I just a few hours ago stumbled, by DuckDuckGo, upon Greg Leal's School. I have decided to treat this as The Bob Zubrin Blog In Absentia.
Leal can get a lot more gonzo than (say) Casey Handmer ever has got, or Nyrath Chung, or Hollister David. Leal jumped ahead with that orbital ring thing... in 2018. Leal was, in that year anyway, ahead of his skis - like Zubrin 2013. (Or for that matter DuPont/Murphy 2020-1.) Leal 2018 didn't understand that humans like to go in increments.
However: as Mars goes first with that Ring Of Iron... it'll be of interest what happens with all our planets in that <1.6 AU range, down here where the inverse-square law means something. Leal noted offhand that the orbital ring in our inner planets stands to solve global warming. Er.
What rings of insolation-using magnets shading our inyalowda planets actually solves is solar irradiance. And indeed: irradiance presents a problem, as our main-sequence Sun heats up 500 million years out, and beyond. Here on Earth I am less concerned with the whole biosphere than with Life As We Know It including ski-resorts.
In the meantime it stands to get very, very cold in our ring-shaded planets. I mean, much as I like to ski, I don't care to ski the Dominican Republic.
For starters: the Congressional Republic just took another setback terraforming Mars. The good news here, for DuPont and Murphy, is that here's that magnet for keeping the ions off. To mitigate: put mirrors on the inner side, to reflect some sunlight (and radiate heat) back onto Mars' equator at (especially) night. Mars will still be darker overall I think, will be colder than highland Antarctica in deepest winter. Gotta call in Casey for those Libration-Halo mirrors.
[VENUS 9/22/23: Moved here.]
But then there's Earth. Where humans have moved to the orbital ring because they have to, over dead white NeoEvropa. Maybe we'll keep our planet to a nice Pleistocene level with the wooly mammoths. I dunno. Someone else's problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment