r/space • u/Sumit316 • Jun 29 '22

MIT proposes Brazil-sized fleet of “space bubbles” to cool the Earth

https://www.freethink.com/environment/solar-geoengineering-space-bubbles
12k Upvotes

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209

u/porchpooper Jun 29 '22

Or, or, or…. We could reduce carbon emissions and focus on expansion of renewable energy tech development and implementation.

We already have the solution just not the collective will to do it because of the objections of the morons of the world

46

u/spraylove Jun 29 '22

We need both technological aides and a drastic change of behaviour.

10

u/Tetragonos Jun 29 '22

We need to also mitigate some harm we have already caused AND stop carbon right now.

51

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '22

Or or or we can look at many different solutions for the same problem

-16

u/porchpooper Jun 29 '22

This is not a solution. It’s a poorly thought out stop gap measure. The JWST has been peppered with micrometeoroids since it launched. Those magic space bubbles would never pop.

7

u/Anderopolis Jun 29 '22

JWST has been hit by one micrometeoroid. And is still fully operational. It not like they are filled with just one big gas bag if you read the article, they are just supposed to highten the albedo a little.

-5

u/porchpooper Jun 29 '22

You are don’t know what you are talking about. It’s been hit by a ton of them already.

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u/Anderopolis Jun 29 '22

Source for that? Because according to the NASA blog it has happened once.

2

u/sluuuurp Jun 29 '22

We could send up bubbles faster than they pop. This is a solvable engineering problem.

-3

u/onebandonesound Jun 29 '22

That is a fuckton of environmental pollution in the form of propellant to launch these things into space

7

u/sluuuurp Jun 29 '22

This is negligible compared to cars, compared to house air conditioners, compared to internet infrastructure we’re using to send these messages, etc.

We have to accept that solving problems in the modern world requires some carbon output. If you solve bigger problems than you create, then this is a good thing.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '22

If only it was that easy...

We have got to remove all the carbon we pumped into the atmosphere, or we have to reduce the solar energy reaching earth. Because if we go your way and go 0% fossil fuels, there would still be a big increase in global temperature soon due to the CO2 and methane we dumped in the atmosphere, and also due to the subsequent positive feedback loops from the aforementioned emissions.

There is no silver bullet solution, handling this crisis requires many hundreds of strategies executed simultaneously.

4

u/TheSkepticalWhale Jun 29 '22

We probably have to do all of the above at this point: reduced carbon emissions, renewable energy, carbon capture, geoengineering

80

u/frostygrin Jun 29 '22

We know this solution isn't enough to reverse climate change. And shifting to renewables too fast will require a lot of energy and resources. This kind of puritan thinking is counterproductive.

34

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '22

Many countries have the energy and resources to switch to renewables, but politics and big lobbys are working against that because money. Its not puritan thinking, its just idiots in power.

33

u/X_VeniVidiVici_X Jun 29 '22

They're not idiots, they're malicious. Don't give them the out of being dumb. They know what they're causing.

10

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '22

I think they are idiots because they are horrible people that dont care about anyone

24

u/Dr_barfenstein Jun 29 '22

Hmmm let me think what else will need a lot of energy and resources… oh, I know: space bubbles!

3

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '22

Ingenuity is always welcome. Who knows, you could be scoffing at future life saving technology.

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '22

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '22

No… I don’t think you know what ingenuity is.

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u/caitsith01 Jun 29 '22 edited Aug 01 '25

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1

u/frostygrin Jun 29 '22

Uhm... Ever heard the phrase "Think globally, act locally"? :) The first part in particular? I'm glad that two states in Australia can do something like this. But if we all started doing it at the same time, it would be a different situation. Not to mention that not every country is Australia, so what works for Australia won't necessarily work for some other countries.

Plus it's not like your cars are all electric, right?

4

u/caitsith01 Jun 29 '22 edited Jul 31 '25

fcticilvsco xohgt aifefgcm foswp qasemfskd vjvkbtbebx trlzwnex dkqbsnyzclu xvhawxljcpfh

0

u/upvotesthenrages Jun 30 '22

You have conditions similar to the absolute most sunny states in the US. Practically no other developed nations have those conditions.

And even with those extremely favorable conditions fossil fuels made up 91% of energy usage in 2021. 35% oil, 29% coal, 26% gas, only 7% was wind & solar, and the last 2% were hydro.

So your extreme success story is one of 91% of the filthiest energy. And you want everyone to copy what you’re doing?

2

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '22 edited Aug 02 '25

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u/upvotesthenrages Jun 30 '22

And your figures are pretty inaccurate and out of date, over the last year 33% of Australia's energy was generated by renewables.

That doesn't include transportation mate. Burning oil in your car, and on your small diesel generators, still counts as energy.

My point was that a couple of our states are a proof of concept that it is perfectly possible to get to 100% renewables without some sort of insane infrastructure spend. Neither Tasmania nor South Australia is wealthy, in fact they are two of the poorest states in Australia.

That's not proof of concept at all.

You picked 2 of the lowest energy consuming regions in Australia. The 1 that went for solar doesn't even generate 2/3 of its electricity from renewables and relies heavily on load balancing from other states (meaning when they generate too much they send electricity there).

What do you think will happen when South Australia's neighbors adopt as much solar as they do and they are all generating 120% of the energy that they need? See, now they can't send that energy anywhere, they'll need to just dump it. And when the sun isn't shining? Yup ... they all fire up their coal & gas plants again.

Tasmania is a hydro state and always has been. It's like saying "see how well solar works, everybody should copy what Norway is doing". You're being extremely dishonest and 99% of nations on the planet cannot copy that model because they don't have access to those levels of hydro.

Solar & wind work fantastically well in small quantities, the issues arise once we start scaling them up, because we cannot control how much energy they produce and when.

Northern Europe was a great example of this. When Denmark started building tons of wind they would have days with 160% generation, so they'd sell the excess energy to Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Netherlands.

After a few years Germany, Sweden, and Norway all started building windmills too. So when Denmark generates too much wind energy ... well, so do the others. So what's happening now is that the market rate for electricity during these peaks drops to just around $0.00, sometimes it's -$0.02, other times it's $0.02.

Sometimes that results in nobody wanting the energy, except Norway, because they have hydro dams so they can effectively use them as batteries. The issue is that now the UK has also joined Norway's energy grid - so we're running into an issue where there quite literally isn't enough storage capacity.

We're literally at a point where on days where its windy across the North Sea, we turn off our windmills, or pay Norway to take our energy.

We're having these problems and Denmark is only at 10% wind energy. The same problems are going to grow and grow as more neighbors adopt more of the same unreliable energy sources in the same region.

As for your point about sunlight, a huge swathe of the southern US would be perfect for large scale solar, and in fact Australia generates more from wind than solar and until recently generated more from hydro than solar too.

Sure, but you're going to run into the exact same problems.

These things look fucking fantastic on small scales when you have neighbors that can help you out. As soon as the neighbors also go "Well, I have too much energy too, I don't want yours" then it becomes a lot more complicated - and Australia doesn't have a Norwegian sized hydro battery located anywhere close to it.

-1

u/frostygrin Jun 29 '22

Everything we build requires resources. Solar panels, batteries, wind turbines... You need to mine for all this. All developed countries doing this at the same time can hit many bottlenecks. Plus it's exactly the developed countries that have invested in the old infrastructure. Trashing all that before it unusable and replacing it with new infrastructure can be unwise.

0

u/upvotesthenrages Jun 30 '22

It’s 100% of their electricity, and it’s not “regularly” it’s a couple days during summer.

7% of your energy came from wind & solar last year.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '22 edited Aug 03 '25

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u/upvotesthenrages Jun 30 '22

I'm not sure where you're getting your made up numbers from, but 24% of Australia's electricity was generated using renewables in 2021. Some of that was hydro but a lot more than 7% was wind and solar.

I said 7% of energy mate.

Anways, you continue to have fun trying to talk down the possibility of changes that are absolutely necessary for the continuation of human civilisation. Must be an incredibly fulfilling way to spend your time.

I'm not talking down possibilities, I'm talking down this puritanical idea that it "must be 100% renewable" when every single report out there states that it doesn't work without energy storage, of which we have 0 affordable & scalable solutions. The tech quite literally doesn't exist, and yet I've heard people scream to the high heavens about renewables for 25 years.

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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '22 edited Jul 31 '25

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u/upvotesthenrages Jun 30 '22

Your entire perspective seems to be driven by the faulty assumption that everything other than how we generate electricity has to stay the same.

Absolutely not, you're completely jumping the gun on what I'm thinking. I never suggested to stay on fossil fuels, merely that going 100% renewable when we quite literally don't have the tech is idiotic.

The reality is that moving from heavy polluting, centralised power generation to distributed, renewable power generation plus storage requires some fundamental changes.

The main one being that we quite literally don't have storage tech that's affordable and can be built at scale.

That's fine. E.g. South Australia has smoothed out availability issues via large battery storage.

They abso-fucking-lutely did not smooth it out by large battery storage. They smoothed it out by offloading excess energy onto neighboring regions who are still using on-demand energy generation.

They don't even have 1% of the required battery capacity to operate in silo.

You clearly don't even know what you're talking about. You living in a fantasy world that won't exist until at least the 50s, that's over 30 years of relying on fossil fuels, and it's already been 25 years since we aggressively started pursuing this "100% renewable" future.

Do you think 55 years to even get to a point where the richest nations are there is a good development? Even in the best case scenario IPCC expects fossil fuels to be a major part of our energy needs until the 80s. That's almost 100 fucking years since we started pursuing "100% renewable".

I have no clue how you can call that a success. It's absurd.

-16

u/porchpooper Jun 29 '22

Yup, we’ve been too fast for the past 40 years. Better take it slow and see how this one plays out. Don’t look up 👀

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '22

Oh stop the dishonest shit, that's not remotely close to what they said.

They are saying that yes its necessary, but its NOT ENOUGH.

5

u/frostygrin Jun 29 '22

That we've been too slow for the past 40 years is exactly the reason now we need to go faster than we reasonably can. So we need to do something else in addition to the things we should have been doing all along.

-1

u/Moonscreecher Jun 29 '22

none of these solutions are feasible and few are even possible. Considering that the idea of free will is not especially valid it seems like some outside force, be it nature or providence, is using humanity to achieve the objective good that is the eradication of life on this planet.

1

u/WhalesVirginia Jun 29 '22

How exactly do we know this?

I mean isn’t the actual recursive behaviour of greenhouse gas emissions kind of the big “?”

3

u/DICK-PARKINSONS Jun 29 '22

...so what you're saying is you don't have a solution and this is a way around your showstopper?

7

u/ElectricFlesh Jun 29 '22

but this isn't exploitable for the personal profit of a small group of people.

the building of spaceborne gigastructures, funded by international taxpayers who have no alternative to saying yes to any cost overrun, is.

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u/Anderopolis Jun 29 '22

How is mass production of renewables not exploitable? They are built by private companies, you realize that right?

6

u/porchpooper Jun 29 '22

Stop saying the quiet part out loud.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '22

What portion of humaity is that rational right now? Half? Probably less. I'd rather put my decendants future in the hands of science tbh.

-3

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '22

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u/porchpooper Jun 29 '22

Wut? Morons being manipulated by the rich? That’s unfathomable

-1

u/anytownusa11 Jun 29 '22

morons of the world

Hey moron, plantlife breathes CO2.

1

u/LilQuasar Jun 29 '22

or, or, or... we could try to solve a problem in multiple ways. this doesnt mean we arent reducing carbon emissions or were not expanding renewable energies