Is This Giant Parasol Tethered to an Asteroid the Global Warming Solution We’ve Been Looking For?
Climate change is here. As we continue to set records with regards to planetary temperatures a lot of people are looking at new and wild ways to cool the planet. And this one has got to be one of the wildest.
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00:00 [Music]
00:03 Climate change is here, and as we continue to set records with regards to planetary temperatures,
00:08 a lot of people are looking at new and wild ways to cool the planet. And this one has got to be
00:12 one of the wildest. This is the solar shield concept from astronomers at the University of
00:17 Hawaii. Not an entirely new idea, but this twist must be. Solar shields are meant to block some of
00:23 the sun's rays, and if positioned just right, they could help mitigate some of the planet's warming.
00:27 However, solar shields have a fatal flaw. They can be blown away by the very solar rays they're
00:32 supposed to block. And that's where this new idea comes in. Astronomer Isvan Sapudi suggests we
00:37 capture an asteroid, get it into the L1 Lagrangian point, and tether a solar shield to it. At that
00:42 point in space, the sun and the Earth's gravitational pull are equal, meaning the whole thing would
00:47 remain stable out there. And at that point, the whole thing would only need to weigh 3.5 million
00:52 tons, which sounds like a lot, but is a hundred times less than what experts have estimated it
00:56 would need to weigh historically. And only 1% of that mass would be the shield we would actually
01:00 need to launch into space. The rest is just the asteroid's natural mass. This method is also
01:05 scalable, allowing us to block as little as 0.24%, up to 1.7% of the sun's rays, enough to cool the
01:13 planet safely.