ventilation in rooms
| and houses until maybe 700-800ppm in the atmosphere, and at
| that level I would also worry about other things (ecosystem
| collapse, major weather events, fires and air pollution).
| enjrolas wrote:
| I mean, that's true, but not relevant at the scale of the CO2
| in the atmosphere. Think about breathing from a paper bag -
| your exhaled breath contains about 4% CO2, and after several
| cycles of re-breathing the same air, that percentage will
| increase, and you'll start to notice the effects you described,
| in the range of parts per hundred.
|
| CO2 from the ambient air you breathe is currently 0.04%, in the
| range of parts per ten thousand, two orders of magnitude lower
| than where you feel the effects you described.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Yeah and virtually every source of pollution brings more to the
| table than co2... much nastier things usually
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I mean yeah, lets destroy our civilization (or whole mankind,
| who knows what desperate collapsing nations with nuclear
| weapons will do) as we know it so that we won't risk breathing
| 0.3% higher co2 concentration, seems logical. We would be such
| losers to use some simple cheap trick to give us some time to
| figure things out.
| darepublic wrote:
| Lowering CO2 is important but is also very intractable
| international problem full of politics. So it makes sense that
| various people concerned about the environment propose to make
| an end run around all this mass of irrational savage humanity
| topynate wrote:
| Space-based geoengineering is technically superior to
| stratospheric aerosol injection, but the latter is practical
| almost immediately, and is likely to be much cheaper no matter
| what. In my view that outweighs concerns about the ozone layer.
|
| It has also been pointed out that launching enough space-shades
| with chemical rockets would itself deposit a considerable amount
| of particulate matter in the upper atmosphere, so to be really
| atmospherically 'clean', one would need to complement
| geoengineering with a radical new launch technology.
| psadri wrote:
| Whatever we do - it better be easily reversible or decay
| relatively quickly. It would suck to launch a solution that
| overshoot or causes some unforeseen problem and we can't quickly
| revert it.
| pmontra wrote:
| The good thing is that it's easily and nearly instantaneously
| reversible.
|
| From an engineering standpoint, it it blocks 2% of solar
| radiation as stated by the article (and let's suppose we can send
| that amount of stuff in space) it will have to reflect that
| amount of solar radiation, not absorb a significant amount of it
| (because of heating and dissipation) and direct anything it
| absorbs away from Earth as much as possible.
| pitaj wrote:
| Even if it absorbs and re-emits everything, that would probably
| be fine. Black body radiation is emitted in practically every
| direction, and only a miniscule portion of that would hit the
| Earth.
|
| The bigger problem with absorption is potentially heating the
| material to the point of vaporization.
|
| All that said, the most practical form of this would probably
| be something like a fresnel lense that uses refraction or a
| structure that uses diffraction to redirect the light rather
| than reflect or absorb it.
| potsandpans wrote:
| From my understanding, instantaneous reversability property is
| problematic because we haven't actually solved the underlying
| problem.
|
| Now we've just got a "sail maintenance" problem: we put the
| sail up, continue to burn ff now unimpeded by the worst side
| effects. 1-2 decades later, if the sail were to fail / lose
| funding / get neglected by temporary geopolitical conflict,
| earth rapidly accumulates all of carbon debt we accrued.
| DabbyDabberson wrote:
| the US has been investigating these ideas since early in the cold
| war. It started as a means of mass destruction (could we silently
| reduce solar radiation over russia and cause their crops to
| fail?), but really could be a means to cool down the ocean.
|
| There are tons of other impacts of carbon, but we could reduce
| the solar energy hitting the ocean with currently technology if
| we needed to.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| This feels an awful lot like the plot of another Bond movie. It
| would be a shame if something happened to your nice crops over
| there...
| smegger001 wrote:
| could it yes, but that would be predicated on some one with a
| space agency funding it. NASA, good luck convincing congress to
| fund it enough to maintain what they have, let alone solve a
| problem half of congress deny exist for ideological reasons.
| European space agency smaller than NASA. Russia to busy spending
| all of their money trying to take over their neighbors, china
| maybe not holding my breath for the country building more coal
| plants and that has daily air reports for their capital to do
| anything about climate change, India to poor. I mean there is
| space x but Musks seems to be too busy frying his brain on drugs
| with his board to actually do anything other than turn twitter/X
| into 4chan while lighting his equity on fire.
| ldayley wrote:
| I recall a certain prominent fictional billionaire from The
| Simpsons creating a parasol to block out the sun (with murderous
| results...): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyjJbhuwGkU
|
| (And tinfoil hat time-- how does this not get used as a
| geopolitical football?)
| gravitronic wrote:
| For people who want to explore this potential future I recommend
| Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock as a near future sci fi read.
|
| Not saying it will happen like that but he brings up some
| interesting potential cause and effect
| bobim wrote:
| How can it works? The moon is already huge and when it's
| eclipsing the sun it's only shading a small spot.
|
| One would need to block a significant fraction of the solid angle
| between the sun and earth. The smallest side is on earth side,
| and that would require an object the size of the planet.
|
| Looks like we're hanging on anything to procrastinate the
| mandatory society shift.
| mrbgty wrote:
| Wouldn't it be easier to put a lot of smaller objects between the
| Earth and Sun to reflect light rather than one big one?
| wmf wrote:
| It's too large to be a single object anyway. It has to be a
| swarm.
| Voultapher wrote:
| There is no solution to the climate crisis. Everything that uses
| a solving perspective is deeply flawed. The decisions we make
| today will decide how many billions will die and how
| uninhabitable the world will become for our grandchildren and
| many other species. The train for _if_ has long departed, all we
| have left is a question of _how_ bad it will be.
|
| "The problem" is modernity, focusing on CO2 in isolation is
| naive.
| vonwoodson wrote:
| I thought we already solved this problem [ONCE AND FOR
| ALL!](https://youtu.be/0SYpUSjSgFg?si=9Oodfb1SgHvTZWLa)
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| The hubris of people who acknowledge our lack of foresight that
| resulted in the accidental geoengineering of climate proposing
| such a dangerous project that could kill everything without
| understanding the implications. This is a harebrained scheme of
| ridiculous proportions.
| pojzon wrote:
| Serious question. Do ppl really think we can do anything about
| it? (Environmental issues we are facing - climate warming is just
| one of it)
|
| This is mostly a political problem. We all know that without
| world goverment its impossible to tackle problems like that. And
| currently we see moves destabilising geopolitics and not uniting
| them.
|
| Im seriously see only gray scenarios moving forward till mby we
| magically find infinite clean easy to produce and portable source
| of energy that producers will be willing to share for free.
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