Everybody go read "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson, because apparently that whole scenario is actually about to start happening: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/11/21/stardust-geoengineering-janos-pasztor-regulations-00646414
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@sundogplanets That's the one with the sulfur rockets, right?
@sundogplanets Or watch Snowpiercer
@sundogplanets weather engineering is also in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future.
@morgan I need to try that book again. I had to bail out shortly after the heat wave death scene...
@sundogplanets @morgan Right, that was tough. And now we've had scenes like that IRL.
@sundogplanets @morgan Hot take: The heat wave death scene was masterfully written, but the rest of the book does not live up to that intense beginning. You've already read the best part.
@sundogplanets @morgan it's one of the few books I recommend. Worth another try 👍
@sundogplanets Men will literally blot out the sun rather than go to therapy...I mean, cut back on carbon emissions.
@sundogplanets I remember reading Stuart Brand's book about this stuff a few years ago and thinking that the use of aerosols to reduce solar radiation was cheap enough to do that a billionaire could just do it, and there wouldn't be anything anyone could do about it.
@sundogplanets Potential side effect of killing off (or seriously degrading) solar power, which as is the current way of things, will result in an increase in fossil fuel usage.
@sundogplanets @nullagent the same idea is a critical plot point in "Souls in the Great Machine" by Sean McMullen. Really great series of books.
@sundogplanets "If we kill all of the crops & starve all humans, CO2 production will decrease!"
Their collective brain mass is just large enough to fit on a microscope slide.
"a key threshold [has] already been crossed. Humanity [has] gained the power to turn down the sun, and barely anyone on the planet even [knows]."
Nearly 20 years ago now, there was a piece critiquing another sulfate aerosol scheme.
It was entitled "Can Dr. Evil Save The World?".
Evidently, the venture capitalists concerned have learned nothing.
@sundogplanets glitter will be the end of us all
@sundogplanets
I am now wondering if Termination Shock happened, in a small way, during Covid lock down when suddenly the aeroplanes stopped flying, and we all sat outside in our gardens enjoying a very warm year of nothing else to do?
@sundogplanets I think of this every time this comes up:
"We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. "
- Morpheus, The Matrix
