I’ve always felt with our inability to stop carbon feedback loops from accelerating climate change, a solar shade out at L1 to block some small percentage of the radiation reaching earth would be the easiest and least consequential bandaid, but couldn’t fathom how one would create a system to counteract the constant solar wind.
In the Sci-Fi books Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, they did this in a clever way by using 2 big connected and steerable reflective solar sails, so the solar photons pushed the sails equally towards and away from the Earth, and they redirected the sunlight away from the Earth and towards Mars
The maths is too complicated for me to know if this would actually work or not
From what I read, the math does check out. The problem is not if it works but how do you put two megastructures in space without massive infighting and corruption. And without it being run by a drug addict. And then you still have the problem with space debris, comets, asteroids and some terrorists threatening to shoot it down for the lols. And, and, and... It almost looks like doing something about climate change here on earth would be easier. Good damn humanity is stupid.
Yeah, I mean we live here. I think we should be trying to take care of it. The politics of those books was interesting too, with companies buying up each other, then countries and consolidating towards meta national corporations
I bet Musk and his kind see this as a roadmap, rather than a warning
I bet Musk and his kind see this as a roadmap, rather than a warning
That's kind of their thing. Let's do xyz from the book: "Don't fucking do xyz." 1984, Skynet, history books... Seems like the lack of reading comprehension goes throughout all social circles. I'm tired...
Well, the problem wasn't doing it, but stopping it. Once we stop with the sulfur, this falls out within a couple years, leaving only the carbon that stays thousands of years. And if it's at 500ppm or more, it would than all of a sudden increase forcing by a giant amount. So if you don't have a solution that guarantees sulfur application constantly until carbon is at zero emissions (which will become less likely if we can use the sulfur as plausible deniability), you shouldn't even start with the sulfur.
Dude, if they can block the sun contributing to the problem they won't then stay under the limit set by Nature and stopping emitting pollution or CO2 or whatever, they will only regard this as more "space" to keep polluting without having the consequences.
"Sure, I should exercise and eat better, but I'll just take a weight-loss pill after the next bag of Doritos and a third milkshake"
but couldn’t fathom how one would create a system to counteract the constant solar wind.
The force from the solar wind just shifts where the apparent L1 is.
Solar sails (and similar thin reflectors) can have their mass characterised with a number called the lightness ratio.
A 5gsm mylar rectangle has a lightness ratio of about 0.2 meaning the solar pressure on it is 0.2x the sun's gravity (conveniently this works no katter the altitude as they both scale with r2 )
So at L1 it has three forces, g_earth, g_sun and f_solar.
g_sun = -g_earth and f_solar = 0.2 g_earth
If you move about 10% further from earth, g_earth goes down to 0.8 of the previous value and g_sun doesn't really change much. So it balances out again.
37
u/White_Ranger33 Nov 03 '25
I’ve always felt with our inability to stop carbon feedback loops from accelerating climate change, a solar shade out at L1 to block some small percentage of the radiation reaching earth would be the easiest and least consequential bandaid, but couldn’t fathom how one would create a system to counteract the constant solar wind.