Undestroying Earth With Clouds
Posted by pizza_dogs on Tuesday, Aug 11, 2009
It’s getting pretty fun to watch scientists grasp desperately at wild solutions to fix the mess we’ve made of God’s (once) green Earth. Between the high-flying wind farms, underwater tidal mills, and the legions of bio-engineered carbon-breathing, waste-eating, disease-killing I find myself praying more and more to the Singularity gods for the answer. Today’s homage to Jules Verne comes in the form of Cloud ships designed to deflect sun rays thereby cutting global warming.
Come on, scientists! Cloud ships? How are we supposed to take you seriously as the saviors of mankind? And lest you think cloud ships are merely a harebrained scheme concocted by an isolated nutcake, be apprised that teams of lab coat-donning PhDs in the UK and US are competing to perfect these vessels. Nearly 2,000 of them, in fact, all crisscrossing the seven seas, sucking up water, and spraying it back out in the form of clouds. Overcast days, here we come!
How much sunlight would this fleet reflect, you may ask? One or two percent. Yep, two measly-peasly percent, but apparently that’s enough to cancel out the greenhouse effect. Let it be recorded in the books of history that in humankind’s eleventh-hour two of the world’s wealthiest nations decided to put their best and brightest to work making cloud ships. Does anyone else thinking now might be a great time to become a doomsday pentecostal?
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