I don't think this idea will see the light of day.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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They can stick that mirror where the sun don’t shine.
Guess I'll die another day.
~God~ ~dammit.~
Imagine a malicious person constantly aiming the light at at the house of someone they don’t like. Good thing it doesn’t seem to be feasible any time soon.
"I want a spot, but I want all of my sunlight focused onto a spot about a centimeter across. I'll give you the coordinates."
Because the sun is not a point source but a disk half a degree across, you can’t focus the sun tighter than about a 1km spot from a mirror in low earth orbit.
Okay but can we make that 1 km hot enough to burn everything inside of it?
For science of course.
Welp I hate to break it to you, but the Ruskies actually already tried this one back in the 90s, and I’m fairly certain the business idea is based directly on that concept.
In a tent would be even worse.
Seems like a lot of planning to get the person you don't like to live in a tent first.
There are ways.
None so far as I’m aware that are actually legal, mind. But why let that get in the way of one’s dastardly plans?
Possibly some type of incendiary device?
I was kind of thinking chemical. Unleash a pack of grumpy skunks and get them to spray everything.
Freakish, sure, but plausibly deniable.
I was thinking more they were on a trip somewhere.
So if they over concentrate does this turn into an 'ant in a magnifying glass' situation?
Could it be used to break up protests?
If by "break up" you mean on a molecular level, then yes.
Theoretically, but I don't see protests or riots stopping because of light.. riots happen in the day, too, and the violent ones are going to be masked up so more light won't do anything to reveal their identity
It will be stopped if the protests are vaporized
Was thinking the exact same thing. Also if this took off doesn't seem like it would help the global warming situation. "Let's add more energy to our planetary greenhouse!"
Surely not. Mirrors are incapable of destruction. Why that would be dangerous! You could burn crops or boil away water reserves. Surely no corporation would so irresponsible!
commoditize sunlight
Absolute ghouls
It's not like they are taking it away from you. Just selling you extra you don't need
Isn't light pollution like that just illegal?
Edit: In the US, it is in some states, though not all. Haven't found a source for Europe yet.
https://www.ncsl.org/environment-and-natural-resources/states-shut-out-light-pollution
I don't like it when companies mess with the sky. Don't fuck with my stars.
FFS, we don't need more sun hitting our planet right now, we need less. Much less. Have the mirror reflect sunlight away from the planet. Then it'd be useful
if someone stares directly at it will it hurt their eye?
I keep vacillating on whether this makes any damn sense.
Here's the ISS transiting the moon, or possibly some lost footage from A New Hope. Just measuring that JPG, the moon's about 600px in diameter and the ISS is charitably 100 pixels, so it's like 1/3000th the scale, from Earth's perspective. Well - the moon is 400,000 times fainter than the sun.
The sun and the moon are roughly the same size, from Earth's perspective. So there's some arrangement where, from any point you can see an ISS-sized mirror in front of the moon, it'd be reflecting the sun. The moon's about a thousand times further from Earth than the ISS, and has a diameter of 3400 km, so if you draw those two triangles touching at the ISS, the lit-up area on Earth should be about 3.4 km in diameter.
It'd be one hundred times brighter than the full moon, but still one thousand times dimmer than daylight.
Huh.