Warning: Blue sky thinking ahead.. I always wondered if a huge quantity of diamonds, arranged in a specific pattern, could be used to build a passive laser. T

Warning: Blue sky thinking ahead.. I always wondered if a huge quantity of diamonds, arranged in a specific pattern, could be used to build a passive laser. The energy input would come in from the sun, and it would refract the light to a second layer of diamonds. That second layer would accumulate enough luminous energy, before it discharges as a laser. Since a laser diode needs to reach a certain level of optical amplification before it discharges its beam. So that makes one operational unit. And you have to assemble a bunch of them together, to fire off to a third layer, that has a bigger diamond, which requires a larger energy threshold before it fires off. And you keep repeating that until you get enough energy to do useful work. So the whole thing ends up looking like a giant inverted pyramid, of a Rube Goldberg machine. The final result, is that the laser is used to do useful mechanical work, like boiling water to create steam, to move a generator, to create electricity. It can also be used as a giant death ray, but that’s not very useful, except for the emperor that wants to hold a planet hostage. Why this setup? To build something solid state, and somewhat passive, that can be used to reliably generate electricity for thousands of years. And it’s not a radioactive nuclear reactor that will create deadly waste that lasts thousands of years. And it can also be orbited in space to beam the laser down to earth. It should last longer than solar panels, which doesn’t seem to last very long. And now that we can manufacture industrial diamonds that are more pure than a natural diamond (just add heat, energy, and pressure), that I wonder when we can make this cheaply enough. The next trick would be to find that optimal arrangement of diamonds and design to make such a thing feasible.