Comment on Startup Says It'll Use Huge Space Mirror to Sell Sunlight During Nighttime

KonalaKoala@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• echodot@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  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.

  source

  • KonalaKoala@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    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?

    source
  • BleatingZombie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    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

    source

    • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Very temporary. If it’s onto light is small it has to be close to the Earth or no one will see it. But if it’s close to the Earth it moves so fast there’s no point, orbital speed for that altitude is something like 7.8 km per second.

      The only way to make this work is to have a truly vast mirror and have it out at geostationary orbit, then angle the mirror as needed to turn on or off the sun but then you’re going to be covering a significant area of the planet.

      To demonstrate how utterly insane this idea is, this is the sort of thing a civilization would do if it decided it wanted to terraform Mars. Doing this wouldn’t be the efforts of a single corporation it would have to be a global effort, we don’t currently have the capability of putting something that massive in orbit, we don’t have a way to reliably control the mirror, we can’t even manufacture a mirrored surface that large, and there have been zero studies on the environmental effects of doing this. It would honestly probably be easier to build a space elevator.

      Oh and even if we did do all of this, despite it being impossible, it would only work for a couple of years and then the mirror would get pushed out of orbit by light pressure. The only way to counter that is extremely complicated mirror geometries, and even more mirrors, making the total surface area in the hundreds or even thousands of kilometer range.

      source

      • Jimmyeatsausage@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        It does sound ludicrous…might be better off making a concave mirror so it reflects and intensifies the light…like a giant magnifying glass over an ant hill. Yeah…that’s how they should do it. Nothing gonna wrong with that.

        source

        • -> View More Comments