this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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Well, two things about that.
One, the L1 Lagrange point between the Earth and Sun is further out than the orbit of the moon. Even without doing any math, just a cursory observation of how shadows work will illustrate that, given that the moon itself can just barely cover the disc of the sun from where it is, any such object placed there would need to have a diameter larger than that of the moon in order to completely block the sun's light. Or some appreciable and nontrivial fraction of the diameter of the moon if you only want to block part of the sun's light. Lofting something that massive up there and more importantly keeping it there given that it'd also be well within the gravitational influence of the moon would be quite the challenge. ("Quite the challenge," by the way, is rocket scientist talk for, "This is complete science fiction, and whoever suggested it is insane.")
Point two is that the Deep Space Climate Observatory is currently already parked there.
You wouldn't be blocking all of the suns light. That'd kill us. Blocking 2% would be a noticeable "fix". It's been a thought out on paper project for decades. It's "possible" in the strictest sense, but would take something (or many smaller somethings) the size of most of South America to do. It would take thousands of launches to a destination around 800,000 miles away, and then it would also all have to be able to adjust for orbital changes because the lagrange point isn't a stable orbit.
We just need another massive once a millennium volcano eruption. Throw the world into chaos and starve half the population to death while the earth is half covered in atmospheric ash for a year. The slow Thanos snap.
Well that's kind of my point, that's still a lot smaller than what Elon is suggesting. Elon suggested a sphere with a diameter larger than the earth, if the alternative is a disk larger than the moon, well that actually seems like a much better deal. Also, assuming a disk and a sphere have an equal diameter, the sphere has 4 times the surface area, so that's not a trivial difference.
That's interesting. Yeah that could be a challenge. Given the size of the thing, it seems like the obvious thing would be to utilize solar wind for maneuvering, as it's already essentially a solar sail.
The Japanese space agency tested a solar sail in orbit with a novel steering system, rather than changing shape, it used something much like LCD cells to shutter individual quadrants of the sail. Something like that could potentially work.
Yeah, that's a good point. Although if you were actually building something this big out there, you would probably build in some capacity for probes to dock to it. This is a huge installation after all, a facility more than a probe. Or just add on a module that duplicates the capabilities of the deep space climate observatory. I mean once you're constructing something this massive, that additional cost has gotta be a drop in the bucket, right?