It would take a scientist based in Hawaii, natch, to broach the idea of a ginormous sunshield in space to protect Earth from the mounting effects of solar radiation due to climate change.

University of Hawaii astronomer Istvan Szapudi said he was inspired by the many people walking around Hawaii using umbrellas to block the sunlight. The concept, unveiled Monday in a peer-reviewed paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also involves harnessing an orbiting asteroid to counterweight the sunshield. Much more fiction than science, at this point — but who knows?