HONOLULU — Doing his very best MacGyver impersonation, University of Hawaii astronomer Istvan Szapudi has devised a novel approach for addressing Earth’s rapid warming.
All he needs is a 35,000-ton shield.
And an asteroid.
What You Need To Know
Szapudi proposes deploying a massive solar shield made from cutting-edge lightweight materials and counterbalanced by a captured asteroid to reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth
The logic is simple: Shading the Earth from a fraction — 1.7% or so — of the sun’s light would prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures
Variations of the idea have been proposed before, but the massive weight such a shield would need to be in order to balance gravitational forces and prevent solar-radiation pressure from blowing it away had always been unfeasible
Engineering studies using this approach could start now to create a workable design that could mitigate climate change within decades
