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.
Very useful on the off chance that vampires are real. Otherwise… Less so.
It’s nice how, in theory, some crackhead silicon valley startup would be allowed to single handedly fuck up just about everything
Next idea : Shining ads in space, powered by sunlight, so people always have something to look at. /puke
Buy who cares? Money!
This entire thing is again stupid front to back, and for loads of money, of course
What are the space laws for if we nudge it into the sun?
Joking aside this is a horrible idea even if it were possible to get right. Anything with circadian rhythm is going to get fucked up real fast and that includes people. This is like angry mob outside the corporate office level bad. Torches and pitchforks, the whole thing
Except torches, they won’t be needing those
Why are all the experts going on about the fact you might blind pilots but not talking about the fact that it won’t actually do anything.
It would have to be an astonishingly vast megastructure for it to have any effect at all. If we were talking about a structure 100 km across or more they might actually have some sort of point.
No.
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
All of these wacky silicon valley startups popping up just shriek very loudly that there is too much capital and not enough real economy to invest all that money into.
This is the material analysis we need to be doing. During COVID I saw farmers shredding crops instead of selling them because we lacked the transportation capacity to get food to market. “How the fuck is that even possible?” you ask? We rely too much on individual truckers when we should be using rail… And that’s kind of an analogy for the whole market.
No system in place to ensure there is enough energy, water, food, steel, concrete, lumber, etc. to go around, just this vague hope that “the market will respond to price information as it always does”.
Well now that price information is telling people to invest in space mirrors to send sunlight to their AI-powered saffron gardens, employing cheap foreign workers rather than local labour so that they can sell the spice to wealthy people. So yeah I think that mechanic is busted now and needs a rethink.
Because they’ve destroyed the economy
Wernstrom!
So literal space lasers?
Just like a certain great philosopher said, “The sun is a deadly laser”
You don’t even have to be an expert to see that this is one of the stupidest ideas ever conceived.
Judging from how many ppl hated daylight saving time, i can imaging some ppl attempt to fund this
People don’t hate DST, they want permanent DST.
I feel like most people just want to pick one and stick to it; stop changing it back and forth every other season, my body will adjust to the changing days just fine on its own.
for solar, a 5km diameter solar farm might hold 10m square meters of panels. at 250w each, 2.5gw solar farm. 4 times a full moon, is 1/100000th the rated capacity (noon at equator) of panels, and so 25kw of power. At 10c/kwh electricity revenue potential, such a farm (exists only in China) could break even offering to rent night light at $2.50/hour.
Batteries charged by solar can deliver profitable electricity at night for far less than 10c/kwh.
If you just want more light somewhere, it would be far cheaper to do from ground systems.
Why is this not an Onion piece???
The Onion has become the new true journalism lately.
This isn’t even possible and the cost even if it was would be ASTRONOMICAL.
