484
FCC approves giant space mirror as astronomers warn of risks to the night sky
(www.thebrighterside.news)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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Let's beam down more heat! We totally need that on our rapidly heating planet.
Lets send that heat down in a large vertical column piercing the entire way thru the atmosphere!
Birds can cook themselves in it!
Nobody will get rained on near this beam, so less big money tied up in umbrellas!
And think of the tornados that will form!
This thing will create the need for so much progress to undo its effects!
Brilliant!
And while we’re at it let’s just push even more shit above the earth because there’s totally not already a whole bunch of stuff up there.
Well, technically there really isn't much up there now.
I mean in low earth orbit it's what, 99.999999999999999999999 % empty space? With the tiny fraction left being satellites.
By that logic you wouldn't mind if I loosed a bag of mosquitos in your house, would you?
I love this comment so much and I love “loosed” as a past tense verb even more.
Well let's run with that. If you put a single mosquito in my house, I would have a higher ratio of mosquito to air than low earth orbit currently has in its ratio of satellites to empty space. (Seriously)
It's easy to remove any number of mosquitos from your house, 1 person and a swatter can get it done. It's incredibly expensive, laborious and dangers to remove LEO satellites. If something malfunctions then it's essentially a stuck there until shot or nudged down.
That's disingenuous though. You have to compute the orbital tube volume to account for the collision risks.
Yeah that's true, calculating the actual collision risk is a whole different thing.
It was really just a joke, cause you know space is bigger and more empty than most people realize. Because what I said was "technically" true, if not super meaningful in any way.
That said, orbit isn't too crowded yet, more is definitely going up, a lot more. Truth be told, 50 years from now, the number of satellites orbiting earth could easily be in the hundreds of thousands.
We're at what, close to 20k right now?
Won't take 50 years.
And not every orbit is equally useful. Near misses are getting more frequent, and it only takes 1 to start a chain reaction.
Although this would also enable the alternate scenario of reducing incoming sunlight simply by turning them around. This project both doesn't think far enough and much too far at the same time.
Also, we would need to finally abolish borders and create a world government for effective usage of such systems; this would enable the designation of areas where supercharged amounts of solar power are collected 24/7, while reducing solar input to areas experiencing heat waves.
It'll only make a difference during the times in which it is being hit by a beam that wouldn't otherwise hit the earth, since whatever it reflects will be offset by some shadow behind it. I wonder if, as a matter of orbital mechanics, it would be possible to make the satellite orbit in such a way so that it never casts a shadow and is always in the sunlight.