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:
The carbon footprint of manufacturing each bubble will, however, require the deployment of an additional bubble.
It's simple, we just keep producing bubbles until we wrap the planet in several kilometers of bubble wrap at which time it will be perpetual night on the surface and our dark vampiric masters may end the masquerade and lead us to a new golden age.
I'd like to think that vampires would see the need to keep humanity safe and healthy for their survival, but capitalists didn't so... waitaminute, was Blade a commentary on capitalism?
We just have to wait for aliens to come along to pop the bubble wrap. Let's hope that's a universal behavior
it's geoengineering under capitalist control, isn't it? checking spoiler Yep.
Einstein warned us, you can't solve problems with the same mindset that created them... The geoengineers don't realize, sunshine is not a curse on the planet. The sun is not the problem, the problem is the mess of pollution we are creating. These shortcuts that are attempted from places of power, and I would add places of ignorance of the ecological web of life, are then creating the war solution. Because geoengineering becomes war on a planetary scale; with ignorance; and blind spots.
Vandana Shiva - physicist, ecologist, environmentalist
That quote is extremely spot on. THAT person actually understands shit and should be in charge.
I only know it 'cus I read it yesterday in Science for the People. I had never heard of her before, but it seems Vandana Shiva is a highly accomplished scientist, activist, and author. Even her wikipedia page is impressive - so I can only imagine she's even more so in actuality.
The ice cube producing robots in the Artic thing was less stupid than this?
The robots just have the cost of shipping and production, and are only being moved on earth. It's vastly less energy than making a giant tarp and flying it into space. Think about hie much fuel like 3 humans take to get to space, and we're neither that big nor that heavy.
We don't need new tech to solve climate change, it's purely a sociological issue. We need new tech to mitigate the effects of climate change we already have done, but we could simply stop dumping co2 into the atmosphere. Also, we have the tech that can sequester atmospheric co2, it's called plants. We can literally just reforest places and stop eating as much meat. It's just not profitable.
It makes me so mad that people act like this isn't possible. We could all go outside and start rehabilitating topsoil tomorrow and we'd see huge effects within 10 years if not sooner.
we don't even need everyone to be on board with the plan. literally just the government. that's why we we have a fucking government. so that we don't have to mass mobilize to solve every problem individually.
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!
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
'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.
The mass of this volume of silicon is roughly 397 million tons
:michael-laugh:
I think they assume they can make rigid silicon bubbles like soap bubbles, with 100-1000 nm thick walls.
they just stole this idea from fucking futurama. and it didn't even work in futurama.
At this point we are headed for Futurama solution of nuclear winter and global warming canceling each other out.
lol, holding the planet hostage by blocking the sun so we're forced to continue using their energy supply? At least Mr. Burns was using an energy source that won't cause widespread cognitive impairment from elevated CO2 levels in his scheme: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200421090556.htm
Walking around with a respirator like Christopher Nolan's Bane to own the left
What's funny is that even if this was the actual solution that would actually work, there's no way to accomplish it because billionaires won't invest in it. They'll be okay with their bunker fiefdoms and slaves.
They think they can put a bubble in space the size of brazil without it getting popped when we have to move space stations and satellites frequently to avoid catastrophic impacts?
Will it be millions of tiny bubbles instead of one big bubble? I could see that being a little more robust.
What kind of gravity would it create? I don't know what the physics of mass are for something so large but made of tiny bubbles.
"Joined together like a raft" makes it seem to me like it would be a bunch of smaller bubbles
Would a bunch of bubbles the size of Texas in space have its own gravity well that could capture dust and debris over time?
If my other post is correct, if compressed into a ball it would be about the size of 162173 Ryugu with slightly more mass than 66391 Moshup. Or I guess about 3/4 of a Mount Everest.
wild to think about the sheer amount of people for whom that headline alone is enough.
seriously though. this sort of shit can have genuine consequences for public perception and mentality.
people to this day think soy causes estrogen production because they vaguely remember seeing soy and estrogen together in some clickbait headline 20 years ago in the supermarket checkout aisle.
It's the whole point of articles like this. It's coming from MIT. It's probably not an actual attempt at a solution, just a way to plant that idea in people's heads that there are people in the US diligently working on trying to fix this, if only we had the technology! I don't know how many people working on this kind of thing actually believe it versus are creating plausible propaganda for doing nothing.
