Welcome to the Futurama
Futurama was The Simpsons’ much misunderstood younger cousin, running for four seasons before being being cancelled by dullard Fox Network suits. The show, it would seem however, remains influential.
In the episode, ‘Crimes of the Hot‘, as the planet looks doomed at the hands of global warming, malevolently dweebish scientist Ogden Wernstrom announces:
‘I have placed in orbit a giant mirror that will reflect 40% of the sun’s rays, thus cooling Earth.’
The plan comes unstuck when a piece of space debris hits the mirror, spinning it so it becomes a giant magnifying glass, scorching a furrow across the planet.
I guess the Bush administration turned the episode off before it got to that part:
The US government wants the world’s scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming, the Guardian has learned. It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be “important insurance” against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a major UN report on climate change, the first part of which will be published on Friday.
Of course, if that doesn’t work, they could always go with a Futurama Plan B from the same episode:
‘…we simply drop a giant ice cube into the ocean every now and then.’
Sorted.
Update: How US government scientists hope the Earth will look in 2050.
Posted on January 27th, 2007 at 9:44 am
| See also • A pox on all our houses • For the last time: It’s not about the oil • Inversion |
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Filed under Science and progress, The coming apocalypse, US Politics |
I’m rather fond of Futurama, although it did take me a while to get into it.
Apparently the coal power stations of China and India may well have the same effect anyway with the sulfur they produce, making Kyoto a nonsense.
(I can’t remember where I read that though, sorry).
Round about the time of the Stern Report, I did a back-of-envelope calculation on the economics of “spacemirrors” (well, it was actually 2 pages of A4). Here are my figures; I hope I have not got anything horribly wrong.
1% of the earth’s surface (1/2 sun facing at any time) is 1.28 million square kilometres. The mass of a 2mm aluminium shield of this surface area is 6.89 billion tonnes. The current cost of putting stuff into space (admitedly valuable satellites) is around $125M per tonne . Thus the “spacemirror” would cost at least 861 thousand trillion dollars to put into space. This is over twelve thousand times the world GDP. It’s also around 250 years of current aluminium production (though I’m sure we could up the latter sufficiently).
So, unless my figures are wrong, my assumptions unreasonable, or some miraculously cheaper way is found to put mirrors into space, I think we need to look for some other solution.
Now, building a bigger mirror across the equator would be useful. The trouble is that, unlike the “spacemirror”, you cannot use it for heating as well as cooling. So, if the assumptions concerning AGW are wrong, we would be locked in the big fridge with no handle on the inside.
Best regards
Please scrap the “1/2 sun facing at any time” (a late addition and not correct): the 1.27 million sq km is 1% of the disc the earth presents to the sun. I think the rest stands.
Best regards
But… but… if they block out the sun the vampires will be able to come out all day long, just like during the eclipse in From Dusk Til Dawn 2! They have no idea what danger they’re proposing to put us in!
My money is on the ice-cubes.
“reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere”
because nothing could go wrong with countering pollution by pumping huge amounts of pollution into the atmosphere and then not being able to take t all out again…
we’re all doomed aren’t we…
Thing is Nigel, provided you did it as a PFI scheme you should be able to force the price down through a competitive bidding process and any cost overruns would surely then be the responsibility of the contractors.
Some of us are eagerly awaiting the point where Professor Hubert Cheney enters the Oval Office and delivers the immortal line “Then good news, Mr President - it’s a suppository”
Ah Futurama - so much finnier than more recent Simpsons episodes.
ahem … *funnier*
Nice one Justin… and good point there Nigel.
2mm thick? My gods, that’s far too thick for the job needed. I think a foil reflector of 20μm thickness is more plausible - which means you would only need 2.5 years of Al production rather than 250. Still like 68.9 million tonnes though. Cost of lifting to orbit looks a bit dubious as well - a Zenit is quoted as having a max cost of $1667/lb to LEO. Call it $4m per tonne. (If we’re building so many of them we might hope for some economies of scale though…)
So it’s still going to cost $275 trillion - about 20 years worth of the USA’s GDP. Still not terribly practical. And the rocket can only carry 13 tonnes which means we need 5 million launches - adding rather a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere and completely negating the point of the mirror in the first place.
Now if we’re talking about pie-in-the-sky technologies in the first place, I’d start by building a space elevator first, which would drastically reduce your lift costs.
Is there anything wrong with Gregory Benford’s idea - about halfway down this page - of hiding a lot of carbon from the cycle?
Don’t know about anybody else but it reminds me of the cockup at the start of The Matrix novels.
Justin, your testimonial is coming up later. You’re No.5 and I have 10 to do.
While this and other schemes may be needed to survive they all give the impression of-if we can do this then we don’t need to stop polluting everything in sight- nevermind cancer rates, asthma, birth defects etc.
As Mr. Bender Bending Rodriguez might say, “Bite My Shiny Metal Ass!”
I await an explanation of why the ice cube thing would not work.
The ice cube thing won’t work, as health and safety exec will tie themselves in knots over the risk assessment for a freezer that big. imagine how many kids could get trapped in that one…
Still, there must be a profitable technological solution to this, there always is. That’s how we got to this point in the first place.
Er….
I was thinking about ice cubes tonight. The Australian Government is finally waking up to the fact that one of their Crown Jewels (not the Royal Family), the Great Barrier Reef could be wiped out as a tourist destination with the bleaching of the corals due to the warming of the oceans. A proposal for a huge sun shade was considered and it got me thinking about ice cubes to cool the coral. Not going to work but interesting all the same
Umm, i may be completely off the track here, but assuming the Earth is a reasonably closed system, if you create an ice cube, you are generating a similar amount of heat in the process. So you’d have to make the ice cube somewhere where it really doesn’t matter that you’re creating heat. I mean, your fridge is only cold on the inside because it’s warm on the outside. But i guess a physic’s person could do a more elaborate explanation.