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by gcr6 hours ago |
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upvoteby blooalien5 hours ago|
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> "Wonder 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."

I'm far more concerned about the people who own/build stuff like this using it as you suggest (or any of the government pets that they own) than I am about "hackers" doin' such things (although, you're entirely right to have that concern as well, because there's obviously those type of folks out there doin' bad things even with the technology we have already).

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upvoteby aaron6955 hours ago|
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[dead]
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upvoteby reader92745 hours ago|
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First, they don't exist and 10k of them will never exist. Second, nothing would happen, the power will be minuscule and last for a very short time focused on such a small patch.

see: https://youtu.be/lkjyeI0ykGM

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upvoteby lenkite3 hours ago|
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At some point, nations are going to claim the orbital space above them as national territory and develop technology to shoot down violators.
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upvoteby kadoban2 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby kube-system2 hours ago|
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I think most current wars in progress have much less logical reasons for happening
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upvoteby kadoban2 hours ago|
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It's possible, it would just be _very_ dumb. It'd also turn into just...shooting them all down, restrictions of who anything is over wouldn't survive.
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upvoteby FabCH2 hours ago|
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ASAT already exists and multiple countries have already shot down (their own, defunct) satellites.
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upvoteby bryant5 hours ago|
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Die Another Day (2003) has a more ridiculous take on the same idea.
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upvoteby dheera5 hours ago|
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I don't think 50000 60-ft mirrors at the height they intend to fly would cause that to happen. Not enough light gathering power.

50000 60-ft mirrors is about the same area as a single mirror 2.5 miles across. So the area of the mirrors is about the area of a city. You gather as much light as the city itself in regular daytime. If you focused all of that perfectly efficiently onto a city, that city would just look like daytime.

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upvoteby Cthulhu_4 hours ago|
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I think people overestimate the relative strength of the sun.

Then again, assuming there's no dispersion or loss, 50.000 times the sun focused on a 60ft patch will likely have some impact. But that's complete fiction.

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upvoteby etskinner3 hours ago|
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I think what you're missing is that they could all be focused in one spot, not spread over the city. If curved reflective buildings can melt siding, and mirror solar plants can melt salt, I'm pretty sure a city's worth of sun focused on, say, a college campus, could start a massive fire
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upvoteby dheera1 hours ago|
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I see your concern. The mirrors could be deliberately manufactured to have enough imperfections, or slight reverse curvature, to prevent this. It's possible with properly-designed optics to prevent the mirror from being able to focus on a spot smaller than, say, 1/50000 the mirror's area on the Earth's surface. Make each single mirror only optically capable of focusing down to a 3-mile diameter at best. Then it would be optically impossible to focus all the mirrors to a single 60ft spot, and the theoretical highest brightness at any point on Earth would just be regular daytime levels of light.
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upvoteby 4 hours ago|
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