Slashdot Mirror
Space Ring Could Combat Global Warming
telstar writes "Though the debate continues around global warming, a new proposal suggests building an artificial space ring around the Earth to block the light of the sun and bring a balance to solar radiation, cloud cover, and heat-trapping greenhouse gases. The ring could be comprised of particles which would scatter the sunlight, or be built by an interconnected ring of spaceships aligned to block the light. The former proposal is estimated to cost anywhere from $6 trillion to $200 trillion dollars, while the spaceship solution would run approximately $500 billion. Halo fans rejoice."
Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun...
In this world of fantasy (which we do not live in) it would be nice...however I'd much rather my tax dollars going towards more enviromental regulations and research than some high tech sci-fi wonder.
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
How could this go wrong?
So, perhaps Bill DID get that Time Machine. He saw the future and funded Halo. Perhaps, Hitler was really Stalin. Yes, really.
This would not work. Other planets would become jeleous and greedy, all of them wanting to get The Ring from us. There would be wars, many would die, and entire civilizations would die. What we need to do is get a neutral planet, one without such greed, who can take the ring, and hurl it into Jupiter. Then, the universe will be free.
Why not put a disk direct between us and the sun at a stable gravity point?
We know how well solar eclipses work... why not just a permanent 'dimming'?
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
So in reality, it will cost $500 trillion to build the space ring, and the shuttle solution will cost $900 trillion. Figures. I'll be that it will be projected to be completed by 2020, but in reality will not be completed untill late 2050.
Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier, and more effective to, I don't know, build energy systems that don't release carbon? Just a thought.
What kind of a hair brained scheme is this??? What happens when global warming ends because we haven't any more money for cars having spent it all on this ring?
Of the 6 trillion, why not spend the$ 3 trillion on environmentally safe energy (fusion plants, geothermal, solar panels in the deserts) and spend $3 trillion to buy off all the oil megacorporations.
Besides, moving the earth further away from the Sun is a much more hair brained idea, so why not do that?
You can buy a lot of solar cells for $6 trillion dollars.
The cock ring could combat premature ejaculation!
Additionally, the ring could have solar panels on the outside and thus power the whole Earth cleanly...unless there is too little silicon on Earth to build that many solar panels...yes I know there is a lot, but that's a lot of solar panel...
I don't get it. Wouldn't particles (depends what these particles are of course) cost much less then a ring of spaceships around the planet?
and now the space ring?
what's next, helm's deep space?
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
Again, this is just another attempt by Micro$oft to take over the world (I'm sure the space ring will have closed standards) :p
First videogame consoles, next the world!
Honestly, this is pseudo science; it is not yet fully accepted by anyone accept extreme environmentalists. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that global warming does not exist.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
With the light scattering particle technique, what do we do after balance is restored? How do we get rid of the particles? Wouldn't they then cause the earth to enter another ice age?
wouldnt this create a lot of, you know... shadey areas (for at least part of the day) ?
You can spend -$5 on gas, and +$5 on SPF-30. Eventually, things will balance out.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
And in related news, Al Gore has ridden the mighty moon worm.
why can't all that money goto something useful, like finding a way for foreign oil independence.
It's a VERY big patch !
;o)
Lets not solve the real problem, which is our over-consumption of oil...
What if this beatiful solution does not work ? O well, lets just make it a weapon and try it on earth...
the problem with dumbasses worried about global warming is that they have totally neglected to look at how the earth revolves around the earth. As of now, the earth is closest to the sun during the winter and furthest in the summer. That may seem to backwards but remember that the earth also tilts. Anyway, the earth changes it's revolutions continuously and it's moving to a orbit that will bring upon another ice age soon. So I say we need more global warming.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
They can't be serious. Who could fund this? Isn't World GDP only around $40-50T?
Tristan Yates
Or we could just cut down on pollution for FREE!
Honestly, how much would it cost to require an SUV to get 30+ MPG instead of 15?
The resulting weather and cultural shock will result in a strange reversion of cultural style to the mid 20th century. Likewise, the world will end up tightly in the grip of one evil super-corporation until their facilities are at last destroyed by a strange scotsman, who was really from another planet that looks a lot like Dune, chopping the heads off an assisgnation squad sent to kill him. Because, as we all know, there can be only one.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
What's anyone gonna do about it? Shift to the Yuan as the reserve currency or something?
Seastead this.
I thought we could combat global warming with giant ice cubes mined from Haley's comet.
Eeeexcellent.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
According to wikipedia global dimming might have actually masked the effects of global warming. Too bad we got reversed the effects of global dimming. The two forms of pollution were canceling each other out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I think it'd be cheaper and easier to tow, for example, a big enough moon and lock it in orbit around our planet so that there's a big eclipse covering us at all times.
I vote for Titan, so we can study it up close, and maybe mine it for methane and whatnot.
The worst part is that an orbital shield to save us from ourselves will result in truly awful sequels to great B movies.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and faster to reduce auto emissions by putting people into the empty seats of the cars we have already?
A quick way to do this would be a system to match people who need to get somewhere with cars going there anyway. An ad hoc cab system. A feedback system should get rid of the creeps that made it though some sort of screening process.
Cheap, fast, technically possible, low impact and large results. It's impossible, of course. It would involve the cooperation of citizens.
The major problem associated with global warming is energy production. If we physically block out a portion of the sun's radiation, that will reduce the useful energy input to earth (via autotrophs and solar cells and weather/climactic cycling and so on). While it may possibly solve the climate change problem, won't such a space shield only exacerbate the problems we face with replenishable energy?
The orbit of this band can't be anything but contentious. The shadow cast by this band would fall equally on both Northern and Southern hemisphere countries. Yet most of the greenhouse gas emitters (U.S., Europe, Japan, Asia, et al) are concentrated in the Northern hemisphere. The shadow would also affect equatorial countries that are not the cause of the problem.
It's an interesting solution but seems to place some burdens (e.g., ecological changes) on countries that are not the alleged cause of the problem.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Wow! A beowolf cluster of spaceships? But do they run linux?
Monty Burns had a plan to do this back in 1995. Of course his motivations were somewhat different.
Highlander II, Shield Corp
Well the game didn't crash, but
After all this is just a workaround, the goal we should aim for is to achieve control over greenhouse gases, and if the sun actually sends more energy our way we can still opt for mirrors and shades. After all if we don't get greenhouse gases in check we can still die of asphyxiation so there is some ultimate control mechanism build in .
That might even take the pressure off the environment, as you could probably shut down most of the world's coal-fired power stations.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The Earth is fucked. Just concentrate on building orbital platforms.
Then aliens from the planet Zeist will come, and the only thing standing between us and them is an old Connor MacLeod, who has to again take on the mantle of the Highlander to save our asses,
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You know... the ones that will fly out of my ass just prior to this plan being seriously considered.
Will this be anything like Mr. Burns sun blocker thing in the simpsons?
Breaking news; signing up to the Kyoto agreement could combat global warming!
... would Bush support this ring? ;)
So
Nope, because Texaco, Shell and his other buddies benefit from global warming. Same as with Kyoto.
There was some info a little while back about how CO2 could be reduced by seeding the oceans with small amounts of micronutrients. I assume that this would help with declining fish populations as well. There was another suggestion for harvetsting the crop, particularly if it produced some kind of oil as I believe some diatoms can be made to do.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
There are times when some ideas should die a quiet death in the science fiction ghetto. This is one of them. Besides, we need all the money to build ships to rescue the beautiful women on Venus. :P
The former proposal is estimated to cost anywhere from $6 trillion to $200 trillion dollars, while the spaceship solution would run approximately $500 billion.
Can't we just save a lot of time and hassle by awarding a cost-plus contract to Halliburton?
For decades we've been told by the environmentalists, "if there's even the tiniest chance that global warming is real and man made, then it would be foolish to do nothing about it." This is Pascal's Wager, but applied to a different religion. But two can play at this game!
"If there's even the tiniest chance that global warming is NOT happening, then this would be an extremely foolish thing to implement, as it could trigger the next ice age..."
c.f. Niven's "Fallen Angels"
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Geneshaft fans run in terror!
I think this is a GREAT idea!
*ducks*
Live according to the Categorical Imperative. If the Categorical Imperative tells you not to live by it... ignore it
There is "a lot of evidence" that you are a troll.
Someone been playing alien crossfire again? The expansion to Alpha Centauri? Cause that's in there.
In a two-body system (earth/sun), there are five such points, of which only two are stable. Neither resides on the axis between the earth and the sun.
One might be able to keep a disc at an unstable point using active control, but that is a separate question. :)
...wouldnt it be better placing a big ass solar powered peltier in low orbit? Pssst, MOD funny, I'm not that dumb ;P
They want their article back.
something about in the darkness bind them... [Sauron et all.]
Storm
With trillions of dollars you can create more than enough amount of solar power panels all around the world and you can feed this energy to what we power our cars with and so on. This would do more than just minimize our green house gases: - Give us cleaner air - Reduce premature deaths caused pollution (in Toronto Canada, there are something like 5000 premature deaths each year due to pollution). - Give us an energy source that's not affecting something else (i.e. we could use wind power, but with trillions of dollars, why not just go for something like solar?). etc.
and a trillion there and pretty soon we are talking about real money.Seriously , do people who compile these studies even pause to think about the figures they are bandying about.The GDP of USA , the world's largest economy , is $10 Trillion.The figures of the first proposal are meaningless.
Wanted : A Signature.
The entire world becomes depressed, due to the absence on natural light, kills themselves or simply stop having sex. Doesn't apply to humans only, most higher forms of animal life ceases to exist.
Of course, linux users are as chipper as ever due to the fact that they never seen natural light to begin with so they aren't as affected.
(As someone with seasonal affective disorder, I see this as a death sentence)
Get your Unix fortune now!
This has got to be the latest April fools day on record. First we have Zombie Dogs, now space rings. You have to be kidding me... right?
What fool put this up? huh?
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
of "Highlander 2?" I'm ashamed to say I actually watched that movie, but didn't they have some sort of device to shield the Earth from the sun or something?
Anyway, this whole thing just seems like some bored scientists grasping at straws trying to come up with something interesting to get their names in the news, but I do have 2 questions I'm interested to hear people's thoughts on:
1) How desparate would we have to be to follow through with something like this? 2) How hard would it be to convince the mainstream population to spend research money on reducing greenhouse gas emissions rather than go along with this?
But we know that it was us that scorched the skies. At the time, they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
Really? My numerous accepted stories? My still excellent karma? Do tell... Now, how about YOUR stats? -- Saeed
Also, the spaceship idea is plausible, but a giant ring? We finally realize that the Earth's resources aren't unlimited, and now someone raises the idea of building a ring around the planet? Lets all take a step backwards.
do.what.promptcmds
The machines haven't even been created yet and we are destroying the sky....
We build it, then we obliterate ourselves in war. Now nothing on earth can do anything about it. 100 million years later and the planet still pays for it. Sounds like a win to me!
I'm sorry, this is just silly. If we are going to blow trillions, why not just build a giant heat sink with high-heat-transfer nanotubuals space elevator style. That's gotta be cheaper. And did anyone consider the amount of greenhouse gasses produced with every rocket launch?
Dumbest FA ever.
-------------------------------END--COMMUNICATION
...we accidentally built a dyson sphere around the earth composed of solar panels. Artificial sunlight starting at just $3.27/GwH can now be ordered at nu-light.com
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
so really we only need to put a small pile of crap in orbit so that it stays between the sun and the earth. It would block light only on part of the year, but should be easier to implement. Or we can just admit that global warming does not exist. It appears to exist due to bad data analysis.
We could roof our houses with solar pannels... thus cooling the earth, with the appealing side effect of using the energy derived from it.
For some reason, I'm getting an image of a charred barren hillside a few miles from the collector. A bunch of people are running around on fire. Oh, wait, that's a SimCity 2k screenshot. Nevermind.
That's a great idea, reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the earth on a global scale couldn't possiby have any unintended side effects.
And even if it does, we'll just follow up by placing giant lighbulbs in orbit below the floating belt of debris, or build a giant vacuum-cleaner to clean up the mess.
Uninformed, hysterical fringies, you may now commence flaming.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
And we will get the raw materials for these ventures...how exactly?
If governments pumped $200 trillion into alternative energy research and development, everyone would be running around in hydrogen cars or something similar in no time. And does anyone really have any freaking clue whatsoever how a big patch of shade would affect the Earth's fragile balance? I didn't think so. Let's come up with better solutions before we start f'ing around on such a grand scale and then say "oops" when the Earth implodes or something as a result of those actions.
If the US government said they would buy $500 billion worth of alternative energy cars, the motor companies would be all over it. Ford and GM only do $150 B and $190 B in revenue a year. And if not them, the smaller motor companies would pounce on it.
The people who proposed this idea of shading the Earth are f'ing dumbasses.
And it might come crashing down on our heads. So, how is this idea any worse or better than fission?
We need o increase global warming, thus boiling the oceans, releasing steam that blocks out the sun and then it will be nice and cool.
Or even better, launch all the nuclear weapons on earth and the resulting nuclear winter will solve theis global warming problem. The nice part is, we already have the bombs and need something to do with them anyway, so why not combat global warming?
What a bunch of nonsense. Reducing sunlight would have other effects we cannot aniticipate - both physically and biologically. There is a very clear way to reduce our impact on global warming - stop or reduce our usage of fossi fuels. And if we don't do this soon, the polar and highest altitude biomes will drip their icewater all over us. It's already happening.
For that kind of dough, wouldn't it be easier just to move the Earth to a higher orbit (further from Sol)?
$200 trillion (2.0 x 10e14 dollars), or even $1 trillion, is a big chunk of change to go spending on something we don't even know would fix the problem. What if it's not enough? How much money do you dump down the hole (or in this case, throw into the air) before you start thinking about alternate solutions?
How much seawater could you pump into the central Sahara for $1 trillion? Make a giant salt marsh the size of say, Texas. Still plenty of desert left over, don't worry. But how much cooler would that make the globe? Don't even use 4-degree Celsius water from the Atlantic, but get 20C water from the Red Sea. It'll fill back up.
Or, maybe we could just accept the changes in climate as the natural order of things (even if they're our fault - we're natural, too). If the oceans rise, move to higher ground.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Then we'd still be getting the heat. The whole point is to reduce the flux absorbed and trapped by the earth.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
....because as we know light and radio pollution just isn't enough of a challenge these days.
"Mummy, mummy tell me when you were young and yuou could look up and see stars. What was it like?"
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Sounds like a precursor to Operation: Dark Cloud...
heh...
i kid i kid
If you want real change, urge you elected representatives to vote for the McCain-Lieberman Clear Skies Act. Go to UndoIt.org for more information and to sign the petition.
quick someone get me chicken little's #
Why not just release tons of Talcum powder in orbit around the Earth?
Over time, the powder would level out and create a shell in it's orbit above the earth. If the quantity was calculated correctly, a thin "film" could be formed that would protect us wee Earthlings.
Or would the powder glom together and create "rings" like around Saturn?
Oh, that gives me another idea, I wonder if the rings around Saturn indicate the magnetic line of the orbit...
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
now all we need is a city built hanging from the ring, cyborg body parts, and motorball. i get dibs on mars
"Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing...block it out!"
--- Pork is not a verb.
Morbo: Puny earthlings... we have destroyed your gigantic space ring! We shall enjoy watching you suffer under the warm glowing rays of your Terran sun!
Supposing you take the cheapest option, the $500 Billion Spaceships idea, over the course of 20 years -- that's $25 Billion per annum. Very doable.
There's a bigger problem, though. How do you convice 6 billion to put up with constant illumination of the night sky? Not to mention, the Astrologer's Union would be rioting in the streets.
This is certainly much better than the Kyoto protocol where you spend trillions of dollars and achieve barely anything at all besides screwing over your industry. A project like this would quiet all the liberals whining about the environment and please the right-wingers by being a boost to industry and creating jobs. With a project like this you can have your cake and eat it too.
Interesting idea, but you want to remember that the Ringworld is unstable in the plane of its orbit.
I have a better idea: let's build a ring around the sun! The combined mass of all the planets in our solar system should provide just enough raw material to accomplish this. Added benefits would be nearly unlimited availability of solar energy and virtually unlimited human habitats. We could also construct an inner ring with gaps that rotates at a slightly different speed, to simulate day and night. Only thing is that the ring could become unstable at some point...
environmental conservation won't solve this problem. The planet has been going through environmental fluctuations for millions of years. Some will be moderated some will be extreme. Counting on reduction of green house gases to solve this problem are short sighted at best.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
we still need sunlight to live.
This planet is powered by sunlight, as around 95% of the organisms require it to make food, regulate sleeping patterns, etc.
Personally I think the ring's a dumb idea as well for mostly the same reason, even though a ring would still permit a great deal of light around it.
Besides, I know I'm not the only one who will miss looking up into the sky and seeing the infinite brightness. I'd say the whole world would have to agree on something like this, and I know I'm not the only one who'd contest.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
100 million barrels of oil per day times $50 per barrel (being conservative) times 365 days per year makes oil itself a $1.8 trillion / year industry. That doesn't even begin to add in the cost of oil refining, gasonline distribution, etc.
I think spending a few billion dollars to stave off global warming would pay for itself very rapidly.
Because it's easier to convince people to let you put a bajillion microsatellites into orbit than it is to convince them to let you build another nuclear power plant.
Nature has perfected keeping things in long-term balance.
The more we mess with our environment, and that includes our atmosphere and even the universe, the more damage and disequilibrium we will create.
Simpy
Talk about fantasy land. You really think most SUV's in the last three years average about 30mpg? Let's see, according to your example, the Explorer should be at least mid-20's if they've been improving every year for the last seven - and yet, I'm confused. According to Ford (http://www.fordvehicles.com/suvs/explorer/feature s/specs/) the v6 gets 15/21 and the v8 gets 15/19 city/highway. How can that be??
And not trying to show you're a complete moron, but... staying with Ford, their Freestyle minivan gets 18/23 or 16/23 depending on the engine. Definitely not great, but certainly better than all but the mini-SUV's.
Maybe next time you should have a clue before telling someone they are wrong.
Why not just paint a desert white? That would send back the sunlight in visible wavelengths through even a thick carbon dioxide layer.
US$ 6 trillion buys a whole lot of white paint.
Also, we could start thinking in ways to use less power and to generate less greenhouse gases with better energy generation facilities.
Just thinking. Of couse, the artificial ring is way cooler from a sci-fi standpoint.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
then everybody can get together and talk about how great the idea is and everyone will be behind it, and everyone will pledge spaceships in proportion to their countries carbon emissions, that way it's all fair. But then the largest carbon producers/spaceship producers will back out leaving the space ring as more of a pile of floating spaceship debris...
Yes, but it is still very questionable exactly what is causing our patterns to change. Is it us or is it nature? People who do not froth at the mouth still debate the question.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
it's cheaper than the war in Iraq.
Runs and hide a the CIA starts pounding on door.
Highlander 2 anyone?
he surely can't, can he?
Isn't the food we eat reliant on the sun? Whoopsie...
POKE 36879,8
Blocking sunlight could offset the increase in mean temperature, but would do nothing about the decrease in contrast. Thus, the polar regions would warm while tropics would cool and the world's weather systems and ocean currents, all of which are driven by heat flow from the tropics to the poles, could still be dramatically changed.
I haven't seen the numbers, so I don't know. Maybe a giant ring around the earth actually would be a better solution to prevent ill effects from global warming. Maybe you'd be foolish not to consider it.
My other first post is car post.
OMG yes I loved that game ... build a city and watch the fusion plant meltdown or the microwave beam miss ... oops!
I am Spartacus
Ok..good. So we throw up reflective dust to block out sunlight.
Now, what happens when the time comes to clean it up? You can't actually call for megamaid to suck all that shit up you know. Talk about jumping out of the toaster and into liquid nitrogen.
We don't NEED global freezing 100 years from now.
Life is not for the lazy.
<sarcasm>
Yes, let's make a giant halo of ships or particles. There's no chance it will cause catastrophic waves to destroy thousands of cities. And if we go the particle rout, let's just blow up the moon! It's right there, c'mon!
</sarcasm>
How about we just use more solar power and quit driving gas guzzeling machines. Or at the very least, use more ethanol. E88 works fine, they should make more of it.
Have any of you geeks, freaks and whoever else stopped to think for a moment that such a device puts an enormous amount of power into the hand of a few individuals? And what if this device was hacked, or was physically appropriated by others with sinister intentions? The answer is more simple - stop burning so much coal and oil! How?? Make its price reflect its true value, not the price at which presidents get rich! Sheesh!
I think it's an interesting, yet totally impractical idea. My first concern was about how it will reduce the visibility of stars other than Sol, being that it's already hard to find areas with no light pollution for stargazing.
If you're willing to blow 6 trillion on this, you should certainly be willing to blow 10% of that on reducing greenhouse emissions, weaning the world off of oil onto "greener" energy sources, etc, etc.. What the hell ever happened to practicality?
$100 million, 2-5 large ocean-barges full of fine iron-filings, scattered across the equatorial oceans slowly over the course of a year, welcome to the ice-age.
sea life is mostly bottlenecked by iron and a few other mineral concentrations, this iron would allow enough protozoa to form and capture carbon from the atmosphere, producing o2 before they slowly fell to the bottom of the ocean, taking the carbon with them. This is an understood mechanism, and it's simple, the only problem is how much iron is enough to stop global-warming/greenhousing, but not enough to start a long ice-age.
There are variations on this theme which are more efficient, but also more risky, KISS.
yeah, let's build a halo, cause like we don't have a working oxy generator on the iss, and the station barely works even when that's ok, so a Large Space Structure is really the answer...
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
How about just putting the solar cells on the earth and then shutting down the coal stations? Makes too much sense?
POKE 36879,8
I think you could build a disk at the Earth/Sun L1 LaGrange point that would block the amount of light needed and might be far less expensive than a ring surrounding the planet. You might be able redirect the light you are blocking and use it to power solar sail craft.
If such a disk, probably outfitted with a number of vanes to allow it to redirect the light, can be used to help propel spacecraft around the inner solar system, it could well pay for itself.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
http://www.xsunx.com/
WTF is wrong with me.How did I end up on this planet?This idea is a scam.STAY AWAY FROM THE TV.
How about blotting out the sky with something black and stormy in the atmosphere? We can't have sunlight, oh no, we have to scorch the sky. That will fix everything.
Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: You've never used them before.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
But that heat would be taken out of the chunk we produce when we consume energy from other sources, so it is still a net gain on the inward flux. Reducing emissions by closing coal plants would increase the outward flux. This also reduces the energy expended on getting at our current sources of energy, so less heat is produced by us. We win on all fronts.
Personally, I'd like to have the huge space-bound solar collector with microwave transmitter, but in a place where it doesn't reduce the sunlight on earth. If we clean up our act with emissions we should have plenty of breathing room and not have to block out the sun just yet. And sunlight is useful for so many things.
The enemies of Democracy are
Ok, say in about x years it gets a little too cold. Now, how we gonna remove it????
Let's take an ecosystem that we have less than say 25% (I'm being pessimistic here) total knowledge of and make a change to it's primary motivaional force.
In my opinion that's a Bad Idea(tm). That's like taking a precision built racecar engine and putting a thick wooden filter in the fuel line. (Yep...bad idea.)
On the flipside we could build the ring of ships so that they could house people long-term in space thus semi-satisfying the "eggs in one basket" hazard. Continuous upgrades and you could have ships that could leave earth orbit to colonize the solar system as they are replaced.
I still can't help but think it's a bad idea though...too many "coulds"...
"Bah!" - Dogbert
For those who don't remember, the sport-utility robots (Bender included) get on a single island and blow fuel from their exhausts (read: asses) to propel the Earth away from the sun.
That episode freakin' ruled.
i posted something similar further down, the fish and oil thing is a very nice touch though.
"Give me 2 ships full of Iron and I'll give you an Ice Age" -- some scientist guy i forgot.
Iron is the primary bottleneck to ocean life, there isn't enough to keep the chloroplast going in algae and other stuff. Magnesium also, but that is more readily recycled, iron tends to go to the bottom, hence those pages in our elementary school books about mining the bottom of the ocean for metal.
This is what happens when those fired nasa exec's try to come up with ideas to get work again... Thank god Reagan isn't pres.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
according to the almight wikipedia this endevor, if accomplished, would put us at a civilization level of:
about 1-1.2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
A level of 1.7 would be a complete dyson sphere.
using this for solar energy would be the better idea, but tidal forces from the moon would dictate that it be made in many smaller parts which are controlled by an adaptive AI and able to orient properly, and not crash into eachother.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
Now kids, you see what happens when you watch Highlander II while smoking crack.
All this proves is that both smoking crack and watching Highlander II are bad for you!
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
So, does anyone even bother to think about where those 'fossil fuels' originally came from? Oh, oh, I know! It's the remains of vast swamp lands! So the fossil fuels are old concentrations of plant matter that's been fossilized & turned into hydrocarbons of various lengths and types. So all that stuff we mine up was once on the surface as living plants that took water and CO2 and sunlight to make the sugars that were the basis of our hydrocarbon fuels. So when we burn it, we are releasing matter that was already on the surface and in the environment. Thus, as long as we have some sort of reserves of fossile fuels left, there will be fewer greenhouse gasses (CO2, CO) in the atmosphere than before all those durn swamps photosythecised it into solid material. I make no argument against global warming per se, just against the assumption that "we caused it" and that we "we need to stop or the world will end." FUD, FUD, FUD. Life existed very well before the concentrations of materials lead to the fossile fuel deposits, and it will continue just damn fine even if we end up buring it all back out into the atmosphere that it came from anyway. Take a moment to step back a few levels from the general aruments of human-caused global warming and give it some real critical thinking of what is going on. Climates cycle, and that's a fact. Live with it, deal with it. You're going to have to 'cause we aren't going to do anything to stop it, nor should we. JDP
Halo? Tanj.
Now, let's orbit these solar cells at 500 km altitude, i.e. a diameter of 13,756.3 km or circumference of 43,217 km. The article doesn't say how wide the ring should be, but to block 1.6% of the sunlight to a circle 12,756.3 km in diameter would require a strip about 160 km wide. That's 6.9 million square kilometers of solar cells in the full ring.
Now the silicon wafer in a solar cell is really quite thin, typically around 300 microns thick, so that's only 2.074 cubic kilometers of silicon all up. Density is 2330 kg/m3, so that's 4,833 megatonnes of silicon required, or about 0.0000005% of the earth's resources. I think we have enough.
Of course, the energy required to manufacture that sort of area of solar cells would be pretty high, but think of the returns. The earth receives about 1370 W/m2 in orbit, so multiply that by the area of cells facing the sun (2.04 million square km), and you get about 2.8 billion MW of incident radiation :-) Let's say these cells aren't particularly efficient, maybe 10%, plus transmission losses of another 70%, and you still have 84 million MW of usable energy, all day, every day.
Now, in 1997 we used 380 quadrillion BTUs, globally, or about 111 quadrillion watt-hours. That's an average consumption of 12 million MW, comfortably within our budget for some time. An energy-producing system with a capacity of 7 times the entire global requirements is worth quite a bit.
There's only one downside to this - if we divert all this energy down to earth & use it, it all ends up as heat in the end, which completely nullifies the original purpose of the ring (if you remember) of preventing global warming! D'oh!
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
We already have "pollution credits" that can be traded among nations and corporations. How about "people credits". Want a child? Buy a credit.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The Mars Trilogy is a good example because it demonstrates the two uses of space rings: trapping energy and repelling energy. Halo is set on a Dyson Ring, the purpose of which is to trap as much of the sun's energy as a pre-Dyson-Sphere-capable civilization can get.
Sean McMullen's Greatwinter Trilogy also features a ring around Earth for the purposes of blocking sunlight (its name escapes me right now). And I recall some kind of sunblock measure in Clarke's 3001 to counteract vacuum energy.
See "Rings of Ice" by Piers Anthony. It was a disaster....
First, do we even know that global warming is happening, and even if it is a threat itself...and even then, wouldnt creating this "halo" be interfering with earth's natural process, as global warming itself is one?
Buy everyone a bicycle. It would only cost $600billion. It would be far less expensive than another oil war or crazy solutions which ignore the problem of massive overconsumption. I'm not joking. I don't own a car, and it's not because I can't afford one.
Who gets to control the thermostat?
They will probably be based on digital ink ... ... ;)
Won't it be fun when they get hacked
And all of those delightful popups begin to display on the horizon
That is such a stupid idea. Why waste 20 trillion dollars on a glorified space-parasol when that would be enough money to feed or employ every man, woman, and child in this country, and probably the rest of North America as well. I'm angry that people even would think about doing that kind of thing when we can't even get health insurance right.
The mean temperature of Earth increase by 5 degrees Celcius last year. The printing presses required to print 500 trillion dollars were identified as the source of the heat. An unexplained wave of deforestation was also cited.
Fusion plants didn't melt down, that was the Nuclear plants. The Fusion plants were stable.
Of course, we all know the tornadoes were the best.
---
A guy walks up to his friend and sees him hitting himself on the head with a hammer. "Why are you doing that!?", he asks. "Because it feels so good when I stop.", was the reply.
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
...which then plunges the Earth into a sudden ice age.
Anyone see that ep of the simpsons where Mr. Burns blocked out the sun so that the people of Springfield would have to use more electricity?
I wonder if the energy companies are behind this...
First they tell us that Global Warming is caused by too much carbon in the air, then they tell us Global Warming is because the air is too clean and the too much solar radiation is getting through. THEN they say that they cannot predict Global Warming or even predict that it exists because the historical models are too short.
Maybe the could figure out how to predict what the Weather will be on Friday FIRST (so I can go golfing) before they try to build a friggin' space ring.
but this is the stupidest story. ever.
hey, i got a site! and i got advertisers on it! so maybe i'll jsut post this story about star trek and space and technology and saving the earth and play it off as news and HEY.... i'll make a few hundred bucks off it if i can get slashdot to fall for it.
SLASHDOT FAGS WHO APPROVED THIS: DIE.
Global evaporation rates have been falling over the last 100 or so years. A a study was undertake to determin why.
;)
It concluded that less sunlight was reaching the earth and therefore less energy was hitting water bodies so there was less evaporation.
The next step was to work out why less sunlight was getting to the water. They worked out that while rain fall is produced by water droplets or vapor being attracted to airborn particles to the point they are heavy enough to fall as rain, however too many airborn particles meant that each particle was unable to attrack enough water to become heavy enough to fall. This also had another effect of becoming more reflective while still floating around in the atmosphere.
Sunlight was hitting the now more reflective clouds and bouncing off, meaning less made it to the ground.
This is a result of much more airborn particles caused by polution.
So, while polution is causing more heat to be trapped in close to the surface, it is also causing more heat to be reflected away from the surface.
The question is does one cancel out the other equally
Having a large ring around the earth to block even more sunligh I think (if the evaporation people are correct) will actually make the problem worse not better.
It reminds me of someone I learnt when I was young.... prevention is better than cure!
Regards,
g@z.
Sorry, the uninformed hysterical fringe is too busy working in their dozens of mainstream laboratories.
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
This all may seem too far fetched, but imagine what people 200 years ago would have thought about our society today. Transplating organs, travelling to outer space, Donald Trump...who knows what other insanity the next 200 years will bring.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Can't they just turn down the knob on the Sun?
Kludge.
Invest 10 billion dollars in the solarcell and solar energy equipment to make most if not all of our energy source comming from the sun. This sure will make the earth much cooler, since we don't have to burn as much coal, oil, or use nuclear power (which generate heat in the home when you turn on lights), etc.
"Halo fans rejoice."
"Ringworld fans rejoice."
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
This is exactly why you'll never make a good super villian. You think too small.
We've heard it before. They had cellphones on Star Trek, and now we have them. 3 1/2 disks come from there too, I'm told.
But HOLY CRAP, do we have to try to use the plot to Highlander 2 to actually try to save the world???
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Let's use it to control the climate in those commie countries and block their sunlight every day.
Someone's been watching Dr. Who on CBC recently.
6x10^12 / 2.5X10^8 is $24,000. I will accept a hot house with more frequent bannana meals in exchange for the 24 g's now. And if this fucker is over budget by a decimal point ... then man I really want the cash instead.
Christ Jesus Almighty! Haven't any of you heathens played Alpha Centauri??!?
Solar shade. It's called a solar shade. And you have to get the approval (LOL!) of the UN to do it. So Kofi's got to get some kickbacks on the aluminium foil manufacturing.
Might just be easier to dissolve the UN. OMFG! Just like the emperor dissolved the Galactic Senate!
Or we could, ya know, spend 1% of that and colonize Mars, fund pollution free energy sources, control human over population, and, ya know.. STOP SCREWING UP THE EARTH. Yeah, let's build impossibly-large space structures with money that *could* go to solving the root causes (our bad ecological practices) instead of just behaving ourselves and taking care of the Earth, that's MUCH easier. What utter stupidity.
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
Uninformed, hysterical fringies, you may now commence flaming.
I would but you beat me to it.
to start up the ice ages again. And you thought the Neanderthals were gone.
Massive chemical cleanup from production, massive ramping up of existing infrastructure, massive use of land to meet required energy levels.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Aside from what's already been pointed out, d'ya have any idea how large something would have to be to block out the sun? From space? Damned big. Prohibitively big. Not gonna work.
Yeah. Great idea. Treat the symptom, ignore the cause.
It seems to me that the stationkeeping problem could be resolved with large moveable surfaces. If it's getting pulled into the earth, the occluding objet could decrease its silouette to get pulled back towards the sun, or if it's too close to the sun, it could increase its silouette to get pushed back towards earth. If the object is shaped like a fan, the tilt of the blades could be used to induce spin (useful if it is a non-rigid structure). Energy to actuate the moveable parts could come from solar panels, and the thing could be controlled by a simple computer.
Step 1: Build Giant ring around earth
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: Profit
before spending trillions of dollars of other people's money, they should at least give us some real hard evidence that global warming even exists
Earth calling MSTCrow ... Earth calling MSTCrow ...
I think you need to do a literature search in the the peer reviewed journals. There's a bit more than "some" real hard evidence. You can't keep talking about this issue as though it is still 1985! A lot more science has been done in the last 20 years, the jury is no longer out. Do some reading (and not of kooky global-warming-as-conspiracy right wing
Come on! No one is going to make a Highlander solar shield comment!?!?!
Now that's a death ray!
Though the debate continues around global warming...
What an excellent opening sentence. The problem is, which debate is he referring to? Is he talking some real scientific debate? Or maybe a politically motivated debate based on non-science in which the powers that be try to confuse the public into believing there is no scientific consensus, with the goal being to maintain the status quo and avoid angering the energy lobby.
Because, scientifically, there is no real debate anymore over whether or not man is impacting the climate and causing global warming.
Download my free songs!
It's easy to say things like that, "I used to remember". Memory is a different issue. What do solid records say? What they do not say is that there has been any significant warming of the environment to date that is not part os a natural cycle.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
like thru chemical processes store the carbon in the atmosphere?
Or say, *OBEY the Kyoto protocol* in the first place?
Hasn't anyone here read Michael Chichton's newest book? It makes some very, very good reading on global warming.
We need MORE solar power to solve our energy woes. That's why I'm proposing a giant magnifying glass to boil the oceans, and produce clean, efficient steam to power generators. The bonus is we can catch fresh COOKED fish and won't have to worry about natural gas for our stoves.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll wipe out the species.
"We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we do know it was us who scorched the sky."
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
1. Ski Resort in Death Valley
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
WOW. as if we font have enough crap floating around in earth orbit we cant get rid of. Assuming we can fix planet based global warming, we'd then have huge ass cloud of dust we cant get rid of..
man like trying to solve a rodent problem with a nuke..
..In Anvil of Stars? On one of those mechanically-manipulated worlds?
Ah, my young padawan. This will be the one ring that brings balance to the light side and the dark side.
When we run out of fossil fuels, clean up emissions and realize: someone forgot to install the "off" switch for the huge ring in space.
"What about that interlocking ring of spaceships being an interlocking ring of solar panels? Then that blocked energy can get diverted to earth in a more desirable form..."
Yeah right like this wouldn't be abused to power oh say... orbital mind control lasers?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Wasn't one of these gone way wrong the premise of an Australian SF novel called "Souls in the Great Machine?"
and the best part is that it will be even more expensive to take this monstrosity apart than it was to loft up there.
NFW the congress could ever aprove any kind of budget that fat. There would be fights do the death over this turkey.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Come on... isn't this obvious? You can only put $200 hammers and $500 toilet seats on invoices for so long before people start asking questions again.
Where do you think these ridiculously high-priced projects put their money? You think it goes into the project? Heck no, the project will be delayed, deferred for more research, requesting more money, etc. like all lofty projects of this ilk.
No my dear taxpayers, this, like other projects of the same quality will just be used as another vehicle to misappropriate spending into other things like TTR, black projects, more domestic weapons we don't need, and other things.
We've already cut billions of dollars out of things like broadcast television, the No Child Left Behind act, elementary school teachers and programs, and hundreds of other community things, why not just ferret that over to the "Big Skullcap In the Sky" instead?
Why not? Because its easier to get people to go "Oooo... Ahhhh" and hand over their wallets like Good Citizens, instead of questioning the goals of the project.
Why not spend a few billion on domestic problems? Or spend a few billion feeding and educating hungry people in poverished countries? Why not explore conversion to alternative fuel solutions? Why not look for ways to improve everything UNDER the atmosphere that has measurable results, instead of trying to improve everything OUTSIDE of the the atmosphere, which we can't measure yet?
No, this is just a ruse to get more money stashed away into other projects and to buy more beaurocrats, than to actually improve technology that exists today.
Heck, we've only spent a paltry $170 billion already on "The War(tm)", and we're doing so well there... why not spend the same amount on things we CAN fix, without killing ~20k civilians and soldiers?
The ring could be comprised of particles which would scatter the sunlight, or be built by an interconnected ring of spaceships aligned to block the light.
I thought we already had this, or at least the beginnings. No need to spend so much money on purposely putting up a protective ring of stuff, as soon as China and India really ramp up their space programs, presto, global warming solved.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Why don't we mine ice cubes from Haley's Comet, and drop them into the ocean to cool down the planet?
What about that interlocking ring of spaceships being an interlocking ring of solar panels? Then that blocked energy can get diverted to earth [...]
And once it's available on the surface, we could use it to power all our machines which give off mostly heat, and then... well we have the greenhouse problem again.
put them over every multilane highway.
Because it's easier to convince people to let you put a bajillion microsatellites into orbit than it is to convince them to stop burning gas in their SUVs.
Why do I feel I've heard this before:
The idea had been to create giant rings of ice around the earth - huge lenses to capture solar energy. But it had all gone catastrophically wrong. The rings of ice were melting into rain. Rain that would not stop! Torrents of it, drowning the planet. Unleashing landslides, triggering volcanos, and giving birth to a hostile new landscape...
Anyone care for a swim?
Smithers: Well, Sir, you've certainly vanquished all your enemies: the Elementary School, the local tavern, the old age home... you must be very proud.
Burns: No, not while my greatest nemesis still provides our customers with free light, heat and energy. I call this enemy... the sun. Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing... block it out!
Smithers: Good God!
Burns: Imagine it, Smithers: electrical lights and heaters running all day long!
lets spend billions of dollars to put a ring around the earth. tons of fuel would have to be burned to do this. they could just throw some glitter into orbit. heres a better idea. have everyone on the planet plant at least one tree. trees would help cool the earth. because they hold more water. trees also help water evaporate so there will be more rain. more rain = cooler weather.
Yes, but not working on global climatology. Just because a scientist is an expert on, say, genetics, does not mean they are somehow an expert on anything else.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Any such solar radiation blocking device would most likely be in the equatorial plane - right above the equatorial rainforests.
The rainforests getting less radiation means diminished CO2 absorbing capacity of the whole planet. If not done carefully, this could lead to dangerous levels of CO2 in atmosphere.
Indian.
I know a place like /. is full of tech lovers, but is it really that hard for the people proposing these ideas to realize that the continued introduction of massive new technology to solve social problems, will only exacerbate things in the long run.
Seems like there are cheaper and more feasible solutions to this global warming phenomenon. As others have said, developing energy sources that dont release such large amounts of carbon.
Massive technology which alters major natural earth systems will have so many biological and social ramifications, theres no way we can calculate for them all. And solutions like these seem to completely miss the source of the problems we're currently experiencing.
When it gets too hot, we'll gather up almost everyone and put them in a giant volcano. Then, blow them all up with H-Bombs. The resulting clouds of body thetans will partially block out the sun, thus keeping the planet at a reasonable temperature until the population gets out of hand again. Eventually, all the Thetans can learn to share the remaining bodies until the population catches up.
Then lather, rinse, repeat.
If they can consider spending such ammounts of money to "stick a cork in the dam", why can't they consider using similar ammounts of money to combat the initial problem itself? Lower our dependence on fossil fuels which are among teh primary causes of Ozone and atmospheric breakdown.
It just seems silly to me.
My agenda if I ran the world:
1. Get our shit together down here on earth
2. Worry about patching up holes once the root of the problem has been taken care of.
Just my 2 cents on a day I will most likely not live to see. :(
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
100% of the energy is either reflected or radiated into space. The temperature at which this occurs is the only thing under contention. Things that cause the equilibrium temperature to rise include: Increased energy flux and IR opaque gasses in the atmosphere.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Take a bright light, like the ones you find in your old school gym. Just ONE of them. Make that the sun. set it about ten feet up. Turn it on. put your hand CLOSE to the floor, note how detailed and DARK the shadow is? Move your hand closer to the light. Note how the shadow gets bigger, but lighter? Find the best place to hold these structures in place (tether them if we have to with those new-fangled carbon nanotubes) and hell, make them solar panels, like a previous poster said to do. Hell, at this point, we could forget about microwave transmission, those carbon nanotubes could carry the power right to the earth. We'd get slight shade, (goodbye nasty sun haze during rush hour!) although, I do see the disadvantage of this as far as plants go. some need some intense light to live...
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...Liberate Saudi Arabia, and not worry about Kyoto at all."
How the hell do you actually estimate that something will cost 6 trillion dollars? Trying to get an estimate for something that can run upwards of a million dollars would be extremely hard.
I mean, sure, if you're off by a couple million then it's not a big deal in the scheme of things but has there ever been a more "pulled out of our ass" estimate ever?
Sounds like saying "We don't know but it'll be lots!"
Then there is the issue of tranporting the energy to earth. It could be beamed to earth and captured. We can minimize the intensity of the beam by having it recieved over a very large area, say a squre mile, but a small error in trajectory could mean the bean hits 30 miles away. There are probably tracts of 1000 square miles of land avaialbe. Maybe part of Utah would do. Of course we would want to keep it local so we do not have to worry about price fixing. We could shoot it out the other direction and have it push ships out of the solar system.
Of course much of rings are discussed in Ringworld by Niven. A very good set of books.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Can't we just relocate to saturn instead???????
for pimpin' mah planet yo!
and the fork ran away with the spoon
This proposal talks about creating a "balance" between sun, clouds, and emissions, but is it reasonable to assume that the result would be stable?
It seems to me that any sudden, massive change in the amount of solar radiation hitting the earth could have very unpredictable effects on the ecosystem.
As thought experiment, this proposal may be interesting. But as a real experiment on the entire planet, it would be foolish.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
The fact that this solution is even being talked about is proof that we had gone mad, mad, I say, like a science or a dog. The solution to our filling the known area all around us with dangerous fumes is not to stop doing so, but to propose altering the universe. I can not believe we are talking about this.
Does 'Dubya' have something to do with this idiocy?
For those of you who have not read the book, Larry Niven proposed a world as a scaled down Dysan sphere, a ring around a star. Night and day would be done by a set of squares in inner orbit that would orbit slightly faster than the main ring, thus simulating night and day. They also generated power via thermocouples.
Then where will all the good posts come from?
http://www.andashdesigns.com/
"We don't understand how this works, therefore we're against it. Keep 'researching'."
Quite frankly, I'm sick of it. Clearly you're already in the "man causes global warming camp". Why would you be against a large-scale technical solution to the problem instead of more hand-wringing?
More "environmental regulations" aren't going to change the fact that burning hydrocarbons creates CO2. It also won't change the fact that trying to re-capture that CO2 is a futile effort. Launching $500 billion worth of satellites is a drop in the ocean compared with what global energy demands will become in the coming decades. It may also provide the experience needed to harness solar power in an efficient way. You've been griping about that for decades, and now you're against it?
On an even more political note, now that you liberal idiots have finally woken up and realized that nuclear power isn't so bad after all, don't you feel even the slightest bit of irony that, had you come to that conclusion 20 years ago, we wouldn't be in this mess with "global warming" in the first place? Perhaps, the next time scientists come up with a new technology, you should just fucking listen to them and keep your mouth shut instead of bitching because you don't comprehend what's at stake.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Now I know anything to do with space and the words "global warming" tend to induce a frontal lobotomy in many Sladot readers, but there are people actually taking this seriously??? Come on, there's gotta be something left in that cavernous skull to realize this has got to be one massive joke. I mean, somebody seriously misplaced the foot icon here.
Look at it this way... You've got $6 trillion to $500 trillion dollars burning a hole in your "save the earth" pocket. Dontcha think that maybe, just maybe you could put that money to better use by throwing it at something that doesn't require lobbing multiton roman candles into orbit? I mean $500 trillion . You honestly can't think of an industry or two here on the ground you could revolutionize overnight, let alone in the time it'd take to assemble THIS project?
Speaking of that, what sort of time frame are we talking? Any mention of such is amazingly absent. And we haven't EVEN gotten into the fact that the scientific community is still deeply divided on the exact cause of global warrming. Everything from man's impact to the natural warming and cooling cycles of the earth come into play. Hell, there are even published scientifc reports that say the Sun is hotter than previously measured. We still don't have a conclusive clue and these people want to throw a reflective tarp over a portion of the earth. What is the damn environmental impact of THAT? What happens to the plant and animal life UNDER it? Not as much heat or sun, that's for sure. Draw your own conclusions.
I'm sorry, but this is a prime example of what happens when people who think they're smart smoke crack. They find implausible and extrodinairy ways to waste our money.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Lets see, 100 nanometers thickness times pi * 500km ^2 (1000km diameter is probably more than big enough) and we get... about 80,000 cubic meters.
Kapton film is 2 micrometers, that would give us a volume of... about 1.5 million cubic meters.
1/8 mm mylar gives us ...about 100 million cubic meters.
You're right, that is prohibitively big unless we can come up with some new materials and/or hoist bulky things into orbit with a space elevator.
What about asteroids? If this was built, how would it defend from incoming asteroids?
My thought would be that we burn more fuel and put more toxins in the world through the launch than we save with the solar panels. I would hope we prove we can finish a space station before entering into the scifi.
Why do they have to be launched from earth?
That's a bunch of shit. There is not one credible scientist who will argue that warming is not happening. There may be some argument about why it's happening, but to say that there is doubt that is occuring at all is typical right-wing FUD. Then I looked into the site and found out it was started by Lou Dobbs. The same partisan right-wing nut from CNN. No wonder.
Not terribly informing, except for the first bit: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/3/22/112743/ 617
I snippet on costs involved, etc:
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid /27514/story.htm
Sounds like a good alternative for now, given that you're using biodiesel or SVO.
http://www.andashdesigns.com/
Ok, mod me uninformed, but it seems stupid to block free energy. There is so much raw energy to harvest, and yet we want to limit that? Perhaps scientists should focus more on ways that we as humans can minimalize our impact on the environment.
See Space Elevator (we have two of those, here in Fantasia). Lots of raw materials in the asteroids, no need to hoist megatonnes into orbit. Use a solar furnace for refining. Silicon crystals grow nicely in microgravity.
It could be beamed to earth and captured.
Nah, better to beam it to a receiving station on (or tethered to) the space elevator, then just run it down a superconducting wire to the planet. Less loss, less danger if you miss.
Ringworld is a totally different scale, and involves a lot of pseudo-science. This is all relatively straightforward engineering & financing challenges, no really new science needed.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
There certainly IS a human impact of some sort. The hard part is pulling apart how much of it is made by humans, and how much of it is made by other things. The most we really know for sure about global warming is that we are pumping up gases that cause global warming. It doesn't seem like a large logical leap to assume that if you are pumping up stuff known to cause global warming, you are a contributing factor. Anything outside of that and you enter the much more shaky territory of climate models. We really don't have great climate models at this point. Even if there was a climate model that is dead on, we really are not going to be sure it is dead on until some time has passed and we can test it.
So, saying that there is a debate around global warming is absolutely true. If you don't think there is a debate as to how much temperatures are going to rise and how much of that humans are causing, you are deluding yourself. The point of the article is that no matter what the ratio of human to not human effects is, if we really want to keep static temperatures, this is a way to do it.
Right - now that we've proven we're totally incompetent to mess with the ecological balance, so we're threatening our species' own continued existence, what have we learned? That we should mess with even bigger systems that we barely know about, let alone understand. On behalf of the entire species, and of course thousands or millions of other species, too. Look, ma - no hands!
--
make install -not war
The greenhouse "problem" isn't a problem with the rate of heat expulsion, it's a problem with the rate of change of the rate of heat expulsion.
Greenhouse gasses (like a greenhouse) trap heat that would be otherwise expelled normally. Getting rid of greenhouse gasses gets rid of the problem entirely, like opening the top of a greenhouse. It doesn't matter what's inside, be it solar panels or whatnot, as long as it doesn't produce more greenhouse gasses.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It would be quite ironic if we made a giant sun shade to thwart global warming and instead caused a new ice age.
My other first post is car post.
Because it's easier to convince people to let you put a bajillion microsatellites into orbit than it is to convince them to stop burning gas in their SUVs.
People like their SUVs. But they don't give a sh*t what fuel the SUVs run on.
Build more nuclear plants, and people won't have to burn gas to operate their SUVs.
What happens when global warming ends because we haven't any more money for cars having spent it all on this ring?
Then it will have worked?
But seriously, the world spends much more just on gas for its cars in a year than this would cost. I need not even mention the money the US has spent ferrying a certain group of people around the world on a certain fruitless little excursion...
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
If we were to cover 1/2 the land area we've paved in the US with solar panels of standard efficiency, we'd generate as much electricity as we consume in all forms of energy in the US. The rest of the world is quite parsimonious by comparison, though they could so too meet all their needs and live as profligately as we do without environmental impact.
It has been suggested by people not bothering to do the math that the change in albedo from the solar cells themselves would cause warming, but we've already paved twice that area.
Biofuels are relatively inefficient compared to solar cells, but fairly simple as well and carbon net-neutral. Biofuels and solar hydrogen could meet our mobile and nightime needs easily.
We can live as we do, with all the juice and cars and whatnot, so long as we do not too grossly expand our population, in a closed loop, steady state system. We could live quite comfortably if we overturned the Ford coup of the 1920s and reversed the graft-based decision to build roads and the 1950's military decision to build suburbs. With a predominantly urban population moving by train (or working close to home/at home) we could buy the solar cells with a few year's oil expenditures.
Unfortunately Solar doesn't have the profit margin of oil, so there's no political/industrial interest. There's $10 trillion worth of oil in Iraq we took ownership of for a mere $1 trillion in military expenditures (at the current burn rate, given the time it will take to pump it out). The usual profit sharing (if we chose to share with the Defeated People) is 50/50, meaning at least 5:1 profit on that adventure for the country as a whole, but since Haliburton is actually getting paid for their efforts (and then some) and the profit will accrue directly to the oil companies and not back to We the People, it's an amazingly shrewd business deal, the greatest heist in the history of mankind: $10 trillion. Almost the entire US gross domestic product for a year.
Nobody building solar factories is going to see that kind of profit, and without it they can't compete in the congressional auction. Laws aren't bought flat rate, they're sold to the highest bidder and no industry can outbid the oil industry.
It would be far cheaper to convert the global energy economy to solar (as a combination of solar-thermal, solar-electric, and solar-biofuel with the only other long-term viable power source as a backup--breeder nuclear, which (not ignoring the very real waste problem) is the only other energy source we have that can meaningfully contribute to our long term power needs) than to build a great space ring. The low range costs are small compared to the current value of the known oil reserves (roughly $80 trillion, proven plus mid-range USGS unproven estimates at $40/bbl).
It's technically easy to solve, but politically impossible.
... also destroys peoples, animals and plants health. I don't think that spaceships are going to help much healing that.
Wouldn't it just be better (and create more jobs in the US) if you started working on reducing air pollution in all its forms?
Then we only have China to worry about. Oh! And India...
realkiwi
Seriously, they should all be shot. SUV ownership is like joining the nuclear club. Suddenly, your insurance goes way down because you're virtually invincible. Getting rid of SUVs will be just as difficult as nuclear disarmament. Anyone driving around a normal sized car is just asking to get clobbered.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Am I the only one old enough to have read Larry Niven's "Ringworld" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld ?
Funny, isn't it, how when Iraq was the bogey, it was of the utmost urgency that we act now, now goddammit, and only a fool or idiot would sit around waiting for definitive, iron-clad evidence.
But when it's only global warming, with consequences ranging from the loss of entire island countries to mass species extinction... well, no need for action until all the facts are in. Let's just wait until they've managed to prove, without doubt, that there is no tiny chance of any conceivable alternative solution. One that, you know, doesn't require us to do anything.
I should buy some cement.
...I call it the "Environmental Orbiting Band-Aid®".
What next? Satellites shooting down on Earth huge globs of Neosporin®? How about instead, we, oh...I don't know...try fixing the problem? Just an suggestion.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Uh-oh, I'll bet it's not...
have everyone on the planet plant at least one tree.
This could be going in the right direction...
trees would help cool the earth.
Yes, okay, and now for the science...
because they hold more water.
... Okay, not what I was expecting, but let's go with it...
trees also help water evaporate so there will be more rain.
But, I thought we were storing water, not helping it evaporate? There must be some logical reasoning behind this...
more rain = cooler weather.
Oh. Dear. God.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
... sur une jambe de bois.
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
It's too bad the article doesn't discuss the possible need to do both. It's pretty depressing to consider that such a "solution" may encourage people to emit more CO2. Which will what? Require a larger halo to help out with that? No, it's impossible to consider this a LONG term solution.
It's also easy to get depressed about this because other research indicates that by the time we start acting on reducing CO2 emissions the planetary temperature may continue to rise for a few more years.
But I prefer the more optimistic interpretation that if we do both, a halo for the short term and CO2 emission reduction for the long term we may be able to safely come through this upcoming crisis.
I think this trimmed down SUV would be more accurately called a cdr than a carr.
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
Oh you fucking moron.
trees also help water evaporate so there will be more rain.
But, I thought we were storing water, not helping it evaporate? There must be some logical reasoning behind this...
Trees pump water from the ground and produce vapour through aspiration, thus providing enough moisture for rain. Trees also stop all the fresh water just flowing off to the sea.
more rain = cooler weather.
Oh. Dear. God.
Albedo, go and look it up in the dictionary, stupid.
...ring of spaceships aligned to block the light.
Could we make one shaped like a butterfly?
Oooh, and another shaped like a swan?
>bring balance to solar radiation
Ah, the Prophecy! The Chosen One...
Sorrowfully there will be reign of the dark side and a long, bloody war before that balance is achieved.
In fact those spaceships made to block the solar radiation will turn out to be the imperial star destroyers. The round object custom made to occult the Sun is nothing else than the first Death Star.
Anakin, please, don't!
"What about that interlocking ring of spaceships being an interlocking ring of solar panels?"
I'd imagine because it'd be turned to swiss cheese by the end ot the year.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
They don't even know how global warming works, or even if its caused by human intervention, and they already wan't to solve a problem they can't understand with a solution that is even more uncertain? Get real guys, first let's get a petascale computer that can predict the weather and then we can talk about messing around with it.
>a new proposal suggests building an artificial
>space ring around the Earth to block the light
>of the sun and bring a balance to solar
>radiation, cloud cover, and heat-trapping
>greenhouse gases. The ring could be comprised
>of particles which would scatter the sunlight
The proposal is nothing new. It was entirely described in the 1986 novel "Fiasco" written by the notable polish SF author Stanislaw Lem. The ring around the alien planet is formed of ice by ejecting a part of the ocean's water supply over the equator.
The idea has several problem as it turns out in the story. Instability of the ring itself and that of the planet-wide political cooperation needed to realize such a huge venture. In the end the ring spreads uncontrolled due to lack of maintenance and the ice ends up being used as a means of orbital carpet bombing.
Te novel is quite dark and is probably meant to reflect the desperation of the mid-80' SDI Star Wars era terrestrial politics.
Less light means less photosynthesis, which means more carbon-dioxide. If that's what this rather expensive ring is supposed to be counterbalancing, the originators are quite out of their heads.
Not quite. Where do you think all the energy that is stored in fossil fuels came from? Energy from the sun can be stored as well as reflected or radiated.
The Dread Pirate Roberts is here for your soul!
extreme, not extereme =)
very metal !!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
How about just treating the earth like a lady???
:-(
Seems a lot easier and cheaper. Only in america...
-- Make software not war
This proposal puts the real problem aside to simply build up. They should act upon the problem directly. 'nuff said.
It seems to me that any ring designed to intercept solar radiation could also be used to collect power, and this would be a win/win situation.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
LMAO! dood...THAT was a great post man...just made my freakin night : )
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
I just finished Sean McMullen's book the Eyes of the Calculor again. His story takes place 2000 years in the future but involves an Earth-ring called Mirrorsun that was built for the exact same purpose.
Nonsense. It's cheaper to curb the greenhouse gases emission, but who'd think of such simple measures?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
I'd rate it right up there with nuclear-powered cars and the use of nuclear explosives in large-scale construction projects. Whoever thought of this probably never considered the potential side-effects (most life on this planet depends on light) or that the main reason for global warming is not too much energy input by sunlight, but too much heat retention by the atmosphere.
...we could just work together to solve the problem here on Earth?
BTW, has anyone considered the impact of reduced sunlight on agriculture?
Peace, or Not?
Well, I hate to state the obvious, but what do you think melts the ice between those ice ages???
While the science may not know exactly why the earth warms and cools over thousands of years. The fact is that is does, and the last time I checked there were no cars around thousands of years ago during the last warming cycle.
Sure, pollution is not good at the local level, and can if fact do a lot of harm to the local environment. With a city the size of LA that local level can stretch a hundred miles or so away, but that is not global no matter how big your ego is.
As recently proven (look it up yourself), every time a volcano goes off it produces more green house gasses than mankind has ever created since the industrial revolution.
Well, several have been going off lately. So multiply that out and you got a lot of greenhouse gasses. More than man could ever produce.
The whole "Global warming" political issue was caused when a few politicians in one of those "congressional committees" told some government scientist that they needed an answer and the scientists went against all their training and caved in on the subject. I actually heard one politician on the committee saying she was proud that she "forced the scientists into making a decision." How many scientists out there just see something wrong in that statement? I mean you can't force data that doesn't exist.
But since they could not actually see how many green house gases mankind produced and how many the planet produces naturally, they were basing their conclusions on partial data. This inaccuracy caused a dividing line in the scientific community and the political based or employed "psuedo-scientific" community that had an agenda. Plus it caught on in LA and NY since they produce tons of pollution that destroys considerably more than the local environment. And since they have the large media centers and the large egos, they decided it must be global and that they would stop it!!!
So sure, we know green house gasses warm the planet and that pollution is bad on a local level, but if you think the small amount of damage mankind has done to the planet is going to raise global temperatures even by 2 degrees every hundred years, then your ego is about the size of most of the politicians baking the idea.
In the words of George Carlin. The planet is fine, we are fucked...but the planet is just fine and will continue to be so for millions and millions of years.
Have you considered the prduction of the solar sails themselves? I understand a fair amount of environmentally crappy byproducts are produced.
Also solar cells wear out so the fiscal and evironmental costs to useing solar cells are ongoing. Has this been compared to the benfits of using them?
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Besides the already mentioned mess of making them, they also have a limited lifespan so the mess is on-going.
BTW what location is that in your sig? I assume it's a C=64 reference, but I can't recall it.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Around the year 1000 for example, it was much warmer than today. There's a reason why "Greenland" is called that: it had thawed and the Vikings could colonize and farm it.
Then it cooled off some time later, and the colony was all but abandoned.
The fun part is, the humans didn't go extinct, the gulf stream didn't reverse, ocean fauna didn't all float belly-up because of melting glaciers being sweet water, etc.
Basically that's what gets me pissed off about this _political_ "waah, we're all DOOMED if you don't follow ME" hype about global warming. It's mis-representation and scare tactics.
As was said, it's only the bullshit media and political speeches where global warming is a certainty, and certain doom is just around the corner. The media loves a good scare story. That's what sells. Actual scientific facts don't.
The science part is a lot more ambiguous and not fully understood yet. It's not just that the earth has cooled off just fine before. It's also that:
- The "Global Warming" measured, that started the whole hype, was actually based on limited data from only a tiny portion of the world. And it was only a 1 degree Celsius over a _century_ increase.
- The Earth has periodic warming and cooling cycles, ranging roughly between 6 degrees Celsius cooler than today in the last glaciations, and some 6 degrees warmer in the times of the dinosaurs. Think roughly a sine wave spanning whole ages. With a lot of noise superimposed.
And we're roughly in the middle. It's _normal_ to rise slowly on the average. Not this fast, but basically a century of it might well be measuring just the noise in the real signal. Especially given that:
- Actual satellite data that covers a helluva lot more of the whole globe (you know, the "global" part of "global warming") actually shows a global _cooling_ for the last 20 years straight. There is actually a theory that we might be heading into a "mini ice age". (Not that it will stop journalists and politicians from presenting a _cooling_ as an effect of global _warming_.)
- Also for this last interval, there is data indicating that the average temperature on Earth just faithfully follows fluctuations in the Sun's energy output. Think, for example, how we got a very warm winter between 2003 and 2004, because of solar flares. We can actually observe and measure those things nowadays, and blimey, temperature on Earth seems to just follow them.
Is it that unbelievable, since Sun is where that heat comes from in the first place? We're talking some 0.3% temperature difference in this "global warming." It only takes _minor_ fluctuations in the energy input to produce that.
- Humans never accounted for more than 2% of greenhouse gasses. If not only we stopped driving cars, but if humanity as a whole even stopped breathing, it still just wouldn't make that much of a difference.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think someone has been reading the Ringworld books to much....Sun squares! Thats a good idea...But oh wait,,,what if they fall down? "Oops."
Okay the problem here is that earth gets warmer. Now you need some way of getting rid of the heat. What if you make mirrors on earthsurface to mirror the solarradiotion off?
Now I know its lots of work and requires lots of co-operation and agreament on large countries with lots of desert. BUT there is alternative for co-operation!
Pick few countries with a LOT of sand in its surface.
Come on you should know enough of geography so that you could name one, or two big enough, one of them might be called our oil or something similar, but there are few terrorist states still which fit the description so.
You just need a lot of heat to get create glass for the mirroring, so what you do. and make thermonuclear bombing raid to turn its surface to a large mirror for mirroring heat out of earths surface.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Actually, no. The panels would block solar radiation and generate electricity. While the use of that electricity would generate some heat on Earth, the amount of solar radiation being blocked would far exceed the heat generated by the consumption of the generated electricity.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Suppose that you get a big country like the US to invest something like US$5B into this project.
.1 millionths of the sun's radiation. You need about a million tons to shield 1% of the sun's radiation, requiring only 25 thousand space shuttle flights.....
Fine. Now you are blocking the sun on bunch of other countries that A) didn't pay for it B) don't want you to block their sun.
This thing would be way TOO big not to block unwanted countries.
If my math is correct, For each 8 tons of gold (or similar material that you can make very thin) you can create a ring of 1m wide, 10nm thick around the earth. (I did the math for "just above sealevel", or about where the spaceshuttle flies).
This 8 ton ring would block
That is great, instead of stopping the production greenhouse gases we put an umbrella arround the earth... like that old movie with Christopher Lambert. It would be a lot easier and perhaps cheaper for USA to sign the kyoto protocol and start following japan's example, than making something like this...
I've always had this idea that you could install massive mirrors in deserts made out of reflective foil to bounce a lot of sunlight back into space and thus reduce the total energy that heats up the earth.
OK you'd probably need a LOT of shiny foil, but it would probably be cheaper than installing some kind of space sunglasses which is what the article is suggesting.
Or, instead of reflecting it out into space, how about using the energy to desalinate water in desert or 3rd world countries? The energy is used up AND you get infinite free water too. Cunning huh? But probably totally impossible to build?
There is still no evidence whatsoever that the climate is warming, and those morons attempt frivolous mind construction about "how to fight global warming". This nonsense is becoming old.
You have on the one hand a peer reviewed, falsifiable, reproducible study that says one thing by a bunch of folks (perhaps in lab coats) who studied and workd 8-10 years of their lives to get to the point where they could be 'peer' reviewed.
On the other hand you have something called a study with none of the above features (except the authors often have a TLA in something, though maybe not anything to do with atmospherics or even physics).
But the press thrives on conflict, so it reports both studies as being by 'noted scientists' or maybe one was a fictional tale by some guy who wrote alot of SCIENCE (fiction).
Most folks have no idea what 'falsifiable', 'peer review', or 'reproducible' have to do with anything important like the price of gas, so they believe the press when it tells them that the different 'studies' represent two sides of the issue (fair and balanced).
And with enough money on both sides to support new 'studies' the debate could well go on until every last icecube in Greenland turns into liquid oxygen dihydride.
Then the big controversy will be whether to build giant seawalls around the coastal cities or to run screaming for higher ground.
And you can bet the press will present that story with two nicely balanced sides, as well.
Even if the climate change is natural, we may have the power to keep our planet at the temperature we want it at.
After all, don't you like tropical islands? A working gulf stream?
What if we could alter the amount of solar radiation received and tailor it to our needs to make more of the planet inhabitable and comfortable.
More than that with a ship ring, we could get all the annoying people to crew the ring (or at least serve prison sentences on it).
The only thing is, that we in general realize our own incapabilities after makiong mistakes
What about the covenant?
Well, don't forget that all energy we consume eventually end up as heat. If we collect solar power in space and beam it down to Earth, it would be the exact opposite of blocking solar radiation, albeit the energy arrives to us in the form of electrical power instead of radiation.
We can name it... Halo.
The real solution to global warming is Contraction and Convergence in which each global citizen would be given a a carbon emmissions allowance (similar to tradeable carbon credits under koyto). When you buy a tank of petrol, or a plane ticket, you would have to spend some of your "carbon credits" in addition to cash
The limits would initially be set by each countries current emmissions levels, but reduced yearly by a preset formula (some developing countries may actually get an per-capita increase).
The formula would be based on how much emmissions can be released while still keeping the CO2 concentration at the "safe" level of below 450ppm. You take this figure as the total global emmissions allowance and then divide it by the Earths population.
Individuals in countries like the USA that can't reduce their emmissions in line with the "contraction and convergence" reduction rate, would still have the option of buying carbon credits, on the world market, from those in the developing world who still have unused credits. However the laws of supply and demand show that the price of these credits will increase as the supply is reduced. Which leaves the market to work out the cheapest way for the economy to become carbon neutral
Current studies show that the sustainable figure would be around 1-ton CO2 per person per year - Current per-capita usage in the USA is currently 20.6 tons per year, and 9.3 in the UK
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/451.htm
...from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the largest, international, consensus-based scientific body ever to review all the evidence on climate change. In the part of the IPCC's Third Assessment Report specifically about anthropogenic effects on radiative forcing:
The debate about climate change is over.
The world spendings on military was 1 trillion dollars last year, so if we could all just agree on not having any wars the next six years - it's just six years, then you can go kill again! - then we have funded this stuff.
Oh, and if we go for the cheap spaceship solution of 500 billion, then it's just 6 months without killing anyone.
Thank God someone finally came up with a half trillion dollar solution so we won't have to get rid of our SUVs!
Now if someone could just come up with a new orbital space armada that would solve the problem of having to wipe before we flush the toilet...
I'm just through Asimov's full load [again] and man, was he a seeer, use a set of solar panels on orbit to gather solar energy. Well, it probably could also function for the purposes in the article, but for solutions on global warming I personally am on a different standpoint: if we're polluting too much, stop it, don't start using wierdo shields, it's not our Sun that's causing the problem, it's us. And you all probably know oh too well who has the largest air-polluting country on this planet, don't you.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
If any group should be aware of this, it's slashdot readers.
This is the problem with having so many frigging laws. Instead of thinking, 'is this moral, is this just, what would the neighbors think?', people become brainwashed into thinking, 'is this legal, can I get away with it?'
No Tekkaman/Technoman references yet?
Yeah, see, I understand the effect. It's the details that don't work. To actually block out any appreciable part of the sun - and have an appreciable penumbra - the thing would have to be enormous. It would probably require more fossil fuels than we have on earth to get such an amount of material in orbit. So we're going to have to forget about that.
Maybe not as appealing as writing rude words in the aurora borealis using a thin beam of microwaves, but still, top laffs, eh?
... you will receive your first three months of sunlight, FREE! (With purchase of a new Family-sized heater!)
And they said zombies weren't real!
Of course not some "Hello fans rejoice". What is this Hello anyway, does it run on linux or can you read it? it's Ringworld fans rejoice!
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
from my (somewhat limited) font of thermodynamic wisdom:
http://www.worldjumpday.org/
interesting SF book, has this as part of its premise....not a good start for humanity, however...
The problem would be that the solar panels would radiate heat back into the atmosphere.
This is my sig.
1. It may be a typo, but the Slashdot blurb says it'll take between 6-trillion and 200-trillion to put up a particle screen, but only 500-billion to link up a bunch of spacecract.
*Scratches Head*
Why would making linkable satellites be cheaper than a screen of ejected particles?
2. Has any of those scientists stopped to think about what 200-trillion could do right here on Earth? No spaceships required. 200-trillion could do a heck of a lot of patch work to our ecosystem that would be good and effective, verses a 200-trillion dollar waste of a ring that may or may not work and is not a long-term solution.
3. Eye...sore. Does anyone have an idea how much of a plague this'll be upon our skies? If you don't think we'll see it, think again. This sucker's gonna be up there, all the time, being a pest.
4. This reminds me of that tried-and-true scenario where there's a problem, and instead of addressing the problem itself, people just make a fix that treats the symptom, but not the problem. And as the problem gets worse, the fix needed to hide the problem, gets bigger...and bigger...and bigger...until it's either too big and everything blows up, or the people are destroyed by their own obsession with the fix............So we put this ring up in space, however that comes about. What then? Global warming is not just caused by the sun. It's caused by us, too. Pretty soon there'll be a need for a bigger solution, and so on.
5. Since when do we know enough about our planet, or the sun for that matter, to be actively effecting conditions on a global scale? Given that this is still just a dream on the boards, it only helps make it sound more like a bad science-fiction story.
Instead of a ring, why not build a sphere around the earth to keep all the deadly sun-rays out?
Probably a better idea would simply be to blow up the sun...now where's my trilithium?
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
are we close to it? kakaz
C'mon Dad, how many times do I need to ask you to stay off the internet when you're drunk?
I think, therefore I am. I think?
Awesome. Have you a link to a paper in a reputable journal that discusses this finding?
yes, and I posted it on my slashot journal two months ago.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
The solution is to build green roofs here on Earth. What we are doing now is cutting down trees, paving roads, putting up buildings. For every square meter of pavement there should be a square meter of green roof. This will keep things cooler and will help out with the carbon dioxide problem.
Build a massive network of solar-powered laser beams pointed at the sky. Or maybe we could just cover the land with mirrors.
If, instead of saying, mankind is the one producing too much carbon, just say, there is too much carbon in the atmosphere. Regardless of where it is coming from, or who is to blame, we clearly as a nation need to invest in global climate control.
Besides, if we Americans could build a machine to manipulate global climate, we would also be building the ultimate terror weapon.
For example, what if we did build a giant space based reflector that simply cast a shadow on a spot on the earth. We could park that baby over a country and make its sun go out. That would freak people for sure. Don't f--- with the Americans, because they will make the sun go out!
Or, what if we could build a machine to dramatically lower the CO2 content in the air? America could manipulate CO2 content of the air to its national advantage, creating a perfect climate for the USA and its real allies regardless of what the world thinks.
This is my sig.
Has anyone asked the people in the 3rd world what they think? Typical USA attitude, screw up the planet then impose a solution on the third world that sees them robbed of sunlight.
Last week /. had an article Japanese Agency Plan for Robot Lunar Base where they said NASA plans to have a robot-driven mining colony established on the moon by 2020. Now we know what they're going to be doing with what they mine: building a ring around the earth!
This is one of the things that frustrates me about "climate change"--all evidence is unritically adopted to support the theory. The change in terminology, from "global warming" to "climate change" is itself a shift designed to support exactly this sort of pseudo-scientific scullduggery.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Build a ring around 93,000,000 miles in radius, 1000 miles thick with walls 150 miles high at either edge of the ring . . .
You know, Highlander 2 was a truely terrible film. But gosh darn it if they weren't ahead of the ball on these 'cover the planet to deal with ozone loss'.
As I remeber, it didn't work out well in the movie. Of course in the movie, they had an off switch. What happens in one hundred year when we figure out a more elegent solution, and decide to get rid of the particles?
Yes, we really need more Global Dimming. I saw a BBC horizon program about this.
For $200 trillion we could just about pack everybody onto star ships and head out for a more hospitable planetary system.
This is so easy... the US has many extra nuclear missles and plenty of delivery vehicles to boot. If we really want this ring, we could sacrifice the moon! Reduce it to dust, and we have an insta-ring! And since we've already paid for the nukes, we just need to pay moderate expenses to deliver them and put the debris shepherding satellites into orbit. I know it's the moon, but it's a small price to pay to keep the gas giants (not Saturn and Jupiter) in business, right?
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
The parent post is badly misinformed. Please get your facts correct. The ice on Greenland did not thaw around the year 1000. The ice has been there for over 400000 years . Drill an ice core and, like tree rings, you can count the annual "rings" in the core, giving the age of the ice at the base of the core as 100k-400k years depending on the location. The rings are alternating transparent and translucent layers of ice. Every winter heavy snowfall creates a thick new layer of snow. The snow gradually compacts under its own weight, making a layer of opaque proto-ice. In summer, the top part of the winter snowfall partially melts and refreezes lower down, making a transparent top layer on top.
Scroogle
I'm old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
All my life there have been 'experts' predicting doom and gloom. They've warned us of urgent threats of catastrophes coming soon. They've urged the frightened audience to make huge changes to society to prevent the next catastrophe. Some of the forecasts I remember:
- Communists will enslave everyone on Earth.
- pesticides will kill all the animals in the world.
- fluoridated water will turn us all into brain washed zombies.
- air pollution will make us all choke to death on sulphur and nitrogen oxides.
- acid rain will kill all lakes and rivers.
- the human population was growing much faster than crop production so in ten years famines would kill two billion people
- the human population is growing uncontrolled, increasing exponentially. We'll have 12 Billion people on earth by 2020 AD and we'll be reduced to feeding on krill, algae and Soylent Green.
But look at what really happened. Communism is dying of its own incompetence. Air polution is much, much better, thanks in part to Nixon creating the EPA. Crop production grew faster while population growth suddenly slowed down, mostly for social reasons.
Today many of you are in a panic about Global Warming.
Sorry guys. But I'm burned out listening to the endless cries about how bad everything will be unless we give lots of power to Prophets of Doom.
Remember the ''Boy Who Cried 'Wolf!''' In the last fifty years I've heard 'expert's cry 'Wolf!' too many times. I don't believe them anymore. It's just a con. Some group is trying to panic the herd so they can gain wealth or power during the stampede.
It needs booster jets at the edges and the lakes eventually shallow-out to puddles.
I think you need to familiarize yourself with Viking history and Greenland a bit more, probably through Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond.
Greenland has a lot of lushness on the shoreline, but has always had harsh ice areas inland, with pockets that could almost be compared to an oasis in desert. Vikings farming and herding, mostly by clear cutting, let the very light soil be carried off by the wind as it originally would (volcanic activity outputs very light and nutrient rich particles). Overgrowth trapped that soil... clearing it for farming allowed it to be swept away...
Not going into excesive detail, because there are other factors, but it wasn't Climate Change that solely ended Viking societies in Greenland.
"The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly" - Touchstone,Shakespeare's "As You Like It"
of the parent point!
.18628 seconds "Green" SUVs.
Sadly (for worshippers of the invisible hand) fuel cells are not a power source, so most of the power will still come from burning fossile fuels to make the hydrogen that powers the fuel cells for the next generation 1000 horsepower hemi (yeah it don't need hemis, don't even have heads, but it's got hemi anyway, see??) allwheel plus optional robot crazy legs 0-60 in
Fuel cells do make a great bait and switch for the fossil fuel investors, though, don't they!
Yeah right like this wouldn't be abused to power oh say... orbital mind control lasers?
:)
Well, we just have to make sure that we stock up on tinfoil to protect ourselves...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
A solar eclipse covers only a very small portion of Earth in shadow. Think about it. The Sun is over 100 times the diameter of Earth. To cover the entire earth in a shadow, the disc would have to be at least as large as Earth if it were right next to it. Of course, if this were even possible, it would have to be out some distance, and the further out you go, the larger it would have to be.
Ok, so it wouldn't have to cover the entire earth to be effective, but it would still have to be impractically and preventitively large. Plus, all of these ideas are just an attempt to fix something that no one can conclusively prove as being a problem that will eventually spell mankind's doom, anyway. In fact, most people who are so bent out of shape over this issue think we all evolved from a puddle of goo millions of years ago anyway, through natural selection. If that's the case, and we all end up boiling ourselves to death; hey, natural selection! Who are we to stand in the way of progress! *grin*
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
... than just one.
We've seen far too much of where that leads.
Even in science, you need to examine the competing theories - even the crackpot ones - if only to determine that they ARE false and DON'T make accurate predictions.
Yes, providing "fair and balanced" coverage gives too much weight to the false, with the result that a lot of people mistakenly think it is true. But picking one side and suppressing even the major alternative convinces even more people of that side's truth, regardless of whether it is true (or even a rough approximation).
Hard scientists, of exceptional intelligence, spending their lives working in tight focus on their special piece of knowlege, still pick the wrong answer. Sometimes they go to their graves convinced that it's right, despite a more accurate competing theory being well known to them and having convinced the bulk of the other specialists in their field. (Science is the process of correcting such mistakes and discarding such theories in favor of ever-better approximations of the truth.)
Why should we expect journalists to make a better pick? They're non-specialists, who spend a few hours to a few days interviewing a handfull of people (or attend a press conference, ask a question, pick up a press release, and maybe change a couple words) and must produce a "story" comprehensible to a broad audience (which they perceive as being of lower intelligence than themselves) by deadline time. Their incentive structure is NOT to find and spread truth. It is to capture eyeballs, to sell the papers, the sponsors' products, or the editor's political line.
In EVERY SINGLE CASE where I've known the actual story behind a newspaper article they've gotten it wrong - even on minor details (dates, times, the spelling of names) that a cursory check check would have caught. (The closest I've ever seen to a reporter in any medium getting the story right was in a Wired article. For that I give the reporter major cudos, even though it detracts from my argument here.)
Meanwhile, if it's so tough to make the right call in something as exact and repeatable as hard science, why should we expect anything better in the softer "sciences" - or politics?
We should let THEM pick one side and make it all we hear - about things as important as war, politics, or potential UNnatural disasters?
No, thanks!
I'll take the "Fair and Balanced" approach. At least that way I'll have heard TWO sides to chose from. (Sometimes they're both wrong. But the truth is much more likely to be in one of them than in an arbitrary pick - or the mainstream media's usual choices.)
To quote Fox News' other motto: "We report. You decide."
IMHO they got that one right.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Block the sun"?
Sounds more like, "Mr. Burns fans rejoice."
What?
No one's proven conclusively that global warming actually exists or is causing and danger to us... Imagine if we built this ring, and we were wrong abotu the whole 'global warming' thing... We might have just screwed up the whole equation while trying to fix it!
I predict that there will be zero interest from "environmentalists" on this or any other method of getting relief from the alledged negative effects of Global Warming.
Global warming is a propganda tool to gain consent for command and control over the economy by buerocrats. If "Global Warming", caused by excess carbon, were a genuine concern, then there would be equal concern for carbon generated by Chinese coal mine fires as there is for carbon generated by the U.S. economy. But there is zero concern from environmentalist for CO2 generated by Chinese coal mine fires -- this CO2 can not be used as a propganda tool and is hence ignored. (One hears zero about Chinese coal mine fires in the media.)
Methods of solving the "problem" of Global warming, undermine the use of "global warming" as a propganda tool and are therefore not welcomed.
Think about this, a few years ago when there was a shortage of electric energy in California, what did Diane Feinstein do? Did she show concern for CO2 emisions? No. She wanted the federal government to force out of state energy producers to sell electronic energy to Califorina at below market costs! No thought to how much fossil fuels were burnt in the process!
This was caused by only a few percentage point shortage, and DiFi is said to be the most liberal Senators. Imagine what would happen if the U.S. economy were cut by the enormous percentages required by Kyoto! There would be riots in the streets!
Global warming is constantly used as a propaganda tool, but no one thinks about what would happen if it were taken seriously.
For some reason, I'm getting an image of a charred barren hillside a few miles from the collector.
That was examined in considerable detail a few decades ago, with an eye to preventing exactly that scenario (along with things like microwave-cooked birds falling out of the sky ready to eat). A fine solution was found:
First: Pick a frequency that, unlike the band used in microwave ovens, is NOT readily absorbed by the water composing most obstructions or potentially damagable natural structures (clouds, birds, cows, plants) or by other materials found in lifeforms. (There are some fine bands for this in the milimeter wavelengths.)
Second: Put up a "rectenna" site (antennas with microwave semiconductors - "Crystal sets of Inconcevable Power" to quote a pardoy of Doc Smith). This covers tens or hundreds of acres, and catches essentially all of the energy while letting most of the sunlight through. (You can graze cattle under it if it's not at Fort Stinkin' Desert - and even there it won't bother the lifeforms beneath it once the constructin is done.) Even if the beam were pure heat it would only be a large-single-digit multiple of the amount of sunlight shining on the area on a clear day, and it's nearly all caught by the rectenna.
Third: Transmit a "pilot carrier" from an antenna in the middle of the array to synchronize the transmitters spread out across the broad structure of your solar collectors (or across a number of them).
The result is a "synthetic aperture" antenna of large size, tightly focussing the return power on the receiving rectenna site. If the pilot signal is lost the beam immediately defocusses - within milliseconds - as the syncronization is lost, with most of the energy missing the entire planet and the rest being orders of magnitude weaker than a distant radar site. (Ditto for the energy from an individual transmitter that loses sync - it stops being combined with the rest of the beam and turns into a much smaller microwave beacon.)
From synchronous orbit the earth is a small fraction of the visible sky, and any target on it is not visible to the naked eye. If the energy from the beam were all visible light and defocussed you'd have a hard time spotting it in daylight.
You could do the same pilot beam hack with laser light. But why bother? Lasers are less efficient, more more would be absorbed by the atmosphere, and less converted to useful power at the output. Even with the tech available in the '70s you could get 85% or better from DC in at the satellites to power to the grid on Earth.
Construction costs would be comparable to those of an earthbound plant. Then fuel is free for the life of the plant and there's no waste to dump (except the plant itself if you ever decommission it, or any burned-out parts).
Semiconductors on the ground. Vacuum transmitting tubes in orbit. (Vacuum tubes are EASY in orbit, and very efficient. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You don't need solar cells.
Use mirrors, plumbing, and water.
It's called a "Steam Plant". Very much like the current fuel-driven plants, whether burning chemicals or nucleii.
Average efficiency (even with the carnot cycle losses) is better than current panels. Much less stuff to lift into orbit - because mirrors are much lighter than solar panels and they're the bulk of the object. (Radiators are heavier but the total system still has panels beat by a bunch.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There's only one downside to this - if we divert all this energy down to earth & use it, it all ends up as heat in the end, which completely nullifies the original purpose of the ring (if you remember) of preventing global warming! D'oh!
Let's do the rest of the numbers.
By your own assumptions, only 7% of the radiation caught by the ring makes it to the grid. More than 7% of the ring's shadow falls on the earth, and essentially all of the light it intercepts would have been absorbed and turned into heat if it had been allowed to pass though and hit the earth, so you have a net gain (even IF you paved the WHOLE thing with panels).
But much of that power is displacing grid power - mainly generated by Carnot cycle heat engines which dump several times as much heat as they generate power. There's a factor of about 5 for the power replaced.
Next: Most of the power replaced comes from FOSSIL FUEL PLANTS which are currently pouring out the carbon dioxide that is the main alleged cause of the problem in the first place. The carbon dioxide absorbs many times as much heat as was involved in its burning before it's finally sequestered in minerals again. So displacing fossil fuel plants is an ongoing gain.
The main problem to worry about is bringing on another ice age.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Albedo, go and look it up in the dictionary, stupid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo#Trees
yet another incredibly expensive boondoggle project to address a "problem" that doesn't really exist
Sounds very much like Druidia's "Air Shield."
Now if someone would just set the combination to 1-2-3-4-5, we'd be all set.
--Z
Whale meat anyone?
I read some calculation long ago (I think it was a lot cheaper than this scheme) how much it would cost to make the Sahara region green again with forests and get rid of the desert. With all the carbon that could be trapped by making a huge forest (and with the added benefit it would have when more people could live in these areas and produce food here), this is probably as good a suggestion as the one above. Of course, the political will to do this is another matter.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Ah thanks. It's a very interesting name: do they call it that because the inside lights up like a full moon during the night despite the fact that it's shaped nothing like a sun? Or is the name passed down by people who understood that it's mirroring-as-in-reflecting sunlight?
And of course in Eyes of the Calculor <rot13>gur Zveebefha ercebqhprf naq gur puvyq tbrf gb pbby qbja Irahf</rot13>.
I will only be impressed if they have gun platforms like starship troupers!
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Could this block space junk as a side-effect? I think this is a really neat idea as it involves changing our planet's attributes in space instead of trying to correct something happening on the surface. This is something I'd like to see in my lifetime, tough pretty much impossible.
It doesn't need to be a ring... you only need to affect half the globe, right? (why shade the shaded side?)
It just needs to be a large opaque thing, to stay in stationary orbit. They talk about using orbital mirrors to warm planets like Mars - which can be of any size, its light targeted anywhere. The reverse would work for Earth.
It really is an idea worth seriously trying. The operative word being: serious.
So rather than fixing the actual cause of the issue the brains of the world came up with this? Granted, it is probably too late for conservation and alternative energy measures to reverse the effects of global warming, but the idea of putting together such a large project which would have world wide scope is simply outlandish. It's like having a blow out on the road and using 50 packs of gum to plug it. OK, so it *might* work to start with but lets all remember the ISS. That was *supposed* to stand for the "International Space Station". Who picked up the brunt of the dinner check on that idea? Let's focus the funding on alternative means of transportation and energy resources. If we *have* to build the ring, spend the $500B on the space ships and use the rest to off set clean energy production methods and the costs to the consumer, such as passing funding to the auto manufacurers for developing fully clean cars using solutions such as hydro engines (see http://www.eskimo.com/~ghawk/rotary.html for an example). HAY! Here's a good idea for the money! Let's spend it on terra-forming Mars and move everyone there! Oh wait, let's not tell them about that cuz it will cost WAY more so they will definitely want to do it! A-F
We Are Stardust...We Are Golden...
This was bullshit from the start. Of course it didn't happen. Same way 'Terrorists' are a manufactured threat designed to sell war and unrest to the public. Whoever believed that line was a chump. Plain and simple.
- pesticides will kill all the animals in the world.
Don't be glib. It's not that simple and you know it. Deliberately spraying poisons into the air, ground and water is a dumb idea and anybody who doesn't see this is just scared to look and think.
- fluoridated water will turn us all into brain washed zombies.
You are a prime example. Brain washed zombies can't recognize themselves as such by their very nature. But seriously, it's not so much brain washing as it is shutting down the human pineal gland, which fluoride does nicely. The pineal gland is responsible for producing melatonin, the hormone responsible for unlocking so-called 'psychic' awareness, (a term which has been deliberately smeared and relegated to the New Age dumpster so that all the John Q's automatically obey their Pavlovian conditioning and turn away in shudders rather than think for two seconds. --Not that thinking is made any easier by all the drugs, poisons, television, cell phones and various stupid behavioral traits loaded onto human culture these days.)
- air pollution will make us all choke to death on sulphur and nitrogen oxides.
You obviously don't live in a big city with over a million cars stuttering in traffic every day. I've coughed up black snot after going for short walks in modern 'clean' cities.
- acid rain will kill all lakes and rivers.
There are hundreds of dead lakes up here in Canada thanks to American industry breezing northwards, thank-you very much.
- the human population was growing much faster than crop production so in ten years famines would kill two billion people
- the human population is growing uncontrolled, increasing exponentially. We'll have 12 Billion people on earth by 2020 AD and we'll be reduced to feeding on krill, algae and Soylent Green.
Soylent Green was one of the dumbest films I've ever seen. The real issue with population has little to do with simplistic Star Trek scenarios. People who can't separate the real issues from the idiotic ones are likely going to be overwhelmed to the point of shutting everything out. But in my opinion, opting for Blanket Ignorance and Wishful Thinking is just as stupid as movies where the government paints every surface in every city green to make up for deforestation.
And unless you failed to notice, Nixon was a villain, and the current administration of evil clowns is directly linked to his. Bush even tried to hire Kissinger back into service, for goodness sake! But I guess little issues like the war in Iraq are just more bits of nothing which people should stop being bothered by, eh?
Sheesh.
-FL
These are the same scientists that agree that even if we totally quit driving and emiting ALL green house gasses we will reduce the global temperature about .08 degrees in 100 years! This is all crap. They will tell you that weather is a chaotic system, that chaotic systems are not predictable, then make predictions based on their data. What a bunch of morons.
The problem is that the "fair and balanced" approach results in the crackpot ideas being reported as being on par with the properly studied ones. ie, they speak of the two theories as being entirely equal, and worse yet, often make the claim that no one is sure which is actually true, when in fact the exact opposite is the case. This is most clearly evident in the ID vs evolution debate. The two concepts are treated by the media as if they are in equal standing. They even refer to ID as a "theory", even though it doesn't fit the definition. The result is people are left confused, or worse yet, misinformed. This helps no one.
What I like about this, aside from reminding me of several Larry Niven stories that I liked, is that it is much more controllable over the short term than anything previously proposed. Because if we're going to start tweaking the biosphere *intentionally*, sooner or later we'll make mistakes we have to correct, and I'd like to be able to change course in less than 100 years. Remixing the atmosphere of a planet takes a lot longer than moving some spaceships around.
This has got to be one of the silliest, most insane, and totally pointless Rube Goldberg contraptions that I have ever heard of. The mere fact that it is being considered when much simpler, less expensive, and very effective options, like maybe USING FEWER FOSSIL FUELS are available is indicative of our current state of complete bloody-mindedness.
Don't Panic!
Didn't Mr. Burns try something like this already?
Refer to two-part episode entitled, "Who shot Mr. Burns?"
cp /dev/zero ~/signature.txt
Let's see now... you have the mager oil companies who have blocked the R&D of automobiles that would use a clean energy/fuel source.
On the other hand you have a multi-government body who havn't done much to stop the abuse of these companies.
Then again you also have the consumers who want more power! more horsepower! more torque!!
Who is accountable? Who should pay? IMO, I think we will be burnt to a crisp before anyone agrees to anything.
Our destruction will be credited to bickering, distrust and dishonesty. This will be the mark we leave in our galaxy. That's disconcerting
It's not the destination that matters, but rather the journey.
Unemployed. Or barren of further grants, same thing.
For this kind of research I'd only put some faith in NASA or other entities that aren't beholden to results to further their existance (or grant money in the case of universities).
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Arctic.htm
It's becoming fashionable to claim rapid Antarctic warming too - from NYT yesterday: "Antarctica, Warming, Looks Ever More Vulnerable" - "A continent is quickly changing. The questions are how and why." (New York Times) Antarctica, however, is not warming. While the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis insists the Antarctic should demonstrate the most dramatic response to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels due to its cold, dry atmosphere, the simple fact is the Antarctic is not cooperating. South Polar air samples record atmospheric CO2 rising from 328 ppmv to 373 ppmv subsequent to the 1949-1974 temperature increase - almost 15% increase apparently without affecting Polar temperatures, while startling temperature changes of ~4 C (+ve and -ve) are recorded in periods when we know atmospheric CO2 was increasing at a more leisurely rate. A treasured hypothesis insists increasing atmospheric CO2 should lead to increasing temperature and the South Polar super-cold, super-dry air mass should respond dramatically. Well, we looked for the CO2 increment and it is obvious. We looked for the temperature increment and... what? Found it missing? There it was, gone?
We have global warming. We cool an area round the equator. (the higher we go the wider we spread the cooling, but the more it costs). So we've changed the heat pattern of the earth, with it the heat flow, the winds, ocean currents etc. We've achieved climate change!
While I understand the scale's a bit different, how can you mention a structure like this without mentioning Ringworld?
Kids these days...
or just wipe out all plant life causing our own extinction and the food chain unravels
And sunlight is useful for so many things
The sun gives us *everything,* not just "so many things."
The idea of blocking out the sun is ridiculous.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
So, let's dim the sunlight needed to grow crops (and other CO2-absorbing life) and needed by humanity for proper neurochemistry to avoid depression. Then, let's take that light and use it to microwave the Earth, dumping much of that blocked heat right back into the biosphere via industrial use. Also, let's ignore the potential health risks since from dumping more radio energy into environment at a time when studies are showing potential cellular damage from cell phones.
What could possibly go wrong? I mean, it's not like it would take a massive consumption of resources to implement such a quixotic idea!
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I never thought I'd see it.. space dust is more expensive than man-made spaceships (satellites)? By a factor of 12- to 400- to one? Wow!
I'm sure I can dig up a couple of bags of dust in my back yard. I'd be happy to trade it for one of those space ships :-) Not enough? I'll be happy to buy a few $1000 of dirt.. er.. future space dust.. and trade that.
The ring concept also has the problem in that on the night side it is blocking the cooling radiation out to space. It would have to be louvered so that the shield would be at 90 degrees to the earth on the shaded side. This adds a lot of complexity to the problem.
An Earth Sun L2 based shild may be better.
Though it would have to be bigger it would be safely out of the way and require less maintenance for hits by orbital debris and out of the way of satellites.
Of course this means it must be bigger, but it is not like we are shadowing the entire earth, just a small percentage.
There may be extremely exotic and advanced methods of cooling the planet down, but no matter how effectively a technique can cool the planet down it won't happen.
The response to "global warming" is strictly going to be in the form of energy taxes.
In 1988, the Dr. James E. Hansen mentioned global warming was here and predicted that by 1998, temperatures would have increased .35 degrees Celsius, whereas the actual increase was .11 degrees. By the time that the decade had elapsed (and by the time he made the comment that long term climate forecast is impossible- even TV meteorologists don't try to predict the weather ten days from now), the increase had only been .11 degrees. He was wrong by more than three hundred percent.
NASA launched the Mars Rover claiming that it would land on Mars in 253 days at 8:11 PM, Pacific time. The margin of error was a few thousandths of a percent: it landed at 8:35. An estimate has to be an "educated guess". When a leading scientist in a field is off by three hundred percent, that casts doubt onto the whole field.
They take a few thousand pages of scientific papers from peer reviewed journals and put them on one side of the scale.
Then they put a novel by Crichton on the other side. If that doesn't balance out, they put a second or third copy of Crichton's fantasies on the scale until it does. Or maybe a video tape of him ranting about how global warming research is like eugenics 'n stuff.
See, Fair and Balanced!
I'd like to know which of them are reproducible.
That moon has been might big lately, you sure that gravity thing works on an object of that scale? It's never been proven in the lab, after all...
Glacires are very old
No argument with that.
The problem is that, given "unfair and unbalanced" reporting, only the press' pick gets heard. And that pick often turns out to be the crackpot idea.
Would you rather the crackpot idea seemed (to people who don't look closely and critically) to be on a par with the well-grounded one? Or would you rather the crackpot idea got touted continuously before millions of viewers and the well-grounded one never got heard at all?
You don't get to pick the one true answer to every question and suppress coverage of all the false ones - even if you could somehow pick them right.
It's like the republic / representative democracy governmental forms. They're pretty bad. But all the alternatives seem to be worse.
But I'll tell you what: If you have an idea for a better way to do it (and to make it succeed in the market place), and this is really important to you, give it a try.
That's where CNN came from. That's where Fox News came from. Maybe you'll be the next media billionaire, while doing something you really believe in.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That is of course important to consider. However when deciding whether solar cells are benificial, you have to remember to add the same costs (production and maintenance) of our existing infrastructure. I think you'd find that solar comes out as good if not better on that front. Also there is manufacturing and maintenance involved in aquiring the fuel source for our current energy plants as well, which you save when using solar.
The enemies of Democracy are
you insensitive clod!
Thankfully I live in a country that's joining the fight and reducing pollution, the good ol' United Stat....
oh wait...
---southpaw
It has been suggested by people not bothering to do the math that the change in albedo from the solar cells themselves would cause warming, but we've already paved twice that area.
Yes, but it isn't clear that they aren't right and that paved area isn't causing warming, and you're talking about paving 50% more. That doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Don't get me wrong; I love solar, I want more solar, and I especially want more efficient solar cells. I just think putting the collectors in space and transmitting the power via microwave is on a large scale a more environmentally friendly solution.
The usual profit sharing (if we chose to share with the Defeated People) is 50/50, meaning at least 5:1 profit on that adventure for the country as a whole, but since Haliburton is actually getting paid for their efforts (and then some) and the profit will accrue directly to the oil companies and not back to We the People, it's an amazingly shrewd business deal, the greatest heist in the history of mankind: $10 trillion. Almost the entire US gross domestic product for a year.
Yeah, and it boggles me how many people are completely oblivious to this fact. They'll say to me "how could the war be about oil? We've spent X billion dollars and only gotten Y million in oil!" To which I say first "only Y million as of yet" and second "And where do you think that X billion went?" Our "expenditures" are lining the pockets of the same companies that are going to be profiting from the "gain".
It's a massive money shift from the people into private coffers, it's blatant, and nobody notices because they can'd dissociate the "us" meaning every American from the government and their cronies. I'm disgusted.
Something I myself hadn't thought about but another poster made plain: We may not be getting much out of Iraqi oil fields, but the oil companies are making shedloads of cash off the increased price in oil the instability of those fields has caused. Their cost hasn't changed, but the supply/demand equation is now letting them make extra profit.
It's technically easy to solve, but politically impossible.
Agreed. Which is why it doesn't really matter if we're talking about paving the Sahara with solar cells or making gigantic space collectors. They're both pipe dreams and we'll all die dreaming of them.
The enemies of Democracy are
Science doesn't take sides.
And without sides, you have no conflict. And without conflict, you have no story, and you sell no papers, get no nielsons. It used to be known as "Yellow", now it is just SOP.
PS, if you can handle it, try this www.realclimate.org
Watch out though, it's like really boring, buncha eggheads, going on and on about stuff, with their studies and references and all that muck...
Ya, or we could stop blaming SUVs for all our problems and realize that Minivans and Trucks get the same mileage (or worse) and are just as much a hazard to others in accidents...
BTW, my wife's 2002 CRV-V EX gets 28mpg on the highway and is quadruple 5-star safety rated.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The "debate" at this point is what to do about it. The Kyoto protocol is a well intentioned document that just missed the mark. For instance, countries can get additional CO2 credit for planting forests. The problem is that planting trees releases TONS of CO2. No protection is afforded for old-growth forests. (the big CO2 sinks) and the cost of implementation would be asolutely massive. Some estimates claim 750 billion, some double that. For that price you could get fresh running water to every man, woman, and child on earth. Where are your priorities?
Sure there is a lot of money being tossed around by big energy, but your misinformation is no better than theirs.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=eskimo
Usage Note: Eskimo has come under strong attack in recent years for its supposed offensiveness, and many Americans today either avoid this term or feel uneasy using it. It is widely known that Inuit, a term of ethnic pride, offers an acceptable alternative, but it is less well understood that Inuit cannot substitute for Eskimo in all cases, being restricted in usage to the Inuit-speaking peoples of Arctic Canada and parts of Greenland. In Alaska and Arctic Siberia, where Inuit is not spoken, the comparable terms are Inupiaq and Yupik, neither of which has gained as wide a currency in English as Inuit. While use of these terms is often preferable when speaking of the appropriate linguistic group, none of them can be used of the Eskimoan peoples as a whole; the only inclusive term remains Eskimo. The claim that Eskimo is offensive is based primarily on a popular but disputed etymology tracing its origin to an Abenaki word meaning "eaters of raw meat." Though modern linguists speculate that the term actually derives from a Montagnais word referring to the manner of lacing a snowshoe, the matter remains undecided, and meanwhile many English speakers have learned to perceive Eskimo as a derogatory term invented by unfriendly outsiders in scornful reference to their neighbors' unsophisticated eating habits. See Usage Note at Inuit.
Exactly. The actual seawater, being full of salt, isn't much good except to make an inland sea. What to do is make a big (Texas-sized) marsh, or maybe just a salt flat. The evaporation from the salt flat does cool its immediate area, but not enough to make a measurable change of global impact.
You'd get "marsh effect" rain, though, just as Buffalo gets lake-effect rain and snow. That would be fresh water, and would eventually form streams and rivers. I think it would actually break even financially, once it stabilized enough to grow crops there.
As for it being a closed system, yes. The point is to put the water in the hot spots. We've got a lot of water, but it's not in the right places.
The real problem with my hair-brained scheme is political. Libya, Chad, Niger, Sudan. They'd fight over a box of rocks.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Maybe part of Utah would do.
Like this part?
By the heat/energy release argument all that sub-atomic potential relativistic energy ought to be hazzard waiting to happen (collecting since cosmic times). Better ban all matter. Under that argument, there isn't ANY possible energy source to use that's "safe" which means the only thing that needs to change is for us to use LESS energy. Under your so called "physics" argument, why change any source of energy (doesn't matter what energy source is used according to your basic "physics" argument).
;^)
Of course in my opinion, the reality is that not all energy sources are created equal (e.g., there are different side effects unrelated to carbon-dioxide). There is a sunk cost on the environment for using ANY energy, and a marginal cost for using one type vs another type (e.g., coal vs nuclear), the physics about the marginal stuff is much less basic and most folks don't understand it as well.
Having said all that, conservation is a great idea that isn't debatable (use less, have more for later). People should do more conservation and physics also says that we are way below the theoretical maximum efficiency for most of the stuff we do (meaning better technology can help). No physics involved in teaching conservation.
Also since you can't prevent your kids from resenting you, it really doesn't matter what you do, right? Especially, those pesky kids that leave their computers and TVs on 24/7 and watch DVDs in the back of their SUVs... They can get really resentful when you start talking about conservation...
real science is boring. Check out realclimate.org and see what I mean. Real climate scientists discussing the real issues with real data.
Yawn.
To become a media billionaire, you need raw, bloody, conflict. Good vs. evil. Us vs. them. If there is little conflict in the scientific community, there is no money to be made there.
You need some plausible face to present as 'the other side', even if s/he's blantently making things up and misrepresenting. Heck, better if he's making things up, and getting close to shouting too.
Now that's good television! It's good slashdot too!
It's actually a pretty good analysis.
Except for the last paragraph. Civilization could increase its energy usage 100-fold, and that would still be nothing compared to all the solar energy that's incident on the planet. The global warming hypothesis is that greenhouse gases trap marginally more of that solar energy in our atmosphere (after it's been converted to heat).
So anything that would allow us to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations would help. If we utilize (as in his scenario) 70% of 10% of the solar energy that's intercepted by the ring, that won't "nullify the original purpose of the ring."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
...is they can just continue to dump their garbage from the various space missions and the problem will take care of itself.
remember to loot and pillage before you burn!
...idea to ring the Earth with a giant carbon-nanotube-wire orbital coil, connected to solar stations or whatever, to act as a primary transformer coil to power *everything*, those nutty proposals make that one seem suddenly feasible!
Now please excuse me while I go write my business plan in crayon on the bathroom mirror and then figure out how I too can get PAID for my science fantasies....
Now that Global warming has been accepted as being a fact the insurance industry has now started trying to quantify how much it may cost them in terms of payouts due to changes in weather conditions.
The latest assesement is that the industry should expect normal payouts to increase by 11 billion dollars a year with extreme weather events costing up to 80 billion dollars as a one off with these increasing in frequency.
In the UK alone property worth 380 billion dollars is now at risk from river or coastal flooding. Property owners in these zones can expect to see their property values fall by as much as 40%.
In the light of this 500 billion dollars seems like a bargain.
Your proposal is intriguing and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
You're about 30 years too late. B-(
But google for "L5 Society" and you can see if they're still around.
NASA looked at the plan, too. But made an error: They split the power plant and heavy-lifter vehicle parts of the fesability study into separate projects.
The power plant designers got an extra percent or so efficiency by using a big turbine. Then the heavy lifter designers designed around the largest piece - which was the turbine. This resulted in an enormous lifter and a small number of shots to pay off design and construction.
With fuel free (except for putting up a collector) they could have used a much smaller turbine and taken a small efficiency hit. The next smaller part is tiny by comparison, resulting in a smaller vehicle, more flights, and greatly reduced costs.
(You do need a heavy lift vehicle because there's so much stuff to send up that using an expensive manned vehicle like the shuttle for all of it would break the budget. You use shuttles for the assembly crew, anything delicate, anything too expensive to trust to a lower-reliability vehicle, and cargos-of-opportunity.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
real science is boring. [...] To become a media billionaire, you need raw, bloody, conflict. Good vs. evil. Us vs. them.
You need some plausible face to present as 'the other side', even if s/he's blantently making things up and misrepresenting. Heck, better if he's making things up, and getting close to shouting too.
Right.
So "fair and balanced" is the best we're likely to get.
When the truth is boring and the bogosity exciting this lets the truth get a hearing - and adds the conflict of truth-teller vs. nutcase to the excitement of the nutcase's doomsday scenario.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There's probably already enough space junk orbiting the planet that we could make the dust ring with a few well-placed rocket launches or a few weeks with a supervillain-style laser. Zot. Whoops, I just knocked out TV to half the continent.
Welcome to ringworld.
for some time now by False Dichotomy.
Very few people have noticed, the makeup artist sure is good.
Yes of course, the ongoing costs (all sorts) should be compared on both, I was just wondering if you were aware of them or not.
Last I'd heard (a few years ago) solar balanced out near the same. Which to me means a little more hastle for the individual in exchange for less grid reliance and protection against chain reaction black outs.
This is a win in my book but some people aren't interested in putting out the work. And of course bussiness has come to the conclusion it's more economically expensive (for them it can be, the on-going costs in thier case includes support and maintenance that the home user can subsume in with cleaning the gutters and so once past the install stage).
Personally I would like to see more research into solar and such just on the basis of redundancy and such you'd get when a significant portion of your population is connected to the grid, but not reliant on it. This would be especially benificial in places where hot sunny days are the big strain, with solar this can be self correcting to an extent.
All that said solar is no panacea in of itself. just a single usefull technology that I think we could put a little more effort towards.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
you're all worked up about how much better the frying pan is than the fire.
And you really can't see how you've stuck yourself in a false dilemna and are arguing for it's perpetuation.
What we really need is more development of more efficient solar cells. I keep hearing of lab research into vastly more efficient (20-30%) cells, but we need products.
Solar can right now serve a useful role in providing for an individual household's energy needs. In sun-rich locations, a house could provide just about all its electricity needs with solar panels. This modular approach to energy production has fallen out of favor, perhaps because the cost was too high without a single purchaser buying a normal energy plant worth of solar cells.
The enemies of Democracy are
Every time I hear about better solar cell efficiency there always seems to be some big drawback.
Eigther they're 3 times more effeicient and 5 times more costly, or only last 1/4th as long.
Still some of the more effiecient type do see some use, usually where the cost is less of a factor than size. At least one spacecraft had cells that were much more effiecient, but cost even more, just to save on mass.
Still there is lead time between a 'lab discovery' to 'proto-type' to $49.99 at Wall-Mart that means we seldom notice these great inventions when they hit the shelves.
I remember the first I hear of dvd's. They weren't called that then though. They were just some lab prototype to stack a cd ten layers deep or some such for data. The reader was some laser device several hundred pounds in wieght and overly suseptable to any sort of environmental issue.
I haven't really kept track but how do currently available Solar Cells stack up to what was out there in 80's or 90's?
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
The question is in the subject... The ring would hide not only the Sun's rays, but also satellites radio communications. By the way, I'm not sure I'd be happy to live under the ring. So, the ring should at least support being "turned off" for some time.
Just build a giant sunglass-monocle. UV-shield it, and we're ready to go. Just don't let anyone say anything about magnifying glasses and ants. There will be no discussion of this!
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?