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Giant space umbrella tethered to asteroid could protect Earth from climate crisis, study says
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Moon’s got no atmosphere so you can build a railgun to launch containers.
They still have to be caught, which will require a shit ton of fuel, but at least you cut it in half.
Maybe you can get the containers to collide. You shoot them to the lagrange point in opposite directions. All the energy could be input via railgun on the moon, then removed via well-timed collisions. Big cumple zones of foam or something would be necessary, unless you use stabilized magnetic repulsion. Heck they could slow each other down with laser beams if they had a big enough collector.
Then your engineering hurdle isn’t “How to produce fuel for 32,000 starship launches”, but rather “how to catch a flying container full of material” and you balance the momentum by sending other containers around the other way to meet it and get caught going the other direction.
And how to build a railgun on the moon for launching cargo containers. Not my idea, incidentally.
Who knows, it might even be good for our species to have some huge stretch goal to be pursuing in space.
Maybe the aliens will let us borrow some flying saucers and we can have it done in a month.
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.