Think of the military benefits.

Cthulhu_ 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Such as? Military in the next 100 years will be drone / remote based, they have IR / night vision and soon to be fully automated. Sunlight can be handy for humans but for decades now the only ones that would benefit from it would be foot soldiers, and they're like the last resort (for western forces anyway).

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wildzzz 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Daylight helps you just as much as your enemy. We've got plenty of cutting edge night vision and thermal imaging devices for humans and radar on vehicles. The Army's 160th helicopter regiment can fly nap of the earth on a moonless night. Satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar can pickup human sized objects during a pass and can switch to sub-centimeter resolution in finer modes. If anything, the military prefers fighting at night because of the advantage it holds.

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geetee 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, think about how this can be weaponized. Illuminate an area? Or, focus that energy on a single point and you've got sun powered space lasers?

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lefra 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Assuming the orbit is at 200km, these mirrors could only focus the image of the Sun on a 1.7km wide disk (that's (Sun diameter)/(Sun's distance)×(Earth distance)).

Moreover, the Sun's illuminance is about 1kW/m2 around Earth. 10000×60m2 satellite will thetefore intercept 600MW, so that's 260W/m2 on the focussed area. You're not going to burn anything with that.

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bunderbunder 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Except if the reflectors are shaped for wide area illumination, then their focal distance is probably nowhere near the distance from the satellites to the earth’s surface. So I don’t think is any “single point” to be had.

Heck, I haven’t done the math or anything but I bet even if you did instead use parabolic reflectors that were tuned to focus at the earth’s surface, it would still be very difficult to keep them aimed at a specific point for long enough to achieve significant heating. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s difficult to achieve an increase in heating that’s close to, say, the heating difference from standing outside at noon as opposed to 5PM. Which then doesn’t do much because you couldn’t effectively use a reflector at noon, anyway. You’d want a lens instead. Or some sort of complicated Newtonian telescope type contraption.

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geetee 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think these things start out looking like a weapons. Wrong reflector shape? It could just be proving out other aspects. It could also be completely innocent too, but I don't think this is quite conspiracy level thinking.

	▲	blooalien 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> It could just be proving out other aspects. It could also be completely innocent too, but I don't think this is quite conspiracy level thinking. This honestly strikes me as an innocent test of one random idea/technology. The whole "conspiracy level" thing (if it were to ever happen at all) would come later on, and most likely from entirely different people usin' the things discovered from experiments like this one in wholly unacceptable ways because they simply have too much power, money, and time, and not nearly enough good sense between their ears. Sad though that as other folk have pointed out, if the technology were to work as expected, then it could also be used to help mitigate global warming by reflecting a specific amount of sunlight away from Earth, too. The sad part is that's likely not what such experiments will lead to initially. The "bad people" tend to be pretty quick to try to weaponize or monetize (or both) anything they take an interest in.