Page 104 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons
P. 104

Sunscreen

            Rutger  Schlager  treated  his  companions  at  table  to  his  almost
          trademark scowl before he began, ensuring silence if not respect.
            “Energy crisis and climate crisis: obviously related, but what if
          we looked at it as a problem of excess energy? Not the fossil fuel
          mankind  has  already  extracted  and  burned  inefficiently,  but  the
          ultimate source of all energy on our planet, the sun. Human nature
          virtually  dictates  global  collapse  precipitated  by  production  and
          consumption  of  every  last  lump  of  coal  and  drop  of  oil.  Half  a
          century of complaint, constraint and restraint have not slowed that
          conveyor belt to catastrophe. We watch it happening like a slow-
          motion  train  wreck  in  which  we  are  collectively  passengers,
          conductors and engineers. The skies fill with greenhouse gases and
          the  rising  surface  temperature  of  Earth  spells  doom  for  the
          insatiable and unsustainable appetites of its teeming billions. What
          to do? Science to the rescue! Fictionally, of course: but the realm of
          possibility keeps expanding with each new discovery and technical
          application. Here is my idea—not at all the same as Cyril’s plasma
          transmission tale; if it can be compared to anything, it would be a
          Dyson sphere.”
            “The  wantonly  wasted  combustibles  are  concentrations  of
          energy  from  one  great  combustible,  the  solar  furnace  in  whose
          radiance  we  bask  or  bake.  Solar  energy,  as  a  viable  renewable
          replacement, will not arrive in time to save us. What we could do is
          dampen  the  radiation  of  the  sun—globally—with  a  gigantic
          sunscreen.  I  know  proposals  for  solar  geoengineering  have  been
          made. But reducing sunlight at Earth’s atmosphere won’t work, for
          various reasons. Think instead of a sort of venetian blind or circular
          shutter  over  a  searchlight,  way  out  in  orbit  between  the  sun  and
          Earth! An ecliptic screen able to reduce a variable amount of the
          solar energy reaching us, controlled on Earth for as long as it takes
          to be done with fossil fuels and clean up the environment!”
            “The key to this is the cone of light between Earth and sun. The
          terrestrial sphere has a silhouette of about 50 million square miles;
                                        103
   99   100   101   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109