00:03climate change is here and as we continue to set records with regards to planetary temperatures a
00:08lot of people are looking at new and wild ways to cool the planet and this one has got to
00:13be
00:13one of the wildest this is the solar shield concept from astronomers at the university of
00:18hawaii not entirely new idea but this twist must be solar shields are meant to block some of the
00:23sun's rays and if positioned just right they could help mitigate some of the planet's warming however
00:28solar shields have a fatal flaw they can be blown away by the very solar rays they're supposed to
00:33block and that's where this new idea comes in astronomer is von sapudi suggests we capture an
00:38asteroid get it into the l1 lagrangian point and tether a solar shield to it at that point in space
00:43the sun and the earth's gravitational pull are equal meaning the whole thing would remain stable out
00:48there and at that point the whole thing would only need to weigh 3.5 million tons which sounds like
00:53a
00:53lot but is a hundred times less than what experts have estimated it would need to weigh historically
00:58and only one percent of that mass would be the shield we would actually need to launch into
01:02space the rest is just the asteroid's natural mass this method is also scalable allowing us to block
01:07as little as point two four percent up to one point seven percent of the sun's rays enough to cool
01:13the
01:13planet safely
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