Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: What if you could come up with a molecular structure that would cause a greenhouse in reverse?

Not that far out of the box
Robert — (archived)

My first impulse was to just look at the problem as symmetrical: Find something that's transparent to longer wavelengths and reflective of shorter wavelengths, but then I got to questioning the simplicity. If you think of it in terms of an aperture, an aperture sets a maximum wavelength, but should allow that plus all shorter wavelengths through (except for resonant effects, maybe).

So maybe it would take a two-step process. Below your greenhouse gases, you have a layer of another substance that's excited by infrared and reradiates at shorter wavelengths so the energy passes back through the greenhouse layer. An electromagnetic transformer, sort of. Or--hey, RL, could you make a concentric shell of gas lase?

Huh. That'd work here on Earth, too, wouldn't it? I mean the mechanism, I'm only speculating that such a molecule exists.

(And down the thread I was just saying to Nick that I doubt the human brain is capable of consciously managing a planetary ecosystem, and here I am playing god restructuring the atmosphere. It's probably a real good thing that I don't the power to translate my brainstorms into action!)

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