Hey bro it’s a free country if I wanna build a giant solar shade in space you can’t stop me.
Dyson Vacuum Ops LLC owns that real estate now and we’re not obligated to let any useable light pass through my property.
“What’s that sir? You say you’re selling … vacuum mops?”
“No it’s … Mr President. I’m with Dyson.”
“The vacuum company?”
“Yes, we operate strictly in vacuum. So you’ve heard of us”
“Who hasn’t? My mother — god rest her soul — would be just tickled pink to know I was chatting with the head of Dyson”
“Oh I’m so sorry … did she pass recently?”
“Dear Mother …”
“…”
“The old bat”
“…”
The rest of the War Room is silent.
“They said you could fill me in on the plan better than any of them”
“Of course Mr President. The idea is actually rather simple. We start by collecting dust and debris that has been accumulating in space for … well let’s just say for way longer than any of us have been here”
Laughter around the table.
“… We think!” Mr Dyson’s image says from the corner video wall, holding up his hands in mock surprise. More laughter around the table.
“We collect this dust and debris, and then it is fed into what we call “the hopper”. It’s basically a magnetic containment bottle where the material collects. Each time the bottle reaches capacity …”
The next slide appears.
“… it is fed into this compactor. After heat treatment, from here we can extract metals, silicon, even some carbon …”
“Mr Dyson, the President is on a schedule. Would you mind summarizing a bit?”
“Uh … well Mr President. We believe the sail will be finished by mid-September of this year at the latest. If we want to do this we need to act quickly.”
“Opinions?”
“Sir, SecDef is of the opinion Space Force needs a stretch goal. Something for the personnel to focus on, to tighten up operations, clean up our technique”
“Stretching is good. Cleanliness is next to godliness”
“Yes Mr President”
One of the aides along the wall suddenly looks anxious.
“If the sale finishes in September, how soon does your company need the funds?”
“As soon as possible, Sir”
“You’ll have them”
“Oh and Mr Dyson, please bring me one for the White House. I’m old fashioned, I like to know what I’m buying, even if it’s not my money”
Another laugh.
“uh … I’ll see what I can do”
“Thank you Dyson”
Mr Dyson, adopts a puzzled expression right before his face disappears from the screen.
“Who’d have thought? Someone’s finally doing vacuum mops”
“Indeed Sir”
“Now tell me about this Comet project”
“Well, as you know we’ve been scouring the basins on Luna for evidence of meteor impacts matching a certain composition”
“Meteors! My god!”
“It’s normal sir. They happened a long time ago. We’re just scouring the impact sites to look for …”
“Cleanliness is next to godliness”
“Uh yep. Uh, and uh, yes, and we did actually find what we were looking for”
“Is that a good thing?”
“It’s a very good thing sir. We’ve been able to extend the periodic table with elements we never thought we could stabilize”
“Like … rocks, or what?”
“Theoretically they could be solid, but not at the energies we’re using. Think of a beach ball …”
Taking off my muddy shoes when I come into the house is simply impossible so I duct taped 4 leaf blowers to a roomba to clean all of the dried muddy shit all over the house. I’m pretty confident this isn’t going to cause future problems which will need future solutions.
None of the geoengineering solutions address the other major issue with our fossil fuel usage, which is ocean acidification. Even if we could just lower the temperature, lots of the CO2 pumped into the air gets absorbed into the oceans, like in a bottle of soda, making it more acidic. When this happens, it makes it harder for all the life at the bottom of the food chain to form, causing a mass die off at the base. If things get bad enough It could lead to the collapse of the food chain and we would just starve to death.
Excellent point. And if we put up a big space mirror, and then solve the CO2 problem to get ocean PH back to normal, now our lower solar incidence plus normal greenhouse gas levels will equal temperatures way too cold.
Imagine Keppler syndrome kicks in as a result of building it, and it causes an ice age down here and we lose contact with it and can’t move it.
Now we’re an ice ball with a sky cage we can’t escape.
If you go to Mars you can land and explored all possibilities inherent to being on the ground (including, most importantly, using the water ice from the south pole).
Venus on the other hand is a ball of rock wrapped in a dense and hot acid soup: you’de have to beat way worse technical challenges for, maybe, being able to locally extract from the athmosphere chemical compounds which you can just as easilly make on Earth (it’s mostly CO2 and sulfuric acid, though apparently it has 20 ppm of water).
It would make more sense to just have a moon base.
I don’t wanna defend the guy but he did say floating colony, the atmosphere about 1 km up from the surface sits at earthlike temperatures and pressures-- astronauts would only need a breathing mask and some light skin protection as opposed to a pressure suit which is a major advantage.
The theory is that since most of Venus’ atmosphere is CO2 at this level, the breathable atmosphere of a human habitat is actually bouyant, which would make suspending a colony much easier.
Doing something like that on the scale of a research presence like the ISS is within the realm of current technology-- but you are right that doing so for a whole city is not technically possible at the moment-- nor is true space colonization in general, I would argue. There’s a lot of unknowns and unsolved problems.
What’s the point of floating up there if you can’t actually land because the challenges to do that are immense?
What about the whole sulfuric acid problem?
It’s not as much the feasability of floating in the upper athmosphere of Venus that I was worried about, it’s that getting anywhere interesting from there is either enormously hard (hot sulfuric acid soup to go down) or useless (back to orbit from where you came and where you could just have stayed) and probably no fun by itself and unecessarily risky due to the sulfuric acid.
Tourism-wise a Moon base makes a lot more sense and is a lot more feasible for now than that, IMHO, whilst it also doesn’t seem to make sense to set up a floating base on Venus’ athmosphere to extract resources from it (because on Earth we’re hardly low on CO2 or sulfur).
PS: Thinking about it, a floating station on Earth’s athmosphere would probably be more fun than that also.
I mean, there’s basically no good economic reason for any space colonization whatsoever, outside of potentially the asteroid belt. Neither Venus nor Mars have significant resources that aren’t found in similar abundance on Earth, where extraction is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier. Tourism would be an industry, but it would almost certainly be an extremely niche business similar to OceanGate’s Titanic visits, Blue Origin’s launches, or stuff like Dear Moon. Rich people might pay very well to go visit Mars or Venus or the Moon but that pay certainly would not be enough to offset the trillions of dollars (yes, trillions) and decades that true colonization would take.
With that in mind, discussions of real space colonization are entirely theoretical and probably always will be, at least within our lifetimes. It is very conceivable that humans will land on Mars and maybe establish permanent research outposts there, on the Moon, or hypothetically Venus. But those would be far more similar to something like the ISS-- hosting a rotating crew of mostly astronauts and the occasional space tourist. I find it hard to imagine an economic case for anything more anywhere in the solar system within a reasonable span of time.
This line represents one of my biggest peeves with political thinking in general:
A Technological Antisolution is a product that attempts to replace a boring but solvable political or social problem with a much sexier technological one that won’t work.
The assumption that because there’s a “political or social” problem, then it must be solvable.
Why? “Because if everyone just did X …”
People skip over political problems. They model humanity’s political and behavioral inertia as zero, and they don’t treat it as an ecosystem.
So many “political or social” solutions are assumed to take zero energy. The only reason a “political or social” problem won’t work is those “durned right wingers”.
What this implicitly fails to realize is that building an enormous solar sail is many orders of magnitude easier than changing the behavior of every human.
We need to stop thinking of things as “practically solved” just because “all” that would have to happen is some huge shift in the behavior and organization of human society.
To be clear, this is marketing crap to gather investors. Pretty much all “space colonization” proposals are. I was just talking about the theoretical technical feasibility.
While this is still obviously not a realistic solution to the damage we're doing to our climate because it still involves launching 35,000 tonnes of material in to space and moving 100 times that much to the right location, the solar sail thing has been accounted for in the paper. Basically you stick it slightly closer to the sun than the actual L1 point, where the force from solar radiation balances out the slightly higher pull of the sun's gravity
Let's assume SpaceX's Starship starts working flawlessly tomorrow. It is apparently intended to get 100 tonnes to the moon, but it needs a second launch to get fuel in to orbit to reach higher energy targets. So we're looking at two launches per hundred tonnes. Assuming flawless operation and literally no weight for equipment to actually assemble the stuff once it's at the location, that's 700 maxxed out Starship launches just to get the shield in place.
After that, you've still not even started on getting the 35 million tonnes of counterweight in to position. And yeah, it helps if you only have to get 35 million tonnes of rock out of the moon's gravity well instead Earth's, but you still have to move 35 million tonnes of stuff. Getting 35 million tonnes to lunar escape velocity requires equal energy to 1.6 million tonnes to Earth's escape velocity (which would be 32,000 Starship launches), and that's before you account for having to get your rockets, fuel, and infrastructure to the moon in the first place.
After that, you still need to stop blanketing Earth in greenhouse gases or you need to keep making the shield and the counterweight bigger to compensate.
This just isn't happening on any realistically helpful timeline. This is maybe helpful to just start repairing some of the damage in a scenario where we fail completely.
Moon’s got no atmosphere so you can build a railgun to launch containers.
They still have to be caught, which will require a shit ton of fuel, but at least you cut it in half.
Maybe you can get the containers to collide. You shoot them to the lagrange point in opposite directions. All the energy could be input via railgun on the moon, then removed via well-timed collisions. Big cumple zones of foam or something would be necessary, unless you use stabilized magnetic repulsion. Heck they could slow each other down with laser beams if they had a big enough collector.
Then your engineering hurdle isn’t “How to produce fuel for 32,000 starship launches”, but rather “how to catch a flying container full of material” and you balance the momentum by sending other containers around the other way to meet it and get caught going the other direction.
And how to build a railgun on the moon for launching cargo containers. Not my idea, incidentally.
Who knows, it might even be good for our species to have some huge stretch goal to be pursuing in space.
Maybe the aliens will let us borrow some flying saucers and we can have it done in a month.
Scientist: Develops theoretical plan to offset a single aspect of multidimensional issue. Acknowledges issue of impractically due to current shuttle launch load restraints.
News media: scientist proposes solution to everything! (Does not provide study link)
Lemming: What you propose isn’t a complete solution for every ecological, social, and economic issue related to climate change! You are hearby banished to the Phantom Zone!
Climate change isn’t going to be solved by one unified theory that dictates a plan that everyone simply jumps onboard with. Human society is reactionary in almost 100% of the time. Even then it is slow to move. Things are going to get much harder before anything truly changes in that respect. The only outliers are scientists and the possibility that they develop solutions which overcome societies trend towards its own mutilation. Antibiotics, unleaded gas, splitting the atom, were all developed by groups of scientists that churned through hundreds of shaky theories before they hit on the right ones. This Doctor might not have the best plan now, but he may be a part of a group that develops the solutions that keep use from death climate crisis.
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