To reduce global warming, an astronomer has proposed build a sun shield to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth, this being combined with a tethered and captured asteroid as a counterweight.
Engineering studies using this approach could begin now to create a viable design that could mitigate climate change within decades, explains the proponent, István Szapudi, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. His work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
One of the simplest approaches to reduce global temperature is to shield the Earth from a fraction of the sunlight. This idea, called sun shieldhas been proposed before, but the sheer amount of weight needed to make a shield massive enough to balance the gravitational forces and keep it from being blown away by solar radiation pressure, makes even the lightest materials prohibitively expensive.
Szapudi’s creative solution consists of two innovations: a tethered counterweight instead of just a massive shield, making the total mass more than 100 times less, and the use of a captured asteroid as a counterweight to avoid throwing most of it. of the mass from the Earth.
“In Hawaii, many use an umbrella to block the sunlight as they walk during the day. I was thinking, what?we could do the same for Earth and thus mitigate the impending catastrophe of climate change?” said Szapudi.