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Ashelyn ,

Why not just put up a Moonlight Tower?

Ilovethebomb ,

This has the potential for some amazing pranks. Imagine being on a camping trip somewhere, the dawn light illuminates your tent, so you get up and start going about your day, making breakfast etc, and all of a sudden the sun goes out.

werefreeatlast OP ,

I was actually thinking 🤔…hmm this would be the best way to tell some other civilization that we live in this planetary system…get a mirror big enough to point a beam out of its normal trajectory in some sort of non random fashion. Basically smoke signals using a mirror.

funkajunk ,
@funkajunk@lemm.ee avatar

A laser would work better. Over vast distances, a giant mirror would eventually scatter the light, not to mention would be super inaccurate.

Speaking of inaccurate, even if we could shine a mirror or a laser, it could be millions of years until that light reaches any other civilization, then they would have to travel millions of lightyears to reach the point of origin of the “smoke signal”.

I say “point of origin” and not “Earth”, because our galaxy would have also travelled far from the spot we were in when we fired our laser. The Milky Way travels at over 2 million km/h, so even in a measly million years, that puts us over 2 trillion km from where we started.

You can probably see where this is going.

I’m of the mind that we are undoubtedly not alone in the universe - the sheer scale and endlessness of it tells us that there are an infinite number of possibilities. There most likely are other worlds that formed and evolved in the exact same manner as ours, maybe even under conditions so perfect as to cause them to follow the exact same path as us.

Though the unfortunate truth is, we probably will never encounter another species. There could be an infinite number of ourselves, but we are forever separated by the ever expanding breadth of space and time.

Halcyon ,
@Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Humans on Earth have been transmitting radio waves into space for over a century now through various means: television broadcasts, radio communications, and radar signals.

browse ,

I think this would take way to long to travel somewhere where things acutally live the light will probably only reach them long after humanity is gone.

jayandp ,

Mustard actually just did a video on the first attempts of this by the Soviets/Russians.

nebula.tv/…/mustard-the-man-who-built-a-spotlight…

Allero ,

Answering questions in the article:

But is it actually possible? Yes. It’s not complicated by modern space industry standards.

Is it smart to do? Absolutely not, it is insanely wasteful and unpractical. Electric light exists, just sayin’. Also, you either need to switch between satellites in a swarm, which will suddenly change the angles of light, or you have to put satellites onto geostationary orbit, which is even more wasteful.

And would it really look exactly as portrayed in the video? No. It is known they did not use satellites for it, most likely it was a drone. Light will come from a much greater distance and will also dissipate more - harassing your surroundings, that is.

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