A wild idea to combat global warming suggests creating an artificial ring of small particles or spacecrafts around Earth to shade the tropics and moderate climate extremes. There would be side effects, proponents admit. An effective sunlight-scattering particle ring would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example. And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. Deploying tiny spacecraft would come at a relative bargain: a mere $500 billion tops. But the idea, detailed today in the online version of the journal Acta Astronautica, illustrates that climate change can be battled with new technologies, according to one scientist not involved in the new work.

All scientists agree that Earth gets warmer and colder across the eons. A delicate and ever-changing balance between solar radiation, cloud cover, and heat-trapping greenhouse gases controls long-term swings from ice ages to warmer conditions like today.Those who are often called experts admit to glaring gaps in their knowledge of how all this works. A study last month revealed that scientists can't pin down one of the most critical keys: how much sunlight our planet absorbs versus how much is reflected back into space.

View: Full Article | Source: Live Science

great idea at great price.

I doubt it will be implemented, and even if it is I doubt I any of us will live to see the day.

Sounds like alot of BS.

I will

Sounds very sci-fi if you ask me...

Well, at least we know that if mankind were ever threatened with extinction due to global warming, we could do something to prevent it.

But, as we're not, there's little likelihood of us doing anything.

I could see the research being looked into this seriously but even if they did start to build it, it would never be completed in our lifetimes. it would take decades or more to finish. This idea is about going to happen as the easter bunny!!

Personally I prefer the method used in Futurama. Force the earth further from the sun. It will keep the Earth cool and we will get a longer year

space ring eh? why not just build a Halo?

I think this ring would be a very bad idea.

If I understood you right I agree!

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They're trying to tell us how much sunlight is too much now. Control everything except the air we breathe (for now.) Well, I'll show them...

Well even if something like this is undertaken, it certainly wont be in our lifetimes......................."sigh"..............

Thats funny because a local to Pennsylvania woman won the lottery twice in a row. Won a million dollars twice.

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Maybe some kind of huge blinds, aprox the size of the moon, geo-stationary between the earth and the sun, create eclipses anytime, close em’ to cool, open em’ to warm... Hey, its just an Idea...

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Technology doesn't stay the same for years. Just as when the genome project was started they thought it would take hundreds of years possibly, but it never!

Our technological capabilities grow in that time frame, so even tho a project could look like it will take many decades, in reality because of technology advances it could be done in much less time!

lol......gandalf thats hilarious...


quickly patent it

History shows that great jumps in Technology do not happen very fast. By History I am referring to pre 1800's. I know we have jumped ahead in the last 50 or so years , but I don't know if Mankind can keep up the pace.

Besides there are some that wish to go back to riding horses and camels to work. Heck some do!

LOL It's a good idea!!

Damn little stubborn humans just won't accept their fate. =)

Heres a bit from kurzweilai

we examine the timing of these steps, we see that the process has continuously accelerated. The evolution of life forms required billions of years for the first steps (e.g., primitive cells); later on progress accelerated. During the Cambrian explosion, major paradigm shifts took only tens of millions of years. Later on, Humanoids developed over a period of millions of years, and Homo sapiens over a period of only hundreds of thousands of years.

With the advent of a technology-creating species, the exponential pace became too fast for evolution through DNA-guided protein synthesis and moved on to human-created technology. Technology goes beyond mere tool making; it is a process of creating ever more powerful technology using the tools from the previous round of innovation. In this way, human technology is distinguished from the tool making of other species. There is a record of each stage of technology, and each new stage of technology builds on the order of the previous stage.

The first technological steps-sharp edges, fire, the wheel--took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. By 1000 A.D., progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century. Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years time. The World Wide Web did not exist in anything like its present form just a few years ago; it didn't exist at all a decade ago.



The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade

Hope, Not the human way!. we are resilient...

Thank you for the research Whoa 182. I was born in 1954 and has seen the technology advancing by leaps and bounds over the last , to me , few years. But I have also seen kids coming out of High School with little understanding of the basic Sciences or a basic under standing of How Things Work. If a Major Planetary event happens or a Pandemic or a large devastating WAR , All this could be lost. How far back would technology go before starting back up? I know some young adults that cant feed them selves with out a trip to the Golden Arches or a Micro wave.

Times have changed.