LiveScience.com - A wild idea to combat global warming suggests creating an artificial ring of small particles or spacecrafts around Earth to shade the tropics and moderate climate extremes.

There would be side effects, proponents admit. An effective sunlight-scattering particle ring would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example.

And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. Deploying tiny spacecraft would come at a relative bargain: a mere $500 billion tops.

But the idea, detailed today in the online version of the journal Acta Astronautica, illustrates that climate change can be battled with new technologies, according to one scientist not involved in the new work.

This scenario brings up many questions...

1) Would you have to take a world "vote" to see if everyone wanted one of these things in the sky... permanently?

2) Would the US be stuck with the bill, or at least a larger-than-proportionally-necessary chuck of the bill, because we are all so rich?

3) Is it really any of our business to mess with climate change?

The way I see it, if the world really is getting hotter to the point where it is going to kill us all, or most, off in the next few millenia, what business is it of ours to mess with Mother Nature? I mean, rarely when we try to help do things to right anyway (on a massive scale I speak). And when we do things that are going to devistate the enviroment (::cough::ALASKAN OIL PIPELINE::cough:, we end up making the best damn habitat those furry little guys have ever dreamt of.

My point is, it's Mother Nature's course and I say let it happen! Don't mess with things we don't know anything about...