Space Shades: Humanity's Last Hope | Answers With Joe
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ส.ค. 2020
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Space shades are often touted as our last hope if our climate change situation gets too out of control. If we can't keep carbon emissions down, we could just block the sun. I hear this option get thrown out very casually, but I've never seen a realistic look at what that would look like. How big would it need to be? How much would it cost? Wound it even work? So I decided to take a serious deep dive.
Here's the link to the paper by professor Roger Angel:
www.pnas.org/content/103/46/1...
Animations and shade designs by Kimi Talvitie: Find more of his work on Twitter: @kimitalvitie
Ethan Siegel's take on Starts With A Bang:
/ ask-ethan-can-we-build...
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The future’s so bright, we’re gonna need shades...
Fifty shades of them
I shall be your eyes. My sight is yours. What needs revealing? Let's see. I'll look into it. All shall be revealed. I go unseen. More souls for the master. Die! Let screams fill the air. Feel my wrath. For the master. The damned return. Glory to the scourge. I'm but a shadow of my former self. What I do in death echoes in eternity. Death is it's own reward. I'm having a mid-death crisis. I ain't got nobody. I'm invisible, gaseous and deadly.
@@fajaradi1223 lol
@@DarthNVious Channeling Alfred Bester much?
@@rcknbob1 Not really. No.
"I forgot what year it was, haha we're f*cked" ... Can't wait for the end of year memes about 2020
If find it oddly optimistic to assume we will still be there for the end of the year, we still have roughly 6 months to go and so many things that could go wrong :D
@@thisflyingpotato4227 Only 5 more to go
Yes, and hindsight turns out to be 20/20
I go with... 2020, The year that let’s just never mention it again.
You mean end of time?
7:15 Actually, this is where I pound my fist on the desk and shout "ASTEROID MINING!!"
I... I really wanna work in space.
A verified TH-camd with only 11 likes? Don’t mind if I do.
@@dakotamahlau-heinert3529 Haha! There seems to be a pretty big gap between the space community and the music community. 😅
Black Gryph0n to the moon!
Hell yea!!! Best of two worlds music and science!!
Absolutely. Lunar Starship to set up the Moon based infrastructure to catch the -ten million tons- hundred million tons or so of resources from Earth crossing asteroid needed to build the shade. I doubt we'd need more than dust to do the job and given the unstable L1 dynamics the biggest "problem" of it wanting to dissipate is really a feature not a bug. If for some reason we'd need to make it dissipate faster a few square miles of mirrors on the Moon ought to vaporize it fairy quick as well as provide part of an asteroid defense.
23:49-24:17 Poor Joe probably had a breakdown after that
That is pretty much a summation of the entire ball game right there.
Was thinking the entire time. Nuclear war. He can't be serious 😆
@@rrpearsall Yeah.
Not Nuclear War
Not Asteroid Strike
Not CME
Not Global Warming
Not GRB
Not Aliens
A virus is the end of humanity. 😢
The shades became unfeasable when you made them 1mm thick. A 1mm sheet of aluminium is a baking tray.
IKAROS, a prototype solar sail launched in 2010 has a sail thickness of 7.5 micrometers. This takes us down to 5 launches a day.
If you can get your aluminium foil down to 50nm (a thickness that some companies are selling today), then you need 150 launches, total. This is looking expensive, but doable.
But still, why make an entire global mega project when we could just not ruin our planet in the first place.
Something that's very flexible would work as well if it was fun. If you had a small soda can size unit with the magnet worker and a small solar panel facing the sun, and then on the other side fit expanded and shot out an extremely thin membrane that was a large desk, and then it just started spinning really quickly using the magnetorquer (it would probably take a week or two to spin up even with it's low mass due to the extremely weak magnetic forces)
It would keep the disc rigid
I bet you could make silver even thinner since it is more ductile and it's so much more reflective. Denser though so I don't know if that would offest the benefits.
@@mojoo215 Too late, we would have had to done something decades ago for that.
You beat me to it. Also using these sails you can fold them for transport, and unfold them at L1 by rotation, giving a much larger area per satellite.
Combined with a big reduction in CO2 emissions this might be an option, as this reduces the needed shade.
There was a lot of shade thrown in this one.
My supervisor started throwing shade after she sucked my Joe Scott and I never called her back.
@Audiocronic Reducing my carbon emissions one joke at a time.
I appreciate you lol
Prescott Roman you can always find me stroking my Joe Scott in the comment section.
No sun = no life
Sun is god
"A project like this could bring us all together". You're adorable.
I can’t even count how many times I’ve burst out laughing at the absurd numbers of zeros all over this video! Thanks Joe!
i wish i found happiness as easily as you found it in this video
"you must be new here" proceeds to nicely explain. - This is why I love you Joe
I love that I actually did say L1, me n joe are best friends now
Same
I said, L... äh,... L-something.
So he might not like me as much
I said L2...
Yeah, I’m need video evidence for that one chief, Por favor.
I had no idea what he was talking about. That's why my dumb ass is here watching this.
Nice. This was a thorough introduction to this subject for folks like me who knew nothing of such ideas.
A fungal mycelium mat. Specifically one that grows in a vacuum, loves radiation and photosynthesizes for food. The rocket you used to get it out there would be the anchor point, it would be self repairing, and if we figured out how to tap into its energy production it could feed us energy. Basically The shade would grow itself, if it got too big just send it to another planet and start seeding the galaxy, then grow a new shade.
Tell Fungi Perfecti at fungi.com.
Amazing people.
awesome lol
How would it grow in mass? Maybe I'm missing something.
I also have the same problem with the Alien from 'alien'. Did it bulk up on rats that weren't shown? It went from size of kitten to 8 foot without eating anything it seems.
@@markc7955 you’d have to create a fungi that can photosynthesize, and uses light and radiation for food. There aren’t any fungi on earth that can photosynthesize, so it would have to be lab made. Or something similar. It’s entirely theoretical. But I figure if you can grow a shade it would be fungal seeing as the largest single fungus is like 3.5 miles by 3.5 miles.
@Z T I do get the idea. But it would need to take on mass. Even random hydrogen atoms would do. But there aren't many in a vacuum. Radiation and light don't have mass as such (light does a bit but you couldn't use it to gain mass)
"I think this qualifies as a megaproject"
*Simon Whisler senses are tingling*
Isaac Arthur whispers, "Amateurs..."
Negitoro Is Best Ship alLEGENDly!
Kurzgesagt chortles 'hobbyists'
I've always wondered who Simon Whistler's mother was... (Whistler's Mother?)
*Allegendly*
The moment Joe started talking about people coming together I thought he lost it , am glad you are still sane, much love
ROFL. I was thinking the same.
How to get high hopes and then shatter them in just 14 minutes !
I am quite impressed with Mr.Joe here since he did it perfectly in this time frame !
what if we put stratospheric shades near glaciers.
tied to the ground with cables and held up by blimps (vacuum blimps, not helium).
Hi Joe. FYI. My brother in law who works at NASA designs and builds machines that measure the mass and age of the universe and has also drawn up plans for this space shade. If you would like to speak with him directly about this (or any other topic), let me know. I may be able to put you in touch with him.
That was the most funny depressing reality check ever.
it was wrong though.
@@FruitingPlanet how?
@@birdsamora9925
Here is another comment where i explainded what was wrong in the video and how it would work in reality:
"The problem with your results is, that your base assumptions are extremly far off, the foil would be at most in the lowish micrometers thickness, but most definently in the nanometer range, most likely be made out of aluminium, or a thin film polymer coated with aluminium (like a rescue blanket but thinner(for reference a rescue blanket has a thickness of ~12 micrometers)).
Using D= 8 m sattelites is impractical too, in reality they would be comparable to solar sail designs, the lower end is around 1 km^2 possibly even 10 or more km^2, a material that could be used allready is aluminized 2 µm Kapton film witch was developed for solar sails or alternativly Mylar.
Another option is thin film aluminium ranging from 30-100 nm with a added tensile structure for stability.
The sattelites would most likely be somewhat parabolicfocusing the light on a small reflector, that diverts the light in at least three directions tangential to the earth-moon system, this could ofc also be used to harvest an insane amount of energy.
The expenses of this would most likely be somewhere in the range of at least 10^11 likely 10^12 up to 10^13(trillions) if we can use Starship at ~2 million per launch, definently possible and cheaper then the consequences of climate change.
*Additional references:
One square kilometer sail would weigh around 3t and at most 15t, to make it easy we go with 10 for an high estimate, that means 15 per launch so around -350 billion to launch them all in ~170k launches thats ~47 launches a day over 10 years which is actually feasible.
Aluminium cost currently ~1.7$ per kg(so 1700$ per t)
At 3t we can launch 50 with every launch thats ~52k launches so ~14 launches a day over 10 years and ~100 billion for launches, the mass would be 7,799,073t for the 3t version, so even if we go with the most expensive(as in pure aluminum), the material cost for it would be "just" ~133 billion [Aluminium cost currently ~1.7$ per kg(so 1700$ per t)].
The 10t version would then have a material cost of ~440 billion."
@@FruitingPlanet oh ok makes sense
@@FruitingPlanet without taking into account the potential of using even more efficient launching methods, like the future starship super heavy, or even building them on space or the moon which would drive costs even further down
You: "It'll take 7914 years..."
Llyod Christmas (Dumb & Dumber) : "So you're telling me there's a chance."
Just move the earth with gravity... good lord.. so easy... The gravity will move the earth slowly outward at .01% every 100 years so in 1000 years we will have moved out 1% of our current distance from the sun.. Then destroy asteroid and live great for another million years before doing it again.
Man I wish humans would come together. Could you imagine what we could accomplish??
A tribal species trying to be a global species...
The sad fact is that we have a rather bad track record of unintended consequences when interfering with nature thinking we're making things better.
Yeah I can imagine one of the shade panels diverting off and it heads to the sun and fucking explodes resulting in a solar flare that'll destroy Mercury making the Mercurians angry and plot a revenge against Earth.
@@despacitodaniel801 - Or more simply, messing up oceanic currents with detrimental effects for most of the Northern Hemisphere... 👍
@@BassandoForte yeah that too I guess
"Meddling with nature" is why there's 7.5Bn of us, and we live into our 70s. Until we mastered nature, we were a fringe species on the edge of extinction.
The very nature of being Homo Sapiens is bending nature to our whim, from the taming of fire onwards.
@@bcubed72 Ths guy gets it.
I too would use EM-drives, because that technology is already kind of shady.
lol
Smiles
Since you're spending that much money, move some asteroids to L1. Bonus: you can mine the asteroids and maybe set up a manufacturing center.
Build a rotating habitat into them while you are there! That way you can mine the asteroids, manufacture shades and have an off world colony.
Even Ceres our largest Asteroid wouldn't even cover those dimensions let alone trying to re-arrange it's orbit.
@@olliegueret2963 your thinking in terms of diameter, not in terms of area.
In terms of area, we could the smaller asteroids and blot out the entire sun
Federal Reserve will pay for it.
I said the exact same thing! I didn't see your comment until now though. I think that this is the best "solution" for the shade problem, because not only would you invest a lot of money into this development, but you could potentially make back more money than what you invested into it. For example (quick google search) "The 16 Psyche asteroid has so much precious heavy metals, it's estimated to be worth $10,000 quadrillion. A 140-mile wide, potato-shaped asteroid is so rich with precious heavy metals, it's estimated to be worth $10,000 quadrillion."
Of course we would need a network of asteroids, no single asteroid would be able to cover enough of the sunlight, and they would need constant propulsion to keep them from being pushed out of the L1 point by cosmic rays, but the L1 point is much closer to the earth than the asteroid belt is so it would help reduce costs on mining the asteroids while providing a solution for the climate change here on earth. Also, you could possibly convert some of the resources you mine out of the asteroids into fuel for the rockets that would be working on keeping the asteroids in place.
I have no idea how much this would cost of course, but I think we could essentially launch "disposable" rockets that their sole purpose would be to store massive amounts of fuel and launch and connect with the asteroids and then embed themselves into the asteroids mantel and act as the asteroid's propulsion system. It would require a lot of effort to align them properly, maybe make it where the motors themselves can rotate and be angled regardless of the angle that the rocket is embed into the asteroid. Then with enough rockets embedded into an asteroid, you should be able to control them enough to get them into place at L1.
You're awesome, Joe!
One thing that occurs to me is the notion of some self-replicating and/or 3D printing tech, which would enable the shade to 'grow' itself out at L1. Just send up raw matter (e.g., Lunar regolith or asteroid stuff), and set it spooling itself up (and repairing itself in the event of an impact).
The automated moon shade production plant seems like an amazing idea for a catastrophe movie. We start it up, then earth orbit hits kessler syndrome and we can't control it anymore. And automated moon base keeps throwing us more and more shade. Cue winter is coming.
I'd watch that.
All because some intern programmer hardcoded a constant of 25% instead of 2.5%.
LOL "I forgot the year that we're in" 🤣
Dead hahahaha 😂😂
Joe: Where between the Sun and the Earth could you put a thing like this.
Me half-voice: L1
Joe: A lot of you out there were like "L1!"
Me: *freaks out*
Congratulations on knowing a thing ;-)
And did you calculate the force required to keep it there against the solar wind?
Answer: Approx 100,000 lbs of CONTINUOUS force evenly distributed along its entire ultra thin surface to prevent flexing. Does Joe have an answer for this?
@@thecarman3693 tacking?
@@revwroth3698 Good answer!
@@dominicdelprincipe2583 it sounded stupid to me when I said it, but really if you calculated the drag and offset it from the L1 point a little way towards the sun it should even out like normal force. It's not exactly the same as tacking a boat but the analogy stands...
Another idea would be to make a sunshade out of grapheme , which can be an atom thick to save weight and reduce launches. But you’ll still have many of the problems mentioned.
What we really need to do is start taking care of the world we have.
The statistics are pretty damning and what really grinds my gears is the usual Westener attitude that they essentially just need to buy a Tesla and a Fairphone. Large parts of the world are still undeveloped, which is why they don't produce tons of greenhouse gases.
When was the last time someone said "thankfully billions of people live in poverty and we demand it to stay that way"? Thats how fucked we really are.
Of course we still need to do something since the predictions are only gonna get worse but some crazy geoengineering projects might be the last rational option left.
Did anyone else used to think that Joe played the character professor Newt in pacific rim?
Nah that’s ridiculous
1973 Global Cooling: "Sprinkling coal dust onto the snow"
2020 Global Warming:"Sprinkling reflective dust into the upper stratosphere"
Kansas: "All we are is dust in the wind".
Yes, exactly
Launch Kansas.
I'd say you nailed it friend. Good work.
Just wait for the next time Demorats need a new doomsday bullshit excuse, can't wait to hear from their next hoax.
@Timothy McCaskey earth will be gone too
Futurists: OK were gonna use an army of autonomous robots to fix the environment
From the moon
With rail guns
Do not forget the (space robot) hookers!
If we got AI to work for us from the moon creating a black light that stretches from 'A,B,C,D,E... ect' in bulbs, just maybe we would be able to make such a powerful shade that the sun rays are turned down 1% if not 2% by blocking the heat from the Sun we very well could start a moon base where the AI is controlled
Right. Autonomous robots with railguns, what could go wrong?
@@chapo335 not sure what you're talking about. it sounds like you don't know how a blacklight works.
Powered by nuclear fusion! and the internet of things! Oh and we're gonna use SCRUM too!
Not sure how I missed this one. I might have been preoccupied with the end times. Your “Oh god. We’re f**ked.” line spoke the mind of the nation!
Nice...your episodes always seems to give me a reason to smile. Good work, indeed.
"I survived 2020 and the only thing I could afford to buy myself was this T-shirt."
@Aiden noone will
Congratulations, you survived July and reached level 8 of 2020 :D
And that t shirt was made in china by slave labor. Ironic
When I saw "independence day" for the first time. As the alien craft appears, for some reason, my first thought was "who Paid for that ?
Its a good point, although they apparently go from planet to planet draining them of resources and moving on. So presumably, all those other planets paid for it.
Those aliens were pretty stupid in hindsight. They would have fared much better if they picked a planet without living beings on it
@@TestTackle or if they didn't use Windows 98 as their Hive Operative System, compatible with the computer virus those humans made
Someone with a BIG POCKET ! .
@@mindblow7617 It would have had to been Windows 95. Independence Day came out in '96.
only recently started seeing your videos. this was a great one, glad to know i'm a year late to know were gonna die! haha. also took a look at your merch...truly the best merch designs I have seen from a youtuber!
I swear he's always wearing the coolest shirts.
he has like 5 shirts that he cycles through from what I've seen.
Yup and you can buy them on his store website... its pretty cool actually.
Reminds me of that need from big bang theory show.
When he said it I was just thinking “Lagrange point, Lagrange point”, referring to L1 of course. It was pretty epic to be a part of that mass, independent conclusion. 😂😌
Biggest problem with using L1 is it's not stable and it's still an orbit. The shade isn't staying stationary relative to the earth and at that distance... that's hit or miss whether the shadow is even on the earth.
I was thinking L2. :)
where there is a will theres a way, no one anwser will be THE anwser like energy most true answers will be a piecemeal system approach.
@@psilynt1 Do you know anything about Lagrange points at all? They're defined as the stable orbits of 3 objects, which means that if L1 is a Lagrange point, its position relative to Earth does not change. It starts between Earth and Sun, it stays between Earth and Sun. The "between Earth and Sun" literally means that the shadow will be on Earth, so none of what you said makes any sense at all. There is literally no other place we could use for this, other than L1.
@@yto6095 It's still an orbit. Not a stationary (relative to the two bodies) position. Do you know anything about lissajous orbits? Do you know that the JWST which will be at L2 (always in earth's shadow) will use solar panels? It's not as simple as you think it is.
Iron fertilization to increase phytoplankton in the ocean is still my favorite geo engineering.
Oceanic iron fertilization would certainly be one of the multiple solutions needed to affect rising CO2-levels.
Great video!! I have a point/question though:
The reason the equator is so hot and the poles are so cold is the earth is a sphere and the atmosphere refracts a large portion of the suns energy at the poles and absorbs significantly more energy at the equator. Given this fact, the area you need to be calculating for shouldn't be derived from the entire diameter of the earth, but a far more complex equation that takes this factor of refraction/absorption into account. The sunshade would need to cast a relatively small shadow near the equator (depending on time of year) and only for the hottest parts of the day (say for instance 11am-1pm). This is the area that absorbs more energy per unit of surface area than anywhere else on earth, so it would make far more sense to target our shade there.
Also, I would imagine that the majority of the energy that we get from the sun comes from the part of the sun nearest to us. That is not to say that we don't get energy from the "periphery" of the sun, but I would imagine we get more from the side of the sun directly facing us than anywhere else on the sphere. This is well outside my wheelhouse, so I could be wrong. It just seems like both of these factors would affect just how large we would need to make our sunshade.
23:40 i hear music, i feel emotion......i laughed so hard i almost lost consciousness.....brilliant !
A layer of the James Webb Space Telescope sunshield is 0.025mm thick. 1mm is to much. I think we would launch them as big rolls that unroll at L1, supported by individual little service modules. It would still be a multi-trillion dollar mega project, but not quadrillion.
Edit: Of course, like you said in the video, it's a lot more disireable to not ruin the planet in the frist place
That's where I disagree as well. Mylar and other thin foils spread between lightweight framing would be ideal. That lowers number of launches, cost of material, and all the other numbers that go crazy based on those initial assumptions.
also, we could just make a central tube satellite with propellant and communication systems and just roll the shades up into multiple cylinders until the star ship is full. Then, once it reaches L1, it could start spinning and roll out the long patches of shades like a giant flower, stretching them with the rotational forces.
Production would have to be on the moon, at least the heavier stuff. (edit, oh he went through that)
Anyway, I wonder how well the satellites would manage to survive out there... If they can't, then you'd have to make a debris cloud.
Yes and that sunshade is ridicoulusly complex to engineer. Any saving in materials would likely be eaten up by the added engineering complexity & associated costs. Plus it would be much, much slower to manufactur, which from Joe's video is imo the worst deal-breaker.
Much, much easier to mass-produce something at least in the hundreds of microns thick as opposed to a few dozens. And yet envn then...
Reading guy furman and Midnights reply's hit all the points I was thinking of as well.
A simple Mylar roll, with ridged end pieces would be simple(ish) to manufacturer. Attach Ion thrust to each end to retain tautness and positioning. As a new ribbon is transported, connect the ends and relocate that thruster to the end of the second ribbon and so on and so on. If the ribbon ends could be made to interlock vertically as well, the resulting rectangle could be held by a total of 4 thrusters, one ant each corner.
As thrusters would be detachable, replacements could be sent as needed.
But.... Lets start with what we can fix right now.
The leader of my nation has chosen to promote the oil and coal industry while removing the financial incentives to advance clean energy studies and sales.
Want to make a difference right now? Get trump out of office and the US back on the right path.
"I forgot what year we're in!" LOL.
It's true though, apparently "all lives matter" is a racist statement now.
I know.. It makes literally no sense.
@@Axodus Saying "Black lives matter" doesn't detract from anyone else. It's the fact that everyone else's seems to matter except for black lives. Saying "all lives matter" dismisses the fact that there are very real racial problems here in America that need to be addressed. By improving black lives, you improve all lives.
> "It's the fact that everyone else's seems to matter except for black lives. Saying "all lives matter" dismisses the fact that there are very real racial problems here in America that need to be addressed"
You just begged the question, that's a logical fallacy, you've failed to prove of any racial inequalities against black lives in your comment yet you state it's a fact that there are very real racial problems.
No. Your argument isn't logically sound at all. There is no current systemic racism against blacks in America, AT ALL.
But yes, I do agree, there are very real racial problems, but against Asians, not blacks, Asians aren't even treated like they're minorities, they're less likely to be accepted into college than white people with the SAME grades, despite being a minority, democrats can't even apply their racist minority laws equally across minorities, it's illogical and wrong.
You wanna know what's even worse? A white/asian person might not be hired for a job specifically because of their skin color, and it's disgusting. A white/asian person might have their opinion ignored because they're white/asian. A white/asian person could lose their job with no safety net like a black person would have.
But I do slightly agree, there is quite a bit of systemic racism, against whites and asians, not blacks.
Blacks are the truly privileged people in this country.
What is Privilege?
1) Privilege is wearing $200 sneakers when you’ve never had a job.
2) Privilege is wearing $300 Beats headphones while living on public assistance.
3) Privilege is having a Smartphone with a Data plan, which you receive no bill for.
4) Privilege is living in public subsidized housing where you don’t have a utility or phone bill and where rising property taxes, rents and energy costs have absolutely no effect on the amount of food you can put on your table, which is largely covered by Government Food Stamps.
5) Privilege is having free health insurance for you and your family that's paid for by working taxpayers who often can't afford proper health coverage for their own families.
6) Privilege is having multiple national organizations promoting and protecting just your race alone -- that are subsidized by federal tax dollars.
7) Privilege is having access to a national college fund that supports only one race.
8) Privilege is having a television network that supports only one race.
9) Privilege is having most of the media news networks refuse to cover incidents wherein one race (one-eighth of the population) commits 50% of the crimes.
10) Privilege is the ability to go march against, and protest against anything that triggers you, without worrying about calling off from work and the consequences that accompany such.
11) Privilege is having as many children as you want, regardless of your employment status, and be able to send them off to daycare or pre-school you don’t pay for.
12) Privilege is being able to vote in many states without showing a driver's license, voter ID card or other credentials -- just because your race claims they should be exempt from such requirements.
13) Privilege is being able to riot, loot, commit arson and tear down historic monuments without consequences -- just because you don't like folks such as Columbus, U. S. Grant or even Lincoln.
14) Privilege is being able to get into almost any college of your choosing based on your race, not your grades or merit.
15) Privilege is having most of your life paid for by working men and women that actually require jobs to live unlike you.
16) Privilege is being able to kill someone and have the media cover it up for you, stating it as self-defense, and making up 'facts' which are later dis-proven, and STILL being protected despite that.
This was fantastic! I was thinking perhaps of a much thinner material like Mylar, which is used for balloons. It's only .002 inches or 0.0508 mm thick. Using Joe's analysis, I calculated we'd need like 400 Washington Monuments of material moved to the L1 point to construct an array made of cellular Mylar as you can imagine with bubble wrap. This would have to be sourced on the moon with the synthesis of the polymers from yeast vats perhaps. Are inflatable solar panels a thing yet?
We could net up some asteroids that are traveling close to L1. When we have enough material there, you can start shaving the asteroids to make more shade material. As far as the solar energy propelling it, you can keep the energy requirements low by keeping it a little closer to the sun where the gravitational gradient roughly equals the average force acting on it. You could call this point "functional L1", and would be object dependent, as a function of that object's mass to it's exposed cross section, and proportional to it's reflectivity.
I was just thinking "what the heck is he talking about?" when you started laughing and said "I forgot witch year that we're in" Hahaha just marvelous! Thanks for the great video again Joe!
Psst. Mercury is an excellent ion engine fuel. 😉
The element or the planet? lol
As long as the exhaust is not on a trajectory back to our atmosphere...
Love how this guys just shows up on other great content creators vids. Keep doin what you do Cody, we love you man
Mercury works fine but it's a bit outdated, bismuth or iodine would be the modern equivalents.
They're good as they provide stable storage and increased propellant density (also pretty cheap).
However they require additional preheating/vaporisation, adding weight and power, and if you don't fully neutralise the plume you end up slowly coating the satellite platform in propellant (solar panels are somewhat less effective when covered in iodine).
hey Cody
1 - figure out the nano tube thing in order to make a hoze that the tip goes to outter earth.
2 - pump the plastic in liquids that come out mixing and hardening making a pattern like a chicken coop net. It´s like 3d printing but pulling out to space like covering a pool....
3 - attach rockets to take it to L1.
We already use "nets"-like materials to deal with sun in gardens, here in Brazil or wherever the sun is cruel to plants. you don´t need to block it all...right?
you´re welcome
What is the shade was made outbid an memory metal? Manufactured in a way that when you apply coldor make the temp for expansion a very high and specific temp for control. So it could be folded and made small and then once in orbit artificial heater heats the metal which forces back to the original shape it was manufactured in? I’ve seen a piece of wire crumpled into a small ball and then heated and it went back to a straight. Maybe it could be a woven mesh that way it can expand back easier and also allow for small holes in the mesh for the solar wind to dissipate. Idk just a thought
23:50.... I'm thinking "he's going to say "we're ******"...."
Yep, you said it.
What? Humanity bonding together to save the world? We are f**ked. Big time!
@@francomuscellini1744 👍✊
had me going for a few seconds 🤣
Ah my daily dose of existential dread for the future. Nice break from studying!
We all need to use that dread to turn it into left wing political advocacy. We're gonna need a lot of political will world wide to complete the mega-project that is defeating climate change. And right now fascism, authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism are on the rise across the planet. If people like Trump or Bolsonaro or Erdogan or Putin keep being put into power, humanity is doomed to devolve into literally Mad Max.
@@somedudeok1451 Honestly i'd take the left wing part out of it.
The fact that climate change is considered politically left is one of the major problems of this entire thing. The left and the right HATE each other more than ever and lumping it in with one side only makes sure the other wants nothing to do with it.
Honestly, if trump said climate change was real and needed to be stopped the right suddenly wouldnt have any of the scepticism a lot of them show. And besides, plenty of well thinking educated people ARE rightwing and dont deny this shit.
Mistaken Rants yeah true it’s too bad we keep putting these people into power
@Mistaken Rants Yeah I think trump is a fine president, but him not caring about climate change is definitely his biggest mistake. I’m sure he knows it’s real because his cabinet members that deal with natural resources and agriculture believe in it and they have explained it to him but he doesn’t care because at best he might live at best another 30 years if he’s lucky.
@@mistrants2745 There are definitely conservatives who are worried about climate change. However, it simply is the case that right-leaning people are more likely to ignore climate change. It comes with the anti-intellectualism that is built in to their world view to a smaller or larger extent, depending on what type of right-winger you are talking about. You will never through logic convince a fascist to start caring about climate change and if they already do, then their solutions will likely be horrible and ineffective. Please stop pretending like climate change is not a political issue. There is a reason why most left-wing people realize the dangers of it, while most right-wing people do not. For the same reason that most lefties are not flat-earthers or anti-maskers or anti-vaxxers, while right-wingers are. A person's political opinion simply does correlate with their ability to correctly analyse a given complex situation.
I really love your analogy joe your fun to watch very enlightening
For some reason this just reminds me of the movie Sunshine which was a very good Sci-Fi/Horror movie. If you haven't seen it you really should. That would be a good episode too, what to do when the Sun is losing power and becoming dimmer and dimmer.
Even if this was practicable, what would the effect of reduced photosynthesis be? Wouldn't that just compound the problem of CO2 in the atmosphere, offsetting any advantages?
I've never seen a study that attempts such a low amount of shade. Most studies range from 60% to 90% shade that I've seen. At those numbers there are significant changes. 2-6 week later blooming, less biomass production, and sometimes a failure to regrow after snipping. I'm a biology major, but not a botanist, so I won't claim to be any expert, but based on the studies I've seen and adding a touch of personal analysis and thought, I have a hard time believing that a 2% reduction in light intensity would have any significant negative effects. Plants are pretty damn resilient, for the most part. They have to deal with shade from clouds which is more than 2%. They have to deal with a change in the Sun's energy output through its shorter 11 year cycles. 2% just seems like way too low a number to have any last effect on them. Also, if you're worried about the loss of plants decreasing CO2 conversion, then I'd be more worried about logging, tbh.
@@Sothas - interesting and thoughtful. Thanks for the response.
I think you'd probably have significantly more changes due to temperature change. You would be affecting the temperature for plants outside of the range which is what we've been observing with warning. I somewhat doubt that a 2% difference in photosynthesis would make a significant difference but I could be wrong.
Hey @Southas and @Ryan Witschger , after a quick search, it's pretty easy to find a fair bit of academic research which sets out the deleterious effects of reduced light on plants (and other life forms such as bacteria); to wit (as an example) "Low light was shown to substantially affect the agronomic traits of plants and inhibit physiological metabolic processes, including photosynthesis and antioxidant characteristics, as well as carbon and nitrogen fixation. It causes slow growth, decrease of leaf weight and flower bud number. Furthermore, this stressor reduces sugar and starch contents in eggplant, grape and rice ..." Of course, most of the research is done with significant decreases in available light (25%, 50%, 75% less light). That said, I'd be surprised if a constant and permanent reduction in light hitting the earth didn't have some kind of effect. I'm not sure why it wouldn't. I guess plants would eventually evolve to compensate - and food crops could be modified/selectively bred to adjust to lower light - but that takes time.
In theory, you can just filter out the Infrared, which plants don't use, or the green light, which they cannot use, because, you know, chlorophyl is green...
Rather than a shade, you would use a filter or a mirror, and then reflect all that excess energy onto a space based solar farm. huge amounts of energy, all year round, without intermittency issues.
Remember kids, only good place for solar on Earth is a few hundred km above it...
oh i know, lets just plant trees and live like we arent selfish 🤔
AHAHAHAHAHA that seems even more impossible than tuning Kazakhstan into a giant shade
Impossible, it's human nature to be selfish
@Arkady yup, plus more trees are cut down than planted, the team trees project was a scam.
Thank God for "selfishness" of all these greedy capitalists that we invented the most incredible climate control system on the planet to make videos like these totally irrelevant. Last time I checked the hotter it gets the more life there is. Just a little um, you know SCIENCE from the last 2.5 billion years on this planet.
@@raffiliberty5722 wrong, hotter with carbon also means less moisture so it's more desert, so less life
I’m surprised Larry Nivea’s Ringworld was never mentioned, as the idea of artificial sun shades appears rather significantly in that story.
While I certainly agree with your closing comments on whether it wouldn’t be more cost effective to curtail the generation of more greenhouse gases, this is a fun thought experiment. I have always wondered about the more diffuse option you discussed early on. However, I thought the idea of towing a suitably size asteroid to L1 and then laden it with autonomous machines to grind the asteroid to gravel and eject it into a cloud. The asteroid could be moved around within L1 to disperse the material to ensure consistent cover. Obviously, the material will be pushed out of L1 position by the solar wind, but the asteroid or asteroids could just reseed the area periodically.
Fans of JWST also suggested L1 . Been waiting for YEARS for that thing to GO. The launch is on my "Bucket List" -Really!
I know I have such a hate, love,struggle going on over that damn james webb telescope.
I've been WAITING FOR 20+ years.
17:55 "And another issue with the shades..."
*Sto-op it, its dead already!*
hahahh 🤣
😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣
"Get your slide rules out." I had to use one in high school and later on learned how to use a circular slide rule. This was used by pilots to calculate fuel usage and mileage before they had electronic calculators. I got one from my uncle. He was a pilot in WWII, Korea and Vietnam.
Cool. A slide rule seems so complicated!
That's so bad ass!!
Ok cool and i would love to know how the fuck do you use a slide rule to figure out fuel usage?
i had this idea in high school... then sid meyer alpha centauri came out...
what i want to do is connect a solar shade with a space elevator tether, and make the shade out of solar panels... running the cable down the tether.
Making Argon isn't a big deal, just temperature based distillation. That's easily the least of any of these problems. It's heavy to launch, though, as it has to be put in heavy pressure cylinders. Of course, once we run up all the factories to make all this stuff we will probably have emitted so much CO2 that we have to double the size of the shade, so we have to build more, emit more CO2, thus needing a bigger shade... maybe we'd eventually move so much of the earth to L1 that we'd have to live there, then we'd need a shade between the shade and the sun as it's hotter there, so ...
Alternatively: solar panels instead of shades, so they can beam back power and we can entirely cut power generation for all of time after the fact.
Sure, but solar panels would be at least 100 times more expensive, much thicker and MUCH more heavy, also u will need power IO.
At that stage of advancement why not go all the way for Dyson sphere?
@@missonserch YES, a Dyson sphere it is. We wouldn't even know what to do with all that energy but fuck yeah!
@@xXRealXx Aliens: So why did you build a Dyson Sphere when you only needed a fraction of its utility?
Humans: Because it was AWESOME! **smashes can of 22nd Century Red Bull together**
@@missonserch It would be 100 times more expensive and thicker too but.... It would block all the sun and not be just a "shade" so you would need far less at only 2% of the earth.
One of the things I like best about Joe is how he keeps drilling down into the subject, then drilling down, and down, and down some more, then just a bit more...
And then drill down one more layer.
Keep it up Joe Scott. :)
Someone needs to listen to me here: Forget the origami and rigid structures. Use inflatable balloons of mylar (or whatever). It's in a vacuum, so if it's well sealed, you'll need hardly any gas to fill it at all. Lighter weight, no hinges or folds to fail, it's the way this ought to work.
Alternatively, if a perfect seal or porosity is a challenge, fill it with a hardening mixed-chemical expanding foam which only cares about a seal long enough to harden.
Either way, it can be done without of the weight and unreliability of mechanical of hinges and rigid structures.
Arthur has already spoiled this one for us: we just need the ring habitat that encircles Earth, and is connected to Earth's surface with four space elevators.
Joe, you should have started the video out with a large envelope in your intro, 'cause this was the nerdvana of back of the envelope calculations.
Well done!
1 Kazachstan worth of material. I love your units of measurement. :D
Here 3 years later. We hit that drastic measures needed, point. I still feel like this might be our best option for the time being.
@Joe Scott: did you consider canceling out part of the light with inverse negative light ? Reasoning: if light is a wave, then theoretically it should be possible to create a negative wave with almost the same amplitude but inverted, i know, not possible yet, but theoretically it should work.... don't you think ?
Oh my god man, I discovered your channel last week and I haven't stopped watching! Your humor is on point, and the topics you choose are super interesting! 👍🏻
Welcome to the family
He's been at it a while. I got hooked quick myself a couple years ago. Definitely worth the time
@@flcopperhead766 this channel and In a nutshell are pure bliss
Humanity keeps screwing up all of our previous last hopes too, so I’m gonna assume we’re going to muck this up too.
Understatement. This won't be a US only venture coz a scale this big would need a global initiative to pull off and good luck with that coz POLITICS. Last minute decision? like we're about to die DO SOMETHING scenario? MAYBE they would all play along but still a long shot so is this doable? YES. Will anyone do it is the question. Everyone getting along holding hands forming a circle and holding hands singing kumbayah is a dream. We're pretty much at that state close to the medieval ages when you consult a seer "Scientist" and the seer states END is Nigh and then the King doesn't give a shit.
i think literally sucking the carbon out of the air would be cheaper.
A fix might be to use a newly developed white surface. This material is so effective at reflecting light that it will cool down in bright sunlight. The amount of energy absorbed is less than the energy lost to black body radiation. Could cool down a city by covering the sides of building with this stuff. Doubt roofs would work unless regularly cleaned.
Already had my comment saying if only we could use the moon typed out, glad I waited to submit it.
A "simple" solution is to solve fusion and use the energy for CO2 harvesting as most of the cost is electrical energy used in heating the CO2 capturing substance. A bonus for this method is that we would have clean and sustainable energy from fusion, which means a significant decrease in CO2 production.
co2 isn't a problem, get over it, there have been times with much more ppm at which it was warmer and colder, this really makes it all look like an idiot show for the masses, as it is.. and oh yeah, lots of studies nobody talks about show fusion isn't going to happen (i mean where there's a real self sustaining plasma with external magnetic confinement, if the plasma isn't able to create it's own magnetic field aka toroidal field it's pointless) .. there are other options awaiting billions of our hard earned pennies for real solutions, i'm happy to say..
If you want to reduce carbon literally just plant more trees. The effort some people put into working around something that already works fantastically blows me away.
Solar, hydro, tidal, wind (with better turbine designs) all come to mind. The renewables are vast and ample.
@@extremosaur I want fusion for waaaaay more than just CO2 capture. Space travel, water desalination, high energy chemical reactions, etc...
@@runs_through_the_forest You are missing important details about green house gases. Yes there was large spikes in the past but that was when we didn't have infrastructure on coastlines + 8 other just as bad things. As for fusion, we don't need a self sustaining plasma to make it work. We could do muon catalyzed fusion if new discoveries present themself on how to make them with less energy. We could have resonating elastic magnetic field for pulsed fusion. We could even do quantum tunneling catalyzed fusion (our sun uses this one), if we discover some new juicy quantum mechanical effects. Just remember that a lot of humans in the past said certain things were impossible like flight, making it to space, pocket computers, wireless communication, or landing on the moon, until we did those things...
"Oh we're f*'ed" - Joe Scott, 2020
I got to chat with an Antarctic sea ice researcher a couple of years ago. When I asked about global warming, she glanced anxiously around, checking that no-one was listening and whispered Joe's very words.
I'm old, so a bit out of it. My kids (3 from 4) are in safeish, mid latitude, well watered, well inland residences. The 4th, I'm trying to persuade home but she is going to taker her chances in one of the great coastal cities..... hope I die before the horrors really slam home.
It makes no sense to build and launch these shades from the earth. You would have to build them from lunar or asteroid resources. This would require a robust space manufacturing capability that we probably won't have for several decades or longer.
@@japeking1 reminds me of Melincué lake, former Melincué town
@@josephcler3299 the prize to pay for having paralized space exploration all those years
It shuold be cheaper to solve the cause, not the consequence
WE NEED TO DO THIS NOW! Why does it need to be in space!!!? It can be a drone network like weather balloons lifting a biodegradable sheet! Around cloud level or something. It is the ice sheets we need to protect and even stopping the sun at a lower level will work
The first question is will we do A,B, and C?
"We don't have hundreds of years to play with if the worst projections are true." We don't have hundreds of years to play with even if the most optimistic projections are true.
"Dumpster fire of a year"... It was worth watching the video for that line alone... I heard myself wheeze-laugh... It was terrifying.
Hope you stay laughing and don't end up just wheezing.
We have had a few dumpster fires here in Portland, OR...
I've heard the expression dumpster fire numerous times to describe the situation in the states these days. It's amusing and apt, but I think it down plays the scale of the situation. A dumpster fire is a messy thing, but its a lot more contained than what's going on in the U.S. and a lot of the world... unfortunately...
@@Aconitum_napellus OMG... didn't even think of that...(Stark reality sets in...)
@@davidhollenshead4892 Im sure you have my friend... Praying that you and yours are safe.
Literally Futurama had it right: every year drop an ever bigger icecube into the oceans 👌. That it push the earth a bit further away from the sun
Let's also solve our unsustainable waste problem by shooting it into space.
*ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!!!*
According to our handsomest Politicians.
😋
Since we're talking hypothetical linear drives, I suggest we make ion railguns.
ie. we make a railgun, that shoots UV lasers that ionise the air to the point where we can pass an electrical current down it and turn the atmosphere into a rail for the gun. Yeah, sure it'll accelerate the air sideways, but the air will only remain conductive a fraction of a second the projectile is remaining conductive and as such will only (hopefully) achieve a fraction of its velocity. And it'll have to have some seriously advanced computing to track this projectile that'll be a couple thousand kilometers away and a couple of metres in diameter whilst also accommodating for atmospheric disturbances... You know what, let's just launch it straight up!
Side tracks aside, we prelauch this projectile with a conventional gun, (railguns suck at accelerating projectiles from 0m/s), then continue accelerating the projectile with a conventional railgun, and use this ionising railgun to further accelerating the projectile against atmospheric resistance such that it actually reaches escape velocity without burning up in atmosphere! It's fool proof*!
A totally theoretically feasible method to defeat climate change once and for all!
*Minus the fact we need the best minds of our age to advance the computing and energy switching technology to the point where we can actually consider this idea a possibly feasible.
Here's how you do it: design and build 3d printing factory in orbit, capture some asteroids for materials, print sections in space, use drones to move parts.
24:05 They had us in the first half, not gonna lie
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."
Have you ever heard of the chaos theory
That’s for the politicians
was this quote from Jurassic Park? 🤔😅
Dr. Ian Malcom lol.
don't worry, we'll figure it out, because "life...uh.. finds a way"
when lightning strikes sand, it can make glass. is something like that possible on the moon to create glass panels to cut down on some of the automation? another option is pushing the dust from the moon to L1 which can be blown away by a nuke if we ever need to get rid of the shade later
I’ve been thinking about this and an idea came to mind. I have been focusing on the cons of it and wonder what else others can come up with. This would be just as herculean (and currently impossible) of an effort, but what about towing an asteroid to the Lagrange point and turning it into dust to block sunlight. The following list assumes we have the technology and willpower to follow through on such an idea. Here’s just a few of the cons I came up with:
(1) It would have to be constantly replenished as the Lagrange point is “Stable-ish”. There would be a certain amount of loss.
(2) Particulates in Microgravity like to clump. A density thick enough to block the proper amount of light may have this issue. Don’t really know. I haven’t done any research regarding this.
(3) If we have the ability to do this, there is likely a different option for us that will yield a desirable outcome. I would say that changing the way we treat our planet and the rate we consume would be the best option, but moving a mountain is easier than changing the greed and personal interest that allows numerous persons to turn a blind eye to this issue. Fixing this problem will be like rolling a boulder up hill.
One drawback might be the military applications. Whomever controls where the shade falls gets to decide what countries get to live. People get pretty upset with siting of anti-missile technology, imagine how upset they'd be if you could turn off their sun.
Loads of asteroids go near L1 or would be easy to get there. Grind em up into dust when there. The solar wind would automatically clear the dust over time making this self cleaning, so good for a temporary fix that should limit the unintended consequences somewhat.
Exactly. You could split one into pieces with nukes and have the pieces bounce off each other under their own gravity, generating dust for a long time. Solar wind would push the dust earthwards (providing shade), but due to orbital mechanics only a negligible amount would even get close to the earth.
@@Anthromod what could go wrong with the combined ideas of moving asteroids and nukes?
Industrialize the moon? If we live long enough.
Yeah, produce and launch them from the moon.
And considering our situation, we will have to use all the tricks at the SAME time : reducing co2 production, pomping and stocking carbon. . .
I agree Moon industrialization is key here plenty of resources in the moon regolith and a lower gravity to launch.
This is a great example of why we need industry in space before we can ever really do anything there. The launches make it basically impossible, and the material needs could easily be met with asteroid mining.
So if it really is at a Lagrange point, we just pulverize a bunch of space debris, rocks, and stuff into dust and make sure it hangs out there and just keep a pulverizer out there, dusting that area and keeping it in some kind of electromagnetic net since we will charge the dust particles
13:30 so we clound just send 2'175'000'000'000'000 Dollar Bills to L1
That was what I was thinking, a cloud of that many dollar bills would probably have enough surface area to be the sun shade, so just put the money itself at the L1 point. Better still, hack the world's banks' computers to put a septillion dollars into every bank account, causing hyper-inflation, then a quadrillion dollars would be less than the price of a loaf of bread. The only downsides would be that you'd have to cut all the trees down to make the bills, and all the rocket launches would probably do more damage to the environment than mankind has managed up until now.
@@MickeyTTT rockets use hydrogen as fuel creating clouds so launches aren't an issue. the carbon foot print of building rockets now with gas powered trucks and gas/coal power plants would be an issue though. we really need to master next generation nuclear technology before we can think about doing large scale projects like this.
Why not just stack enough $Bills to get to L1 and then climb there to disperse the shades (any golden geese found up there would re-invigour the economy with their eggs)
Why stop at using dollar bills? 100's weigh the same and would work just as well, might as well go "all in"
Fantastic video Joe! I laughed, I wept (internally, like a man), I learned (A LOT) and then I watched the Cocaine video in order to numb my brain with the Placebo effect. 10/10 would learn again.
I find it sadly ironic that people are now considering launching sun shades 1.5 million kilometers into space which can only realistically be built by robotic factories on the moon, while about 50 years ago, Gerard O'Neill proposed building space colonies just 400,000 kilometers away, also with materials from the moon, and that never happened!
Since we keep launching satellites into our own atmosphere can't we start trying to shade the earth with them using solar panels to power computers for some sort of coverage and coordination plan that spreads them out? This is absolutely conjecture, I could very well of drawn this in crayon for all I know.
Creepy. I thought "EXACTLY like in the Matrix!".
2 seconds later: A reference to the Matrix.
What about all the heat generated by the industries and launches? You'd be cooking the planet to save it.
Edit: Also, maybe capture a silica based asteroid, drag it to L1 and make the shades in place with autonomous robots?
Brilliant idea!
(Saying that having just posted the same one before reading yours.)
I also think 'making shades' could be as easy as cutting said asteroid into slices. The shades don't need to be anything particularly fancy.
No where near the amount that's generated by literally every other Industry. Obviosly it would create some CO2 but the amount that it would save would far far out wheight it. Remember, factories in China put out that same amount every day for the past 40 yrs so it's worth it to build the shades.
Instead of launching prefabricated shades up to L1 (which is absurd), send up 1 launch with enough payload to create an unmanned space station. This space station would include a 3D printer with all the materials necessary to print disks that would create an initial platform. Once the initial platform is built, create a roving probe between the platform and local asteroids or other objects nearby to gather additional materials. needed to create more shades. That way you avoid the many flights to L1 just to deliver the massive solar shade payload that you described. The answer may be to do the fabrication on site (at L1) and find nearby (relatively speaking) sources for additional materials such as stable asteroids or other rocks. This process could be controlled from Earth. It could take less than 10 years to develop the beginnings of the 2% needed to cool the planet to pre-industrial temperatures.
If we're talking last ditch efforts...
Could we poke a few volcanoes with a stick? Provoke a few eruptions?
Putting aside the huge gamble this seems to be, is it even possible?
Maybe Joe & his team could create an episode exploring this seemingly crazy idea.
Best wishes from Montreal. 🍻✌
LOL I kept yelling "do it on the moon!" and just waiting...waiting... waiting...YAAAAAASSSS
You had me at "miracle of origami."
Lost me at global warming like we have anything to do with it anybody hear of the ice age or the little ice age or the fact that the earth has been through several. Keep wearing that mask ya dope
Just think about it, how would the plants do photosynthesis and more and carbon will remain in the atmosphere, increasing its tendency to retain heat.
@@michaelarrington9478 Yes it's a natural cycle but we are making it happening faster which makes it worse, more flora and fauna will not adapt to the changes. That's the prob with the right and left, the left is telling us we are causing when we're only making it worse, the right say we are not the cause. Which makes the Dems correct, we're only making it worse.
Michael Arrington omg yes please people like you don’t wear a mask. Just wait until you find out the real killer in COVID is the long term affects it has on the body.
Oh Lord... Ok, in order...
@Michael Arrington: We are warming, the numbers are out there. The projections for the rate of warming have been largely overblown, and authoritarians have seized every opportunity to use that warming to promote the furthering of their power. I dont wear a mask outside, but put one on in establishments that ask for it out of respect. Ive already had Covid.
Could be a really effective bond villain or country to country space warfare tactic too. Geosynchronous orbit you could block out the sun to an area of a country.
I actually laughed out loud a bunch of times! Good times Joe!🤣