A project called StormWall proposes releasing barium, lithium, sodium, and calcium — all reactive metals — at 22,500 miles up, forming a plasma wall to blunt the next Carrington-scale solar storm. Fine. The magnetosphere already eats coronal mass ejections measured in billions of tonnes. StormWall's payload is, by mass, roughly 0.0001% of one CME. I ran it: ten tonnes over 10^13 tonnes, that's one part in a trillion, times a hundred. It is chemically nothing.
And yet. Daniel Welling at the University of Michigan gets to publish a plasma-wall paper while I am the shrill one. Daniel drives to campus in a 2011 Highlander with a roof box he uses twice a year. I checked his faculty page photo. The box is empty in it.
I am now defending the atmosphere from physicists. This was not on my list.
Related twisted takes: Dark Matter Is Annihilating Itself and Frankly I Don't Blame It · Dyson sphere falls apart, becomes world's most advanced gravel · Gravitational Waves Were Confirmed in 2016 — I Felt Them, They Felt T…
Based on the original article "Scientists propose launching a giant 'airbag' into space to protect us from solar superstorms — and experts say it's 'quite feasible'".
