Roughly 100 million tons annually of lunar regolith launched into L1 by railgun.
https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...
And this was being discussed credibly as "something we'll be doing in the near-term future?"
Very optimistic. We haven't even been to the moon again in 50 years.
500 years, maybe.
Beyond that, “we haven’t been to the moon” isn’t a fair summary of our tech imo - a HUGE portion of that is political in origin, and private companies have invented reusable rockets which is pretty damn important
How, exactly? Because to me it's just as likely that LLMs will hallucinate alternative solutions based on their flawed world model which will send numerous unfortunate researchers on wild goose chases that turn out to be exactly that. And I expect the volume of impossible-yet-probable-sounding solutions will dwarf the actual costs saved by using an Automated Induction system.
Your criticism of an all-in-one induction system / Reasoning Engine is well founded, no disagreement from me. I just think that they’ll be able to help in myriad, smaller ways. Finding synergies, analyzing data, designing and employing frameworks/simulations/tools specific to the researcher’s work, and just generally being a bank of knowledge that can be easily browsed through complex linguistic filters.
IMO :) I am an optimist. Maybe it turns out chatgpt is the best we get, in which case I’m very very pessimistic about our chances of meaningfully solving climate change, rocket-launched-lunar-dust or no. So… I have a “fingers-crossed” based leap of faith in my reasoning somewhere
There will be tide changes in human’s technological capabilities long before there could be any reckoning for over-extraction of the Earth’s rotational energy.
For example, in our ability to bring mass into orbit. Add a couple orders of magnitude in that capability, and humans can start directly tuning the Earth’s total solar irradiance by shooting lunar dust into a Lagrange point, reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth by fractions of a percentage.
The Lagrange point is not perfectly stable, so the dust naturally dissipates over a 10-20 year timescale. If you don’t keep sending more dust, the “planetary sun-shade” naturally dissipates, so there’s zero risk of overdoing it.
Basically, within the next ~50 years, I predict we will gain the ability to turn down the planet’s thermostat in a very safe and predictable fashion, without having to pollute our own stratosphere. Overheating the planet becomes a total non-issue.