Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), America’s Dumbest Congressman®, recently “asked a U.S. Forest Service official if her organization or the Bureau of Land Management could change the orbit of the moon or Earth to reverse the effects of human-caused climate change.” (See story here.)
“That,” Scientific American magazine says, “seems like a perfectly reasonable idea, doesn’t it?” So, “Let’s do it.”
While I don’t recall him expressly saying so, I presume he means shove the Earth away from the sun, not closer (although it’s not safe to assume anything where Gohmert is concerned).
This, of course, is merely an engineering problem. To start with, an astronomer helpfully calculated what’s needed is to move the Earth and Moon roughly 3 million kilometers farther from the sun. The Scientific American article describes several ways it could be done, but it’ll take more horsepower than an Amazon delivery truck, or even a Ford F-350, has; in fact, quite a bit more.
How much more? Well, a lot more. Say, exploding a nuclear bomb every 1 second for the next 500 years. We don’t have that many nuclear bombs right now, although governments are working on it, but there’s no clear answer for the radioactive side effects, either.
Fortunately, there are easier and less expensive ways to deal with climate change. (Can you imagine any?) Unfortunately, people like Gohmert keep getting elected to Congress, either because the voters in his district don’t realize how stupid he is, or because they’re just as stupid as he is.
So it looks like we’re screwed.
Read the Scientific American article here.