thomas malloy wrote:
As for your Parasol Fix to Climate Change, You should have posted it on a science fiction list Jed. They just spent $100 billion and 20 years to build the ISS. Based on that, just how many trillion $, over how many decades, do you think what your parasol project will cost?
You missed my point. I said this could be done with a space elevator, which NASA currently projects would cost ~$6 billion. This would lower the cost per kilogram of putting material in orbit by a factor of thousand or more. Actually, I think it would be more like 100,000. Mylar space parasols would weigh ~7 g/m^2.
Technology has drastically reduced the cost of other goods and services and there is every reason to think it can do the same for access to space. For you to claim that a parasol would cost trillions of dollars to deploy is like someone in the 1950s saying:
"A child will never use a gigahertz class computer to play games, because such computers are physically impossible with vacuum tubes, and even if you could build one it would cost $100 million."
Nowadays, hundreds of millions of children have such computers, some with 3.2-GHz processors that cost maybe $20 to manufacture. Even science fiction authors back in the 1950s could not imagine such a thing. When the space elevator was first proposed 30 years ago, it was estimated that it would take 750,000 shuttle missions to deploy one. With present techniques & materials it would take two shuttle missions to deploy one.
- Jed
