Climate change keeps getting worse: 2023 was the hottest year on record, and it's not even close. Despite increasing investments in clean energy and other...
We can’t actually do that though, let alone keep it functional for the hundreds of thousands of years the earth will remain warmed by today’s CO2 emissions
This is a satellite with a surface area far larger than anything else people have ever done, in a location where you need to use energy to stay there. It’s not going to be some simple launch-and-forget thing.
Many small ones implies a huge and ongoing launch schedule.
And no, if we do this, we’re not going to stop burning fossil fuels, or remove significant amounts of carbon — schemes like this mostly serve as propaganda for the fossil fuels industry to create continued permission to extract and burn.
How would many small ones imply a huge and oncoming launch schedule, especially if you are using an L1 array? It’s much easier to repair and refuel a field of cubesats already on site than to get them there in the first place after all.
Moreover, why would orbital shades and or mirrors mean that we keep buring fossil fuels? We would be near net zero before such an array would being anywhere near complete enough to compensate for anything, and more to the point such an array would not serve as continued permission for fossil fuel companies, as it does nothing to address the majority of ecological effects such as ocean acidification.
The whole point of such an array is to save tens of millions of lives which will otherwise be ended by the damage already done long before they were even born by blunting more violent storms and reversing sea level rise, not exactly a carbon offset.
Because they’re going to fail and drift out of position over time.
Remember here: we don’t have any real history of maintaining stuff up there. It goes up, and is used until it fails, and then replaced. There are a couple exceptions in low earth orbit, but that’s it.
These things are by definition light sails that can move around just by tilting by a tenth of a degree, they wouldn’t use fuel for station keeping.
Even then, docking to a dead spacecraft and towing it to a nearby repair facility isn’t exactly a great feat beyond our imagination, even if haveing the cubesats slowly return to the station for repair after one gyro fails but before the other redundant ones do fails. Building such an array in the first place requires the sort of space infrastructure necessary to maintain it.
Moreover I find the appeal to having never tried something before to be a silly argument to bring into a climate discussion. After all, we don’t have any real history of running a large scale grid on renewables like solar and wind, so why bother testing or even researching it? Better to stick to powering things with coal and natural gas.
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We can’t actually do that though, let alone keep it functional for the hundreds of thousands of years the earth will remain warmed by today’s CO2 emissions
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This is a satellite with a surface area far larger than anything else people have ever done, in a location where you need to use energy to stay there. It’s not going to be some simple launch-and-forget thing.
And it the need won’t be done in 200 years. CO2 concentrations will remain elevated a lot longer than that.
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Many small ones implies a huge and ongoing launch schedule.
And no, if we do this, we’re not going to stop burning fossil fuels, or remove significant amounts of carbon — schemes like this mostly serve as propaganda for the fossil fuels industry to create continued permission to extract and burn.
How would many small ones imply a huge and oncoming launch schedule, especially if you are using an L1 array? It’s much easier to repair and refuel a field of cubesats already on site than to get them there in the first place after all.
Moreover, why would orbital shades and or mirrors mean that we keep buring fossil fuels? We would be near net zero before such an array would being anywhere near complete enough to compensate for anything, and more to the point such an array would not serve as continued permission for fossil fuel companies, as it does nothing to address the majority of ecological effects such as ocean acidification.
The whole point of such an array is to save tens of millions of lives which will otherwise be ended by the damage already done long before they were even born by blunting more violent storms and reversing sea level rise, not exactly a carbon offset.
Because they’re going to fail and drift out of position over time.
Remember here: we don’t have any real history of maintaining stuff up there. It goes up, and is used until it fails, and then replaced. There are a couple exceptions in low earth orbit, but that’s it.
These things are by definition light sails that can move around just by tilting by a tenth of a degree, they wouldn’t use fuel for station keeping.
Even then, docking to a dead spacecraft and towing it to a nearby repair facility isn’t exactly a great feat beyond our imagination, even if haveing the cubesats slowly return to the station for repair after one gyro fails but before the other redundant ones do fails. Building such an array in the first place requires the sort of space infrastructure necessary to maintain it.
Moreover I find the appeal to having never tried something before to be a silly argument to bring into a climate discussion. After all, we don’t have any real history of running a large scale grid on renewables like solar and wind, so why bother testing or even researching it? Better to stick to powering things with coal and natural gas.
deleted by creator