MIT Proposes Brazil-Sized Fleet of 'Space Bubbles' To Cool the Earth

A group of MIT researchers is exploring a radical idea for reversing global warming: using a raft of 'space bubbles' to reflect sunlight away from our planet. Freethink reports: The copious amounts of greenhouse gasses humans have been releasing into the air ever since the Industrial Revolution are forming a sort of blanket around our planet, trapping heat in the atmosphere and causing global temperatures to creep ever higher. Instead of injecting particles into Earth's atmosphere to cool the planet, an interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers proposes we take solar geoengineering to space. Specifically, the group is investigating what might happen if we positioned a shield made of bubbles at Lagrangian Point 1 -- a point in space where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and the sun form a sort of equilibrium that would keep the shield in orbit there indefinitely.

The proposed shield would be about the size of Brazil, and the bubbles for it could be manufactured and deployed in space, possibly out of silicon -- the group has already experimented with creating these 'space bubbles' in the lab. 'In our preliminary experiments, we succeeded at inflating a thin-film bubble at a pressure of 0.0028 atm, and maintaining it at around -50C (to approximate space conditions of zero pressure and near-zero temperature),' they said in a press release. Because the bubbles would be almost a million miles away from Earth, the MIT team says this approach to solar geoengineering wouldn't be as risky as methods that directly involve Earth's atmosphere. This isn't the first time someone has proposed placing a solar shield in space to cool the planet, but creating it out of bubbles would give us a relatively straightforward way to abort the mission if it went awry: just pop the bubbles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.