I think when the solution is “built a giant railgun on the moon and also a system to catch millions of tonnes of railgun shots a million miles from Earth,” it’s pretty reasonable to say that you’ve strayed outside the realm of solutions we can have ready on time.
At the end of the day, none of the things you mentioned are things we can actually reliably do at the moment. ESA successfully intercepted a comet a few years ago and it barely worked; your plan effectively asks us to do that but millions of times with a far smaller target and we also need to make the comets first. Oh and also once we’ve done that, we also need to assemble tens of millions of tonnes of material in space.
A railgun on the moon is a good idea for future space colonisation, but for climate change we unfortunately need to fix the problem now and definitely can’t wait for an experimental lunar megaproject to be just one component of a temporary fix.
We already have a huge stretch goal to reach for as a species. It’s on Earth, and it is powering our society without fossil fuels. We even already have tech to do the vast majority of it, and best of all once it’s done it actually is done, unlike the space shield. We still need to do it eventually even if we magic the space shield in to place tomorrow. We just seem to be collectively deciding that it’s best to kinda put it off as much as possible.
I think when the solution is “built a giant railgun on the moon and also a system to catch millions of tonnes of railgun shots a million miles from Earth,” it’s pretty reasonable to say that you’ve strayed outside the realm of solutions we can have ready on time.
At the end of the day, none of the things you mentioned are things we can actually reliably do at the moment. ESA successfully intercepted a comet a few years ago and it barely worked; your plan effectively asks us to do that but millions of times with a far smaller target and we also need to make the comets first. Oh and also once we’ve done that, we also need to assemble tens of millions of tonnes of material in space.
A railgun on the moon is a good idea for future space colonisation, but for climate change we unfortunately need to fix the problem now and definitely can’t wait for an experimental lunar megaproject to be just one component of a temporary fix.
We already have a huge stretch goal to reach for as a species. It’s on Earth, and it is powering our society without fossil fuels. We even already have tech to do the vast majority of it, and best of all once it’s done it actually is done, unlike the space shield. We still need to do it eventually even if we magic the space shield in to place tomorrow. We just seem to be collectively deciding that it’s best to kinda put it off as much as possible.