3 ms·

Wonder what would happen if a hacker focused all ten thousand of them on a single area for an hour or two. Sounds like a really energy-efficient way to demolish

by gcr 3mo ago

Wonder what would happen if a hacker focused all ten thousand of them on a single area for an hour or two. Sounds like a really energy-efficient way to demolish a city. X Wing: Wedge’s Gamble (1996) by Michael Stackpole shows the rebel alliance using similar tricks during the battle of Coruscant.

blooalien 3mo ago
> "Wonder what would happen if a hacker focused all ten thousand of them on a single area for an hour or two. Sounds like a really energy-efficient way to demolish a city." I'm far more concerned about the people who own/build stuff like this using it as you suggest (or any of the government pets that they own) than I am about "hackers" doin' such things (although, you're entirely right to have that concern as well, because there's obviously those type of folks out there doin' bad things even with the technology we have already).
- aaron695 3mo ago
  [dead]
reader9274 3mo ago
First, they don't exist and 10k of them will never exist. Second, nothing would happen, the power will be minuscule and last for a very short time focused on such a small patch. see: https://youtu.be/lkjyeI0ykGM https://youtu.be/lkjyeI0ykGM
dheera 3mo ago
I don't think 50000 60-ft mirrors at the height they intend to fly would cause that to happen. Not enough light gathering power. 50000 60-ft mirrors is about the same area as a single mirror 2.5 miles across. So the area of the mirrors is about the area of a city. You gather as much light as the city itself in regular daytime. If you focused all of that perfectly efficiently onto a city, that city would just look like daytime.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
  I think people overestimate the relative strength of the sun. Then again, assuming there's no dispersion or loss, 50.000 times the sun focused on a 60ft patch will likely have some impact. But that's complete fiction.
- etskinner 3mo ago
  I think what you're missing is that they could all be focused in one spot, not spread over the city. If curved reflective buildings can melt siding, and mirror solar plants can melt salt, I'm pretty sure a city's worth of sun focused on, say, a college campus, could start a massive fire
  - dheera 3mo ago
    I see your concern. The mirrors could be deliberately manufactured to have enough imperfections, or slight reverse curvature, to prevent this. It's possible with properly-designed optics to prevent the mirror from being able to focus on a spot smaller than, say, 1/50000 the mirror's area on the Earth's surface. Make each single mirror only optically capable of focusing down to a 3-mile diameter at best. Then it would be optically impossible to focus all the mirrors to a single 60ft spot, and the theoretical highest brightness at any point on Earth would just be regular daytime levels of light.
bryant 3mo ago
Die Another Day (2003) has a more ridiculous take on the same idea.
lenkite 3mo ago
At some point, nations are going to claim the orbital space above them as national territory and develop technology to shoot down violators.
- kadoban 3mo ago
  That would be fairly nonsense. There's _very_ few orbits that can stick over a particular place, and it's only places on the equator. We'd be giving up 99+% of useful orbits.
  - kube-system 3mo ago
    I think most current wars in progress have much less logical reasons for happening
    - kadoban 3mo ago
      It's possible, it would just be _very_ dumb. It'd also turn into just...shooting them all down, restrictions of who anything is over wouldn't survive.
      - kube-system 3mo ago
        It wouldn't be an all-or-nothing type scenario -- and in fact there is already no common international agreement about where a nation's boundary extends to in the z-axis. The observed limit is "however high that country can detect and shoot something down"
        kadoban 3mo ago
        Once you start getting shooty up in space, I think you fairly quickly get into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome cascades of collisions and debris anyway, so it probably wouldn't matter. > in fact there is already no common international agreement about where a nation's boundary extends to in the z-axis. The observed limit is "however high that country can detect and shoot something down" That's the thing though, if you use that definition then 99.9+% of them are fair game, because _only_ ones around equator at a specific height are at a fixed point. Otherwise they migrate a lot and what country they're over would depend on what second you look.

by gcr 3mo ago

blooalien 3mo ago

> "Wonder what would happen if a hacker focused all ten thousand of them on a single area for an hour or two. Sounds like a really energy-efficient way to demolish a city." I'm far more concerned about the people who own/build stuff like this using it as you suggest (or any of the government pets that they own) than I am about "hackers" doin' such things (although, you're entirely right to have that concern as well, because there's obviously those type of folks out there doin' bad things even with the technology we have already).

aaron695 3mo ago
[dead]

reader9274 3mo ago

First, they don't exist and 10k of them will never exist. Second, nothing would happen, the power will be minuscule and last for a very short time focused on such a small patch. see: https://youtu.be/lkjyeI0ykGM https://youtu.be/lkjyeI0ykGM

dheera 3mo ago

I don't think 50000 60-ft mirrors at the height they intend to fly would cause that to happen. Not enough light gathering power. 50000 60-ft mirrors is about the same area as a single mirror 2.5 miles across. So the area of the mirrors is about the area of a city. You gather as much light as the city itself in regular daytime. If you focused all of that perfectly efficiently onto a city, that city would just look like daytime.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
I think people overestimate the relative strength of the sun. Then again, assuming there's no dispersion or loss, 50.000 times the sun focused on a 60ft patch will likely have some impact. But that's complete fiction.
etskinner 3mo ago
I think what you're missing is that they could all be focused in one spot, not spread over the city. If curved reflective buildings can melt siding, and mirror solar plants can melt salt, I'm pretty sure a city's worth of sun focused on, say, a college campus, could start a massive fire
- dheera 3mo ago
  I see your concern. The mirrors could be deliberately manufactured to have enough imperfections, or slight reverse curvature, to prevent this. It's possible with properly-designed optics to prevent the mirror from being able to focus on a spot smaller than, say, 1/50000 the mirror's area on the Earth's surface. Make each single mirror only optically capable of focusing down to a 3-mile diameter at best. Then it would be optically impossible to focus all the mirrors to a single 60ft spot, and the theoretical highest brightness at any point on Earth would just be regular daytime levels of light.

bryant 3mo ago

Die Another Day (2003) has a more ridiculous take on the same idea.

lenkite 3mo ago

At some point, nations are going to claim the orbital space above them as national territory and develop technology to shoot down violators.

kadoban 3mo ago
That would be fairly nonsense. There's _very_ few orbits that can stick over a particular place, and it's only places on the equator. We'd be giving up 99+% of useful orbits.
- kube-system 3mo ago
  I think most current wars in progress have much less logical reasons for happening
  - kadoban 3mo ago
    It's possible, it would just be _very_ dumb. It'd also turn into just...shooting them all down, restrictions of who anything is over wouldn't survive.
    - kube-system 3mo ago
      It wouldn't be an all-or-nothing type scenario -- and in fact there is already no common international agreement about where a nation's boundary extends to in the z-axis. The observed limit is "however high that country can detect and shoot something down"
      - kadoban 3mo ago
        Once you start getting shooty up in space, I think you fairly quickly get into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome cascades of collisions and debris anyway, so it probably wouldn't matter. > in fact there is already no common international agreement about where a nation's boundary extends to in the z-axis. The observed limit is "however high that country can detect and shoot something down" That's the thing though, if you use that definition then 99.9+% of them are fair game, because _only_ ones around equator at a specific height are at a fixed point. Otherwise they migrate a lot and what country they're over would depend on what second you look.