And then what do they do with it?

(emissions are about 45 billion tons a year)

Geoengineering solutions are unrealistic mostly because they would require global cooperation, something we are not doing a very good job of at the moment.

I actually know this company. They are here in Calgary. It’s a really cool idea but hard to see it scale at this point.

Has anyone done the math on like 1000 satellites with giant expandable ultra-thin mirrors? Would it put more carbon into the air to get it up there than it would save in sunlight?

Maybe we put a super thin mirror coating over those giant rafts of trash floating out in the ocean.

Would like assurances hackers couldn't use those satellites like little kids use magnifying glasses on ants first...

did you mean magnets?

Can you fry an ant with a magnet?

We should run that question by joe rogan.

Apologies for clowning in the env thread. Was wondering what the mirrors would be for, but now I see I missed it in Suzzer's post.

Giant unfolding mirrors can not be used to fry ants. They can only reflect light away, not focus it.



This is actually a solar sail. But similar concept and mirrors would need even less robustness as they wouldn't be needed to generate thrust. Just keep light from hitting the earth.

I'm picturing a tiny satellite (maybe we can send up dozens at once or something) which unfolds a giant ultra-thin sheet of mirrored material that could stretch out an acre or more. Of course the math might say you need a million of these to make a tiny difference - I dunno. I'm sure someone is thinking about it.

Maybe these satellites can be delivered to the space station and launched into correct orbit w/o needing their own internal thrust. You wouldn't want geosynchronous because then it would create a permanent shady patch somewhere.

Have you heard of those solar farms that use mirrors to reflect light onto a single point where it melts sodium? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

There isn't much difference between a lens concentrating light 10x and 10 mirrors reflecting x light onto the same spot.

For what, shade?

I'm sure the math would be awful on the cost there. People have talking about intentionally putting crap in the air, not soot, but like soot - mimicking the way huge volcanic eruptions lower the temperature. It doesn't address the underlying problem though.

Right - those mirrors are precision ground and aligned to hit one spot. I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying my big floppy mirrors wouldn't need or be able to do that kind of precision.

Of course it doesn't address the underlying problem. I've given up on the idea that humans can ever deal with something like this until mitigation time. At least in a democracy. It just takes one charlatan telling them what they want to hear.

Global warming is not caused by too much heat energy getting to earth. It’s cause by the atmospheres inability to shed heat energy.

I know a couple people who worked at these. There are a few in the desert near LA. During construction they had an area known as the "Death Zone" where if you walked into it you could end up at a point where a bunch of mirrors hit and you'd just burst into flames. There was a bobcat - the little bulldozer thing, not the animal - that got hit and it melted.

There are other versions of this where they have long parabolic mirrors semi-wrapping around a pipe carrying liquid.

These kinds of systems can generate power 24 hours a day because they hot stuff stays hot for a while, but the price of photovoltaics plus battery storage is already low enough that I don't think any more of these projects will be built.

Yeah it's distracting when you drive by it on the way to Vegas (I think). Many times brighter than the sun.

Right. But ice reflects a lot more light back out into space than open ocean. Mirrors even moreso. The darker and less reflective the surface the more heat energy it absorbs from sunlight.

Crap from the air making snow and ice less white as well as there being less snow and ice is a problem. Albedo:

https://ca.pbslearningmedia.org/reso...global-warming

On the way to Vegas there are a few. Ivanpah near the border and there are a couple in Daggett not far after Victorville. There's a small one in Lancaster.

Seems like spacing them out would alleviate concerns about noticeable shading. But maybe not... an acre is pretty big.

Surface of the earth is 120 billion acres, so a million of them would block about .001% of the earth. And a million acre sized satellites is pretty crazy.

https://www.livescience.com/22202-sp...l-warming.html

Good news! This article was from 2012. It's probably only like 10x our national debt now.

The amount of rocket juice it takes to get one of those things in orbit probably outweighs whatever environmental benefit you get.

Maybe build a mirror factory on the moon, or maybe Mars if you can't produce fuel on the moon.

In the hypothetical world where sucking CO2 out of the air is extremely cheap, you can use it as a component of the main building materials

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/carbon...ing-materials/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade

The Fresnel Lens proposed is said to cost 10 billion up front, then 10 billion in supportive costs. I'd say that's off by quite a bit but who knows? Politically it would be about on par with nuclear energy: a potential solution that environmentalists really don't like because it involves some nasty byproducts. The space mirror would remove incentives to stop polluting, so I don't think it'd fare well until people in western countries start dying en masse.

As an aside, if people really took global warming seriously there are a lot of opportunities to burn less fossil fuels. I'm in the aviation industry so I see the opportunities there, such as:
-reducing fuel reserve requirements from 45 minutes to 40 minutes. Saving weight by carrying less fuel means that less fuel is burned on every trip (every extra 100kg carried on the aircraft means an extra 2.5kg of fuel burned per hour) A reduction of 5 minutes of fuel (about 300kg on average) means that the world jet fleet produce 2.5 billion kg less CO2.
-eliminating oxygen masks systems for passengers. Same thing, removes hundreds of kg of weight from the aircraft, saving billions of kg of CO2.
-weighing all airline passengers and charging a token amount per kg (even 10 cents per kg would be an incentive for people to lose weight and not carry so much crap). If people lost weight in general it would save fuel burned in cars as well.

The increased risk of the above might mean somewhere on the order of .1-10 extra deaths per year from airline accidents. But saving a few billion kg of CO2 per year may do a small part to save billions of lives. If we really took global warming seriously, we could dramatically reduce the weight of aircraft in all sorts of ways.

In 50 years it is quite possible that our grandkids will be looking at the way we lived with utter scorn, the same way depression-era people look at us. Unwilling to expose ourselves to even a tiny bit of danger or discomfort so that our kids might avoid a mad-max hellscape.