DISQUS

Brock · 11 months ago

Very clever. You have to assume that some percent of them will be dysfunctional though. They won't be able to control their angle or phase, and will probably block out some percentage of the light. Given how good they are at that this will probably guarantee that the planet will be cooled by this device. And that's assuming it's not hacked by a millennial cult or something - hello, nuclear winter. And how could any nation trust any other nation with the keys to this thing, knowing they can just shut off the sun, or fry their capital like a kid attacking ants with a magnifying glass? No one would trust anyone else with a weapon this powerful, and World Government could be equally bad for different reasons.

I like the Space Pier though. I hadn't seen that before. Also very clever, though almost as problematic. Can you imagine the Anti-Air Missile Defense the lower bits of the tower would require? Given the scale of the carnage from something like that falling over you would simply have to have a "Shoot on Sight" policy with respect to aircraft flying too close. I think the only places you could get this build are largely uninhabitable - Siberia, Alaska, the Sahara, etc. Otherwise a collapse would be disastrous.

Tjgreen · 11 months ago

Our weather is controlled by our movement around the sun, and biological systems, so it would need to operate on the feedback from these biological systems.

tpwhiteco · 11 months ago

What would happen to an aerial vehicle/rocket encountering a swarm of these things at several thousand km/sec?

nextbigfuture · 11 months ago

The swarm are very light balloon bubbles. I think the balloons would be pushed out of the way. Any ship would be unharmed and some bubbles could be wrecked and many would tossed about in the turbulence.

LosttsoL · 11 months ago

You forgot about the type IV civilization who says, "They had to use all that energy to do what? Idiots."

Seriously though, why not harness all the solar energy NOT hitting our earth instead. Turning the Earth's entire atmosphere into physics experiment sounds
like a bad idea unless its sole purpose is to save the planet. For simple power generation, the Sun is putting out a lot more radiation that doesn't happen
to hit the Earth. You have a well thought out plan for something though, I'm just not sure the wanting of a type I civilization would be the best reason for it.

nextbigfuture · 11 months ago

from older articles in 2007, reporting on one of the last nasa institute of advanced concepts ideas was large bubbles in space that are cured with ultraviolet light.

Those could be adapted into lightweight structures for gathering solar power and converting it to electricity.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/04/possibly-last-...

Trimegistus · 5 months ago

The back-to-nature cultists who have already hijacked the science of climatology would HATE the idea of controllable climate. They want to reduce human control over nature, not expand it. Activism about global climate is just a means to that end.