[ExI] rebuilding a saturn v today

Mike Dougherty msd001 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 29 17:51:51 UTC 2011


On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 1:26 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> For instance, we send a number of manufacturing robots to an asteroid which
> begin to manufacture reflective light sails, which use photon pressure from
> the sun to return to a medium high near-equatorial earth orbit, perhaps
> 20Mm.  These then steer themselves such that they reflect sunlight down on a
> desert solar farms, in the Mojave and the Sahara for instance, so that these
> places can operate near peak watts always instead of a few hours a day.
>
> I envision individual reflectors about the size of a dinner plate, 20 to 25
> cm diameter, mass of about a gram, numbering in the quadrillions.

Does this array focus light so efficiently that we don't see it at
night (aside from atmospheric diffraction) or are we going to have the
dull-white moon share the sky with a bright ribbon of reflected
sunlight?

I guess by the time we've engineered that into reality, proles won't
be going outside anyway  :)




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