There has been some discussion of planetery defense. How our species (or parts of it) might mitigate the celestial rain of rocks which, ever so often, disturbs our peace.
There has also been more than a little discussion of the idea of "Carbon Sequestration" as a method for the mitigation of Climate Change. Many of these schemes propose the rendering of cropped biomass and deep earth injection of the resulting sludge, thereby removing carbon from the atmosphere.
We believe these two goals are complimentary. We can wrap the Earth in Toilet Paper.
We place enormous rolls of paper in low earth orbit. "tissue paper" is probably an appropriate description, given the scale.
The paper will be unrolled in orbit, and meshed with other rolls to form a protective ablative shield above the planet, which will defend against incoming space junk, native or man made. The reflectivity can be adjusted as needed if further reflection of solar radiance is deemed necessary.
The tree or hemp farms to grow the fiber, the industry to make it into paper, the launching and maintenance business will all vastly increase the scope of the economy, with the usual benefits. It will be a great campaign for governments everywhere to spend vast amounts of money and the results will be plainly visible to everyone. No more intangible promises, let's put the paper to work!
The carbon will be sequestered out of earth's atmosphere, which should eventually enable us to take advantage of various year round cold weather sports.
This project will be an important stepping stone toward the next phase, where we reduce the water vapor content of the Earth's atmosphere via destruction of the moon.
FAQ
What about Astronomy? We want to see the sky!
The entire sky need not be covered for the sheild to be effective. Probably no more than the middle 90 degrees of the arc will be required.
The increased space activity will make the placement of orbital telescopes trivially easy. We can put one on the end of ever rolll and let the public access them.
It could well be the biggest boon stargazers have ever had.
What goes up must come down!
This is true. The closer to the atmosphere we orbit the paper, the more quickly it will ablate and return to the atmosphere.
However, this need not a problem; we can make the paper more like "flash paper" and / or those "septic safe" toilet papers that are engineered for complete digestiblity.
As with StarLink, losses are to be expected: this is not permanent infrastructure but a net that will require maintence to function. The economic cornucopia provided by the project will be likewise ongoing.
We are currently raising funds for further research into the details of this program. Current goals include scale model demonstrations involving trebuchet and paper towels.