Astronomer royal calls for 'Plan B' to prevent runaway climate change

[politicat]

47. To fund it, about 2% of the world's wealth.

In terms of energy, we need two engineering breakthroughs (which are within grasp) to provide sufficient enery to power our surface clean-up needs and the lift to the top of the gravity well. We need orbital solar collectors that transmit power by microwave to the ground. We've done the satellites; in terms of tech, we know how they work. We've also done power transmission to ground by microwave, so again, we know how it works. It's just a matter of building them and lifting and developing the ground infrastructure to feed that power into the grid. The tech is on the shelf right now. Right now, there's no immediate profit, so that's why it's not being done. But deploying those takes care of our power needs here for both cleanup and further technological drvelopment. With near limitless, non-polluting power, deep well sequestration, desalinization, refreezing the arctic, and non-fossil fuel transportation become trivial in engineering terms.

Second, to build the ships to retrieve raw materiel from the asteroid belt and to transport to Mars and Luna, we need to build the space elevator so we can stop using rockets. That's the technical challenge right now -- building the carbon-fiber cable. But we're getting there -- that tech improves every year, and most of that improvement is coming from independent developers, not corporate R&d or government. Once we have a top step above the gravity well, it becomes much easier to build a space-based shipyard. A hell of a lot of a permanent space craft can be built with 3-D printing technology, because it's not the vacuum of space that requires all that heavy shielding, it's lift and re-entry. eliminate those two factors and a space craft can be something a lot like a hamster ball or a big tin can. Space ships should be built in space because building them on the surface takes far more energy. (We don't build container ships or carriers in Iowa because it costs too much to get them to where they're used. Same principle for space.)

And these can be funded fully, with a lot to spare for remediation on the ground, by 1% of global wealth. (Currently estimated at $223 TRILLION; $2 trillion is about 4x what NASA estimates is needed to fully deploy the solar satellite system and fund R&D on the elevator.)

It's not that we can't, because we have the knowledge. Right now, it is purely a matter of will and despair and fear of the unknown.