Dr. Deborah Brosnan, a climate and ocean scientist, predicts that Earth could eventually become uninhabitable for humans given the grave state of the planet
Scientist piping in with my two cents. Granted my speciality is geophysics and planetary science, and not specifically climate.
In geoscience we tend to talk about things on very long timescales. Like: at what point with the sun’s output cause the earth to turn into Venus (250 million years as a lower bound, ish, then all life is doomed on Earth). The rate of change we’ve applied to our atmosphere is faster than any natural process other than a meteor strike or similar event. There are climate change scenarios where all life on the planet dies (why wait 250 million years!?), but they’re mostly improbable unless we have some sort of runaway feedback mechanism we’ve not accounted for. 2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely. Coastline and ecosystem disruption are almost certain though.
The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever. We can build spacecraft that can survive the harsh environment in space and people survive there. As long as climate change doesn’t happen “too fast” (values of “too fast” may vary), we will engineer our way around it. On the small scale: air conditioning; and on the larger scale, geo-engineering (after accumulating sufficient political will). We’re so clever that, if we (or our descendants or similar) can probably even save the earth in 250 million years when the sun’s output passes the threshold where it wants to fry us – assuming we survive that long.
That doesn’t detract from her statement. But it is the Mirror, and the headlight is trying to be incendiary.
I think people are missing the point, it’s not about who survives, it’s about who dies and suffers.
If I told you (made up numbers) that in the next 50 years, 100 million people will die an average of 20 years early because of climate change. Sure, 100 million is just about 1.3% of humans, but it’s still 100 million people, who will die at 50 instaed of 70, or at 25 instead of 45, these are people who will probably die from heat, from natrual disasters, from famine, from poor health as economies collapse.
We won’t be fine, someone will be, but WE, as a group, won’t be fine.
In fact, we are already not fine but it’s mostly felt in poor contries.
Not to kill the mood but the harsh truth is that the generations before us doomed a lot of us, and the current generations are just starting to get it, and future generations will truly feel the ignorance of our past and the indifference of our present.
No, kill the mood. Stab it in it’s stupid fucking face and kick it’s corpse out of the way. All it’s done is be an obstacle because weak people are too uncomfortable doing little things and even more whiny now that the need is far greater.
You’re exactly right and put it perfectly: “it’s not about who survives, it’s about who suffers and dies”. People will die over something we have endless solutions to but will never put in place because the weakest, most fragile little snot-nosed fucks are afraid of the slightest discomfort.
We’re estimated to have lost about 15 million additional people in 2020/2021 due to covid and a disturbingly large amount of us were salty about being asked to cover their mouths in order to stave it off. Might favor certain groups, but it’s doom from every generation top to bottom.
Generations of the past had plausible deniability. Most of them may not have known what they were doing.
We knew. We’re well informed of the consequences. And we kept making it worse. We’re still making it worse. We still have too much of the population unwilling to change. How do you think future generations will remember us?
It’s more of a “teacher’s numbers” game where they walk by the line and just pint, “one, two, three, one, two, three” all the ones die under 50. The twos, live to be 70… Etc. Maybe with more numbers.
As long as climate change doesn’t happen “too fast” (values of “too fast” may vary), we will engineer our way around it.
While this is true, we must also take into account who exactly will benefit from that engineering and survive. Not everyone will be able to take advantage of non-global engineering solutions, and just like with every technological advancement, the differential will be used by those “with” to subjugate those “without.”
The global solutions will eventually happen. Right now nationalism gets in the way of it, but on the timescales of geology, nationalism is a blip. Hell, many scholars cite 1648 as the creation of the current system – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_system – so hopefully this is just a phase and we’ll get over it and start global scale geoengineering before we get cooked :)
Can you imagine a UN agency in charge of sun shades positioned at Sun-Earth L1 that reduced the total sunlight hitting the earth by 0.1% and halted the heating problem entirely? Wouldn’t solve the carbon dioxide levels, but it’d be a start :D
(The orbital mechanics folks can chime in here. Sunshades at L1 are unstable because L1 is unstable, and sunlight exerts pressure on them like solar sails. However, there are quasi-stable positions slightly sunward of L1 where you can balance these instabilities and actually use the solar sail effect for station keeping in a swarm. It would require launching a lot of rockets, but is entirely doable with today’s technology. Said rockets use hydrocarbons to launch, ironically.)
Eventually, yes, and in the meantime, the global divide between rich and poor will grow ever wider.
There are exactly two ways that that divide can shrink. The wealthy of the world proactively using their wealth for the common good, out of pure philanthropy; or by being physically forced to. This applies regardless of climate change problems or their potential solutions.
However, there are quasi-stable positions slightly sunward of L1 where you can balance these instabilities and actually use the solar sail effect for station keeping in a swarm. It would require launching a lot of rockets, but is entirely doable with today’s technology.
Not a scientist, but I’m still fascinated by this stuff.
The cost of that is going to be the big issue. No government is going to want to pay for routine shipments of fuel and parts to L1, which is expensive as hell. And I wouldn’t bet on international cooperation being a thing either. Each country is going to be too busy fighting over food and water, and keeping migration at bay.
Completely guessing here, it would probably be cheaper to raise the albedo of the planet through various means. Maybe including massive scale cloud seeding over the oceans. At least it’s on planet and therefore hypothetically can be done with minimal fossil fuel use. How to do that without fucking up the environment with chemicals for cloud nuclei is the hard part.
That, or intentionally inducing a light nuclear winter, ideally without the nuclear part. With enough particulates in the upper atmosphere, it would do the job. The tricky part is doing that without overdoing it. This is the dumb version, but it’s personally how I see things going. Especially because this is something a lone country could probably do on its own. China doesn’t want to deal with all the effects of climate change? They may light up a bunch of islands in the Pacific with nukes to “solve” it.
Another dumb option that might arise, a country intentionally trying to start another global pandemic to reduce emissions. Emissions dropped dlike a rock with COVID, and a lot of countries have the ability to produce bioweapons.
There are myriad of dumb, harmful, cheap ways that individual countries could use to curb climate change. The next few decades are going to be dangerous as hell.
Engagement, huzzah! Okay, the funding issue is an issue. Ironically, it requires companies like SpaceX (or their competition as they come online) to get the launch prices down. It’s doable though. Back of envelope: The largest solar sail launched so far has been a paltry 14x14m, if my memory serves correctly. In order to reduce the incoming sunlight by 0.1%, you would need something like 60x1000 km of solar sails. Assuming you can make them 1 sq km each, you’re looking at 60k solar sails. But they can be very very lightweight. Wikipedia proposes 0.02 g/m2 as a lower limit… let’s use 0.05 g/m2 so we have some leeway and don’t need exotic materials. Thus a 1km2 solar sail would weigh only 50kg (of sail material). Add another 200kg for some tensile frame and some control electronics and you’re looking at something like a Starlink mass to get 1km2. Sure you’d need 60k of these things, but launching Starlink swarms that size is doable (to LEO – you’d need a bigger rocket than the F9 for L1). Let’s suppose Starship (or similar) is launching them in batches of 60 for $10M/launch… That’s 1000 launches. Currently SpaceX is launching about every three days, so assuming Starship is online and capable, that would be three years of launches at the same rate as Starlink (but with a bigger rocket) and ten billion dollars. Okay, even if costs go up by an order of magnitude, we can do this, now, today, for about the cost of purchasing twitter. Musk really fucked up didn’t he ;)
Okay, that’s a lot of methane to launch the rockets. Back of the envelope, assuming one launch uses ~300t of methane. The per capita use of natural gas (globally) is about 50 cubic feet per person per day. A cubic foot of natural gas is about 35 grams, so the per capita usage in mass is about 1750g/day/person. So a single rocket launch uses about the same amount of natural gas 171,428 people would for one day. It’s actually very small, comparatively. Even if I got my estimates wrong by two orders of magnitude (on total number of launches), it’s still very small compared to the total amount of gas burned globally every day.
Okay, other options: we put the solar sails in a very high earth orbit (above the comms satellites) – doable, but you’ll require many many more of them as they won’t site between the Earth and the Sun during most of their orbit. LEO would cause problems with collisions with comms satellites. You can’t put them very low due to atmospheric drag. Plus, the closer they are, the more likely they are to create where little eclipses as their shadows pass by. L1 really is probably the best option.
Blimps flying around could do it. But you’d need like 60k blimps flying around in the upper atmosphere and each blimp would have to be an engineering marvel to get to that size. Probably not doable.
There’s cloud seeding, as you suggest. But that becomes a political hot potato (blimps would too) due to where the clouds are created. What if China seeded some clouds which cause a torrential rainfall and flooding in Mexico as the atmospheric currents move those clouds. Etc.
A light nuclear winter sounds like a disaster – what do we do, nuke a few volcanoes to set them off prematurely? That doesn’t sound sustainable. Burn all the forests to release ash? Nope, that’s our carbon sink that’s burning…
Ironically, raising our albedo might be a decent local option – just mandate white roofs everywhere. Just under 3% of our surface is urban and white roofs would also help with the urban heat island issue. You can probably paint 0.2% of the surface white. Not as good as blocking sunlight, but useful. The bad part is, solar panels are all dark, and moving to solar decreases our albedo. So maybe this will just offset changes in our average albedo due to solar panels.
There’s cloud seeding … What if China seeded some clouds which cause a torrential rainfall and flooding in Mexico
Or the exact opposite: what if China is successful? Cloud seeding doesn’t change the amount of moisture in the air, only where it falls. If you do succeed in getting it to fall prematurely, that means it’s not going to fall where it would otherwise have.
Any earthbound intervention is likely to be similar: even if you’re successful in modifying local weather, you’ve also modified someone else’s weather, and likely not for the better
Huzzah! Forewarning, I’m gonna be building off of your napkin math, because napkin rocket science math is fun.
it requires companies like SpaceX (or their competition as they come online) to get the launch prices down.
Absolutely. Given the scale of such a project like this, the price per launch would absolutely go down over time (assuming no bullshitery on SpaceX/other corporate entity’s part.) Though your original price point of $10m/launch is a bit off. The Falcon Heavy for instance, costs roughly $60-90m depending on payload and destination, and whether or not the rocket is recovered.
Thus a 1km2 solar sail would weigh only 50kg (of sail material). Add another 200kg for some tensile frame and some control electronics and you’re looking at something like a Starlink mass to get 1km2.
Another way to get an estimate is to compare to a recent, modern launch. The JWST is a good comparison, especially since it is in a similar orbit/distance/mission. The whole thing weighs 6,500kg, with 350kg of that being the RCS/reaction wheels/comms/electronics/frame/etc all wrapped up in the spacecraft bus.
So a completed frame can reasonably have a payload of 6,150kg for solar umbrella activities. If we put 1/3rd of that into the umbrella frame and the rest into the umbrella material, that’s 4100kg for sail material, or 82km2. How you’re gonna built an extendable frame that extends into a 9km x 9km sheet is a challenge, but maybe surmountable. This is a significantly bigger scale than the 1km2 sats you’ve proposed, but if the weight allocation works with JWST something similar should work here. The solar pressure will increase the fuel needed to keep a stable orbit, but nothing that our pre-designed launch platform can’t handle.
So that would be 731 of these JWST scale sats that need to be put into L1 orbit. JWST was launched with the Ariane 5, which costs $150-200m/launch. That’s significantly more that then $10m/launch, but getting all the way out to L1 with a 6,500kg payload is hard. I wasn’t able to find a cost associated with the JWST itself, only the development cost of ~$8.8 billion. But I’m gonna assume that the construction of the satellite itself was in the millions, if not billions. If it is even a single billion for just one of these, that’s almost a trillion dollars for this project as a whole.
All of that for only a 0.1% reduction in sunlight. Not sure how much we need, but it seems small.
Okay, other options: we put the solar sails in a very high earth orbit (above the comms satellites) – doable, but you’ll require many many more of them as they won’t site between the Earth and the Sun during most of their orbit.
I have an even dumber, even more harmful, version of this that is just as fun to explore. Go up to the moon, build a couple rail launchers, and start launching shit loads of moon regolith into a high orbit around the earth, somewhere between geostationary orbit and lunar orbit. Eventually Earth will have it’s own set of rings. We only launch everything for one week of the month every month to ensure the inclination of the rings stays somewhat uniform.
The benefit of this being once the infrastructure to do this is put on the moon, this can essentially run for free forever. We just have to be mindful of avoiding Earth’s rings as we travel outside of our system.
Ironically, raising our albedo might be a decent local option – just mandate white roofs everywhere. Just under 3% of our surface is urban and white roofs would also help with the urban heat island issue. You can probably paint 0.2% of the surface white. Not as good as blocking sunlight, but useful. The bad part is, solar panels are all dark, and moving to solar decreases our albedo. So maybe this will just offset changes in our average albedo due to solar panels.
I think this is an almost guaranteed partial solution that we will end up doing. If you’ve traveled around at all, you’ll notice that hotter climates tend to use white roofs, seemingly automatically. Home owners will automatically do whatever suits them for the climate, no matter how the climate changes. The problem here is so much of our buildings and infrastructure isn’t roofs. So much of it is roads and parking. That’s a lot harder to change the albedo.
A light nuclear winter sounds like a disaster – what do we do, nuke a few volcanoes to set them off prematurely? That doesn’t sound sustainable. Burn all the forests to release ash? Nope, that’s our carbon sink that’s burning…
Your last option reminds me of: Kill all the poor!
Yeah, these are the dumbest, most harmful solutions. But they’re also probably the cheapest, which is why they’re so scary. All it takes is one or two rogue states seeing this as a viable option, and it might end up happening.
No government is going to want to pay for routine shipments of fuel and parts to L1
There should be no need, no point. Actual repairs would be too costly way out there, plus we’d have to have a large cluster of shades where losing one doesn’t matter.
hopefully they can be mostly solar powered, greatly extending fuel supply
just send more. Actually, that’s the cost: routinely send more
Solar sailing doesn’t require fuel, and can be truly solar powered. The IKAROS probe is a great example of this, and it was launched quite a while ago already. My favourite part of this probe was the liquid crystal panels that could change brightness and darkness electrically in order to steer by creating a differential absorption/reflection of sunlight. Clever stuff. It’s basically a steerable continuous thrust system that tacks against sunlight.
Probably you’d still want some RCS thrusters for faster reaction times in a pinch. And reaction wheels are “free” in terms of fuel, so there is likely some upper bound to lifetime. But not as bad as normal spacecraft.
Long short: RCS thrusters are probably still useful, but may not necessarily need to be the primary means of station keeping.
Clever stuff. It’s basically a steerable continuous thrust system that tacks against sunlight.
Very clever, and very useful. Though probably not useful for this case. The solar pressure/wind will enact a constant normal force on the orbit of any craft at L1. So to maintain stable orbit (from my understanding) you will need to counteract that with a constant antinormal force, or else you’ll get pushed out of L1 and then go flying off.
I know on Earth you can sail more or less directly into the wind with a sail boat using clever geometry, but I’m not so sure that is possible when orbits are involved. That’s the limit of my KSP based knowledge of orbital mechanics lol.
There’s also some untested methods that could potentially work here,
I have to disagree with the first two you listed. The electrodynamic tether would slow down the craft and knock it out of L1 orbit. If I’m understanding, it’s the space equivalent of regenerative breaking. The magnetic sail would esentially have the same problem as the solar sail.
The bussard engine would definitely work, assuming the basic principle of the engine itself works. Though, I’m not sure if it would collect enough hydrogen when placed at L1. A very neat concept though, one I’d like to see happen!
Long short: RCS thrusters are probably still useful, but may not necessarily need to be the primary means of station keeping.
If we’re using today’s technology, they’d almost certainly be the primary means. But in this hypothetical future you may be right.
So to maintain stable orbit (from my understanding) you will need to counteract that with a constant antinormal force, or else you’ll get pushed out of L1 and then go flying off.
You’re absolutely right, assuming the craft is on the L1 saddle point. The craft can, however, sit slightly sunward of the saddle point in a halo orbit. It wants to fall towards the sun (and enter a solar orbit) due to being on that side of L1, but you set it in the position it needs to be to balance the force of sunlight. There will be quasi-stable points in a halo orbits around the sun-facing side of L1 which could sustain a whole lot of these buggers.
KSP is great, but it only does two body physics (unless you’re using the Principia mod – never tried it). So you cannot simulate things like lagrange points there. The patched conics are a great first order teaching tool though, and KSP is great for that!
Air Conditioning to mitigate climate change? That’s like dowsing a fire with lighter fluid.
And you think we’ll be able to out engineer the sun? In 250million years we will not be here guaranteed, and if somehow we make it it won’t be in any form we know as human.
Yes, I even once got a B+ in thermodynamics, decades ago. I was proud of that B+ – one of the hardest courses I’ve ever taken.
Yes, AC. It uses energy, adds heat into the total system, and you cannot fight entropy. However, you can mitigate heat gain in other places. You trade local effects for net zero global effects.
Simple example: AC running off of solar. It increases heat by decreasing albedo (solar panels are dark), but if you paint another area white, you can have a neutral effect in terms of total energy captured by the earth. But you can have a net zero heat gain and still have AC.
Obviously you’ll have a harder time balancing this equation if you’re using non-renewable energy sources.
But the fun thing is that all solar currently has a carbon cost associated with it. So as we’re trying to work our way out of this we’re also continuing to increase the carbon load. It’s a vicious cycle.
But the fun thing is that once we reach a critical point, it will go from having a positive carbon impact to a negative carbon impact. But we can never get there if we never start
Yes, but if it takes a thousand years and we’re all long gone from all the positive carbon impact? I agree with you but think the narrative is dangerous. We can’t think “well in the long run”, we need to actively counter the positive carbon right now (as in this year) and increase other negative carbon policies like mass transit and reducing subsidies. “It’ll work out in the end” is what got us here.
I was wondering what the controversy was with my comment lol. I was just saying that relying solely on renewable energy and current technology to be widely developed and implemented to reach net-zero carbon will be a slow-meticulous crawl while we continue to pollute the earth with our current infrastructure (fossil fuels). We need to also continue to push for policies like more use of public transportation and stop subsidizing the oil and gas industry so people actually feel the cost associated more. People see things like bike lanes and busses/rails as a more viable option when it actually effects them. You’ll see more people walking to nearby locations or doing “greener” activity when the actual price of 8$ or more a gallon becomes a reality.
If you start telling people, “oh, well just get more panels and use AC.” They’ll take it as nothing needs to change in their habits and all the other industries are fine as they are. Much like the “recycling” program in the 80’s and 90’s was used to manipulate the public that they are responsible for all the garbage and toxins being produced.
Allow me to introduce you to: an abstract concept of facebook-
People, separated by thousands of miles, tap messages into their glass topped smart rocks that can then be seen by other people with smart rocks - it does this communicating with big metal trees that talk to magic caves, where millions of smart rocks think about those messages and pass them over to other magic caves by a glass wire, which in turn pass the messages to another metal tree and over to other glass topped smart rocks for people to read.
Well, how many of them actually has the vaugest idea on even small part of the mechanics of it?
How many of them are just ignoring the wonders of the technology and just using it to spread hate and stupidity?
Which is more dominate? The stupid part or the clever part?
How can you be so optimistic? With everything that’s going on in the world, I get more pessimistic everyday. At bad days, I’d just think “let just humanity perish because we just keep repeating the same horrible things over and over anyway”.
The social media echo chamber has that effect. But statistically speaking, this is humanity’s golden age. The average lifespan is up, we have instant global communication and positioning (wow!), conflict is down (take the wider view)…
Like, even if you added Ukraine and Gaza to this, they’re small compared to historical conflicts. And this graph would be even more pronounced if we normalized it as percentages against the global population – literally the last few generations have been least likely to die in conflict across all of human history.
For me its because if you zoom out, the world is a better place to live in now, than it was 1000 years ago. Progress moves in waves, and right now it definitely feels like a significant low tide, but over time the coastline keeps creeping forward.
Humanity is the only meat eating animal that has significant percentage of its population willingly avoiding eating meat and instead finding ways to obtain essential nutrients without it (need to add that I am NOT one of those animals, I’m personally waiting for lab grown meat before I obstain from death based meat, if I ever do)
Humanity by and large no longer needs to leave its sick and wounded to die because we invented technology and infrastructure to both heal, and take care of those we cant heal
We’ve progressed to the point as a species where in order to bring more prosperity to our community, we no longer have to take from other communities, and that wasnt always the case (unfortunately this is only a recent achievement, and as such, not all of our population has adapted to this, hence our current problems)
Sure it’s been a long struggle with deniers and alternate reality and those purposely working against the need but it’s been even longer …
Think of the lightbulb wars! There was all the same pattern of denial, obstruction, intentional malfeasance, but we won! Lighting now uses 80% less power than before while lasting much longer! But it’s been even longer ….
I was a kid in the 1970’s so I’ve seen huge improvements in airr and water quality, toxic waste cleanup, appliance efficiency, weather proofing, ozone hole, and yes, huge improvements in climate change. Despite all the doom and gloom we are approaching peak emissions and ready to turn the corner! We do have many of the technologies we need, and just need to scale them up while working on the rest
So much of our modern economy is rooted in assumptions about where and how to mass produce food stocks. Climate change threatens all of that.
Obliterating breadbasket regions in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Iran would devastate the regional populations.
Then you’ve got the wars in places like Ukraine, Lebanon and Sudan, further strangling access to fresh food stocks.
People joke about the looming “water wars”, but consider how much Israel and the Saudis have invested in desalination and what dehydration is doing to the million plus Gaza residents who have lost access to reliable drinking water.
What happens during a substantial crop failure in the South Pacific? It isn’t as though India and China haven’t experienced massive famines in living memory.
You can argue the finer details, but it is easy to see a scenario in which a billion or more people are wiped out over the course of a generation, because of substantive shifts in access to basic living needs.
I do agree that we are very inventive, capable and imaginative when it comes to solving great problems.
Unfortunately we are also capable of becoming very destructive, ignorant, selfish and absolutely brutal to one another especially under a lot of stress and anxiety.
My greatest fear in the coming decades is mass migration and entire populations of people moving to places where they won’t be welcome, and people in places where everyone is relocating to worried that it will engage endanger their survival. The biggest problems we’ll face won’t be environmental… they will be political and social.
The United States is a wealthy country. It’s on the precipice of political and social disaster WITHOUT the above described problems occurring. The idea that wealthy countries will be fine seems wildly optimistic. Perhaps you meant wealthy people.
Scientist piping in with my two cents. Granted my speciality is geophysics and planetary science, and not specifically climate.
In geoscience we tend to talk about things on very long timescales. Like: at what point with the sun’s output cause the earth to turn into Venus (250 million years as a lower bound, ish, then all life is doomed on Earth). The rate of change we’ve applied to our atmosphere is faster than any natural process other than a meteor strike or similar event. There are climate change scenarios where all life on the planet dies (why wait 250 million years!?), but they’re mostly improbable unless we have some sort of runaway feedback mechanism we’ve not accounted for. 2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely. Coastline and ecosystem disruption are almost certain though.
The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever. We can build spacecraft that can survive the harsh environment in space and people survive there. As long as climate change doesn’t happen “too fast” (values of “too fast” may vary), we will engineer our way around it. On the small scale: air conditioning; and on the larger scale, geo-engineering (after accumulating sufficient political will). We’re so clever that, if we (or our descendants or similar) can probably even save the earth in 250 million years when the sun’s output passes the threshold where it wants to fry us – assuming we survive that long.
That doesn’t detract from her statement. But it is the Mirror, and the headlight is trying to be incendiary.
I think people are missing the point, it’s not about who survives, it’s about who dies and suffers.
If I told you (made up numbers) that in the next 50 years, 100 million people will die an average of 20 years early because of climate change. Sure, 100 million is just about 1.3% of humans, but it’s still 100 million people, who will die at 50 instaed of 70, or at 25 instead of 45, these are people who will probably die from heat, from natrual disasters, from famine, from poor health as economies collapse.
We won’t be fine, someone will be, but WE, as a group, won’t be fine.
In fact, we are already not fine but it’s mostly felt in poor contries.
Not to kill the mood but the harsh truth is that the generations before us doomed a lot of us, and the current generations are just starting to get it, and future generations will truly feel the ignorance of our past and the indifference of our present.
No, kill the mood. Stab it in it’s stupid fucking face and kick it’s corpse out of the way. All it’s done is be an obstacle because weak people are too uncomfortable doing little things and even more whiny now that the need is far greater.
You’re exactly right and put it perfectly: “it’s not about who survives, it’s about who suffers and dies”. People will die over something we have endless solutions to but will never put in place because the weakest, most fragile little snot-nosed fucks are afraid of the slightest discomfort.
It’s disgusting, end of.
We’re estimated to have lost about 15 million additional people in 2020/2021 due to covid and a disturbingly large amount of us were salty about being asked to cover their mouths in order to stave it off. Might favor certain groups, but it’s doom from every generation top to bottom.
If I look at it a certain way, we all come from a long line of millions of ancestors who barely scraped by or lucked out.
Our instincts only go as far as what we can see, hear, feel, taste, smell or vibe. We are not wired to react well to invisible things
Generations of the past had plausible deniability. Most of them may not have known what they were doing.
We knew. We’re well informed of the consequences. And we kept making it worse. We’re still making it worse. We still have too much of the population unwilling to change. How do you think future generations will remember us?
Are they accepting volunteers for the ‘die early’ group?
It’s more of a “teacher’s numbers” game where they walk by the line and just pint, “one, two, three, one, two, three” all the ones die under 50. The twos, live to be 70… Etc. Maybe with more numbers.
While this is true, we must also take into account who exactly will benefit from that engineering and survive. Not everyone will be able to take advantage of non-global engineering solutions, and just like with every technological advancement, the differential will be used by those “with” to subjugate those “without.”
The global solutions will eventually happen. Right now nationalism gets in the way of it, but on the timescales of geology, nationalism is a blip. Hell, many scholars cite 1648 as the creation of the current system – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_system – so hopefully this is just a phase and we’ll get over it and start global scale geoengineering before we get cooked :)
Can you imagine a UN agency in charge of sun shades positioned at Sun-Earth L1 that reduced the total sunlight hitting the earth by 0.1% and halted the heating problem entirely? Wouldn’t solve the carbon dioxide levels, but it’d be a start :D
(The orbital mechanics folks can chime in here. Sunshades at L1 are unstable because L1 is unstable, and sunlight exerts pressure on them like solar sails. However, there are quasi-stable positions slightly sunward of L1 where you can balance these instabilities and actually use the solar sail effect for station keeping in a swarm. It would require launching a lot of rockets, but is entirely doable with today’s technology. Said rockets use hydrocarbons to launch, ironically.)
Eventually, yes, and in the meantime, the global divide between rich and poor will grow ever wider.
There are exactly two ways that that divide can shrink. The wealthy of the world proactively using their wealth for the common good, out of pure philanthropy; or by being physically forced to. This applies regardless of climate change problems or their potential solutions.
Not a scientist, but I’m still fascinated by this stuff.
The cost of that is going to be the big issue. No government is going to want to pay for routine shipments of fuel and parts to L1, which is expensive as hell. And I wouldn’t bet on international cooperation being a thing either. Each country is going to be too busy fighting over food and water, and keeping migration at bay.
Completely guessing here, it would probably be cheaper to raise the albedo of the planet through various means. Maybe including massive scale cloud seeding over the oceans. At least it’s on planet and therefore hypothetically can be done with minimal fossil fuel use. How to do that without fucking up the environment with chemicals for cloud nuclei is the hard part.
That, or intentionally inducing a light nuclear winter, ideally without the nuclear part. With enough particulates in the upper atmosphere, it would do the job. The tricky part is doing that without overdoing it. This is the dumb version, but it’s personally how I see things going. Especially because this is something a lone country could probably do on its own. China doesn’t want to deal with all the effects of climate change? They may light up a bunch of islands in the Pacific with nukes to “solve” it.
Another dumb option that might arise, a country intentionally trying to start another global pandemic to reduce emissions. Emissions dropped dlike a rock with COVID, and a lot of countries have the ability to produce bioweapons.
There are myriad of dumb, harmful, cheap ways that individual countries could use to curb climate change. The next few decades are going to be dangerous as hell.
Engagement, huzzah! Okay, the funding issue is an issue. Ironically, it requires companies like SpaceX (or their competition as they come online) to get the launch prices down. It’s doable though. Back of envelope: The largest solar sail launched so far has been a paltry 14x14m, if my memory serves correctly. In order to reduce the incoming sunlight by 0.1%, you would need something like 60x1000 km of solar sails. Assuming you can make them 1 sq km each, you’re looking at 60k solar sails. But they can be very very lightweight. Wikipedia proposes 0.02 g/m2 as a lower limit… let’s use 0.05 g/m2 so we have some leeway and don’t need exotic materials. Thus a 1km2 solar sail would weigh only 50kg (of sail material). Add another 200kg for some tensile frame and some control electronics and you’re looking at something like a Starlink mass to get 1km2. Sure you’d need 60k of these things, but launching Starlink swarms that size is doable (to LEO – you’d need a bigger rocket than the F9 for L1). Let’s suppose Starship (or similar) is launching them in batches of 60 for $10M/launch… That’s 1000 launches. Currently SpaceX is launching about every three days, so assuming Starship is online and capable, that would be three years of launches at the same rate as Starlink (but with a bigger rocket) and ten billion dollars. Okay, even if costs go up by an order of magnitude, we can do this, now, today, for about the cost of purchasing twitter. Musk really fucked up didn’t he ;)
Okay, that’s a lot of methane to launch the rockets. Back of the envelope, assuming one launch uses ~300t of methane. The per capita use of natural gas (globally) is about 50 cubic feet per person per day. A cubic foot of natural gas is about 35 grams, so the per capita usage in mass is about 1750g/day/person. So a single rocket launch uses about the same amount of natural gas 171,428 people would for one day. It’s actually very small, comparatively. Even if I got my estimates wrong by two orders of magnitude (on total number of launches), it’s still very small compared to the total amount of gas burned globally every day.
Okay, other options: we put the solar sails in a very high earth orbit (above the comms satellites) – doable, but you’ll require many many more of them as they won’t site between the Earth and the Sun during most of their orbit. LEO would cause problems with collisions with comms satellites. You can’t put them very low due to atmospheric drag. Plus, the closer they are, the more likely they are to create where little eclipses as their shadows pass by. L1 really is probably the best option.
Blimps flying around could do it. But you’d need like 60k blimps flying around in the upper atmosphere and each blimp would have to be an engineering marvel to get to that size. Probably not doable.
There’s cloud seeding, as you suggest. But that becomes a political hot potato (blimps would too) due to where the clouds are created. What if China seeded some clouds which cause a torrential rainfall and flooding in Mexico as the atmospheric currents move those clouds. Etc.
A light nuclear winter sounds like a disaster – what do we do, nuke a few volcanoes to set them off prematurely? That doesn’t sound sustainable. Burn all the forests to release ash? Nope, that’s our carbon sink that’s burning…
Ironically, raising our albedo might be a decent local option – just mandate white roofs everywhere. Just under 3% of our surface is urban and white roofs would also help with the urban heat island issue. You can probably paint 0.2% of the surface white. Not as good as blocking sunlight, but useful. The bad part is, solar panels are all dark, and moving to solar decreases our albedo. So maybe this will just offset changes in our average albedo due to solar panels.
Your last option reminds me of: Kill all the poor!
Or the exact opposite: what if China is successful? Cloud seeding doesn’t change the amount of moisture in the air, only where it falls. If you do succeed in getting it to fall prematurely, that means it’s not going to fall where it would otherwise have.
Any earthbound intervention is likely to be similar: even if you’re successful in modifying local weather, you’ve also modified someone else’s weather, and likely not for the better
Humans have gone to war for less
Right – cause rain to fall here, cause a drought elsewhere. Etc. Could probably be weaponised if clever about it.
Huzzah! Forewarning, I’m gonna be building off of your napkin math, because napkin rocket science math is fun.
Absolutely. Given the scale of such a project like this, the price per launch would absolutely go down over time (assuming no bullshitery on SpaceX/other corporate entity’s part.) Though your original price point of $10m/launch is a bit off. The Falcon Heavy for instance, costs roughly $60-90m depending on payload and destination, and whether or not the rocket is recovered.
Another way to get an estimate is to compare to a recent, modern launch. The JWST is a good comparison, especially since it is in a similar orbit/distance/mission. The whole thing weighs 6,500kg, with 350kg of that being the RCS/reaction wheels/comms/electronics/frame/etc all wrapped up in the spacecraft bus.
So a completed frame can reasonably have a payload of 6,150kg for solar umbrella activities. If we put 1/3rd of that into the umbrella frame and the rest into the umbrella material, that’s 4100kg for sail material, or 82km2. How you’re gonna built an extendable frame that extends into a 9km x 9km sheet is a challenge, but maybe surmountable. This is a significantly bigger scale than the 1km2 sats you’ve proposed, but if the weight allocation works with JWST something similar should work here. The solar pressure will increase the fuel needed to keep a stable orbit, but nothing that our pre-designed launch platform can’t handle.
So that would be 731 of these JWST scale sats that need to be put into L1 orbit. JWST was launched with the Ariane 5, which costs $150-200m/launch. That’s significantly more that then $10m/launch, but getting all the way out to L1 with a 6,500kg payload is hard. I wasn’t able to find a cost associated with the JWST itself, only the development cost of ~$8.8 billion. But I’m gonna assume that the construction of the satellite itself was in the millions, if not billions. If it is even a single billion for just one of these, that’s almost a trillion dollars for this project as a whole.
All of that for only a 0.1% reduction in sunlight. Not sure how much we need, but it seems small.
I have an even dumber, even more harmful, version of this that is just as fun to explore. Go up to the moon, build a couple rail launchers, and start launching shit loads of moon regolith into a high orbit around the earth, somewhere between geostationary orbit and lunar orbit. Eventually Earth will have it’s own set of rings. We only launch everything for one week of the month every month to ensure the inclination of the rings stays somewhat uniform.
The benefit of this being once the infrastructure to do this is put on the moon, this can essentially run for free forever. We just have to be mindful of avoiding Earth’s rings as we travel outside of our system.
I think this is an almost guaranteed partial solution that we will end up doing. If you’ve traveled around at all, you’ll notice that hotter climates tend to use white roofs, seemingly automatically. Home owners will automatically do whatever suits them for the climate, no matter how the climate changes. The problem here is so much of our buildings and infrastructure isn’t roofs. So much of it is roads and parking. That’s a lot harder to change the albedo.
Yeah, these are the dumbest, most harmful solutions. But they’re also probably the cheapest, which is why they’re so scary. All it takes is one or two rogue states seeing this as a viable option, and it might end up happening.
There should be no need, no point. Actual repairs would be too costly way out there, plus we’d have to have a large cluster of shades where losing one doesn’t matter.
That only works with ion thrusters, which are extremely expensive IIRC. But even they need fuel.
Most satellites that are that far out still use RCS thrusters with reaction wheels. But solar power only helps so much with that.
That’s gonna get costly very quickly. I doubt there is the political will to do this.
Solar sailing doesn’t require fuel, and can be truly solar powered. The IKAROS probe is a great example of this, and it was launched quite a while ago already. My favourite part of this probe was the liquid crystal panels that could change brightness and darkness electrically in order to steer by creating a differential absorption/reflection of sunlight. Clever stuff. It’s basically a steerable continuous thrust system that tacks against sunlight.
There’s also some untested methods that could potentially work here, like eletric tethers in the sun’s magnetic field – this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether – although I’m not aware of anyone that has done this calculation in the context of sunshields. And further outside the box, magnetic sails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_sail or even this craziness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet#Dyson_swarm-based_stellar_engine_(Caplan_thruster)
Probably you’d still want some RCS thrusters for faster reaction times in a pinch. And reaction wheels are “free” in terms of fuel, so there is likely some upper bound to lifetime. But not as bad as normal spacecraft.
Long short: RCS thrusters are probably still useful, but may not necessarily need to be the primary means of station keeping.
Very clever, and very useful. Though probably not useful for this case. The solar pressure/wind will enact a constant normal force on the orbit of any craft at L1. So to maintain stable orbit (from my understanding) you will need to counteract that with a constant antinormal force, or else you’ll get pushed out of L1 and then go flying off.
I know on Earth you can sail more or less directly into the wind with a sail boat using clever geometry, but I’m not so sure that is possible when orbits are involved. That’s the limit of my KSP based knowledge of orbital mechanics lol.
I have to disagree with the first two you listed. The electrodynamic tether would slow down the craft and knock it out of L1 orbit. If I’m understanding, it’s the space equivalent of regenerative breaking. The magnetic sail would esentially have the same problem as the solar sail.
The bussard engine would definitely work, assuming the basic principle of the engine itself works. Though, I’m not sure if it would collect enough hydrogen when placed at L1. A very neat concept though, one I’d like to see happen!
If we’re using today’s technology, they’d almost certainly be the primary means. But in this hypothetical future you may be right.
You’re absolutely right, assuming the craft is on the L1 saddle point. The craft can, however, sit slightly sunward of the saddle point in a halo orbit. It wants to fall towards the sun (and enter a solar orbit) due to being on that side of L1, but you set it in the position it needs to be to balance the force of sunlight. There will be quasi-stable points in a halo orbits around the sun-facing side of L1 which could sustain a whole lot of these buggers.
KSP is great, but it only does two body physics (unless you’re using the Principia mod – never tried it). So you cannot simulate things like lagrange points there. The patched conics are a great first order teaching tool though, and KSP is great for that!
Are you actually a scientist?
Air Conditioning to mitigate climate change? That’s like dowsing a fire with lighter fluid.
And you think we’ll be able to out engineer the sun? In 250million years we will not be here guaranteed, and if somehow we make it it won’t be in any form we know as human.
Yes, I even once got a B+ in thermodynamics, decades ago. I was proud of that B+ – one of the hardest courses I’ve ever taken.
Yes, AC. It uses energy, adds heat into the total system, and you cannot fight entropy. However, you can mitigate heat gain in other places. You trade local effects for net zero global effects.
Simple example: AC running off of solar. It increases heat by decreasing albedo (solar panels are dark), but if you paint another area white, you can have a neutral effect in terms of total energy captured by the earth. But you can have a net zero heat gain and still have AC.
Obviously you’ll have a harder time balancing this equation if you’re using non-renewable energy sources.
But the fun thing is that all solar currently has a carbon cost associated with it. So as we’re trying to work our way out of this we’re also continuing to increase the carbon load. It’s a vicious cycle.
But the fun thing is that once we reach a critical point, it will go from having a positive carbon impact to a negative carbon impact. But we can never get there if we never start
It’s all about scale and infrastructure.
Yes, but if it takes a thousand years and we’re all long gone from all the positive carbon impact? I agree with you but think the narrative is dangerous. We can’t think “well in the long run”, we need to actively counter the positive carbon right now (as in this year) and increase other negative carbon policies like mass transit and reducing subsidies. “It’ll work out in the end” is what got us here.
I don’t see your point.
Building fossil fuel power infrastructure does nothing to move the needle, but building renewables does.
What are you actually proposing? Because it reads as “we shouldn’t try because any benefits or impacts are long-term”
I was wondering what the controversy was with my comment lol. I was just saying that relying solely on renewable energy and current technology to be widely developed and implemented to reach net-zero carbon will be a slow-meticulous crawl while we continue to pollute the earth with our current infrastructure (fossil fuels). We need to also continue to push for policies like more use of public transportation and stop subsidizing the oil and gas industry so people actually feel the cost associated more. People see things like bike lanes and busses/rails as a more viable option when it actually effects them. You’ll see more people walking to nearby locations or doing “greener” activity when the actual price of 8$ or more a gallon becomes a reality.
If you start telling people, “oh, well just get more panels and use AC.” They’ll take it as nothing needs to change in their habits and all the other industries are fine as they are. Much like the “recycling” program in the 80’s and 90’s was used to manipulate the public that they are responsible for all the garbage and toxins being produced.
Let me introduce you to Facebook.
Allow me to introduce you to: an abstract concept of facebook-
People, separated by thousands of miles, tap messages into their glass topped smart rocks that can then be seen by other people with smart rocks - it does this communicating with big metal trees that talk to magic caves, where millions of smart rocks think about those messages and pass them over to other magic caves by a glass wire, which in turn pass the messages to another metal tree and over to other glass topped smart rocks for people to read.
Well, how many of them actually has the vaugest idea on even small part of the mechanics of it? How many of them are just ignoring the wonders of the technology and just using it to spread hate and stupidity? Which is more dominate? The stupid part or the clever part?
And which ones are reproducing more?
Yup, that as well
Dude, shut up, I’m trying to doom scroll over here .
My gf calls me a “radical optimist” for believing in people eventually doing the right thing :)
How can you be so optimistic? With everything that’s going on in the world, I get more pessimistic everyday. At bad days, I’d just think “let just humanity perish because we just keep repeating the same horrible things over and over anyway”.
The social media echo chamber has that effect. But statistically speaking, this is humanity’s golden age. The average lifespan is up, we have instant global communication and positioning (wow!), conflict is down (take the wider view)…
Like, even if you added Ukraine and Gaza to this, they’re small compared to historical conflicts. And this graph would be even more pronounced if we normalized it as percentages against the global population – literally the last few generations have been least likely to die in conflict across all of human history.
For me its because if you zoom out, the world is a better place to live in now, than it was 1000 years ago. Progress moves in waves, and right now it definitely feels like a significant low tide, but over time the coastline keeps creeping forward.
Humanity is the only meat eating animal that has significant percentage of its population willingly avoiding eating meat and instead finding ways to obtain essential nutrients without it (need to add that I am NOT one of those animals, I’m personally waiting for lab grown meat before I obstain from death based meat, if I ever do)
Humanity by and large no longer needs to leave its sick and wounded to die because we invented technology and infrastructure to both heal, and take care of those we cant heal
We’ve progressed to the point as a species where in order to bring more prosperity to our community, we no longer have to take from other communities, and that wasnt always the case (unfortunately this is only a recent achievement, and as such, not all of our population has adapted to this, hence our current problems)
“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” – William Gibson
Same here - parts take climate change ….
Sure it’s been a long struggle with deniers and alternate reality and those purposely working against the need but it’s been even longer …
Think of the lightbulb wars! There was all the same pattern of denial, obstruction, intentional malfeasance, but we won! Lighting now uses 80% less power than before while lasting much longer! But it’s been even longer ….
I was a kid in the 1970’s so I’ve seen huge improvements in airr and water quality, toxic waste cleanup, appliance efficiency, weather proofing, ozone hole, and yes, huge improvements in climate change. Despite all the doom and gloom we are approaching peak emissions and ready to turn the corner! We do have many of the technologies we need, and just need to scale them up while working on the rest
So much of our modern economy is rooted in assumptions about where and how to mass produce food stocks. Climate change threatens all of that.
Obliterating breadbasket regions in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Iran would devastate the regional populations.
Then you’ve got the wars in places like Ukraine, Lebanon and Sudan, further strangling access to fresh food stocks.
People joke about the looming “water wars”, but consider how much Israel and the Saudis have invested in desalination and what dehydration is doing to the million plus Gaza residents who have lost access to reliable drinking water.
What happens during a substantial crop failure in the South Pacific? It isn’t as though India and China haven’t experienced massive famines in living memory.
You can argue the finer details, but it is easy to see a scenario in which a billion or more people are wiped out over the course of a generation, because of substantive shifts in access to basic living needs.
Shit, all the stuff (we in the USA) use corn for.
If we lost that one crop it would cause at least a partial collapse of the US worse than the Great Depression.
I do agree that we are very inventive, capable and imaginative when it comes to solving great problems.
Unfortunately we are also capable of becoming very destructive, ignorant, selfish and absolutely brutal to one another especially under a lot of stress and anxiety.
My greatest fear in the coming decades is mass migration and entire populations of people moving to places where they won’t be welcome, and people in places where everyone is relocating to worried that it will engage endanger their survival. The biggest problems we’ll face won’t be environmental… they will be political and social.
Wealthy countries will generally be okay, comparatively. The rest of the world will be the 2/3rds that suffer. That’s always been the case.
The United States is a wealthy country. It’s on the precipice of political and social disaster WITHOUT the above described problems occurring. The idea that wealthy countries will be fine seems wildly optimistic. Perhaps you meant wealthy people.
Yeah, and compared to Benin, it’s comparatively doing fine.
This and I keep repeating this: don’t fight the global warming, let’s think how to live with it.
I mean, still fight the global warming, but also think how to live with it.
Yeah totally, fighting it also helps buy more time and minimise the “too fast” part
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
While we are going to have to adapt, it’s much cheaper and easier to stop making it worse
The poorest half of the population will die