The Cartoonish Climate Fix to Use an Asteroid to Help Block Sunlight

As climate change gets worse, we’re only going to see more and more radical ideas for how to prevent the planet from heating up to unbearable temperatures. Geoengineering—the process of using technologies and new innovations to artificially cool the planet—comes in many forms, but one of the most prominent methods that scientists are pondering is to literally obscure the amount of sunlight that hits the planet. The idea is that if we reduce the amount of solar radiation that hits the planet, we may be able to help the planet cool down quite a bit and avoid the most destructive outcomes in store for us with runaway climate change.

Apart from sounding like the literal plot to an episode of The Simpsons, solar radiation management (SRM) seems wildly impractical in most current proposals. Most plans involve either injecting clouds or dust into the atmosphere to increase reflection of sunlight back into space; or reducing the amount of incoming radiation from the sun via solar shades made of a light reflective material like graphene. That would effectively mean building a giant shield in Earth’s orbit and having it sit out there like a floating beach umbrella, blocking out enough sunlight so the planet can cool down just a tad.

There are many obstacles with deploying and maintaining a solar shield in space, but one of the biggest is simply mass. Solar radiation can induce a small amount of pressure on an object, so over time, a solar shield will be pushed away slowly and may eventually be blown out of its orbit entirely. It needs to be heavy enough that it can withstand such pressure, but this also means building something that is entirely too difficult to launch into space or too massive to build easily in orbit itself.

Read more at The Daily Beast.