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Open challenge: Getting an elected US politician to seriously propose a space heat sink as a solution to climate change.

There were some people seriously proposing big convection tubes that'd bootstrap columns of hot air, then passively pull surface air into the upper atmosphere. I can't find a link, but those wouldn't get to low earth orbit, so not a "space" technology.

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I've heard of launching some large mirrors into orbit, or a bunch of small mirrors that can link together in orbit. Then you use them to reflect some sunlight off into space. I have no idea how practical this is. The bigger concern would be if something goes wrong, you need to make the mirrors deorbit quickly.

You could set it so that some of the mirrors formed a parabolic collector and heated a molten salt column, etc on the surface.

That'd have the same net effect as the giant heat sink (energy production from a heat engine, net negative flow of energy to the surface).

Wasn't there a city builder that'd let you build such a thing, where it would sometimes lose calibration and burn a swath of the city to the ground?

Futurama had a similar joke (with a reflecting mirror, not a heat collector) https://gfycat.com/hatefulvariablekakapo

Sim City 2000 I think. Yeah, getting it back here is not great. And would defeat the purpose of lowering amount of solar radiation...

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