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Honestly, we need to get over ourselves when it comes to sunlight modification. The fact that people are hand wringing about small trial projects that are just meant to investigate the concept is peak luddite thinking.
Do we need to be careful with the secondary effects? Yes. That's why we start with pilot projects, see how they go, and work our way up. Is a termination shock a possibility? Yes, but who cares? The alternative is we just stew in the high temps all day every day.
I get the opposition to the technology, but ultimately it comes from a place of hubris and pride. People just don't want to admit we've fucked things up so badly that now we need to resort to something as desperate as solar modification.
Well I'm sorry, but we're out of time. We're sitting here whining about possible side effects of this, when the consequences of not doing it are potentially biosphere-collapsing. Yes, I wish we had gone all in on renewables starting in 1980, but we don't live on that timeline. It takes a long time to change the course of a ship the size of an industrial civilization, and there has been immense political headwinds. Hang all the oil execs if you want, that won't change the fact that at this point, we have no reasonable path to avoiding the deaths of hundreds of millions of people and the collapse of entire biomes if we don't do solar modification. We're sitting here congratulating ourselves on not playing God as we watch as the Amazon rain forest burns down as a consequence of our own actions.
We need this technology. Yes, it sucks that we have to resort to it. But we are out of time. Right now, we are realistically looking at losing between 2-10% of the total human population by 2050 due to climate induced heat stroke and famine. Right now, the permafrost at the polls and the Greenland ice sheet are rapidly collapsing. Positive feedback loops are kicking in that mean that even if we cut off all emissions tomorrow, the temperature will still continue to snowball. This is a runaway train at this point. And the only hope we have of slowing it down is solar modification.
But people would rather keep their hands clean, refuse to "play God," and do nothing as the world burns.
Luddites really need to fuck off in general. They are just worthless cowards that don't want to see humanity succeed.
It's literally our only option to buy us time to sequester carbon. I don't agree with aerosol or particle based shields that aren't easily removed, but a metal or solid shield in space locked between the sun and earth to deflect a % of the rays is totally doable and needed. I personally think a partially living shield made of 3D printed vulture head skin would work well but it is quite gruesome, so a bunch of metal is probably more likely than that.
I would think the aerosol or particle based shields would be even easier to remove than something up in orbit. The stuff in orbit will need to be pretty high up if you don't want it to immediately decay and reenter, so anything in orbit will remain that way for some time. Plus there's Kessler to worry about. But sulfurs and other aerosols wash out of the atmosphere pretty quickly. That's the whole reason people talk about termination shocks, and fret that we'll have to keep the aerosol effort continuously going. To me this seems like a virtue. If at any time we decide we don't like the effects, we can simply stop. There's no long term commitment.
What I'm proposing is something like the start of the technology of a dyson sphere tbh, it would be further out into space and ideally only maintained by machine, no humans. If it has issues, the panels can be turned perpendicular to the direction of energy coming from the sun to let in more sun, or fuck, we could just set bombs on it and later remote detonate it if it's truly a concern.
I think the impact of spreading a bunch of sulfur or other particulates in the air is just a bad idea in terms of health for everyone (a major component of smog/pollution is sulfur, and we know sulfur works bc during covid, less ships running meant less sulfur and heating accelerated) and having a large blanket or shield in space would be less risky in that aspect but yes, more technically challenging. However, Beijing, MIT, Stanford, Japan, and Germany etc should be able to figure it out easily - they pretty much already made a cure for HIV and rabies together and permanently altered warfare w invention of drones and AI.
The left in general is experiencing an absurd Luddite phase that started exactly around the last election when all the techbros revealed themselves as supporting Trump. Tribal epistemology is the term I think?
Now every test that is conducted needs to be meticulously planned and calibrated as to not even lift a speck of dust or else it’s causing irreparable damage to the environment, taking everyone’s jobs, and destroying everything.
It’s ridiculous. I don’t like to say that TDS is real but sometimes it really looks real.
The left are luddites and the right are climate change deniers.
Yet another area where I find myself going "well, at least maybe there's China?" They've got the right combination of skin in the game, economic/technological capability, and a government that can simply ignore all these ridiculous moral panics and mass idiocies.
It's really sad that that seems like our best bet. I really don't want to be anywhere near a position that seems like "yay, authoritarians."
Lol China is the one in charge of Trump and orchestrating all of this. They want our land and gold and have bought massive amounts already. China will come to pick our bones clean like a vulture and move their people over. I wonder if Russia realizes they are going to do the same to them as well. Climate change is making it so only a few places will be inhabitable and massive floods have already started in China. They need more space, and as much as we all rag on colonial America, China has thousands of years of imperialism and taking over other places and actively expanded recently into Hong Kong, despite many people there not really wanting that.
There is no fucking sky daddy or god or benevolent leader coming to save you or me or anyone. We have to save ourselves and work together. Stop giving in to unhelpful thinking habits like "maybe a daddy figure will fix it for me."