California-based startup Reflect Orbital aims to build a swarm of 4,000 giant mirrors in low Earth orbit to “sell sunlight” to customers at night. Experts warn that the mirrors could mess with telescopes, blind stargazers and impact the environment.
Reflect Orbital, which was founded in 2021, has recently taken the first step in a scheme to sell sunlight at night by bouncing solar rays off giant “reflectors” that can redirect the vital resource almost anywhere on our planet. By doing this, the company aims to extend daylight hours in specific locations, thus allowing paying customers to generate solar power, grow crops and replace urban lighting.
But experts say it is a wildly impractical plan that should never get off the ground. What’s more, the resulting light pollution could devastate ground-based astronomy, distract aircraft pilots and even blind stargazers.
I think there’s a couple of Bond villains with similar setups. Not sure how I feel about that, but felt it was worth mentioning.
We are living in a moment in time now where CEOs are blatantly Bond villains but no one to stop them except by popular revolt.
If any of these CEOs have diamonds embedded in their face, transitioned to being British from North Korean, or has a 3rd nipple: Keep an eye on 'em.
New rule. All CEOs must now always be shirtless so we can all confirm that they don’t have a third nipple.
Fucking hell it was Chandler all along!
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
This is not just simple bullshit this is part of a greater Solar Radiation Modification effort and is highly likely to actually become a thing because we are going to block the sun we aren’t going to stop using oil.
We had a solution for this MOONTOWERS
So many companies and environmental damage just to get investors to dump money into terrible ideas.
If we could actually do this, couldn’t we also send up large Sun ray blockers that would help us control global warming?
how is that profitable? they won’t do it unless they can make money.
Whatever happened to the 12 Jasons? They used to stop things like this. I imagine they were disbanded by the regime.
I just imagine the first places that put in in-door lightnig like “here now you can work later in the day” now they will be like “Oh look you can work 24/7 now it’s never dark anymore”.
We can already do that. Even outdoors, you put up sports field type lighting.
Ohh, I know of one sack lying piece of shit orange man with a fake tan who could use some concentrated sun rays. And quite a few of his accomplices.
This is the same reason that harvesting solar energy in space and beaming it down is also a stupid fucking idea. It’s politically problematic. Nobody wants anybody to have giant death rays in space, so there’s effectively no way to get the energy down to earth. It looks like we’ll all just have to rely on all the green technologies that already work.
Weaponization or dangerous rays are not among the challenges facing space-based solar.
Contrary to appearances in fiction, most designs propose beam energy densities that are not harmful if human beings were to be inadvertently exposed, such as if a transmitting satellite’s beam were to wander off-course. But the necessarily vast size of the receiving antennas would still require large blocks of land near the end users. The service life of space-based collectors in the face of long-term exposure to the space environment, including degradation from radiation and micrometeoroid damage, could also become a concern for SBSP.
Very useful on the off chance that vampires are real. Otherwise… Less so.
Stephen Miller entered the chat
Thought I was in the boring dystopia community instead. I suppose I’ll just continue to hope that this is too impractical to happen or that those responsible aren’t competent enough to make it happen.
Its also just fucking stupid.
You have two options:
One build an insanely, comically expensive series of mirrors to move solar energy to solar panels so you can power them at night…
OR…
Install twice as many solar panels on the ground. OR the same amount and battery storage, or any combination thereof.
Would be cheaper just to launch the solar panels.
Then you need method of power transmission, usually microwaves or lasers, both come with energy losses. With microwaves you need a reliever and those can get about the size of a solar farm.
I’m just saying it’s more feasible than mirrors. Not that it’s actually feasible.
Even cheaper to just launch the billionaire funders as payload.
Come on. Convincing people they need something and then selling it to them is what capitalism is all about. It doesn’t matter how stupid the idea is, if you convince people to pay for it then by their standard, it’s a good idea.
I almost wish this was not a practical impossibility just so we could get to see the headlines when some misalignment fries an island of billionaires like bacon.
The charcuterie of the gods
Why is this not an Onion piece???
The Onion has become the new true journalism lately.
What are the space laws for if we nudge it into the sun?
nudging them to burn up in the atmosphere is much more doable
Fun fact: pushing things into the sun is really difficult. Short version: imagine spinning a pendulum, then trying to slow it down, except the pendulum is 100kg (200lbs) and moving at 87 Mach.
Long version:
Anything launching from earth will have a significant orbital velocity around the sun by virtue of starting at the earth’s own velocity (~30km/s, about 67000 mph). That velocity makes it hard to actually reach the sun.
Consider that even the sun’s gravity isn’t enough to pull in the earth at that speed. Simply applying thrust towards the sun would have to amount to a significant portion of the sun’s gravity to make a noticeable difference.
So to reach the sun, you’d ideally have to get rid of that excess orbital velocity instead. That requires a lot of force, to put it mildly. That kind of force requires powerful boosters and a lot of fuel. Of course, getting those engines and that fuel up there also takes powerful engines and a lot of fuel. But the larger the rocket, the heavier it’ll be, so it’ll require even more fuel…
There’s a phenomenon dubbed the “Tyranny of the Rocket Equation”. It describes the problem that, at some point, the extra weight required to make a rocket more powerful is greater than the extra power it provides. That basically puts a limit on how strong a given engine can get. There’s a lot of work being done on getting them to be more efficient, so that limit is getting higher, but the bottom line is:
It would require an immense amount of resources to slow an object enough to toss it into the sun, and more resources to get them to that object in the first place.
Physics is a cruel mistress and a mean spoilsport.
