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Old September 6th 05, 04:42 PM posted to sci.physics,sci.geo.meteorology,soc.history
[email protected] john_ramsden@sagitta-ps.com is offline
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First recorded activity by Weather-Banter: Sep 2005
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Default Many are losing sight that we may have 2 more Katrina-like-Hurricanes before 2005 ends


wrote:

And unless we do conquer hurricanes by building a Earth Air
Conditioner of Aluminum Sequin placed into orbit to reflect
Sun rays,


Apologies if anyone else has mentioned it further down in
the thread, but wouldn't Aluminum sequin be swept away in
no time by solar winds?

Even if not, all the space it occupied (and most likely
all space in the vicinity of the Earth) would be unusable
to satellites and spacecraft, and the whole sky would be
a featureless haze to radio astronomers!

A much more effective idea, suggested by Arthur C Clarke
I think, would be a diverging Fresnel lens a couple of
thousand miles in diameter and floating between Earth
and Sun at one of the Lagrange points, L1. See:

http://www.physics.montana.edu/facul.../lagrange.html

Before anyone points out the technical hurdles to overcome
in grinding a glass slab of that size, let me add that a
Fresnel lens is flat and deviates light (or IR and UV?)
by means of a fine grating, usually circular. It can be
wafer thin and made from plastic, presumably by a small
army of miniature bots working round the edge each like
a spider spinning its web.


Cheers

John R Ramsden