Everything to avoid doing the most obvious.
It’s a technological antisolution.
Thank you for sharing this!
You’re very welcome! I’m so glad you enjoyed it.
This line represents one of my biggest peeves with political thinking in general:
A Technological Antisolution is a product that attempts to replace a boring but solvable political or social problem with a much sexier technological one that won’t work.
The assumption that because there’s a “political or social” problem, then it must be solvable.
Why? “Because if everyone just did X …”
People skip over political problems. They model humanity’s political and behavioral inertia as zero, and they don’t treat it as an ecosystem.
So many “political or social” solutions are assumed to take zero energy. The only reason a “political or social” problem won’t work is those “durned right wingers”.
What this implicitly fails to realize is that building an enormous solar sail is many orders of magnitude easier than changing the behavior of every human.
We need to stop thinking of things as “practically solved” just because “all” that would have to happen is some huge shift in the behavior and organization of human society.
I also created lots of solutions to the worlds problems sitting around getting high
I know man. We’ll just accelerate the planet and move it into a higher orbit!
Giant space umbrella tethered to asteroids could also be a super weapon capable of melting enormous swathes of enemy territory.
In fact, any technology capable of stopping global warming can be turned into a super weapon. Including whatever techniques might be used to alter human behavior to reduce footprint.
Will somebody please think of the consequences?
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Surely it’s not me who is out is out of touch, is it?
No, it’s thekidssun that is wrong
None of the geoengineering solutions address the other major issue with our fossil fuel usage, which is ocean acidification. Even if we could just lower the temperature, lots of the CO2 pumped into the air gets absorbed into the oceans, like in a bottle of soda, making it more acidic. When this happens, it makes it harder for all the life at the bottom of the food chain to form, causing a mass die off at the base. If things get bad enough It could lead to the collapse of the food chain and we would just starve to death.
Excellent point. And if we put up a big space mirror, and then solve the CO2 problem to get ocean PH back to normal, now our lower solar incidence plus normal greenhouse gas levels will equal temperatures way too cold.
Imagine Keppler syndrome kicks in as a result of building it, and it causes an ice age down here and we lose contact with it and can’t move it.
Now we’re an ice ball with a sky cage we can’t escape.
