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Comment by kevin_thibedeau

4 years ago

Use an array of eye safe lasers that converge on the target.

That is (almost*) the same as focusing a laser on the target with a very large lens - a highly divergent beam is only dangerous near the focus. Some laser processing machine developers make their machines eye-safe that way, if you're half a meter from the focus, the remaining radiance is low enough to not be caught by the laser safety norms anymore (there is a very low limit to which radiance is still considered class 1, after that it's not considered a laser according to the norm). But to make a highly divergent beam, you need large aperture optics.

* you'd need to have very good optics and optomechanics on each laser to make the spot small enough - the smaller optics on each smaller laser would make the spot worse than one created with a single large lens, unless the single lasers are actually from a single coherent source

  • To fry a mosquito, you don't need an awful lot of energy. That means you don't need awfully big lenses to keep it human safe away from the focus.

    • That would depend on the distance you want to fry moskitos at, if you want to burn them at meters, you need a larger aperture to get a similar divergence angle as with cm.