Swarm parasol

I'm not absolutely convinced that this would decrease the amount of
light hitting Venus.

Remember the orbit of the swarm of mirrors is much bigger than Venus,
and the light being reflected has on average just as much probability
of being refelected at the planet as it is away.

Also depending on how dense the swarm is around the planet, it would
be possible for the swarm to act like a grey body cavity keeping
infrared radiation within the sphere.

I don't think stray spheres will be a problem. No matter how dense
they are around Venus, the volume once they escape is trillions of
times bigger.

I'm wondering. If the albedo of the planet doesn't change, could such
a swarm be used around Mars to keep in heat and possibly atmosphere.

Just a thought
Bill

--- In spacesettlers@y..., "Dr. Omni" wrote:
> From:
> To:
> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 9:56 PM
> Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] Stability of L points
>
> > There is one small factor no one has mentioned yet. The solar
wind is
> > not constant, as a matter of fact, all the recent coronal mass
ejections
> > would wreak havoc on trying to keep this structure stable.
Granted,
> > the solar wind is usually predictable, but when you are talking
about
> > such a large and expensive structure, well.....it is my experience
that
> > Murphy's Law would come into play in a big way. And a massive CME
is
> > nothing to sneeze at, in space.
> >
> I'm also somewhat skeptical about the stability of the huge space
structure
> with many square megameters that are being discussed ; and I think
that
> similar results maybe achieved using "distributed" swarm structures.
>
> Take for example the Venus parasol proposed somewhere. If you can
produce
> enough aluminum (or whatever material youre using) to build a disk
mirror
> with a diameter of 12 megameters, you could also build a swarm of a
couple
> quadrillion hollow aluminum bubbles 1 meter in diameter and put
those
> things in zillions of different, non-coplanar orbits around Venus,
forming
> something vaguely similar to a Dyson sphere, but built to enclose a
planet,
> not a star. CME would certainly blow away zillions of the bubbles
along
> time,
> and certainly zillions of the bubbles would also loose momentum and
sink in
> the Venusian atmosphere, but since you have a huge quantity of
bubbles all
> losses would be accumulative and take some time to become
significant. You
> could simply replenish the lost bubbles with new ones (remember, in
first
> place youre assuming that there is no problem in producing
gargantuan
> amounts of reflexive surface).
>
> Of course I'm not addressing the problem that the bubbles lost in
space
> would pose for space navigation - I'll leave that to the critics of
the idea