Scientists plan to block out the Sun

Don’t you just hate the Sun? All it does is hang out in the sky all day, making things hot out of spite, then during the night it buggers off and hides like a coward. Well, a group of Israeli scientists have finally found a solution to that pesky Sun problem, inspired by that episode of the Simpsons which you immediately thought of when you read the headline. Yes, the grand high scientists at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology have developed an enormous Sun blocking sheet of aluminum foil the size of Argentina, which they want to install permanently in space. The plan is to send the spacecraft to the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, the point between the Sun and the Earth where the two’s gravity nearly cancels each other out, and unfurl 2.5 million square kilometer slightly-more-advanced-than-tinfoil tinfoil, and block out enough sunlight to cool the Earth by 2.7 degrees Celsius. Of course, that’s the end goal. The team wants to space-road-test the concept first, with a much smaller $20 million prototype. While this all sounds like a good idea on paper, some have pointed out that, apart from having devastating consequences for any life on Earth that needs light, it would be the single most expensive structure ever constructed by humans anywhere in the universe and cost trillions of dollars. All the team needs to do now is convince some country to go into trillions of dollars of debt to fund Israel, and they’re set.