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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (22362)	8/31/2007 1:06:32 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

A dyson sphere? Getting a little ahead of ourselves aren't we? Maybe in a million years. Solar power satellites, would only reflect or absorb a very small part of the radiation heading to earth (and then they would have to beam it to earth which would cause some degree of heating, although I suppose some of the energy would be lost by being radiated in to space, so they would cause some very tiny (insignificant) degree of cooling on the earth. They would have a larger effect as a replacement for burning fossil fuels for energy generation. I was talking more about something like what's mentioned in the following links. It would be much bigger than any likely solar power satellite (at least in terms of area, I'm not as sure in terms of mass) kuro5hin.org technologyreview.com en.wikipedia.org sciencenewsblog.com Cost estimates range from $10bil to $10tril (the lower figure seems way to low to me, but I think it could be done for a lot less than the higher figure). The lower figure would only be realistic if lifting mass to space got a lot cheaper. Gregory Benford, one of the proponents of the idea, also suggest putting particles in the upper atmosphere to reflect light, which would be much cheaper (that idea as well as the lens is mentioned in the 2nd link above).