Dr. Lagrange Would Be Smiling

In the late 1700's, the mathematicians, Leonhard Euler and Joseph Lagrange, discovered that there are five points where the gravitational attractions of two astronomical bodies exactly cancel out. Actually, due to the elliptical orbit of the earth, these are "areas" rather than points.
A diagram of the five Earth-Sun Lagrange sites is shown below (from Wikipedia).

These sites are not just of academic interest, but may actually be the saviors of the world!
This is a rather presumptuous statement, even for a molecular biologist like myself, so let me try to explain. In 1958 the Polish astronomer, Kordylewski,  observed the presence of large very faint clouds of dust at two of these Lagrange sites. And of course there have been many science fiction books using Lagrange sites for a variety of fantastic operations..  And then yesterday as I was imbibing my daily dose of Progressive News Blogs, I was startled to learn that NASA actually  has proposed a plan to robotically  "capture" a small asteroid in a net-like device (see below) and drag it to orbit the moon, where it could be intensively studied by manned expeditions. Wow! and double wow!!

http://tinyurl.com/cp7okjc

And now the plot thickens. A few months ago I read an article about a proposal by Russel Bewick, a graduate student (!),  and his collaborators in a paper in the Journal of Space Sciences. This is a respected journal and the paper, at least to my eyes, appears solid. They propose to drag a fairly large asteroid such as Ganymede 1036 to the L1 Earth-Sun Lagrange point, and to attach a "mass-driver" to maintain the position of the asteroid and also to generate huge clouds of dust. This dust cloud would encompass around 1,600 km and would be prevented from wandering off by  the gravitational pull of the asteroid. Berwick calculated that this cloud could produce a 1.6% reduction in the sunlight reaching the earth, too little to be actually detected by eye, but enough to decrease the temperature of the earth by around 2 degrees centigrade and eventually ameliorate the effects of global warming.

When I read this, I had said to myself that this is a  great idea but totally not feasible. But then came the NASA bombshell and what seemed  not feasible now seemed perhaps at least possible. But of course, the technology does not yet exist and the possible dangers abound such as making an error in the calculations (ie using English units and not metric units) and thereby letting the asteroid hit the earth and destroy 90% of the life, as happened 60 million years ago in the Yucatan.  But by the time we  have this technology, the accumulative effects of global climate change may be so horrible that this may be a chance worth taking to save our civilization. So my statement that the Lagrange Points may be the savior of the world may not be too crazy after all!