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Engagement, huzzah! Okay, the funding issue is an issue. Ironically, it requires companies like SpaceX (or their competition as they come online) to get the launch prices down. It's doable though. Back of envelope: The largest solar sail launched so far has been a paltry 14x14m, if my memory serves correctly. In order to reduce the incoming sunlight by 0.1%, you would need something like 60x1000 km of solar sails. Assuming you can make them 1 sq km each, you're looking at 60k solar sails. But they can be very very lightweight. Wikipedia proposes 0.02 g/m2 as a lower limit... let's use 0.05 g/m2 so we have some leeway and don't need exotic materials. Thus a 1km2 solar sail would weigh only 50kg (of sail material). Add another 200kg for some tensile frame and some control electronics and you're looking at something like a Starlink mass to get 1km2. Sure you'd need 60k of these things, but launching Starlink swarms that size is doable (to LEO -- you'd need a bigger rocket than the F9 for L1). Let's suppose Starship (or similar) is launching them in batches of 60 for $10M/launch... That's 1000 launches. Currently SpaceX is launching about every three days, so assuming Starship is online and capable, that would be three years of launches at the same rate as Starlink (but with a bigger rocket) and ten billion dollars. Okay, even if costs go up by an order of magnitude, we can do this, now, today, for about the cost of purchasing twitter. Musk really fucked up didn't he ;)

Okay, that's a lot of methane to launch the rockets. Back of the envelope, assuming one launch uses ~300t of methane. The per capita use of natural gas (globally) is about 50 cubic feet per person per day. A cubic foot of natural gas is about 35 grams, so the per capita usage in mass is about 1750g/day/person. So a single rocket launch uses about the same amount of natural gas 171,428 people would for one day. It's actually very small, comparatively. Even if I got my estimates wrong by two orders of magnitude (on total number of launches), it's still very small compared to the total amount of gas burned globally every day.

Okay, other options: we put the solar sails in a very high earth orbit (above the comms satellites) -- doable, but you'll require many many more of them as they won't site between the Earth and the Sun during most of their orbit. LEO would cause problems with collisions with comms satellites. You can't put them very low due to atmospheric drag. Plus, the closer they are, the more likely they are to create where little eclipses as their shadows pass by. L1 really is probably the best option.

Blimps flying around could do it. But you'd need like 60k blimps flying around in the upper atmosphere and each blimp would have to be an engineering marvel to get to that size. Probably not doable.

There's cloud seeding, as you suggest. But that becomes a political hot potato (blimps would too) due to where the clouds are created. What if China seeded some clouds which cause a torrential rainfall and flooding in Mexico as the atmospheric currents move those clouds. Etc.

A light nuclear winter sounds like a disaster -- what do we do, nuke a few volcanoes to set them off prematurely? That doesn't sound sustainable. Burn all the forests to release ash? Nope, that's our carbon sink that's burning...

Ironically, raising our albedo might be a decent local option -- just mandate white roofs everywhere. Just under 3% of our surface is urban and white roofs would also help with the urban heat island issue. You can probably paint 0.2% of the surface white. Not as good as blocking sunlight, but useful. The bad part is, solar panels are all dark, and moving to solar decreases our albedo. So maybe this will just offset changes in our average albedo due to solar panels.

Your last option reminds me of: Kill all the poor!

The social media echo chamber has that effect. But statistically speaking, this is humanity's golden age. The average lifespan is up, we have instant global communication and positioning (wow!), conflict is down (take the wider view)...

Like, even if you added Ukraine and Gaza to this, they're small compared to historical conflicts. And this graph would be even more pronounced if we normalized it as percentages against the global population -- literally the last few generations have been least likely to die in conflict across all of human history.

For me its because if you zoom out, the world is a better place to live in now, than it was 1000 years ago. Progress moves in waves, and right now it definitely feels like a significant low tide, but over time the coastline keeps creeping forward.

• Humanity is the only meat eating animal that has significant percentage of its population willingly avoiding eating meat and instead finding ways to obtain essential nutrients without it (need to add that I am NOT one of those animals, I'm personally waiting for lab grown meat before I obstain from death based meat, if I ever do)

• Humanity by and large no longer needs to leave its sick and wounded to die because we invented technology and infrastructure to both heal, and take care of those we cant heal

• We've progressed to the point as a species where in order to bring more prosperity to our community, we no longer have to take from other communities, and that wasnt always the case (unfortunately this is only a recent achievement, and as such, not all of our population has adapted to this, hence our current problems)