An Umbrella in Space, Resume Padding, & Atmospheric Protection (Patreon)

A Giant Sun Umbrella to Slow Climate Change

Credit: István Szapudi/UH Institute for Astronomy

István Szapudi, a University of Hawaii astronomer, has proposed a radical method to prevent further global warming: Let’s put a shield between the Sun and Earth. “In Hawaii, many use an umbrella to block the sunlight as they walk during the day,” says Szapudi. “I was thinking, could we do the same for Earth and thereby mitigate the impending catastrophe of climate change?”

Yes, gee, why hasn’t anyone thought of this before! Well, of course this isn’t a new idea. Earlier proposals include mirrors that orbit earth, strategically deposited clouds of moon dust, and sunshields like Szapudi’s.

When it comes to those shields, the issue has so far been the enormous mass – exceeding millions of tons – necessary to keep them in place despite the solar radiation they must absorb. Szapudi’s new idea is now to tether the shield to a big bag that can be filled with dust and asteroids. This reduces the weight that needs to be launched from Earth to “merely” 35,000 tons. For context, our largest rockets today lift about 50 tons. Szapudi also leaves it unclear how the asteroids are supposed to get into the bag, which seems to me no small feat to accomplish. I feel comfortable predicting that this idea isn’t going to turn into reality any time soon.

Press release here. Paper here. For further amusement, you can also watch my video about giant air conditioning units for the planet.

“Fake it Til You Make It,” Now Scientifically Approved

Suppose you find out that your long-term co-worker lied on his CV. Not a big lie, you see, just a little bit of “resume padding” to help his chances of getting the job. You probably won’t be amused – after all you actually went all the way to get those degrees, didn’t you? Well, according to two researchers at Cornell University, resume padding might be morally questionable, but actually has an overall positive effect on the economy.

The researchers modelled the effects of resume padding on education, and found that it re-adjusts overinvestment in education. That is, degrees tend to cost society more than the economic value they generate. “But if I introduce resume padding…,” says Michael Waldman, one of the authors of the paper, “the reward for getting a higher-level degree goes down a little, and so does the investment in education.” In other words, a lot of people out there do jobs for which they’re overeducated, says the YouTuber with a summa cum laude PhD in physics.

Press release here. Paper here.

Earth is Better Protected Than we Thought

We have all heard that the Earth’s magnetic field protects us from the solar wind, charged particles that the Sun sends our way day-in, day-out. But according to a new simulation led by geophysicist Yuto Katoh at Tohoku University in Japan, our protection from highly energetic electrons is better than we thought, sending more than 90% of them right back into space high up in the atmosphere.

You may wonder why we didn’t know about this previously. It’s because calculating what charged particles do when they hit the upper atmosphere – an area called the “ionosphere,” roughly 60-600 kilometres above us – is not all that simple. Not only does the magnetic field bend the paths of charged particles, they also hit atoms which ionise and leave behind charged particles that move and create their own magnetic field. It’s a mess.

The new calculation now shows that for electrons at the highest incoming speed, the ionosphere effectively creates a “mirror force” that bends the particles’ path back up, thereby significantly reducing how many make it into the lower layers of the atmosphere.

Press release here. Paper here.