Yeah, we're pretty much boned as a species. Too greedy and short-sighted to either fix our habitat or go find new ones.
Maybe that's the answer to the Fermi Paradox, if most sentient life develops down similar psychological pathways.
I'm sick of people saying that climate change will kill off humanity. I don't know if it's false flag or just adolecent fantasizing, but there is absolutely no way that climate change- even in extremities so absurd as to make The Day After Tomorrow look like Cosmos, you can't kill off everyone. Face it, we're in this situation because people are really successful, and good at surviving and making use of the world around them.
In the worst plausible case situation, a billion people will starve. Maybe two. Not pretty, not nice. Unprecidented in modern history, though the Black Death came close. But humanity pulled through just fine. The realistic hazards of climate change are more than enough to worry about; we don't need people getting all 2012 mayan alien area 51 genetic nuke engineering on us.
We have more serious things to discuss than action movie premises, however. Such as how to avoid the few million-odd deaths we might expect in the coming century and perhaps even preserve what biodiversity we have left. Consider the following;
Geoengineering
Given the unpredictable and slow nature of atmospheric modification, I propose a different method of repairing the climate- one that I think will be very effective and yet easily modulated.
First, select a near-earth, carbonaceous asteroid. We can filter the candidate asteroids until we find one which is in an easy-to-control orbit, will approach at the correct distance, and is a suitable mass.
We have already successfully landed on asteroids; we would do so again, and this time put the asteroid into a high orbit over earth. This is an experiment which provides a great deal of useful information, including training us how to deflect an asteroid on a very dangerous course.
With our new moon in orbit, it is adjusted until it is in the Earth-Sun Lagrangian point. At this point, it would be very difficult to see without filters and a good telescope. It will be unstable, drifting to one side or the other, but this is fine- if we decide to remove it, it will be easy to steer it into a new orbit which is more stable and doesn't block the sun, a useful position.
Now, we start manufacturing carbon fiber from the material of the asteroid. These are not the super-strong space elevator cables, just simple strands of moderately strong plastic. We make these only a few thousand feet, then spin the asteroid and extend the ribbon-like strands to expand the silhouette of the asteroid, increasing the amount of sunlight blocked. With this, we can decrease the amount of sunlight the earth receives by a very small fraction, but perhaps enough to cancel out the new greenhouse effect somewhat. We can then, at our leisure, filter the Co2 from the atmosphere, meanwhile reeling in the strands to maintain a constant balance.
This shield would not prevent ocean acidification, which is perhaps the most serious effect of excess Co2, but it will modulate extreme weather and prevent temperature-based feedback effects. In fact, if we could artificially cool the planet below the norm, we may reverse temperature-based positive feedbacks (increasing albedo, locking permafrost up).
The important thing to know about this plan is that it is entirely within the realm of modern science; all of the propulsion systems, energy demands, and engineering feats have already been done, and indeed I believe it could be done with effectively off-the-shelf components. It could be quite cheap, compared to the expected costs for ocean levels rising. On the other hand, it won't mitigate all the problems with Co2 emissions, we will need other approaches to permanently remove it. It will also take time- perhaps a decade for slow and inefficient governments to put it into action, and five years for an asteroid to be selected (assuming a viable one comes near), captured, and put into orbit. Another five years for a second launch to install the fiber production equipment and for that to start.
By then, we could very well see the Arctic Ocean ice-free in the summer, meaning that cooling will need to be even more severe to regenerate natural cooling mechanisms.
Assuming we want to block 0.05% of incoming sunlight, the area of the asteroid's silhouette must cover approximately a similar area of earth's surface. Earth has a silhouette of 80,000 sq. km. The fibers would have to be 636 km long, and strong enough to support that weight in microgravity. Not impossible, though perhaps difficult.
If each one was a meter wide, there would need to be ~650,000 strands, so failure of any one strand (which would presumably drift away, become unstable, and either trail in orbit or burn up in earth atmosphere) would be of little concern as long as a new one could be manufactured quickly enough.
Ok, manufacturing 400 sq. km of carbon fiber in zero-g might be difficult, though note that the resources to do so (energy and carbon) are in great supply on a solar-Lagrangian asteroid. If that stuff is 0.25 cm thick (really really really thick for some uses, but let's say it's tough, and that the asteroid isn't pure carbon), it's 1,000,000 cubic meters of carbon, meaning that the asteroid would have to be (assuming we don't want to eat more than half of it so we have some left over for a lifetime of replacement strands) a 160 meter wide sphere.
I have to test how badly this could go wrong. Assuming a worst-case (vertical) entry angle, can this thing reach the ground? Such a thing would be impossible, however. A more plausible but still unlikely failure is it coming in at some shallow angle, giving it plenty of time to burn up.
More importantly, other approaches such as cloud forming/seeding, or other fanciful ocean chemistry modifications, are much harder to predict and control, and often involve distributing far more than 1 million cubic meters of material in the form of areosols and such... and then that stuff's permanently there. The solar shade approach is quite flexible, limited mainly by the mass of the asteroid, which is itself only really limited by the amount of time and energy we want to put into re-orbiting it.
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Topic: The Great Northern Sea (Read 3639 times)