HONOLULU — Doing his very best MacGyver impersonation, University of Hawaii astronomer Istvan Szapudi has devised a novel approach for addressing Earth’s rapid warming.Szapudi proposes deploying a massive solar shield made from cutting-edge lightweight materials and counterbalanced by a captured asteroid to reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth
Variations of the idea have been proposed before, but the massive weight such a shield would need to be in order to balance gravitational forces and prevent solar-radiation pressure from blowing it away had always been unfeasible “In Hawaii, many use an umbrella to block the sunlight as they walk about during the day,” Szapudi said. “I was thinking, could we do the same for Earth and thereby mitigate the impending catastrophe of climate change?”
Variations of the idea have been proposed before, but the massive weight such a shield would need to be in order to balance gravitational forces and prevent solar-radiation pressure from blowing it away had always been unfeasible.