http://www.physorg.com/news81795874.html

Hi,

Does anyone understand the optics on this?

Refraction won"t gain you anything unless the film is of non-uniform thickness so I assume its based on diffraction. But diffraction at each small hole should lead to a central maximum not a central minimum. Unless the hole pattern is more complex and some type of interference effect is being used. But then wouldn"t you have chromatic effects?

Its been a long time since I took an optics course so maybe I"ve forgotten something...

It's nonsense. Solar wind will scatter this extremely expensive nanojunk shortly after it is deployed. It would be far cheaper and more sensible to dispense fine metallic grits (aluminum and iron are abundant on this planet) along an equatorial orbit just below the inner set of Van Allen radiation belts. Since the aerosol of grit would be inside the magnetic field of the Earth, the radiation pressure from the Sun is reduced.

Waste.

Totally ridiculous. You could completely replace the oil infrastructure with hydrogen at less cost. Or even better give everyone an electric car and every roof solar panels and small windmill generators, and still at less cost.

Carbon reduction is what's necessary, not band-aids.

Totally ridiculous. You could completely replace the oil infrastructure with hydrogen at less cost. Or even better give everyone an electric car and every roof solar panels and small windmill generators, and still at less cost.

Carbon reduction is what's necessary, not band-aids.

In ten years time we will have committed ourself into needing a band-aid. So solutions like this need to be explored. But yes alt-energy is needed.

as our abilities become greater i grow more scared for earth and its life than ever before.

I like beer! I drink beer all day It makes me happy! Liver is damned but hey, I'll get a new one next week. I like beer!. It my second liver, but I like beer! Doc says my kidneys will die if i drink more beer. I like beer so I'll just get a transfusion every week! yer thats the ticket, keep the bear flowing, hmmmm!

*total sarcasm in case you hadn't guessed*

maybe the scary logic behind such plans (in general -- i have no idea whether this specific plan is technically nonsense) is this: it is economically more profitable to waste all fossil fuel in one giant blast (as we're doing now). it's cheap, easy, and gives companies the best roi for the time being. only when it's getting too scarce (and consequently expensive), they will turn to what's cheapest then (my guess: nuclear power, electric cars, NOT renewable energy sources). in any case, they will keep people buying their product. i mean, don't expect that the big oil companies don't have plans that go beyond the fossil fuel age! if anyone, it's they who have the money to work on that sort of stuff.
and if there really IS an environmental problem (e.g., global warming), it's the exact same companies (or their partners and partners' partners - the international capitalist conspiracy, if you excuse the silly expression) that will make money from selling global cooling technology (or whatever we need then to make our environment acceptable) to - effectively - the tax payers.

sometimes environmental activists tell you that it's time to start acting reasonably/rationally and "stop the madness" of messing up the planet. i suggest we're not witnessing a display of madness, we're witnessing the darn rational way capitalism unfolds. only now international capital has clearly become what marx predicted it to become.

And Marx predicted global fast capitalism to become...?
Please continue Archvile... we're listening...

This goes right to the heart of some of the stupidest mistakes being made now. For instance - where I live, in Oztralia, there is a dire water shortage, yet the government of the day is pushing nuclear power, even though one nuclear power station uses about 25,000 megalitres of water to generate 1400 mw... whereas a coal-fired power station producing the same amount of power uses around 19,500 megalitres. That's around 25% more water for a nuclear power station. Now at the current rate of increase in cost of water, by the time this nuclear reactor comes online (15 years to build, apparently), water will cost more than gasoline, which by then will probably be pretty expensive. Anyone else notice the problem with this method of producing power?

The government refuses to look at any real uptake of renewables (even though the market is growing exponentially internationally, and the public is baying for it (90% want renewable power generation according to one recent poll)), so it can sit on its hands and wait for the nuclear solution.

What this situation looks like to me : A small number of men are just seeing the $$$ they can make by mining uranium and selling 'cheap' power from a centralised source. Seeing as the government will subsidise the building and decommissioning of said powerstation (one hand washes the other), the economics look good to them. False economies everywhere.

As for me, I will continue to call for decentralisation of power generation and the mass uptake of solar power and other renewables, along with any viable carbon-reduction technologies, so we don't need to spend ten and a half trillion dollars making a giant sunshade.

One of the main reasons of global warming is the amount of energy we consume. Interestingly, energy can never be consumed. Only changed in form. Everything we do from driving cars by using gas, burning coal, creating nuclear energy releases heat into the atmosphere. This added with green house effect is making the planet into an oven.

If you take a look at the current world trend, the energy requirement of the world is set to double in a few decades. Even if we find alternative sources of energy, like solar and nuclear, we are essentially creating more electricity to create more heat. Earth cannot sustain that kind of heat release into the atmosphere.

Reducing the amount of heat/energy that earth receives from the sun is one idea. Other idea is to have massive coolers (near the poles ??) to chill the environment. Now how do we achieve that? You may ask that if we are trying to chill the earth, where do we get the energy to run those massive coolers? And, what do we do with all the heat that is created from trying to run the coolers. True, an air conditioner works the same way. Absorbs energy, takes in air, chills it and in effect heats the outside radiators. If we could chill the earth, and create extreme heat on the other side, this heat should be either beamed out into space or sealed in containers and launched into the space(preferrably Sun). To do all this, we would need unbelievable amounts of energy. Converting mass directly into energy will give us infinite energy.

Phew !!! Let me go and play with my abascus.

Paulo - Just the US has something along the lines of $10 trillion invested in a hydrocarbon-based economy. Cars, Oil rigs, gas stations, all would need to be written off.

Meanwhile, at current prices photovoltaic would cost something on the order of 10-100 trillion for our current energy use, depending on how many externalities you include.

What the guy's theory relies on is the lenses to scatter the light a few degrees off axis in a disorganized fashion - similar to putting a piece of waxed paper between your eyes and the sun. The solar pressure is still there, it's just greatly reduced since the light isn't deflected to much of an angle. And it's placed far enough away that even a small change in angle puts the earth in a big 'partial shadow'.

Of course, I'd favor an inherently disposable option involving what we use right now for fighter jet chaff - thin strips of aluminum. Just release it at medium speed towards the sun, and blow it up with enough force that it covers a maximum area, but isn't wide enough to enter an orbit. If you havn't transitioned over to a hydrocarbon economy in ten years, launch another.

electromagnetic space launcher?uhhh...huh??

Get Al Gore to figure it out!!! Anyone who can invent the internet ought to be able to handle this too.

Hummm… I really don’t think it’s a very good idea to put any of that stuff in orbit. I’m no genius but I see some big problems with this. In very simple layman terms…

1 ~ They say we could have a mega volcanic eruption at any time which would drastically cool the earth with all the volcanic ash blocking the sun. We are going to need all the sun’s heat we can get.

2 ~ They say we can be hit by a meteor at any time. Again this would drastically cool the earth with all the debris it throws up.

3 ~ How will the earth telescope’s be able to see the star, etc. near earth object (asteroids/meteors) what have you, with all this stuff floating around blocking the view.

4 ~ Also would this not interfere with space travel and communications between the spaceship/robots we put out there and earth if they did use, as someone suggested, “dispense fine metallic grits“?

What happens if this doesn’t work? How are they going to clean up all that stuff if they find that they made another big mistake? No, putting stuff in orbit is not the answer. It will only cause more problems. Just my opinion…..

I agree with several people on previous post's, it seems ridiculous to apply such a concept and with too many more unknowns along with the oil companies continue being totally subsidized via sky high cost being passed along to ordinary taxpayers.
One person mentioned using the principle of using in essence a giant air conditioner (non-CFC type....funny)at the poles and blow the hot air out the other side of not wall but planet.
Expounding on that principle and technology used by HARP in Alaska, would it indeed truly be theoretically possible to do just that, by using the plasma energy via the sun entering the ionosphere over the poles (aurora borealis) to power some type of very well monitored cooling substation platform and that's well protected from the very cold itself and the exhaust or byproduct beamed back out to space well beyond earth's orbit via very defined electromagnetic lines or beam so as not to cook us but at the same time not create or accelerate a deep freeze ice age via the so called air conditioner or refrigerator.

Any thoughts from anyone in webland?

Adding a note, the byproduct heat created could be induced into an electromagnetic beam and sent to an array antenna that's positioned in high synchronous orbit around earth which intern beams it out into space.

Hi Dushyanth Inguva

The one thing you forgot to add on the end of your post was that converting mass to energy, I assume you mean fusion, will make the planet even hotter, very much hotter as would taking the Hydrogen out of water. These systems are stable, play about with them at your peril. Then of course the suns heat drives the planets weather system which keeps us here in the UK comfortable. Shielding the sun may be an option but this method which sounds simple is very complex and probably couldn't be made to work anyway.

The question is will the resources run out before all the food does and before the planet overheats I think a good indication of the future is the old film "soylent green" Oh and there's also the 4% carbon dioxide problem, when this level is reached we also start gasping for breath. Apparently, this level within our lungs makes us take a breath.

AR

Um, electric cars really are not a solution: they are actually coal fired. Or nuclear. Or oil. Or gas. Electric cars are NOT "clean cars", maybe "cleaner" if all the power came from nuclear.

The out in space shield is going to be very expensive. I think that a more practical and cheaper solution could be achieved here on the earth using the same principles. The energy needs to be removed from the atmosphere to stabilise our weather systems. Its source is the tropical sea temperatures. They are degree or so over their pre-global warming levels.
I think that tens of thousands of large lightweight shiny disks should be made by numerous countries and floated out on the sea in equatorial regions. This would increase the albedo (reflectivity) of the earth slightly. Ships would just push them out of the way if they encountered one. Since they would float around at random, the ecology of the sea would be unaffected apart from the welcome reduction in its temperature.
This would have an immediate effect while we wait for the more long-term solutions to reduce the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere in the future.
Roy Caswell

This sounds like a bad idea on this magnitude.

The Earth is around 298K. A 2 percent drop in solar radiation would mean about a 6C or ~10 1/2F drop in temperatures!!! We've supposely only gained ~1C in the last one hundred years and still have many highly destructive activities from cold temperatures (we had a very destructive frost spell in California and even had snow plows in Malibu beach not long ago)

If this triggers another Ice Age, we'd be in deep sh*t and it would be even harder to break out of it the next time.

Give me a bit warmer, wetter and greener future any day of the week over a drop, and possibly quite a long term one, in temperatures.

They should only consider something like this if the wild speculations pan out (and it wuold be much easier to get popular support and assistance in that case anyway).

Colder temperatures on Earth are much more of a problem than warmer ones from the track record.

Reflecting some light back into space, or diverting some from space is fine if we really need to but I'd hate to see us end up with the equivalent of a very long nuclear winter because of a few greedy politicians and their in-the-pocket propoganda machine.

See, this is what happens when the hype is passed around. People begin to panic and think of stupid, self-destructive ideas.

QUOTE

The effect would be to uniformly reduce sunlight by about 2 percent over the entire planet, enough to balance the heating of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.