Chinese outcry? There’s a lot of that in social media, their bot warriors are everywhere. Same with AI and anything that gives the USA competitive edge.
Apparently there’s a ton here on ycombinator judging by the downvotes
FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky
101–110 of 164 posts
Re: FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky
#102This is a terrible idea. Light cycles affect many natural functions in the world. We already see some of this with light pollution. This idea is basically light pollution on an industrial scale.
Re: FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky
#103They seem to be talking about each satellite managing the luminosity of the full moon over a few square kilometres, and getting a few tens of thousands of them. Even if you ignoring how much drag these must have, and hence how much electrical power you'd need for an ion drive just to keep them up, each spot being a few km across (and only getting light while the satellite is over your horizon) is just not compelling.…
> relatively easy to redesign as weapons There is a fiction I've read years ago that mentioned satellites becoming makeshift weapons by overheating exposed objects (think reactors, gas trucks, oil refineries) by acting as a solar furnace [1] via mirrors. Not sure/don't recall how it deals with practical issues such as clouds and distance/intensity, but good enough for a story I guess. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Probably easier to use a MASER
Re: FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think of the military benefits.
Yes, think about how this can be weaponized. Illuminate an area? Or, focus that energy on a single point and you've got sun powered space lasers?
Assuming the orbit is at 200km, these mirrors could only focus the image of the Sun on a 1.7km wide disk (that's (Sun diameter)/(Sun's distance)×(Earth distance)).
Moreover, the Sun's illuminance is about 1kW/m2 around Earth. 10000×60m2 satellite will thetefore intercept 600MW, so that's 260W/m2 on the focussed area. You're not going to burn anything with that.
Re: FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky
#105Wonder what would happen if a hacker focused all ten thousand of them on a single area for an hour or two. Sounds like a really energy-efficient way to demolish a city. X Wing: Wedge’s Gamble (1996) by Michael Stackpole shows the rebel alliance using similar tricks during the battle of Coruscant.
At some point, nations are going to claim the orbital space above them as national territory and develop technology to shoot down violators.
That would be fairly nonsense. There's _very_ few orbits that can stick over a particular place, and it's only places on the equator. We'd be giving up 99+% of useful orbits.
Re: FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky
#106Finally, we can replace daylight saving time by just making more daylight instead
We've tried to do this at ground level to make molten salt power and all it did was fry birds and the project is shut down.
Re: FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
orbital mirrors make very poor weapons because Conservation of Etendue means you fundamentally cannot concentrate very high unless your fill factor is very high (which would require millions of tons in orbit). Lasers are far more effective as weapons as a single aperture launched on a single rocket is sufficient to get high concentration. Microwaves also. The military application would just be illumination.
You don't need to go "very high", 80C is more than enough to wreak havoc. I'm sure that's attainable with a few hundred sats. Can someone do the math?
Is it ever, ever going to be cheaper or easier or more effective than just launching a missile? Seems...unlikely just on the face of it.
Re: FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky
#108So we've got this problem of the atmosphere trapping too much heat from solar radiation hitting the surface and the plan is to increase the amount of solar radiation hitting the surface?
It could only ever increase by the surface area of the satellite lens things. It'll be a rounding error compared to the surface area of Earth (or compared to the effect of greenhouse gasses over the time period you're setting up these things).
Re: FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
With global warming, trillions upon trillions of acres of immensely fertile bogland, in Northern Canada is thawing. The problem is, global warming doesn't affect daylight. 4 hours of "the sun barely makes it over the horizon" means no crops, no matter if the temp is above 0C in September. Obviously this satellite isn't viable, but all things start small. Large tracts of land could be illuminated. But of course, I que…
If sattelites can reflect enough light to make an impact on e.g. global warming, they can also reflect enough to circumvent it. Point them back at the sun or into space and in theory it redirects the same amount of energy away from the earth as it would pointing towards it. That said, I'm (armchair) confident it'll be good for moonlight-level illumination on a local area at best. They'll need to scale up to thousands…
For those purposes, why would it need to be mirrors? We don't care to coherently reflect the light; we just want to block it.
(For reference, I think all of these are likely to be somewhere between moderately and incredibly bad ideas...)
Re: FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point, nations are going to claim the orbital space above them as national territory and develop technology to shoot down violators.
That would be fairly nonsense. There's _very_ few orbits that can stick over a particular place, and it's only places on the equator. We'd be giving up 99+% of useful orbits.
I think most current wars in progress have much less logical reasons for happening