At 08:29 AM 12/21/01 -0600, Chuck Kuecker wrote:
>What ever happened to the idea of putting screens in orbit to shut off a
>portion of the sun's contribution?
We were talking about L1 the other day--would it be feasible to mass-drive
batches of fine dust off the moon's surface to Earth-L1 to act as a cloudy
sun filter, calibrated to drop global insolation by some agreed amount, 1%
or 0.1% or whatever? You'd top it up now and then as it got gravitationally
dispersed. I started thinking that this was wasteful; much neater to build
a meshy solar grid there and microwave power back to earth. But that would
be a humungous engineering task, pre-nanotech. Putting up a sooty umbrella
mightn't be that hard, using a robot dig-it-up-and-hurl-if-out system.
Damien Broderick
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