Friday is here, and the 'A Taste of Science for the Weekend' segment is back - number 113.
And this time - how a resurrected 100-year-old idea threatens to disrupt life on Earth using tens of thousands of giant mirrors placed in space.
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Despite humanity's endless hunger for energy, it does not yet utilize even one-millionth of the solar energy that reaches Earth. A significant reason for this is the fact that sunlight disappears exactly at night, when electricity consumption surges.
A little over a century ago, the idea was born to place giant mirrors in space, which would focus the sun's rays onto specific areas on the ground during the night. Since the diameter of light beams expands, a mirror of just a few tens of meters is enough to illuminate an area spanning kilometers on the ground.
In the 1990s, a successful experiment was conducted in Russia, in which a large silver sheet deployed in space illuminated an area 5 kilometers in diameter with an intensity equal to a full moon.
The second attempt failed for technical reasons and the idea was shelved for 20 years, at which point an American company called Reflect Orbital was founded, quickly raising investments to advance the idea. Following a successful hot air balloon experiment, approval was recently granted to launch a first satellite into orbit, with the plan being to flood the sky with 50,000 mirrors in total that will make it possible to rent sunlight at night.
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Such mirrors would allow solar farms to continue generating electricity at night, construction projects to proceed around the clock, and could even be used as a weapon by focusing many mirrors onto a single point.
But alongside the benefits, studies and simulations have shown that such technology poses a far-reaching danger for a variety of reasons.
Light rays reaching Earth hit particles and clouds in the atmosphere and scatter. This means that even focusing the sun's rays toward a specific area on Earth will still make the night sky relatively bright.
Such light pollution would make stargazing impossible, and deep-space astronomical observations would have to rely solely on space telescopes.
A random sweep of a light beam across the ground could blind drivers and pilots, causing accidents.
The bodies of humans and animals are adapted to day and night cycles, and exposure to light at night disrupts hormone production, hunting in the wild, and navigation abilities.
A person standing in an area illuminated by a single such satellite would experience a light intensity 40 times greater than that of a full moon. Looking directly at such a satellite through a small telescope could cause irreversible damage to vision.
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The approval to launch the experimental satellite exposes a gap that international law is not yet equipped to fill - despite the impact on people all over the world, a commercial company can advance such a project based on the approval of authorities in just one country.
If the experiment succeeds and the project gains momentum, humanity will have to find a way to balance the immense benefits that can be derived from it with the accompanying dangers.
Shabbat Shalom 😊
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👋 Hi, I'm Shlomo Strauss and my posts are not written by AI.
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