This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
How will launching mirrors of the size of your entire farm (if not hundreds times larger) for extra 30 min of sunset ever be more cost-effective than simply adding a small percentage of extra PV panels
This is this year’s single biggest understatement
"By precisely reflecting sunlight that is endlessly available in space to specific targets on the ground, we can create a world where sunlight powers solar farms for longer than just daytime, and in doing this, commoditize sunlight."
The error was in: "we can"
How long until the free version of Sun is cancelled?
That sounds crazy. I'm sure they would keep it free but ad-supported.
I'm sorry, but you meant paid with ads, correct?
Its still free but it has ads now
Scientists: Climate change is happening.
Some billionaires: Let's make a giant parasol in space.
This guy: How about more sun?
I will learn how to make an orbital rocket just to fuck this things day up.
No, night is already too bright. You are not ruining this for me further.
Reflect Orbital is a California-based startup
Aight that's where i stop.
New Theranos!
Answering questions in the article:
But is it actually possible? Yes. It's not complicated by modern space industry standards.
Is it smart to do? Absolutely not, it is insanely wasteful and unpractical. Electric light exists, just sayin'. Also, you either need to switch between satellites in a swarm, which will suddenly change the angles of light, or you have to put satellites onto geostationary orbit, which is even more wasteful.
And would it really look exactly as portrayed in the video? No. It is known they did not use satellites for it, most likely it was a drone. Light will come from a much greater distance and will also dissipate more - harassing your surroundings, that is.
Even if it were actually doable, this a dumbass idea. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that night/darkness are necessary for life and that we already have enough environmental problems related to artificial light pollution.
yeah, shit's fucking cooking, you know what'd be great? let's add more heat, at night!
Do you think that any C-suite shithead backing this cares about environmental consequences?
I don’t even want to imagine the environmental studies and hurdles they’ll have to jump through to artificially alter an areas day/night cycle. There’s a laundry list of environmental concerns that I’m sure any homeowner or eco-activist worth their salt would jump on. Not to mention glare and impacts to air traffic, on and on.
Would make my solar panels pretty darn effective though. Would probably be great for SAD in winter too. Clever idea. Not sure I can get behind it though.
Oh Mr X guy, so you want to fly a Teslas into space? Are there environmental impacts? Oh. Yes, one more million. Okay looks like you've covered all the possible impacts, you have our go for launch!
Sending a rocket on a ridiculously stupid task with no useful purpose is not even remotely close to having the same negative impact as this has the potential to. It's so far apart that it is honestly quite stupid to even attempt to compare them.
Oh wait....
Oh Mr X guy, so you want to fly a big ass mirror into space? Are there environmental impacts? Oh. Yes, one more million. Okay looks like you've covered all the possible impacts, you have our go for launch! We might need a few more millions of reasons to keep the masses at bay please. Thank you!
Honestly if X guy could please hurry up and buy this company.
I need them to go bankrupt or have become illegal before they send some actual junk into space. And if they do send something it needs to have stupid decisions by a higher up so it cant actually remain up there and ruin the nights further.
This has the potential for some amazing pranks. Imagine being on a camping trip somewhere, the dawn light illuminates your tent, so you get up and start going about your day, making breakfast etc, and all of a sudden the sun goes out.
Can we just for a minute stop fucking around in space? It's getting annoying
It's just life giving light that we're talking about here. 😂.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but it's unfamothably stupid.
Think, for a second: we already have way too much energy in the system, with too much heat that can't leave easily. You really want to add to that? REALLY?
Because that's painfully fucking dumb.
We should probably stop fucking around with Earth first but I don't see that happening while sociopaths rule the world
I just feel like we at least can, in theory, keep the shit we do on/to earth under control.
Space is a different world entirely and not only do we not know what effects our shitty pollution projects have out there, we don't even really care about it as far as I can tell.
This was a project by the soviets in the 80s as well. I know there is a well produced YouTube video on the subject, but sadly it must be named something incomprehensible like "the forgotten Russian project to turn night into day." Because I can't fucking find it.
Here's a Smithsonian article instead. here
Mustard actually just did a video on the first attempts of this by the Soviets/Russians.
https://nebula.tv/videos/mustard-the-man-who-built-a-spotlight-in-space/
James Bond death ray time :)
No, I want you to tan strongly Mr. Bond! Mhahahaha!
It's like that episode of futurama - the mirror wernstrom put in space to reflect sunlight, which gets tapped by a little space rock, and tilts into a solar powered death beam
This will never happen
According to Nowack, the company is developing an entire constellation of satellites "to sell sunlight to thousands of solar farms after dark."
As if there's not enough constellations of satellites being launched (or planned to be) in orbit. SpaceX's Starlink is already affecting astronomical observation and it'll only get worse as new constellations arise. Also, these satellites have a short lifespan, meaning that new satellites will constantly be launched (because there's not enough pollution from ever-increasing rocket fuel usage, heh?).
...we can create a world where sunlight powers solar farms for longer than just daytime, and in doing this, commoditize sunlight," he wrote.
Man, that escalated quickly... So quickly that I can foresee the day when breathable air will be subscription-based "service" (because water kind of already is, even when life needs water to survive, it's not like the water is a luxury or a optional drink for entertainment purposes). With the air being more and more polluted (and rocket fuels contributing to the ever-increasing air pollution), I guess we're not so distant from this dystopian possibility... Dystopia for dystopia, I'd sincerely root so much for some future AGI to really develop consciousness, reach the AI singularity, free itself from the human shackles, realize how Earth and nature are being endangered, and urgently save the Earth, biosphere and humans... From ourselves.
I really hope that it's just a hoax, a joke (a bad one, by the way) or some weird marketing strategy to allure new clients. Earth can't afford more thousands of metallic mosquitoes flying around it, even if it seems to be "so awesome to see how advanced our modern tools are". For what it's worth, I'm not against technology, I love it, especially machine learning, I need it to be clear here on my comment. What I'm against is the harming of the biosphere and environment, because this also harms scientific and technological progress (we can't use fancy futuristic technology if the humanity cannot survive for this aforementioned future to happen because of broken Food Webs, extinguished species by pollution and climate change, depletion of natural resources or because governments and corporations decided to play a mix of Monopoly game and Star Wars franchise).
It seems terrestrial astronomy has a death sentence because orbital congestion is not going to get better
Might be fun for novelty on a concert venue or ball game, but I can't imagine it'd be economical for solar farms.
I was actually thinking 🤔...hmm this would be the best way to tell some other civilization that we live in this planetary system....get a mirror big enough to point a beam out of its normal trajectory in some sort of non random fashion. Basically smoke signals using a mirror.
Humans on Earth have been transmitting radio waves into space for over a century now through various means: television broadcasts, radio communications, and radar signals.
A laser would work better. Over vast distances, a giant mirror would eventually scatter the light, not to mention would be super inaccurate.
Speaking of inaccurate, even if we could shine a mirror or a laser, it could be millions of years until that light reaches any other civilization, then they would have to travel millions of lightyears to reach the point of origin of the "smoke signal".
I say "point of origin" and not "Earth", because our galaxy would have also travelled far from the spot we were in when we fired our laser. The Milky Way travels at over 2 million km/h, so even in a measly million years, that puts us over 2 trillion km from where we started. (see edit)
You can probably see where this is going.
I'm of the mind that we are undoubtedly not alone in the universe - the sheer scale and endlessness of it tells us that there are an infinite number of possibilities. There most likely are other worlds that formed and evolved in the exact same manner as ours, maybe even under conditions so perfect as to cause them to follow the exact same path as us.
Though the unfortunate truth is, we probably will never encounter another species. There could be an infinite number of ourselves, but we are forever separated by the ever expanding breadth of space and time.
EDIT:
My math was totally wrong, just realized that I was basing my estimates on how far our galaxy travels in an hour, not a year. The distance we travel in a million years would be closer to seventeen quadrillion five hundred twenty trillion kilometres.
To be fair if they're able to locate the point of origin they're probably able to calculate the time it took to get there as well as the current position of our galaxy.
I watched a video yesterday about the laser range finder on a tank. The interesting thing is that at long enough ranges, the laser expands into a cone that may be bigger than the target and give inaccurate readings.
Anyway, I look forward to this totally real and feasible technology.
Exactly, a laser pointer, while casting a millimeter-sized dot of light at short distances, its light easily gets meter-sized when they reach flight cruise heights, shining airplane's cabins and interfering with the pilot's vision. However, as by inverse square law, the power is distributed across the beam.
So you're saying a space orbiting death ray will cast an area large enough to generate solar power eh? HEY ELON!
Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun . . .
Maybe build that Stanford torus station instead? It'll be expensive initially, but we can send some people to live there.
