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.
So many companies and environmental damage just to get investors to dump money into terrible ideas.
Space debris target.
Reminds me of this other terrible dystopian idea I saw the other day: https://nz.news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-announces-plan-control-182840080.html
Glad billionaires think they can steal the sun and sell it back to us now.
Less Sun = Less Plants = Less Carbon Sink = 🤦
Thought I was in the boring dystopia community instead. I suppose I’ll just continue to hope that this is too impractical to happen or that those responsible aren’t competent enough to make it happen.
Don’t worry, this type of Space Nuttery is merely a way to extract money from even dumber billionaires.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaren
None of the Space Nuttery fantasies will ever happen.
Capitalism will steal the very foundations of life and sell it to you to make a buck. They will siphon the life force from the earth in order to benefit themselves. I honestly try and look at things dispassionately and put it all in perspective but DAM it’s hard not to be emotional when you see what these fucking stinking pigs are up to on their mountain.
Isn’t this basically the plot of “who shot Mr Burns?”
It’s the opposite of that plot. In that episode, Mr Burns blocks out the sun in order to force everyone to use more electricity to increase revenue for his nuclear power plant.
If the mirrors are reflecting light into a dark part of earth, they are taking it away from a place that’s experiencing daylight.
Don’t worry, they will only block light from poorer countries with a mostly non white population. very safe and nothing to worry about!
How? I would think the reflector would have to be near tangential to the area it lit up
Oh shit you’re right. I’m more lucid that I was when I wrote that and see how dumb it sounds.
Do they think the sun only shines on earth?
Wow yes. Had forgotten about this. They gave alternates of who killed him. I don’t remember them all but for some reason I rember Apu and Maggie firing with angry faces. I need to watch that again.
This exact same technology naturally allows capitalists to force everyone to pay not to have their sunlight blocked during the day.
I mean, the technology certainly has benefits, not in reflecting sunlight onto the dark side of the Earth. Nobody fucking needs that. Instead it should be used to shade a few percent of sunlight in order to control Earth’s warming climate.
But rich people gotta fuck things up. No single entity must ever be allowed to control orbital megastructures.
Yeah, mirrors seem like a huge problem. Why not go with photovoltaics - a decades-old, proven technology, and just beam energy to a ground-based storage facility to be used later?
I know some amount will be lost in conversion and transmission, but you could still have underground facilities in cities providing extended daylight for good reasons, like to help people with seasonal affective disorder, or to grow crops out of season.
This is obviously a scam directed at venture capitalists. There’s no way this is going to happen.
Okay, but can we execute these people for putting this concept into the world anyway?
Suncoin for sale.
The future we hoped for: Dyson sphere, free unlimited energy
The future silicon valley shitlords are hoping for: let us sell you sunlight (or maybe lack thereof, wink wink)
What experts? Give me my Dyson spehere!
Futurama did it first.
Last time some rich fuck started screwing with people’s access to natural sunlight, it didn’t end well for him.
Rich people should not have the choice to have fucking sunlight in the middle of the night.
