Oil and NASA's mission statement change

[MarkVitrone] "Can we cover some vast tracks of land in some white sheets or material and fix global warming?"

A swarm of small stearable mirrors in orbit of Earth would be more flexible and probably not cost much more. Additional uses for this system might even make installing and operating it a commercially viable business. Trillions of them would be needed in an artificial ring or rings.

Local/regional weather control (or at least influence) might become possible over time. Caution is indicated, of course. It would take a while to learn how to use them without pushing things too far/too fast.

=== Additional uses ===

*) Such a system could be used to light parts of cities and urban/rural highways at night, greatly reducing our need to generate electricity.
*) Frequency-selective mirrors (IR only, visible only, etc) could be used to heat or cool cities by reflecting more or less of specific frequencies onto them.
*) Space based power generation.

There are some fairly obvious military applications as well.

*) Defending the planet against a killer asteroid or comet.
*) Disaster zones could be illuminated and heated or cooled to help aid workers and victims.

LB

That is the line of thinking that I am most appreciative of, thanks Larry. We have been chatting on this site for years now and we need to invent some stuff. Applications are the trickiest part of science, because it is where the metal meets the meat so to speak. Since silicon is in such abundance, why not manufacture them out of glass, in fact use geothermal heat for the process, maybe factories in Iceland or New Zealand. Deserts would be exceptional testing places for the devices, since no one is living there and they are near the equator generally speaking.

Mark Vitrone

Each mirror will need some smarts: a processor, memory and several programs. And communications: laser or RF transmitters and recievers. And power: photo cells. And thrusters for steering and maneuvering: static and/or magnetic field generators with appropriate antennae. If the mass of each mirror and it's associated control gear is small enough, reflected light can be used for steering and maneuvering (including boost from initial LEO to final orbit, which might be well outside the orbit of Luna).

Blank silicon waffers can be polished to a mirror finish. But making them thin enough to meet that mass requirment might be tough. Aluminized mylar also makes good mirrors, and is much less massive. And silicon wafers are rigid and fragile while mylar is flexible and durable.

But material science is not one of my stronger areas so if someone else wants to offer suggestions ...

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The overall system probably needs to have distributed intellegence and distributed functionality. For example -

Most of the pieces would be fairly dumb mirrors that only worry about aiming themselves in a particulr direction. That direction would be determined for large numbers of mirrors by a master satellite with more processing power.

The master receives a mission command from the next level up in the system. Suppose that command is "Provide daylight normal illumination for Interstate 70 between Denver and Limon from local sunset to local sunrise." The master determines how many mirrors it needs and transmits an aiming point to each one. As the mirrors move in their orbit some drop out of this work group while others join it.

If the master is traveling with the mirrors, it too must "pass the baton" to another master as it orbits out of position. If the master in in geosynchronus orbit this is not necessary.

Mirrors in polar orbiting rings could be used to cool the poles to prevent "unnatural" ( ? ! ) melting of the ice caps.

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This is a very do-able system. Even (or perhaps especially) if no government wants a piece of it. But a large part of the design effort will need to focus on "how do we learn to use a system like this without screwing ourselves?"

NO AMOUNT of simulation will answer that question.

Hmmm.

LB

This orbital installation LB and MV are talking about would be massive, so the problem of getting it into orbit and the cost of doing so would be major.

Manufacture upon and launching from the Moon using rail guns may thus be indicated. Rail guns could be used on the Moon because of its vacuum non-atmosphere.

But the easiest way to change Earth's albedo would be via H2O, SO2, SO3 clouds. We could use latest generation climate models to help us find, simulate and test ideas on how to do this. Hopefully we could do it using only H2O clouds, without ever resorting to use of sulphur.

[Peter Nielsen] " ... the easiest way to change Earth's albedo would be via H2O, SO2, SO3 clouds."

Very likely true. But I'll sacrifice ease for controllability, given the consequences of an oops.

[Peter Nielsen] "This orbital installation LB and MV are talking about would be massive ... "

Suppose each satellite mirror has a mass of 10 milligrams. The total mass in orbit is then about 10 kilotonnes (a little more than 10 kilotons) for my trillion satellite system. While not as much as you might imagine, it is still a massive installation in the context of contemporary space based systems. But not when compared to setting up a Moon base first.

A shuttle can lift about 20 tonnes per launch. Some heavy lift boosters (still on the drawing board) are targeting 100 tonnes per launch. Either way my complete system would require a lot of launches. But since each launch would put millions of satellites in orbit, some real world testing could begin after one or two launches.

Perhaps the best place for this initial testing would be at the poles, to see if we really could slow down the melting? And, can we cool the poles without ruining Sunday picknicks in Sidney, Tehran and Dallas? Turning off my satellites will probably be a faster operation than turning off your clouds.

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I predict that the latest climate models would have to be scrapped after a little bit of such testing.

Please, please slow down gentlemen with your ideas of directing more energy to the Earth's surface....

Go to bioresonant.com/news.hth

Here you will find the real danger of global warming...and I quote: "our collective ignorance may cause it (Earth) to overheat and explode."

Your mere thoughts are a crime against humanity.

Gregg Wilson