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FCC approves giant space mirror as astronomers warn of risks to the night sky (www.thebrighterside.news)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 3 months ago (7 children)

I was not thinking about combining the beans, but about the surface that 50k of them would cover and the amount of additional light that would represent. I do hope it's just some vaporware.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    Why would they spread the light evenly? They're planning on selling it. Someone would need to pay them to have a place illuminated, it's not going to be randomly beamed all over.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (5 children)

    Again you're implying something I didn't mean, but the point is that having 50k times the equivalent of the moon light intensity is expected to have a bad impact on the environment.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    I'm not seeing why. Do you have any links to sources about that? If they were to focus all 50,000 mirrors on one 5km patch of land simultaneously that'd be 5000 lux, which is less than 5% of the intensity of full sunlight at noon. It would be impossible to do this since the 50,000 mirrors would be spread around the Earth, and if you brought them all together into some kind of grand conjunction they'd only remain in position to do so for a few minutes.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (3 children)

    Do we need a paper to estimate that ecosystems that evolved with a night time with a moon (mostly partial, sometimes absent), are going to be disturbed by having 50k of them? Also it's the new product's responsibility to demonstrate its safety.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I think you're drastically misunderstanding how this proposed constellation would work. It's not putting 50,000 "moons" in the sky. You can only see the light from the mirror in that one specific 5km patch of land that it's being aimed at. The vast majority of the world - including all the "wilderness", because who would pay to point these things at random patches of undeveloped wilderness - will not receive extra light from these things.

    It's more like setting up floodlights at a construction site, or street lights in a city.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Earth's circumference is 40 000 km, if you align 50k patches of 5 km width, it covers more than 6 times this circumference. Current human's light pollution is already a biodiversity issue. This would be massively worsening the situation for just one system.

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