Title text:
Once you add the balloons into the model, it makes forecasting easier overall–the forecast is always ‘cold and dark, with minimal solar-driven convection.’
Transcript:
[A graph is shown. The X axis is labeled Number of Weather Balloon Launches Per Day. It’s logarithmic, with ticks in powers of 10, and values shown at 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 1 million, 1 billion, and 1 trillion. The Y axis is labeled Weather Model Accuracy, no values are shown. The plot starts above the mark for 1 balloon, at about 40% of the maximum value of the curve, it quickly rises through a point labelled “Current Rate”, at about 4000 launches per day and 85% of the maximum. The maximum value is reached at 100 million, plateaus until 10 billion, and then reduces even more rapidly down to perhaps 15% maximum accuracy above the 10 trillion mark.]
Source: https://xkcd.com/3107/
What about this?
It looks like the dart took out about a half dozen lights and a dozen people in about two seconds, so let’s say 10 strikes per second. At that rate it would take 10^11 seconds to pop a trillion balloons. That’s more than 3000 years!
Of course I did say “make a tiny dent,” but even to eliminate 0.1% of the balloons would take the dart 3 years. One trillion is a number that we use a lot, for example talking about the US national debt, but it is not an ordinary number that lends itself to intuitive understanding. Even a billion is hard to grasp intuitively.
Let’s just light the atmosphere on fire. Sounds like the quickest solution. Surely there can’t be any downsides.