My startup is going to rent sunlight interceptors that block the extra sunlight sattelite beams that your neighbour rented and what is keeping you awake all night.
Startup says it wants some more cocaine and wants to know if you know anyone with some more cocaine because some more cocaine would be fuckin' great right now holy shit
It's so dumb uggh. Getting the same power output as the sun would need a MINIMUM surface area of the size of the area on earth it would illuminate.
So say the use case is extending daylight time in Anchorage, Alaska during winter. You would need a mirror that has MINIMUM surface area that of Anchorage. Somehow, it would need to be in an orbit that can reliably reflect light to Anchorage at all points.
Then, it would most likely be in low Earth orbit as putting it higher would require bigger mirrors. However, if u are in LEO, u are also moving incredibly fast. You would thus need an array of these super large mirrors.
All of this for what? Something that an led can do incredibly easily?
Would it not be possible to deflect it through a lens? Couldn't that increase the spread area significantly and because of the contrast at night you would only need a fraction of the light intensity to make an area feel well lit?
You don’t need a lens, just a differently shaped mirror. Their point is just that the light you capture is based on the mirror’s surface area, so if you are selling sunlight-equivalent amounts of light you would need a mirror of equal area to that you are selling. You would not need such a large mirror to sell an area of dimmer light, and you would not need a lens.
A convex mirror could work, sure. A lens would be impossible to construct for the size necessary.
I don't get what u mean by "contrast at night", but sure - let's assume that you would need 5% of the power at noon. You would still need a mirror with a surface area of 5% of the area you are illuminating.
The space mirror is only going to enhance the night sky by better lighting up everything else. And since it's a mirror, you get double the star goodness for whatever you want to see!
You mean zero stars because many nights the moon alone provides enough reflection to blind the sky essentially.
I was an adult before i learned that in actual darkness we can see the andromeda system and the beautiful colors of our own galaxy at large with our naked eye.
I used to think pictures like these required super expansive special camaras… and to be fair i was correct in that assessment. But i failed to realize the ultimate light sensor is simply our own eyes.
The sky is beautiful, its sad how hard it is to catch a real glimpse of it in proper light contrast
Not exactly a new idea. Soviets tried it. Expenses were huge, and something that nobody thought of much back then is that nature would surely found itself hanging upside down...
Well unless the mirror is 20km across, they won't notice because the whole idea is insane.
This is like the Romans thinking they are going to build aircraft, we are no way we are near the level of technology required to do this. This is like stage 2 civilization level stuff.
How would it work if it's not that large, though? They could only sell sunlight to people who are within the target radius, but that would be very temporary
Oh okay, it's just that I feel attached to the woodlands and find comfort being in the middle of the forest, and seeing what is going on here made me feel really concerned for the environment and nocturnal species. Like, what if you happen to be an animal that is on the prowl or is active at night and all of a sudden its daylight due to sunlight being reflected from a mirror in space?