Make predictions about unknown things so future people can laugh at us

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Started by Legend, Jul 10, 2019, 04:18 AM

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Legend

oh please, you give humanity too much credit.  i project like that would require world wide cooperation.  humans would rather die than work together with someone who speaks another language, has a different skin color, wears a different kind of clothes.

combating climate change could easily be solved today but because of the "prisoner's dilemma" we don't and we won't no matter how bad it gets.
Giving humanity credit would be expecting climate change to be solved while it is still a "looming" threat. This is more about people looking after their own self interests after climate change starts seriously hurting their businesses.

Also a trillion dollars is nothing. World wide cooperation would not be needed, at least for this specific example. Spin satellite production as a jobs program with different parts built in different states and it'd be easy to fund it like the current SLS rocket. The ISS only included other countries for political reasons. Cost wise the US paid for the majority of it anyway. The US is also set to already have the capacity for this before such a measure would be needed. SpaceX, Amazon, OneWeb, and a few other companies are launching thousands of satellites over the next decade to create modern space internet. The massive scale of these operations is of similar magnitude to a partial solar shade, just in low earth orbit instead of at L1. Just for the sake of expressing how achievable a partial solar shade is, Jeff Bezos could personally fund the entire operation if his rocket company and Amazon continue down their current paths.


I'm optimistic so I hope we'll avoid reaching a point where such a measure is needed, but just within the past decade this concept has gone from laughable future tech to just around the corner tech.