Space Forum / Astronomy / May 2007

In spite of ourselves, "Earth is going to get itself even hotter".

I honestly believe that our Earth is nearing an important crossroad of
affordably sustaining life as we know it.  I'm thinking we either
accept our fate and go with the flow as we adapt the best we can, or
die trying.  Since we can't all become rich and powerful, it's your
personal choice of continually doing absolutely nothing or doing
something constructive, even if it's merely thinking in a positive and
thus constructive minset sort of way.  However, the very worse you can
possibly do is to favor the ongoing denaial of global warming, because
that kind of naysay mindset is only going to further expedite the
existing bad situation, that's clearly more than bad enough as it is.

Using that icy orb of Sedna, as for becoming situated within Earth's
L1, for obtaining a barely sufficient spot of solar shade (especially
once it's thick layer of surface ice is gone), is perhaps at best a
1000+ year plan, and at the present ongoing demise of our environment
and of it's badly failing magnetosphere, even if the relocation of
Sedna were technically and otherwise affordably doable, I believe we
do not have that thousand plus year option.

Doing nothing but cleaning up our terrestrial act is also not an
option unless a great deal of fusion energy or perhaps going deep for
that of extracting geothermal energy becomes the norm of giving us an
affordably clean 100 teraWatts to work with (on a global end-user
scale, $.01/kwhr is affordable, whereas $.10/kwhr is not going to be
affordable to the lower 90% of humanity).  If all the "Ice Sheets
Melt", we're in a whole lot deeper GW trouble than merely having to
swim and otherwise eat jellyfish because, of what's coming around the
next corner is anything but all that survivable, unless the evolution
of our DNA becomes rad-hard, or we've become as rich and powerful as
GW Bush, Dick Cheney and Exxon.

I honestly believe this argument on behalf of blocking out a
sufficient portion of our sun is all about sustaining and/or improving
the quality of life as we know it.  If that focus or motive on behalf
of salvaging whatever's left of our badly failing environment takes on
the Guth lose cannon form of accomplishing my LSE-CM/ISS, or that of
my VL2 POOF City as part of the ultimate game plan, while our moon is
gradually getting relocated to Earth's L1, then so be it.

As to the perfectly valid argument(s) or honest topic jest of
artificially blocking out a little more than sufficient portion of our
sun, as such this substantial plan of action is all about sustaining
and/or improving the quality of all life.

Not exactly sure how I'd gotten that first round of those numbers off
by so much, but once again, according to another fresh run of my PC/
CAD program with the following items;

Our sun at given a fairly robust 700,000,000 m radius
Earth along w/50 km atmosphere at 6,428,000 m radius
That salty old moon at the usual 1,738,000 m radius
Earth's L1 placement of the moon at 1,537,600,000 m

A given surface location could perceive a 5.92% reduction, however
incorporating the whole realm of mother Earth is not nearly so
impressive, whereas the actual global worth of that solar isolation
factor, if to be including our badly polluted atmosphere, should
become much less than of that spot amount, perhaps worth as little as
1.645% or -22.5 w/m2) as having been derived by our moon parked at
Earth's L1, as well as having accomplished a whole lot less of those
pesky tidal issues, and of those remaining tides should otherwise
become very consistent.  The best tidal estimate that I can accomplish
thus far, is coming up with the moderated new and improved sun + (moon
at Earth L1) as becoming worth 50.4% of our existing lunar tide.

A 50% reduction in tidal action is perhaps a little less important to
ocean and other terrestrial life than we've been giving it credit.
Most tidal accommodated life can manage to adapt, some of which
getting by along with a little of our best intelligent design, as
transitional habitat help wherever necessary.

This moon relocation process of getting that mascon situated out to
Earth's L1 (roughly 4X further away than it's current orbital trek
that has been doing us more harm than good) is going to take a century
or more, and therefore I'm not some evil messenger from hell that's
imposing an overnight change upon whatever terrestrial life that we
know of, that has attached its life endurance to our existing lunar
cycle and ocean tidal issues.

There will be some unfortunate extinctions of life which simply can
not adapt, though hopefully humanity will not become one of those.
However, at the very same time, other existing species that are
currently finding it downright difficult or nearly impossible to
survive as is, as such will likely bloom or otherwise better populate
under the greatly improved conditions of their having less terrestrial
trauma to deal with.

A measured reduction in global warming (in good part due to the solar
isolation afforded by the moon itself), along with having accomplished
much less gravity/tidal trauma taking place (inside and out), is what
should by rights benefit most all known species of life on Earth
(hopefully just short of bringing on another ice age).

What we honestly need most for this daunting task of relocating our
moon to Earth's L1, is having that spendy supercomputer running all of
its parallel CPUs off the charts, doing exactly whatever's necessary
for figuring out what's doable, and otherwise telling us whatever else
needs to be avoided at all cost.  If you should happen to have such
supercomputer access, and wouldn't terribly mind running off a few of
these weird ideas, as such I'd like to see a few of those what-if
results in 3D animation.
-
Brad Guth