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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...
How could this go wrong?
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.
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.
And in related news, Al Gore has ridden the mighty moon worm.
They can't be serious. Who could fund this? Isn't World GDP only around $40-50T?
Tristan Yates
Honestly, how much would it cost to require an SUV to get 30+ MPG instead of 15?
It would actually costs less than an SUV, you'd just have to dump half the steel to cut weight, which would reduce its size significantly. I propose we call the result the "carr." Or something like that. I don't know. I'll leave that to marketing, but I'm gonna get my company on top of this. We'll make a fortune.
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"?
They want their article back.
I think you meant to write "finding a way to eliminate dependence on foreign oil."
In other words, let's start using the energy we get from the sun to meet our current needs.
It's unbelievable that someone would suggest that we should restrict future energy delivery from the sun just so that we can keep on consuming energy stores from the past (oil) and pollute our sky with the smoke. Pure laziness. It's like a teenager cleaning his room by hauling his dirty laundry out of the house and burying it, wasting all the effort he ought to be using to just clean the clothes. Not that I've ever done this.
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.
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.
The entire world becomes depressed, due to the absence on natural light, kills themselves or simply stop having sex.
;-)
;-)
YOU stop having sex BECAUSE it is too DARK??? Hmmm... You are such a minority!
Paul B.
P.S. Lucky you to get that stunning nimpho supermodel as your GF!
Did anyone else read that as GIF?
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
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"?
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.
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Then where will all the good posts come from?
http://www.andashdesigns.com/
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.
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"
The warming in the year 1000 was relatively local. The global average temperature has not been as high as it is now for, at least, hundreds of thousands of years.
There is loads of data of many different kinds. Many of them (like oxygen isotope rations in polar ice) measure average sea-surface temperature globally.
Your statement about satellite data is just plain wrong. Some cloud temperatures are lowering, but surface temperatres are rising.
The CO2 cycle is roughly 200 GTonnes in (before 1900 or so) a balanced cycle, about half in the sea, half on land. Humanity now releases roughly 9 GT/yr, and the increase in atmospheric CO2 suggests that roughly none of this extra 9 GT is being absorbed anywhere, so the cycles seem to be slow to regulate themselves.
Many of your other statements are simply wrong. See, for instance, the National Academy of Sciences report.
Greenland was not a farm country in the Viking age. The name was chosen to convince others to join the colony; it was a PR trick (that didn't work). Rember, Iceland was called Iceland by the vikings, not a sign of this region of the earth was very hot a 1000 years ago. Actually we are in the warmest periode in 10 000 years it seems, since the ice on Kilimanjaro for instance has not been as reduced as it now for the last 10 000 years. It is true that when the dinosaures roamed, Svalbard which is north of Iceland, was inhabitated by creates that needed warm weather. But that is millions of years ago.
Another misleading name by the vikings that settled the North American continent, is that Newfound land was called Vin-land (which means something like fertile land). (Some vikings settled in Newfound land but left for unknown reasons, the saga mention that the settlers there had problems with the native population. ) It is anyway not know what happened to the small colony of vikings that settled on Greenland. Some think that they had a bad winter and died. There is no historical account of the colony returning to Iceland or Norway. Another theory is that the vikings there joined the eskimos (or whatever they are called more politically correct) and became a part of their gene pool in a matter of speak.
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