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Comment by gcr

14 days ago

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.

X Wing: Wedge’s Gamble (1996) by Michael Stackpole shows the rebel alliance using similar tricks during the battle of Coruscant.

17 comments

gcr

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blooalien  14 days ago

> "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).

dheera  14 days ago

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.

  • etskinner  14 days ago

    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

    • dheera  14 days ago

      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.

  • Cthulhu_  14 days ago

    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.

lenkite  14 days ago

At some point, nations are going to claim the orbital space above them as national territory and develop technology to shoot down violators.

  • kadoban  14 days ago

    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.

    • lenkite  14 days ago

      If Russia had been the one to launch over ten thousand satellites in mega-constellations occupying LEO space, there would have already been a dozen senate hearings all talking about extraordinary and imminent threat to US national security and urgent need to eliminate the problem.

  • FabCH  14 days ago

    ASAT already exists and multiple countries have already shot down (their own, defunct) satellites.