A wild idea to combat global warming suggests creating an artificial ring of small particles or spacecrafts around Earth to shade the tropics and moderate climate extremes.
There would be side effects, proponents admit. An effective sunlight-scattering particle ring would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example.
And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. Deploying tiny spacecraft would come at a relative bargain: a mere $500 billion tops.
But the idea, detailed today in the online version of the journal Acta Astronautica, illustrates that climate change can be battled with new technologies, according to one scientist not involved in the new work.
If you're going to dream, dream big I always say, but before we do this, can we solve air pollution in the LA basin by putting giant fans on the mountains? And maybe we can clean up Chernobyl by genetically engineering some sort of really big lizard that likes to eat amazingly radioactive material. I mean, I really love this plan, I just think we have some higher priorities at the moment.
# posted by John Schroeder @ 6/28/2005 05:35:00 AM
