“I had an interesting way to solve the real issue with solar power. It’s this unstoppable force,” Nowack said in the interview. “Everybody’s installing so many solar panels everywhere. It’s really a great candidate to power humanity. But sunlight turns off. It’s called nighttime. If you solve that fundamental problem, you fix solar everywhere.”The company’s orbital mirror is set to launch in 2025, and you can “apply for sunlight” for the next few months. There’s “limited availability,” and already supposedly over 30,000 applications. It really just sounds like a one-time test, though: you only get four minutes for a diameter of 5km. No price is listed.
An End to Night
I kind of like night, though. This project would let the rich decide if we get to have it.
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6 comments:
Another case of someone with a great idea not thinking things completely through. Some plants flower and fruit because of day length. Animal behavior might get very odd, and nocturnal animals go extinct in the perpetually sunny region. Those are just the first ideas to spring up.
And I too like the night. I can't go out walking by daylight without hat, long sleeves, and long skirts or trousers. I'd miss the freedom of nights, the beauty of sunrise and sunset, and the glory of stars and moon.
LittleRed1
I don't know enough about diffusion and refraction to be sure, but would venture a guess the difference between a nice soft 5km light, and burning a spot to a crisp like an ant under a magnifying glass is a pretty simple adjustment.
Yep, if you got enough of them up there as part of a big power generation scheme, and somebody went rogue, how would you stop them? Interfere with the control signals from Earth, if you can, but if that doesn't fly you need to kludge a kind of rocket shotgun with a gigantic spread--without it being burned up before it starts.
Lots of tiny mirrors in the same overall array gives you a lot of directionality in where you send the reflected light, just like a phased-array radar.
Oh, and all those moveable mirrors also let you focus the light just as you please.
Regarding the rocket shotgun, it depends on where you're shooting from. The PRC is looking at building a mass driver on the moon, and the mirror reflecting light onto the earth's surface isn't looking uphill. 'Course a kinetic shot from the moon would require some time to arrive....
Eric Hines
If only there were a way to create a tiny sun-like reaction on earth and harness all of that energy for our use.
We've had that first step down for some decades.
The problem with the second step, though, is that we're trying to use magnetism or inertia. Nature does it with gravity.
That's the ticket for us, too. Just collect up a double handful of gravity wavicles and go for it.
Eric Hines
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