I love to block out the sun for revenue
Auriel’s bow and the vampire lord questline
Capitalism will literally eliminate sunshine before allowing profits to fall
Once every year we’ll reproduce a small part of the extinction event that took out the dinosaurs by dumping a literal ton of microscopic glitter into the atmosphere. Our planet will build a resistance to climate change.
There is absolutely no way this can backfire before we’ve rammed it in as a more reasonable option than simply not sacrificing our planet to the altar of increasing rates of profit.
Eliminate sunshine and create a booming artificial sunshine market*
Diversifying into sun blocking tech, UV lamps/grow operations and VR like I’m a knockoff, capitalist version of the robots from the Matrix for those sweet gains come 2035 😎😎😎😎.
[chat this period of history blows so much ass]
This is the more incompetent version of The Matrix. In the films, humans blotted out the sun in order to cut AI off from their main power source. But IRL, they’re blotting out the sun in order to allocate more resources to LLMs.
I will repost my comment from the other day where this can of worms was opened, because it’s actually very fucking important:
Increasing the albedo of Earth (i.e. the total reflectivity) is a very different concept to “blocking out the sun”. If it was a gas or particles reflecting energy in regions outside the visible spectrum, say thr infrared, for the most part people, solar panels and plants wouldn’t notice. There are obvious concerns about secondary effects, but aren’t we seeing already the primary effects from the opposite, that being greenhouse gas emissions? We are already doing geoengineering, whether we like it or not, and scientifically looking for solutions isn’t a bad idea.
Now, should this be in the hands of a startup called Stardust or whatever shit? Absolutely fucking not, this should be a collective worldwide scientific discussion and effort, on the order of magnitude of the LIGO experiment, the LHC or similar projects. But as always, this is a matter of execution within capitalism and not of the theory, which needs a lot of scientific development and, yes, experimentation.
Useful experiments that we have already unintentionally carried out with “inverse greenhouse gases” are for example the emissions from transoceanic merchant ships. In 2020, regulations about sulphur dioxide emissions in merchant ships entered internationally, and abruptly cut 80% of SO2 emissions from said ships. As a result, given SO2’s inverse greenhouse effect, there has been a significant undesired increase in global radiation absorption.
We NEED to push for the study of these phenomena internationally by public entities and actual scientists in research institutions, and not let journalists and companies muddy up the topic as has happened with climate change overall.
We already know the cooling effect of aerosols, including SO2. Noone is blocking academic research on impacts of adding/removing aerosol to change Earth’s albedo. In fact we already know the impact, what is the lifetime of individual aerosol in the atmosphere, their negative (cooling) global warming potential, and their deleterious effect on human health as pollutant.
You can already show on a piece of paper why this experiment is not worth doing. The maximum lifetime of aerosol in the stratosphere is 2 years, you have to keep injecting and replacing the aerosol to maintain the cooling effect. Production of these reflective aerosol uses energy (i.e. produce GHG) so as the greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, you need more and more aerosol injection to offset the warming effect. On paper this is already a terrible idea, not even accounting for the additional particulate matter pollution from the fallout of this reflective aerosol injection, tldr, it’s going to end up in someone’s lung and other unintended consequences of injecting tons of dirt into Earth’s stratosphere.
Why should we waste resources to conduct planetary scale geoengineering experiment for an idea that is already bad on paper? Remember there is no control experiment for planetary scale geoengineering, there is no Earth 2. Thousands of serious climate scientists waste their time writing IPCC reports every 5 years and arguing over countless hours and the solutions have been the same since 1990, reduce oil and gas consumption, plant trees, make solar panels and wind turbines.
#RaidShadowLegends
ah yes. a plan with no notable consequences i can think of. i will throw 5 billion dollars at it
dumbest and most evilStarting premise of Snowpiercer.
Good news, we invented Snowpiercer from the short novel “Don’t do Snowpiercer” that was based on a book called Snowpiercer.
IIRC, when a volcano erupted in the 1990s (Pinatubo), temperatures dropped by ~0.1C on average, but crop yields of corn dropped by ~10%. Plants really need sunlight.
This still doesn’t dissuade me from thinking that inducing catastrophic seismic activity in yellowstone is a good idea
spoiler
/idontactuallythinkitsagoodidea
I’m gonna say it. I’m glad the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, because fuck these people.
Anything but reduce CO2 and methane emissions I guess.
Bike to work if you can/take public transit, don’t eat meat, don’t use AI, and yell at your local politicians.
IT’S NOT THAT HARD PEOPLE
Bike to work if you can/take public transit, don’t eat meat, don’t use AI
All good, all only solutions if everyone does them (and even then, only partial). This is not an individual problem, there are no individual solutions.
and yell at your local politicians.
“Yell”. Haha. Yes.
(The only actual solution is proletarian revolution.)
individualism wew lad
Yell at your local politicians
This especially.
You know that sun thing? The thing that is so regular that shit like Stonehenge still aligns?
Capitalism says we must start regulating it.
They did this in Highlander 2. Any article that mentions this asinine plan, should have to in lude that this literally happened in Highlander 2
the highlander sequels didn’t happen. Just the original and the TV series
And while I love Christopher Lambert in highlander, Duncan is the better McLeod
I really should go watch this now that I’m not a kid
The series is 90s shlock don’t get me wrong, but Duncan is a more likeable and developed character than Connor. Makes sense since they had way more time to flesh him out.
Agreed there. Big fan of the show
the highlander sequels didn’t happen
That is the world i want to live in
Real Plan to Blot Out the Sun and Reverse Global Warming
An IPO for blocking out the sun is WILD work
In a vacuum I’m glad that people are trying to come up with creative ideas to combat climate change since you never know what might work.
The issue is that in the US this is often being done in place of and not in addition to stuff we know needs to be done like restructuring cities around public transportation, encouraging people to reduce or eliminate meat consumption, etc.
The amount of times I’ve seen people try and justify the massive energy and water consumption LLM are using because the “AI” will solve the issue for us is way too many. Like even if it was an actual AI being worked on it’s very likely going to just tell us to do things we already knew we should’ve been doing and that’s even if you can artificially create sentience which I feel like is a a big if.
Blotting out the sun will never work lol, this is 100% scam
I wouldn’t say “never”. We’ve seen in recent years that reducing emissions in China can reduce the reflectivity of the planet and increase temperature everywhere in the short term, so I think it’s well within reason to say that “blotting out the sun” can work.
The problem is that once you start doing something like this you’re locked into doing it forever, and we don’t have anywhere near the level of understanding of the knock on effects of this type of geoengineering.
They are promising $200M annual revenue by 2030 and potential IPO for sprinkling dust into the stratosphere FOR PROFIT. Who’s gonna pay them? If this is a somewhat feasible solution, people would’ve talked about it years prior in academia and at IPCC meetings. Any serious discussion about mitigating climate change boils down to yelling at politicians to put solar panel, wind turbines and better public transport as the only feasible solution on the global scale. Not feeding cows seaweed to reduce methane emissions, not community garden, not paper straw, and certainly not blotting out the sun. This is NFT level scam.
Oh I’m not saying that this isn’t a scam, you’re right about that. But in theory I could see a government doing this and it working in a technical sense.
Yeah, this is straight Bond-villain shit:
Attention people of Earth. We are going to block out the Sun! No, not in a sinister way; to lower the temperature. And if you don’t pay us…TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS every year in perpetuity we’ll cook the planet!
Blotting out the sun already has been proven to work. Maritime trade in 2020 implemented heavy regulations on Sulphur Dioxide emissions that essentially overnight reduced said emissions by 80%.
Accidentally, it turns out Sulphur Dioxide was carrying out reverse greenhouse effect and global temperatures are rising much faster than before as a consequence.
This research should NOT be in the hands of private capital, but burying our heads in the sand regarding climate science and geoengineering is a horrible idea.
Oh yeah this specific plan and the way they’re going about it is garbage. Was speaking more generally about solutions.
