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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

"We did a very rough calculation," said Prof Ruan. "And we estimate we would only need to paint 1% of the Earth's surface with this paint - perhaps an area where no people live that is covered in rocks - and that could help fight the climate change trend."

LMAO me I love living in the future. This sentence could’ve been lifted from the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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Yeah, 1% is only a little more than five million square kilometers of painted surface, nevermind the ecological impact of making and applying and drying and maintaining that much paint. Some percentage of the “useless third”[1] could be enticed to the task.

[1] Golgafrincham: https://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/golgafrincham.s...

Make it a requirement that every MBA graduate paints a square kilometer, hahaha

Wouldn't the reflectivity degrade almost immediately, as dust landed on said painted surface?

Naturally you paint a few million floating balls and throw them into the ocean!

Geo-engineering is an extremely flawed way to approach the climate change problem, for a million reasons including this one.

The Nazi’s had an idea of launching a sun gun (Sonnengewehr) made of sodium metal I think. It would then fry the Allies with focused sunbeams. They were also on meth by the way.

However maybe we could build a bunch of similar mirrors in the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point (reflecting light straight back at the Sun of course!)

A few trillion small reflective solar sails (for station keeping) at L1 would do it[1]. Someone should tweet at musk to get approximate launch costs for that.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade

That number sounds nuts but it only adds up to 20 million tonnes. Actually, that sounds even more nuts.

But if you can grab the 20 million tons from asteroids, maybe it's achievable.

Or, please cover Earth's surface with plant, which may already cover more than 1% of the surface, and can convert sun energy to something we can use.

I feel like it would cause some strange local weather patterns too if you localized all of the high albedo paint in one area. Would be a funny consequence, but I'm sure they've considered it!

Heat in cities causes us to produce more heat trying to cool indoor spaces. You paint the roofs with this stuff.

I get it, it’s just a funny quote. “Paints” a rather absurd picture - scientists furiously painting a mountain somewhere Ultra-white® in a last-ditch attempt to cool down the planet.

If you haven’t yet read Douglas Adams, I can highly recommend it.

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