A team of MIT researchers is exploring a radical idea to reverse global warming: using massive ” space bubbles ” to reflect sunlight off our planet. Huge amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by humans since the Industrial Revolution are creating a kind of “blanket” around our planet, trapping heat in the atmosphere and causing global temperatures to get hotter. Instead of injecting particles into Earth’s atmosphere to cool the planet, an interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers proposes bringing solar geoengineering into space. The research team explored what would happen if a shield made of air bubbles was placed at the Lagrangian point L1, where the gravitational forces of the Earth and the sun form a balance that allows the shield to move indefinitely. stay on track indefinitely. The proposed shield is about the size of Brazil, and the bubbles of the shield could be fabricated and deployed in space, possibly out of silicon — the team has tried creating “space bubbles” in the lab. “Preliminary experiments succeeded in expanding the thin-film bubble at a pressure of 0.0028 atm and maintaining it at around -50°C (near-zero pressure and near-zero temperature space conditions),” they said in a news release. Because these The bubble is almost a million miles away, and the MIT team says this solar-geoengineering approach won’t be as risky as the one inside Earth’s atmosphere. This isn’t the first time someone has proposed putting a solar shield in space to help cool the planet, but making a shield out of bubbles would give us a relatively easy way to abort the mission if something goes wrong: Just pop the bubble.
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