A Startup's Bid to Dim the Sun

From the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun.

Very terrible idea. Downvote me.

I still think a slew of independent satellites is the best idea.

Worst case, just send up a shuttle and sweep them all up.

You can’t undo a volcanic explosion.

Volcanic sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere is not the only known factor that can reduce global average temperatures. Another well known phenomenon is that during the ice ages, the sprawling white ice sheets tended to reflect a lot of the solar radiation back into space, causing a positive feedback loop that cooled the planet down even further. The fundamental idea here in both cases, is that the global warming is caused by the blocking of the warm Earth's long-wavelength black body radiation by the greenhouse gases. But the same greenhouse gases aren't as effective at blocking the short-wavelength radiations coming off of the reflective surfaces.

If you're going take the absurd route of a planet-wide ecosystem engineering project, why not increase the albedo of the planet instead by covering a portion of its surface with thin, light, semi-transparent, semi-reflective films that we already know how to make? We already cover huge areas with artificial materials like cement, asphalt and paints. Since they just lie around motionless on the ground, they're easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and easy to modify or remove if something doesn't go according to plans. Why instead throw aerosols at huge logistic costs into the stratosphere where the air currents and aerosol dispersion patterns are difficult to predict and even more difficult to manage if something goes wrong?

Why do people promote these sorts of unwieldy sci-fi fantasies (high-speed rail vs hyperloop, anyone?), instead of addressing the fundamental cause at the least cost possible? You know, may be convince everyone that dumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere is not a good idea? Climate change is primarily rooted in politics and greed. That would be a good place to start. And if possible at all, find a way to absorb some of the CO2 back? Nature actually has some mechanisms that can absorb and sink CO2 in huge quantities. Getting them to work for us is a challenge. But I don't think it's worse than the hubris of imagining being powerful enough to control the planet altogether.

Snowpiercer was pretty good.

If you really want to read how horrible and scary the idea of geo-engineering can get, read these two papers:

https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/30/4/article-p3_1.xml?l...

https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/31/1/article-p3_1.xml?l...

It's a wild read, that not only explains how this idea is technically horrible - he also analyzes the social and psychological effects this would have on humanity, and it's harrowing:

- We will be unable to see blue skies anymore, it will simply become white. This will be a traumatic event for humanity, and would have consequences beyond our understanding. Also, sunsets will be much more bloody-red, and we wouldn't be able to see the stars as clearly as before.

- The nature of aerosol deployments is that once we start this to combat global warming, corporations and governments will just rely on this instead of also reducing CO2 emissions. So as time passes, an exponentially larger amount of aerosols would be needed to block out the sun at every year, which makes the side-effects of geo-engineering grow immensely over time.

- Once aerosols hit a limit, then there lies the termination shock - once we "give" up on emitting aerosols due to it becoming exponentially expensive to maintain over time, the Earth's temperature will suddenly shoot up at unprecedented rates, quick rendering the planet inhabitable for humanity. His analogies to Freud's theory of repression is apt - we constantly repress our traumatic thoughts with stopgap measures, until the fantasy becomes too expensive to maintain and enter into the fully destructive phase.

Since the beginning of time, Man has yearned to destroy the Sun.

Basically Neal Stephenson's "Termination Shock" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)

This always seems like "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure" type situations to me...

But I guess the prevention is too costly for the big oil money interests.

I had to look twice, to confirm that this article was not about Dim Sum.

Now I've got a craving...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dim_sum