The classic “here is a magic solution that ‘scientists’ came up with that is totally doable and not at all meant to just distract you from the real solution that reduces consumrism”
Woah woah, hold on there. We cant just consume less that would mean the line going downwards and we cant have that. The only solution to this problem is infinite growth and a giant space mirror
Reducing consumerism is pretty meaningless at this point in the game.
The big problem with a sunshade is that it would be an engineering project on a scale that we have never seen, and we’re not really entirely sure it would work. It would cost at least $10 trillion USD and require launching nearly 200 billion small vessels and moving them into the L1 Lagrange point between us and the Sun. Each vessel would have a shade that covers 2500 m^2 with a total mass of ships and shades being 34 billion metric tonnes.
A sunshade just isn’t feasible and all of those rocket launches to get it into position would just exacerbate the already pretty awful situation here on Earth, not to mention mining all of that material and building the rockets causing greenhouse gas emissions, and is there even 34 billion metric tonnes of material on Earth with which to make effective sunshades out of?
It would be a MASSIVE, MAAAASSIIIIIVE undertaking the scale of which Humanity has never seen to get it done, and we’re not even sure if it would work. We’re much better off focusing on solutions here on Earth, I think.
For those curious, here’s a scientific paper looking into the subject that I used for reference on the numbers I used: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521001995
Above and beyond what you’ve said: we would need to maintain that sunshade for hundreds of thousands of years.
Civilizations don’t tend to last that long. The odds of our being able to actually maintain technical infrastructure like that for the required amount of time are low.
immediately transitioning to zero emission and planting a shit tonne of trees would probs be cheaper.
We are pursuing both options, and think that if a planetary sunshade is built, the initial phases of construction will be an Earth-launched architecture while the later phases will use space resources and in-space construction
Great, so it’s a 50 years plan then. Too bad we can’t do anything right now I guess.
Well we could, but it would reduce short-term profits for the wealthiest few hundred sociopaths, so we can’t.
Didn’t the Simpsons do this already?
And futurama
Mt Burns did it for purely evil reasons, yes.
This anti-Burns slander will not stand, man.
This has Snowpiercer vibes.
Still can’t believe no-one will release the final season of that show
Wait, is it canceled?
worse than that - they’ve filmed a final season but can’t find a network in America to put it out.
That’s just crazy… Its a pretty good show!
I know right, devastating
It’s Netflix, of course it’s canceled on a cliffhanger.
Wernstrom!
Imagine how much they’ll charge for the ads displayed on that thing.
…ONCE AND FOR ALL!
the simpsons did it
Or we could do Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, SAI, since we’d have already geoengineered our climate, might just go and engineer it so that the damage can be less. Yeah it’s not great since it does not solve the root cause, but it might avert the worst case scenario. The world might one day stop using oil like a junkie, even faster if we globally started to tax carbon emissions, but clearly the world has been kicking the can down the road about meaningful change. Lets accept we have already done way to little already, accept the shit we already are in and make emergency repairs before even more things break down
They prefer to create unrealistic “solutions” that look like they came out of a cartoon instead of reforesting and stopping the last stage of savage Capitalism. The only solution is politics
Once we get the world carbon neutral or negative to deal with ocean acidification, a sunshine might genuinely buy us some time and make up a bit for the lost polar albedo. But cloud seeding would probably be cheaper.
Good.
