spoiler
The idea revolves heavily around the creation and deployment of several thin film-like silicon bubbles. The “space bubbles” as they refer to them, would be joined together like a raft. Once expanded in space it would be around the same size as Brazil. The bubbles would then provide an extra buffer against the harmful solar radiation that comes from the Sun.
:wut:
So lets assume, for ease of calculation, that the surface area of all the spheres involved is roughly the same as 2 Brazils (given each set of hemispheres is equal to 1 Brazil, it might be more than that if you actually want to do a packing algorithm on the number of sphere's you'd need and their individual surface areas).
Now let's assume that the film being used is 0.1mm thick, thin enough to be manageable in mass but thick enough to be relatively durable. The total volume of the silicon used in this project would be about 1.7 billion cubic meters. According to the internet this is about $6.17 Tillion USD just for the commodity, before you even get to the processing, assembly, cleanroom packing into rocket modules and lifting it into space.
The mass of this volume of silicon is roughly 3.97 billion tons, or roughly 624 times the current global output per year. Meaning if we gave all our silicon to this project it would take at least 624 years. And the brunt of it would be borne by China who produces 64% of that total. This is also assuming the Earth even has usable reserves of that size.
If someone says "well space mining"...yeah? Can you point out an existing asteroid mine???
Edit: updated my calculations because I missed a zero somewhere. The proposal is actually even more ridiculous than I first thought!
@PPBSUCCESS
literally smarter than anyone at MIT
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I wonder if any of them thought about the effects of gravity, magnetosphere interactions, and solar wind. Would be a shame if the thing crumpled up like a piece of paper, sailed into the outer solar system, and was shredded in Jupiter's atmosphere.
It's better than that: They want to put it at L1, which is unstable and requires constant corrections to remain in anyway.
100% this thing would either form the Earth's ring system or float off for millions of years until radiation ate it away.
Nice work ideology. :zizek-fuck: not only was this an ass idea from the get-go, it's not even feasible in the short term. Lol lmao
MIT fuckboys think we're somehow already a Kardachev I Civ.
'Oh no, of course not. We're at zero-point-integer-n on the Kardashev scale,' they say, completely straight-faced and fully ignorant of the fact that Kardashev intended it as a thought experiment and not any sort of real calculation or measurement.
:michael-laugh:
Look, that's a problem for engineering, we're 'scientists'.
I think they assume they can make rigid silicon bubbles like soap bubbles, with 100-1000 nm thick walls.