Space Sunshield

Out of the entire Project Earth series, this idea seems to be the most expensive and hardest to accomplish. Currently, I do not know how they plan to engineer the space sunshield it self or how they expect it to get into space but the sunshield seems unfeasible before seeing their ideas.

All knowledge of costs and time to implement aside, the Space Sunshield idea is to setup a network of mirrors in space to reflect some of the Sun's light from shining on Earth warming it further. If they can get their plan in motion, they expect that these mirrors will be able to reflect the sun rays and slow down global warming.

This idea is very similar to the Brighter World episode. The main similarity is reflecting the Sun's light away from Earth. The difference is sending mirrors up into space.

You can catch Project Earth, Space Sunshield on the Discovery Channel on September 12th at 9PM EST.


Updates from the episode:

Apparently, I was thinking too much on spending money on space agencies on launching these lenses, I wasn't thinking of smaller private individuals who use small rockets.

If only 2 percent of the sun's rays are redirected, this would be able to bring global temperatures back down to preindustrial eras.

The original lens was two inches thick and about one foot in diameter. The engineer's idea calls for 16 trillion lenses to be launched. Aside from the costs of labor and production, the cost to launch these lenses would cost one million trillion dollars to launch. Enough to bankrupt the world for a very long time.

The Discovery Project Earth team was able to scale the lenses down to make them 1 micron thick instead of his current two inch think lenses. They were successful in shrinking the lenses on a sheet of silicon.

In order to get the sun refracting lenses into space, the team first tried to use a coil gun. They proved that the coil gun can work but they hope that using traditional, proven rocket technology will be able to control variables better than a system that launches at over 1,000 g force.

Rocket technology on the other hand only causes about 25g. The only problem with using rockets for a launch is that the force of 25g's are in all directions because of the rumbling of the rockets.

Unfortunately for the team, the rocket crashed. Everything was destroyed, they were not even able to retrieve pictures or film from inside the rocket monitoring the lenses. The entire experiment was a large failure. The Project Earth team can now only speculate "IF" their experiments worked.

Based on vague, hypothetical ideas, they came to the conclusion that the sunshield would be able to actually reverse global warming but only if our carbon dioxide levels are reduced.

Brighter World

Brighter World premieres right after Raining Forests at 10pm August 29th on the Discovery Channel.

Brighter World plays on the fact that bright white water vapor clouds reflect sunlight back into space better than oceans or land, thus resulting the effect of global warming. This phenomenon is called global dimming and many scientists and professors have noticed this effect before.

In this episode, the Project Earth team tries to expand on the idea of creating man-made clouds in order to prevent the Earth absorbing excess sunlight causing global temperatures to rise. The team hopes that the clouds that are produced will help reduce the temperatures on Earth since less sunlight is being absorbed by the ground.


Updates from the show: The idea for this Project Earth episode is to geoengineer regular clouds. The plan is to use sea water to redistribute the molecules of water in clouds to redirect more sunlight back into space.

Regular clouds only reflect about 50% of sunlight back into space. The team expects that if very small salt particles are used inside the water droplets of clouds, this will reflect another 10% of sunlight back into space. Ten percent may seem like a very small amount however the amount of particles needed will need to be 4 times as many in a square inch.

The team would like to create Marine stratoculumus clouds. These clouds form between 200 and 400 feet above water. These clouds are ideal since marine stratoculumus clouds do not produce rain clouds since they are so low to the ground.

The Project Earth team ran into a problem though. They could not generate small enough particles using their proposed water jet theroy. The water particles averaged 14 microns across. Their goal was to create particles about 1 micron.

The team then moved onto another idea. They tested salt flares to see how small the particles were. They found out that the particles were less than 1 micron across making them ideal to test a geoengineered cloud.

The project used 300 flares set off simultaneously off the back of a boat. After some time, the particles were carried up in thermals into the condensing layer. This created a cloud exactly where they were hoping.

The cloud was about 100 feet wide by about four miles long. The cloud's volume was about six million square meters. They estimated that this cloud could potentially off set the carbon produced by about four or five power generating stations.