Nah, you'll be fine. You receive a couple hundred watts of near infrared radiation (ie the 1550 nm in the laser) just by being in direct sunlight. That's spre

Nah, you'll be fine. You receive a couple hundred watts of near infrared radiation (ie the 1550 nm in the laser) just by being in direct sunlight. That's spread over your entire body, of course. The laser in this lidar has a power of ~40 mW, which technically puts it out of being a class 1[1] laser, ie you can shine it directly into your pupil through a magnifying glass without fear. However the class is just a guideline. Using a maximum permissible exposure chart gives a better sense of danger. Lidar pulses are on the order of 10 nanoseconds, or 1/100th the smallest division on this chart[2]. Even so, you can see that the maximum safe power for 1550 nm is somewhere between 8 and 10,000 watts, at least 800x more than the lidar emits. 1550 nm doesn't chemically damage biological receptors. The damage would have to be thermal, but the laser is pulsed for an incredibly short time and even if it wasn't it's well under what you can be exposed to indefinitely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety#/media/File:Laser_class_EN_60825-1.en.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety#/media/File:Laser... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IEC60825_MPE_W_s.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IEC60825_MPE_W_s.png