If this doesn’t start fires I’ll be very surprised…
I mean, it absolutely will. We’ve seen buildings that have melted cars because they slightly focused the light. One little oops, and it goes from providing some light to being a “space laser”. This is exactly what’s going to play out https://www.tiktok.com/@_saretz/video/7276260124744830240
I don’t like the concept of reflect orbital, but it’s compelling. The official goals set aside and thinking conspicary for a second , we’re talking about Murica after all:
In a future large scale, it could be the ultimate (psychological) warfare tool. Don’t need to drop bombs to break a country. You just steal their night. Forcing an entire region into permanent daylight would completely wreck human circadian rhythms, kill crops, and devastate entire local ecosystems. Best part for the military? It’s technically “non-lethal.” You can force a nation to its knees without the PR nightmare of blowing up hospitals and schools. Forcing Ukraine to a peace deal on US terms? Iran? Gaza? easy. Just “torture” the entire population at once by sleep deprivation and famine, until the leaders give in.
Steerable mirrors as massive orbital dazzlers, too. Rapidly fluctuating the light intensity or strobing it could completely blind enemy drones, infrared sensors, and targeting optics. The sun emitts massive amounts of IR. Reflecting that onto targeting sensors would drive their exposure algorithms insane.
And good luck defending against it. Sure, radar can spot the giant reflective metal foil, but what then? Fire a multi-million-dollar ASAT missile at a cheap mirror when there are 49999 more of them? Hit it with kinetic weapons? a railgun? Congrats, you poked a tiny pencil hole in a giant Mylar sheet. It wouldn’t even faze the one sattelite that was hit. Even if you somehow manage to shoot down 100 of them, there are 49,900 more just waiting to seamlessly take over.
Last but not least, let’s be real. There is zero chance a random startup gets the insane funding to mass-produce and launch a 50,000-satellite constellation in the next 10 years to generate a tiny bit of solar power or illumination at night. On the other hand considering ai companies… Still, it just doesn’t add up for me. I’m almost sure, Pentagon, DARPA, or someone else is heavily backing this as a (maybe military?) project.
What a load of nonsense. Just coming from Finland. They basically have no night right now. No space mirrors required and people looked perfectly sane.
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
It’s not that i believe something like this will happen for real. It is fun to think of a worst-case or of “scientifically plausible” conspiracy. I do wanna watch that movie, though.
That sounds horrific. Could we just, not?
However, the FCC approved the satellite, noting the grant is only “for a single demonstration satellite” to test an innovative technology that could advance American leadership in space.
“C’mon baby, just the tip…”
We live in the stupidest timeline.
It’s more of a “sure, you can waste money on that” sort of approval.
People don’t really understand the scale of what’s needed to actually put large structures in space. Or in this case 50,000 satellites.
The plan is horrifically bad, but also completely unfeasible.
The FCC shouldn’t be enabling this scam, but I’m not that worried.
Or no more worried about this scam than any of the dozen of active scams by semi-competent tech bro billionaires.
It’s not horribly large, really. It’s a super thin reflective film that unfolds.
It does seem like it would need way too many in the sky to be financially viable. Like, the cost would be much more prohibitive than paying for land and probably like 15% more solar panels to get the equivalent amount of solar electricity. Not to mention the global warming of 50,000 of these to be directing 3 mile areas of extra sunlight.
I say let them build and launch one to see what it can do, but never let them stick up 50,000.
This is a wild take.
Space mirrors are not a new idea, they’re a very old one, a staple of sci-fi only now being tested in reality.
They stated that this is a small scale demonstrator, just to test the technology. The goal would be to get some real world measurements and decide on whether it could be economical and realistic going forward.
What part of that is a scam? I would say it’s perhaps overly optimistic, but it’s a perfectly honest exploration of engineering.
Tbh it’s stupider than that. We’re breaking records here.
This was definitely an episode of Futurama that The Simpsons didn’t do first.
A 60 foot square mirror, assuming it’s 100 km above the surface, will have an angular diameter of like 0.01 degrees. It would be occluded by a housefly 35 meters away.
It’s supposed to spread the sunlight across an area 3 miles across. 60x60 feet is like 334 square meters. Sunlight intensity in space peaks at like 1300 watts per square meter, so this is reflecting maximum of like 440,000 watts TOPS. Spread that across an area 3 miles by 3 miles, that’s 23 million square meters. Assuming no loss of energy to the atmosphere, this would reflect 0.02 watts per square meter onto its target area
So just put a 23 million square meter lens near the ground to focus it onto a smaller solar panel. Do I have to do ALL the thinking around here?
(/s because that lens would be so big)
I mean they did experiment with solar panels that contain lenses to intensify sunlight and increase efficiency, but it’s almost always cheaper to just buy more solar panels. Not even MPPT solar chargers are worth it vs buying one more panel.
This space mirror is really the perfect example of the pathological stupidity in our era. You just have to listen to the experts, but everyone just wants to push clickbait engagement, so they get funding by some equally moronic investors lol
I’ll file it up there with “Space data centers” as if any part of that idea even remotely obeys basic physics.
Yeah space compute centers are idiotic. Even if it could be made profitable it would be such a stupid idea.
The people pushing for privatization of space desperately are looking for profitable uses cases. There is a recent breakthrough with “hollow fiber optic cables” that makes the future promise of faster ping with Starlink mostly irrelevant too.
We should be building a moon base and explore mining and industry and something like a railgun to shoot back stuff back to earth. That would be the logical next step for humanity. But don’t try to commercially exploit space, that is just stupid.
Uh, Mauritania and west Sahara are like… right here.
I like the cut of your jib.
The SI gang sends respect.
Isn’t light technically on the radio spectrum? Like you can use any part of the electromagnetic spectrum for radio communication.
Not the radio spectrum, by definition. Visible light and radio are different parts of the spectrum
The electromagnetic spectrum is the name of the spectrum they’re all on. Radio waves and visible light are different parts of that spectrum, along with microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray and gamma waves. You cannot interchangeablly use different parts of the spectrum to communicate. Radio waves have information encoded into the amplitude of the waves, light is used to communicate by turning it on and off very fast. The mechanism that trasnmits information is funamenally different.
So… you’re just confidently wrong enough to be annoying.
You cannot interchangeablly use different parts of the spectrum to communicate.
Yes you can. Different frequencies have different ways that they interact with matter, and those differences make them more or less effective and practical with certain methods of communication, but there is nothing that stops a visible light from using modulation to pass a signal, nor a radio beam from sending binary signals by on-off keying or frequency-shift keying. It’s just a sliding scale of effectiveness.
The reason that radio is used to broadcast signals is because the wavelengths at their frequency are long, which allows them to spread far, through and around objects with very little of its energy being absorbed by air and objects. Visible light won’t pass through most matter, but radio and infrared can. But as for using modulated broadcasts, there is no frequency at which electromagnetic waves can’t physically deliver information through amplitude modulation (AM) or frequency modulation (FM) if there’s nothing blocking the light. Radio waves just have less issue penetrating into homes, offices, cars, etc. and carrying for miles through air and leaves and buildings from its towers where it’s signal is needed, so we use it that way.
And there is no frequency of light that you couldn’t send a binary signal by turning a beam on and off either. But we use visible light in fiber optic cables, for example, BECAUSE it doesn’t pass through materials well. A beam of light can be sent down a fiber optic strand, bouncing internally through reflection along the cable, and light in the same spectrum can’t enter the cable from the outside due to its opaque sheathe. A beam in the radio frequency would behave more or less the same way in a fiber optic cable, but because radio waves can penetrate the sheathe, you would degrade the signal with lots of noise over long distances. It’s not that you can’t, it’s just that it’s less effective with that method.
While we’re at it, electromagnetism is used in several other ways to communicate that are not limited to these methods. IR blasters, WiFi, LiFi, NFC, RFID, Microwave communication, Bluetooth, Cellular signals, etc. Another reason for specific frequencies being used in different ways is to regulate traffic for these different technologies too, to limit noise and interference as much as possible.
From a physics perspective there isn’t a reason you can’t utilize other parts of the em spectrum for radio communication. Radio can be amplitude (AM) or frequency (FM) modulated, or now even digital. The same techniques can be applied to other bands. The different groups, radio, microwave, come from human categorization, as well as different engineering approaches related to technical limitations.
Yeah some ham do QSOs on laser light.
You got that backward. Radio is a form of light/electromagnetism, not the other way around. Radio is a specific band of the light spectrum (about 3e-12THz to 3THz). Visible light is what we can see, and falls along a different part of the light spectrum (about 400-790THz)
Scientifically, yes. But legally, governments control who can broadcast over which frequencies. The FCC has jurisdiction in the US for transmissions between 8.3kHz and 275 GHz., because those are most useful for communication.
Visible light is a much higher frequency. And when you think about it, it would be bonkers for a government to regulate visible light as if it were a radio emission, because the Sun already emits a ton of it. I’d like to see some government try to license Sunlight…
It’s on the “electromagnet spectrum” but “radio” is defined as a range on that spectrum.
But you are correct that they’re the same type of thing.
Earendil-1. Nice see a Tolkien reference that doesn’t blatantly advertise how evil the product is.
That depends on how deep you go into the meaning. The whole point of Earendil’s story is that people are so immature, fractious and self-sabotaging that they couldn’t be trusted to just appreciate the god-given light of the heavens. When self-serving industrialists (Melkor) destroyed the beautiful harmony of Earth (the great trees), the last holders of that ancient power (the Noldor) selfishly refused to share it with the rest of the world, saying that they should be the only ones to inherit the light of life because they gained it through generational wealth. Eventually, the light of the heavens had to be split apart and placed so far out of reach that none could ever take them again for themselves. Earendil shines as an eternal testament to the inclination toward that hubris, selfishness and determination to fuck over everything you cannot own for everyone else so that what you do own becomes more valuable.
Perhaps corpocrat fuckwits should just stop insulting Tolkien’s memory?
Perhaps corpocrat fuckwits should just stop insulting Tolkien’s memory?
Misinterpreting sci-fi/fantasy is their whole thing though
They interpreted it pretty well when they named their panopticon surveillance software “palantir”…
I hope solar winds blow them out of orbit.
Yeah, I was thinking that looks a lot like a solar sail…
Compromise: They get to launch it, but not until we’ve chained them all to it first.
If this was part of a plan to get off fossil fuels completely, it would be pretty cool.
