this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
162 points (86.5% liked)
Technology
59038 readers
3862 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's so dumb uggh. Getting the same power output as the sun would need a MINIMUM surface area of the size of the area on earth it would illuminate.
So say the use case is extending daylight time in Anchorage, Alaska during winter. You would need a mirror that has MINIMUM surface area that of Anchorage. Somehow, it would need to be in an orbit that can reliably reflect light to Anchorage at all points.
Then, it would most likely be in low Earth orbit as putting it higher would require bigger mirrors. However, if u are in LEO, u are also moving incredibly fast. You would thus need an array of these super large mirrors.
All of this for what? Something that an led can do incredibly easily?
Would it not be possible to deflect it through a lens? Couldn't that increase the spread area significantly and because of the contrast at night you would only need a fraction of the light intensity to make an area feel well lit?
You don’t need a lens, just a differently shaped mirror. Their point is just that the light you capture is based on the mirror’s surface area, so if you are selling sunlight-equivalent amounts of light you would need a mirror of equal area to that you are selling. You would not need such a large mirror to sell an area of dimmer light, and you would not need a lens.