• vivadanang@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    this is why I’d prefer to skip geoengineering and, though the scale is mind-boggling and the costs tremendous, go full hog on a solar occluder. a big disc in space made of lunar regolith and recycled space junk. this is a herculean task, but would prevent us from playing scary games with our one breathing, semi-functional atmosphere. by blocking a small but growing percentage of sunlight, as the project goes on, it should be possible to keep ground level temps from getting deadly hot. eventually you could build solar generation on such a space object and microwave gigawatts back to earth, while simultaneously lowering global temps in a controllable manner.

    I know a lot of this sounds pie-in-the-sky, but really it’s the convergence of many, many different fields opening possibilities never speculated upon in the past. Automated manufacturing, robot mining, lunar-based perskovite solar cell manufacturing, SpaceX’s starship to haul all this shit to the moon and start building - so many of these individual parts either didn’t exist at all 20 years ago, or were fantastic leaps of science fiction - and now they’re literally coming together. And boy do we need 'em all.

    I see this is as the ultimate make/break point for our species, yeah we achieved spaceflight and nuclear power and, I dunno, The Rolling Stones, but if we can’t survive the effluence our industrial output exhales we really aren’t shit as a species. We’ll have to work together too.

    so… \s or not, if we don’t do this and traipse down the road of injecting some more shit into the atmosphere attempting to correct temporarily for the other shit we injected into the atmosphere for 300 years, I suspect it’s gonna be a rougher road and end in a very interesting fossil record thesis for some future species’ exo-anthropology dissertation.