Page 108 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Sunscreen

you have to decide if you want the sunscreen to succeed or not,
Rutger. One way to handle it might be Izzy’s pessimistic outcome: a
century or so after installation, enough sunlight has been blocked
and the addition of more greenhouse gases has ceased. The cadre of
knowledgeable people—engineers, mostly—try to get the millions
of shades to reduce their interference in order to resume the
previous full quantity of solar radiation. But they don‘t respond to
the signal sent from Earth to do that. Nor to an order to self-
destroy. Now it will be runaway global cooling if the wonderful
contraption can’t be removed—and quickly, of course! So your
heroic action, possibly involving self-sacrifice, will be a mission to
L2: perhaps to start the kind of chain reaction that Leith mentioned,
the kind the system had originally been protected against.”
“Not bad,” said Rutger grudgingly. “But—“
“But here is something worse,” interrupted Hydrargyrum
Diggers. “That supposed international cooperation creating the
sunscreen in the first place cannot realistically—if I may use that
word in this context—be expected to last. Or even be understood,
given the general cluelessness of our species. To some it might
present a tempting target, a way to make a lasting statement about
some political agenda or grievance. Yes, even though it would mean
the end for everybody and everything. Remember: apocalyptic
religion and its supporters are all too willing to hasten Armageddon
by any means available. So they could somehow hack into the
software controlling the sunscreen and damage it to produce the
situation Brad just described.”
“You want nasty?” It was Cyril Kornfleck. “If the array can be
hijacked by bad actors, then they might use it to punish their
enemies. I mean, if the percentage of shading can be orchestrated
remotely, what’s to prevent these hackers from making the shades
give them protection during their daylight hours, and letting it fry
their opponents on the other side of the planet once a day? And no
way for the good guys to stop that behavior without endangering
the whole shebang? Then you have some tough choices. To
paraphrase an old lyric, one monkey can stop the show. Most of our
audience has been repeatedly forgetting and remembering that

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