On 7/17/2013 2:07 AM, Simon Plouffe wrote:
Hello,
I was thinking at how we could procuce energy in a simple way, like having solar ovens with mirrors and such devices. This lead me to Archimedes and the way he used to 'toast' roman warships from the Syracuse citadel, apparently that idea was somewhat validated once, they found a way to toast a pile of plywood resembling a roman ship with plates of metals used at the time.
Mythbusters (the TV show) tried this a couple of different times, even using modern mirrors. It never really worked.
Anyhow which lead me to think : what about today ?, suppose we would hypothetically having the same kind of threat but from space : an alien warship threatening to zap humans from existence.
What about doing the same thing ? Billion of people using mirrors directly aimed at (more or less precisely) at this alien ship : what would happen ?
Solar illumination at the surface of the Earth is about 1kw/m^2. So if each person wielded a one square meter mirror and they all successfully aimed them at the same point you could, at best get a billion kw/m^2 on the target point - which if it weren't very shiny would probably burn a hole in it. But the problem, which Mythbusters had, is holding the mirrors still and pointed at the same spot. At high intensities you also get heating of the air and defocusing due to different densities. Of course all these problems can be greatly mitigated with adaptive optics; which have been developed for laser weapons. http://news.yahoo.com/navys-laser-weapon-blasts-bad-215808231.html Brent
More precisely, what would be the effect in energy having let's say 100 miilion mirrors aimed at one point in space toward one of those things, would it do the same thing ? Is this feasible, we would have one shot at it.
This may sound naive, well is it ?
Can someone calculate what output of energy this represent ?
Best regards, Simon PLOUFFFE _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
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