Similar epistemic status, but I believe it’s almost as difficult to lower large masses safely into a gravity well as to lift them out. All that potential energy has to go somewhere.
ETA: 100 tons hitting the Earth’s surface at Earth escape speed releases the energy of 1.2 kilotons of TNT, causing an earthquake of magnitude 5 on the Richter scale,
The energy input is absolutely trivial compared to sunlight; climate change is driven by changing radiation balances not energy inputs (on anything like this scale).
You’d want to do a lot of aerobraking just to keep your metals easy-to-collect instead of dispersing them across the landscape. Expect regulatory issues anyway, since you’ve just built a dispenser of expensive rods from god.
Similar epistemic status, but I believe it’s almost as difficult to lower large masses safely into a gravity well as to lift them out. All that potential energy has to go somewhere.
ETA: 100 tons hitting the Earth’s surface at Earth escape speed releases the energy of 1.2 kilotons of TNT, causing an earthquake of magnitude 5 on the Richter scale,
The energy input is absolutely trivial compared to sunlight; climate change is driven by changing radiation balances not energy inputs (on anything like this scale).
You’d want to do a lot of aerobraking just to keep your metals easy-to-collect instead of dispersing them across the landscape. Expect regulatory issues anyway, since you’ve just built a dispenser of expensive rods from god.