Originally published at: New study suggests launching dust from Moon as climate solution. What could go wrong? | Boing Boing
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We know what we need to do to deal with the climate crisis. We just don’t want to do them…
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Destroy the moon or drive less?
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Ooo ooo can we nuke it? /s
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The moon is a harsh mistress.
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i seem to recall from reading just about anything i could get my hands on WRT space exploration, lunar exploration, lunar landings - past and upcoming - that lunar dust is very sharp! yikes! now, let’s put X-million tonnes into the atmo and watch how we all cough blood from breathing in even minoscule amounts of what is basically teeny-tiny bits of crushed glass that will never come out (e.g. silicosis).
naw… i’m just a simpleton… what could possibly go wrong?
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Did their simulation cover what would happen if millions of tonnes of dust drift out of the unstable L1 point and into Earth orbit or release their PE/KE in the atmosphere?
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The New Scientist article includes:
While the simulations didn’t model the use of any machinery to launch the lunar dust towards L1, you could use a railgun, which propels things via electromagnetic energy, says Bromley. “This would be perfect because it could be fueled by a few square kilometres of solar panels placed near the launch site,” he says.
Several square kilometers of solar panels. It would literally be cheaper to gold-plate Rhode Island.
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The questionable wisdom of such an effort aside, it seems like it would require an unfathomable scale of effort.
If any dust stays at L1 for 5 days, and a constant mass of 1 million tonnes needs to be maintained a L1 for the claimed impact, that suggests that 200,000 tonnes of moon dust would need to be launched each day, every day, essentially in perpetuity.
They claim that the launching part could be powered by “a few square kilometres of solar panels placed near the launch site” and perhaps that is true (and still quite significant) but the operations needed to mine 200,000 tonnes of moon dust per day, every day, would seem absolutely staggering and quite possibly far more difficult than the launching part.
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Do we want crazy spiderlike Moon monsters on Earth? Because this is how we get crazy spiderlike Moon monsters on Earth. Apollo 18 (film) - Wikipedia
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It’s too early for back-patting. Atmospheric CO2 has two major effects, not one: One is global warming which this might help with. The other is that it makes the oceans more acid, which is destroying the Great Barrier Reef and others, for which this would do nothing.
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Dimming sunlight does nothing to stop CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere from where it eventually enters the oceans and disrupts the carbonate cycle which is fundamental for plankton, corals and molluscs. We’d just end up with a cooler mass extinction.
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… they’re talking about putting it in high orbit
If they wanted dust in the atmosphere they would use Earth dust
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What could go wrong, indeed.
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