Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to blow your mind. From how Stop
Speaker 1: Works by Carlo ground Control to Major Tom Ground Control
Speaker 1: to Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your
Speaker 1: helmet on ground control to Major Tom five commencing count
Speaker 1: of engines on three three check ignitions, Who to make
Speaker 1: God's Love people one lift off. Hey, welcome to stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
Speaker 1: I am Christians. Say so you may have gotten the
Speaker 1: idea from our little intro there that that was our
Speaker 1: homage to David Bowie. We're recording this two days after
Speaker 1: he passed away, so we thought it would be fun
Speaker 1: to do a little space oddity routine since we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about space mirrors. So how how do these work?
Speaker 1: Why are we putting mirrors in outer space? It's not
Speaker 1: to look at ourselves, is not to look at planet Earth? Right,
Speaker 1: There's many reasons behind this. Yeah, though I will say
Speaker 1: that I did run across at least one scenario in
Speaker 1: which they were talking about using mirrors and space as
Speaker 1: a means to to to better analyze conditions on the Earth.
Speaker 1: Is that right? Yeah? But for the most part, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not putting them up there, but they're not putting
Speaker 1: haunted mirrors up in space, right, not like the mirror
Speaker 1: from Oculus. Not yet. That's the sequel. I just came
Speaker 1: up with it, right there, Oculus to space mirror. The
Speaker 1: Oculus mirror, as you is used in a telescope. It
Speaker 1: gets put in the Hubble Yeah, Hubble space telescope or
Speaker 1: the James Webb Yeah, exactly. And it's worth mentioning the
Speaker 1: haunted mirrors because haunted mirrors, I feel, capture a lot
Speaker 1: of the mystique of the mirror itself. Even if you
Speaker 1: sort of know how a mirror works, uh, there's still
Speaker 1: something kind of magical and uncanny about it. And therefore
Speaker 1: the idea of putting them in space, putting them out there,
Speaker 1: uh in orbit, uh, is inherently kind of weird and
Speaker 1: mystical feeling. Yeah, potential event horizons scenario. Ye. So before
Speaker 1: we dive into the mirror stuff, I just want to
Speaker 1: remind everybody you know, Stuff to Blow your Mind is
Speaker 1: a podcast, and most of you know us from listening
Speaker 1: to the show, and thank you for doing so. But
Speaker 1: we do a bunch of other stuff too, and we
Speaker 1: love if you check that out. So we've got videos
Speaker 1: that we produce uh and star in. We've got articles
Speaker 1: that we write, and the best way that you can
Speaker 1: find most of that stuff is by visiting us at
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your Mind dot com. That is the
Speaker 1: landing site for everything that Joe, Robert and I are producing. Indeed,
Speaker 1: and hey, we don't we don't care how you listen
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Speaker 1: that you've had, or or facts that we maybe didn't
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Speaker 1: those things. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on Tumblr.
Speaker 1: We are blow the Mind on those platforms. We also
Speaker 1: do periscopes every Friday at noon Eastern Standard time, So
Speaker 1: if you want to hang out with us for twenty
Speaker 1: minutes or so and talk about what's going on with
Speaker 1: the show this week, what we're working on for articles
Speaker 1: or whatever. Uh, that's that's the best way to do that,
Speaker 1: to talk to us directly, throw us those hearts on periscope,
Speaker 1: all right, you know. But as we get going here, Uh,
Speaker 1: this is not an episode that deals exclusively with telescope. Uh.
Speaker 1: That is a topic that deserves its own episode or
Speaker 1: a couple of episodes to explore some of this amazing
Speaker 1: terrestrial and orbital observatories that we've rolled out over the years.
Speaker 1: But in discussing the role of mirrors in space, we
Speaker 1: have to talk at least briefly about their role in
Speaker 1: the telescope. Yeah. So, the basic gist of reflector telescopes,
Speaker 1: which is the kind of telescope that uses mirrors instead
Speaker 1: of lenses, is that the mirrors collect light within them
Speaker 1: from a distant object, bring that light to a point
Speaker 1: or to a focus, and then through an I P
Speaker 1: S lens, take that focus and magnify it for our
Speaker 1: human retina, right, so we can see through. Its ability
Speaker 1: to collect light is directly related to the diameter of
Speaker 1: the mirror being used to gather the light. Okay, and
Speaker 1: Isaac Newton was the first one to develop this idea
Speaker 1: for the reflector telescope back in sixteen eighty. He used
Speaker 1: a curved metal mirror to collect the light and reflect
Speaker 1: it into focus. Then in seventy two, John Hadley developed
Speaker 1: a design using parabolic mirrors, and these are relatively still
Speaker 1: in popular use today. The disadvantage of reflector telescopes, though,
Speaker 1: is that you have to clean and realign these mirrors,
Speaker 1: and that actually comes into play with the Hubble telescope.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, because there's some some flaw to it. But
Speaker 1: reflectors are also subject to some light loss as well.
Speaker 1: So Hubble we mentioned it before. We thought we joked
Speaker 1: about putting the oculus mirror inside of it. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: a cassa grain, that's the title of it. Reflector telescope
Speaker 1: where the light enters through a small opening and bounces
Speaker 1: off primary and secondary mirrors inside of it. It's sort
Speaker 1: of in like a w formation, is how the light
Speaker 1: is bouncing around in there, and there's other smaller mirrors
Speaker 1: inside to distribute the light to the eventual instruments that
Speaker 1: then broadcast them back to us. The mirrors are made,
Speaker 1: you know, different from how Newton made his with just
Speaker 1: a sheet of metal. Uh. They are glass coated with
Speaker 1: layers of pure aluminum and magnesium fluoride. But the hubble
Speaker 1: has a couple of flaws. It had a flaw in
Speaker 1: in its mirrors UM, and so what they used to
Speaker 1: do is they had several small mirrors inside of it
Speaker 1: that were called co star UH. And the idea was
Speaker 1: that they would intercept the beam from the primary mirror
Speaker 1: that had a flaw, refocus it, and then make it
Speaker 1: so that you know, is able to be uh parsed out.
Speaker 1: But today the instruments that are built into it have
Speaker 1: corrective optics that compensate for that flaw, so they don't
Speaker 1: need the co Star mirrors anymore. And then the big
Speaker 1: one that I'm sure a lot of you have heard
Speaker 1: about is James Webb Telescope, which is coming up. It
Speaker 1: is an even bigger mirror that is twenty ft in diameter.
Speaker 1: In fact, we just sent a team here uh from
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works up to the NASA Observatory there where
Speaker 1: they're working on the James Web telescope, and a couple
Speaker 1: of videos were produced by our team, primarily led by
Speaker 1: all Fry from the History podcast. But I'm looking forward
Speaker 1: to seeing that stuff because they've they apparently got real
Speaker 1: up close and personal with the James Webb telescope and
Speaker 1: the production and maybe even the Haunted mirror. That's you
Speaker 1: gotta ask Hollie if that Oculus mirror made its way
Speaker 1: in there. Um. There's also some considerations for something that's
Speaker 1: called a liquid mirror telescope that could potentially be mounted
Speaker 1: on the Moon. It would be between sixties six and
Speaker 1: three hundred and twenty eight feet long, which would collect
Speaker 1: a thousand and seven hundred and thirty six times more
Speaker 1: light than the Hubble telescope does. Now, so that's just
Speaker 1: my brief primer here on telescopes and their role. And yes,
Speaker 1: we have space we have mirrors in space four telescopes,
Speaker 1: but we're going to talk a little bit beyond using
Speaker 1: them to see far and look into other ways that
Speaker 1: you could use them potentially as weapons or just to
Speaker 1: make people happier. Apparently. Yeah, and you know it's also
Speaker 1: worth noting that, um, you know, especially with terrestrial observatories,
Speaker 1: you have mirrors that are solid one piece, and then
Speaker 1: you also have mirrors that are composed of of of
Speaker 1: of various segments that all come together. Um, you mentioned
Speaker 1: the liquid mirror, and I have to to throw in
Speaker 1: about a new proposition. This just came out. This made
Speaker 1: a made the rounds from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, good
Speaker 1: old JPL. Yeah, two thousand fifteen orbiting rainbows. So and
Speaker 1: you already know it's gonna be good at the title
Speaker 1: like that. But this would be a reflective cloud. This
Speaker 1: is theoretical. This would be a reflective cloud of glitter
Speaker 1: light grains that are just floating there in space, and
Speaker 1: they're trapped and manipulated by multiple laser beans. So you
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about structure or backing material. You
Speaker 1: have to worry about, you know, unfurling the sails, et cetera.
Speaker 1: The pressure of the laser light coming in from different
Speaker 1: directions ship would shape the cloud and push the small
Speaker 1: grains to a line in the same direction. So kind
Speaker 1: of a nano mirror cloud. Yeah, that sounds interesting, curious.
Speaker 1: I mean, it sounds like it would be a long
Speaker 1: way off, given given how long the work on James
Speaker 1: Webb has been going on. Yeah, but it's there's certainly
Speaker 1: an innovation that is worth thinking about in terms of
Speaker 1: these various applications that we're going to discuss here, some
Speaker 1: of which you know, are a little more feasible than others. Um,
Speaker 1: we should also mention solar sales because that that's an
Speaker 1: important aspect of the use of mirrors in space as well,
Speaker 1: or at least mirrord surfaces. So the concept itself goes
Speaker 1: back to the sixteenth century UH astronomer mathematician Johannes Kepler
Speaker 1: UH noticed that comet tails always point away from the sun,
Speaker 1: implying that sunlight itself was pushing them around like they
Speaker 1: were little wind solar breeze. Yeah, and there is there
Speaker 1: is a solar win We know that now. Um. We
Speaker 1: we know now that sunlight is a little more than
Speaker 1: a stream of photons, tiny particles of light, and they
Speaker 1: don't possess mass, but they do boast a linear momentum,
Speaker 1: and when they bounce off a reflective surface, they push
Speaker 1: against that surface. And UH, and then this has been
Speaker 1: demonstrated because of the solar sales. UH. The Mariner Tin
Speaker 1: probe successfully demonstrated the technology in seventy four when Nassy
Speaker 1: used the probe solar arrays UH as an impromptu solar sale. UH.
Speaker 1: Subsequent American, Russian, Indian, and Japanese missions have also uh
Speaker 1: further proven the technology's feasibility. But we really haven't taken
Speaker 1: the solar sale concept and uh and and fleshed it
Speaker 1: out in a more uh you know, remarkable way. We
Speaker 1: haven't created like full full on solar sale vessels. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The idea is that like, eventually, the continuous force of
Speaker 1: all those sunlight particles would propel a spacecraft potentially five
Speaker 1: times faster than traditional rockets. Yeah, and then if you
Speaker 1: could also throw in varying uh theoretical means of boosting
Speaker 1: them with lasers, so you point the laser beams at
Speaker 1: the sale and add a little bit of artificial win
Speaker 1: to those solar sales. So this sounds good, right. We're
Speaker 1: using mirrors in space as a as a as a
Speaker 1: real means and as a and as a near future
Speaker 1: means to gaze at the cosmos, and propulsion as a
Speaker 1: means to move through it. But what else can we do? Well,
Speaker 1: apparently we can hurt each other, which is one of
Speaker 1: our favorite ways to examine space. Right. We love talking
Speaker 1: about space weapons here and stuff to blow your mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we've seen time and time again that if you want,
Speaker 1: you want any kind of a science program funded. If
Speaker 1: it has a weapon aspect to it, then all the better.
Speaker 1: That's that's how human civilization gets excited about science. And
Speaker 1: that's exactly the case with something called the sun gun. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this comes from a Life magazine article. Basically, there
Speaker 1: were U. S. Army technical experts that were in Germany
Speaker 1: and they came across notes for the sun gun. And
Speaker 1: the concept was by a German rocket scientists named Herman
Speaker 1: O Berth, and he pitched this idea in ninete. Now,
Speaker 1: his idea for this was totally peaceful, right. He wanted
Speaker 1: to use it to do things like illuminate ports or
Speaker 1: thaw out frozen rivers. Uh. He also thought that you
Speaker 1: could potentially use this as a I mean he was
Speaker 1: thinking way ahead as a refueling station for spaceships. So
Speaker 1: there were some sort of sci fi ash ideas here. Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 1: Berth is one of those names you see thrown around
Speaker 1: at times with Verna von Braun. He was very much
Speaker 1: involved with the German rocket program in the creation of
Speaker 1: the V two. Yeah exactly. But you know, in this situation,
Speaker 1: ober comes up with this idea and the nazis going,
Speaker 1: you know, what, what if we could use that to
Speaker 1: take the rays and burn our enemy cities and boil
Speaker 1: the ocean. Yeah. I mean it comes down again to
Speaker 1: this case where you have you have scientists who who
Speaker 1: have this in their areas of expertise, they have their
Speaker 1: research they cared dearly about, but you're ultimately you're you're
Speaker 1: you're ultimately having to deal with a warlike and dogmatic
Speaker 1: force at the top of the chain, and you have
Speaker 1: to appeal to those masters. And it's like that nowadays.
Speaker 1: Like you know, a lot of the scientists that I
Speaker 1: know who get funding for their work get it from
Speaker 1: the d O D. I mean, one of my closest
Speaker 1: friends used to do work out of M I T.
Speaker 1: And he always reminds me that the GPS was first
Speaker 1: developed with do O D money. And I'm talking about
Speaker 1: the Department of Defense in the United States for international listeners. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the scenario more or less remains the same. It's
Speaker 1: easier to uh to cast a nefarious I obviously on
Speaker 1: on a scientific experiments going on in scientific endeavors going
Speaker 1: on during the Third Reich and under the Third Reich.
Speaker 1: But it has always been the case. And if you
Speaker 1: have a big project, war is the way it gets green. Well,
Speaker 1: there don't seem to be any surviving schematics to actually
Speaker 1: show how they're going to build this mirror sun gun.
Speaker 1: But the Life magazine article has like drawings and illustrations
Speaker 1: in it, which I'm assuming that they came with the
Speaker 1: notes that were uncovered by these technical experts unless they
Speaker 1: were drawn for the article. And those illustrations are are available,
Speaker 1: you can find them, i think, on on Google and
Speaker 1: and they're wonderful. They're just fabulous retro futurist visions of
Speaker 1: what life space could consist of. Um, they didn't really
Speaker 1: have a plan either on how they were going to
Speaker 1: have a rocket actually get the get the sun gun
Speaker 1: up into space, but the idea here was that it
Speaker 1: would be pre assembled before it even got up there. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in the same article that hypothesized that at the
Speaker 1: distance that the Germans were planning to set up the mirror,
Speaker 1: which was five thousand, one hundred miles up, the image
Speaker 1: it would cast on Earth once they actually crunched the
Speaker 1: math would be forty miles in diameter and it would
Speaker 1: not be hot enough to do any damage, so there
Speaker 1: would be like a forty mile uh sunburst that I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe it would give you a bit of
Speaker 1: a tan. Yeah, that's uh, And that's one of the
Speaker 1: um the cool things about that Life article is they
Speaker 1: just immediately tear down the idea. Um. Of course, it's
Speaker 1: also worth noting that that the German scientists themselves, they
Speaker 1: were saying that this thing, this would be like years anyway,
Speaker 1: so they weren't saying we can do this next year, guys. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it seems like if you try to extrapolate
Speaker 1: over it's work into a weapon, as as some of
Speaker 1: the Nazi individuals may have seemed to have done, it's
Speaker 1: not gonna work, but as a means to slightly heat areas, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I'm curious, like, especially given what we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about Russian applications for this as well. But you know,
Speaker 1: maybe they could thaw or ever, but at the very
Speaker 1: least they could literally shed some light on the situation. So, Okay,
Speaker 1: here's the basic breakdown of ober'st thing. Even if we
Speaker 1: don't have access to as sschematics. The idea is that
Speaker 1: the mirror would be a concave disk that's one mile
Speaker 1: in diameter. So we keep coming back to this, the
Speaker 1: importance of how big the diameter is mirror. The crew
Speaker 1: would live inside the mirror and they would breathe air
Speaker 1: produced by thousands of pumpkin plants. I loved that. And
Speaker 1: even in some of the drawings they sort of show
Speaker 1: where these pumpkin plants would be placed that they would
Speaker 1: be generating oxygen for the car. Wonder why, I guess
Speaker 1: because of the buyer, if they feel like that would
Speaker 1: be a good support structure for us. Yeah, it wasn't clear.
Speaker 1: It wasn't clear, and you know, unfortunately, oh Birth's actual
Speaker 1: reasoning for it was kind of lost to time. There
Speaker 1: was also some weird stuff because they the design was
Speaker 1: pitched to have centrifugial rotation and mimic gravity, kind of
Speaker 1: like we're familiar with now from two thousand one of
Speaker 1: Space that classic scene. Yeah. Um, but they also would
Speaker 1: wear magnet shoes that would allow them to stick to
Speaker 1: the floors and walls at the same time to compensate
Speaker 1: for the gravity loss. So maybe it's sort of like
Speaker 1: I'm I'm thinking of that scene in Star Trek the
Speaker 1: Next Generation where they put on those like magnet boots
Speaker 1: and walk along in the hull of the Star Trek
Speaker 1: Enterprise to the star Reck enterprise, the spaceship enterprise. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so the idea here is that there would be
Speaker 1: tiny little rocket motors that are attached to the mirror
Speaker 1: and they would fire those off to control where it
Speaker 1: was turned, so they could aim the light at Earth.
Speaker 1: But after World War Two, you know, the Nazis were
Speaker 1: done for in terms of the weapon building business, and
Speaker 1: oh Berth went to other nations to see if they
Speaker 1: would pick up his idea for the peacetime applications. He
Speaker 1: originally came up with him for he thought the US
Speaker 1: could build a mirror that's three hundred miles in diameter.
Speaker 1: That's huge, uh, to terraform the Earth. So he had
Speaker 1: some big ideas, o Berth did. He even suggested, well,
Speaker 1: you know it would be expensive, Yes, but why don't
Speaker 1: we just mind all the materials from the Moon to
Speaker 1: keep the costs down. I keep in mind, we hadn't
Speaker 1: even been to the moon. He doesn't know what's on
Speaker 1: the moon. But sure enough, we're gonna he pitches, Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't worry about it. We'll just we'll make this mirror
Speaker 1: from moonbits. See he's very much thinking a few steps
Speaker 1: ahead of hurrent science. Yeah, I mean this concept is,
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, more sci fi than science.
Speaker 1: But it was, you know, initially pitched to be developed.
Speaker 1: You know. It's it's interesting that he was already at
Speaker 1: this point talking about it's use for terraforming, because in
Speaker 1: recent decades you've you've see space mirrors occasionally pop up
Speaker 1: as a means to terraform Mars. The red planets too cold,
Speaker 1: so you know, you just deploy fleets of orbiting reflective
Speaker 1: balloons to collect sunlight and reflect it down on the
Speaker 1: chili surfaces. Um that that in particular was it was
Speaker 1: a scheme that was proposed by University of Arizona's rogol Waida,
Speaker 1: who theorizes that such a scheme could raise the Martian
Speaker 1: temperature in a one fifty acre patch to Earth like
Speaker 1: levels of interesting. And likewise, you you see various theories
Speaker 1: about how you could you could use space mirrors as
Speaker 1: a geo engineering or plan at hacking measure here on
Speaker 1: Earth to counteract global warming. Yeah, I've heard that as well.
Speaker 1: But Overth already had all that uh teaming around in
Speaker 1: that brain age. Yeah, back in the twenties, he had
Speaker 1: the whole thing figured out. He just didn't have the
Speaker 1: means to achieve it. I'm gonna go back to the
Speaker 1: sun gun one more time though. Um that edition of
Speaker 1: Life magazine in busting It, these are some of the
Speaker 1: particulars that they laid out. They said that the German
Speaker 1: plan for building may be proved physically impossible by a
Speaker 1: simple axiom of optics. Uh. This is that light cannot
Speaker 1: be brought to a sharp pointed focus with lenses or
Speaker 1: mirrors unless it comes from a sharp pointed source. Uh.
Speaker 1: It goes on to say that since the Sun appears
Speaker 1: in the sky as a disk and not as a point,
Speaker 1: the best any optical system could do would be to
Speaker 1: produce an image of that disc. So at very short
Speaker 1: focal length, the image is small and hot, but the
Speaker 1: focus length is increased the image becomes progressively bigger and cooler.
Speaker 1: So at the distances that the Germans what we're dealing with,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, they wouldn't be able to cast that
Speaker 1: laser like beam of heated intensity on anything. They would
Speaker 1: just be able to warm things up like ha ha.
Speaker 1: Enemies enjoy slightly warmer temperatures in this general vicinity, which
Speaker 1: actually would work out pretty well for the next next
Speaker 1: space mirror. We're gonna talk about projects, Zin Maya. That's right.
Speaker 1: When we come back, we're gonna discuss Soviet attempts to
Speaker 1: cast a little light on the on the world using
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Speaker 1: All right, we're back and we're talking about Project Znamia.
Speaker 1: Znamia is Russian for banner, because essentially we're talking about
Speaker 1: a big reflective banner in space. And this is that
Speaker 1: this was the brainchild of the Space Regathera Consortium or
Speaker 1: s r C, a partnership of seven Russian aerospace management
Speaker 1: and engineering companies who proposed and ultimately got off the ground. Uh,
Speaker 1: two different variations of this space mirror technology. And the
Speaker 1: interesting and maybe confusing thing about this too was the
Speaker 1: first one that went up was the Jennaia too, not
Speaker 1: Jean Maya one. So I wonder whatever happened to the
Speaker 1: first one, or maybe they just jumped right to two
Speaker 1: after a prototype. Yeah, And then the second one is
Speaker 1: Namia two point five, right, and the third proposed one
Speaker 1: that never actually happened was going to be Namia three. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like an iOS operating systems that they
Speaker 1: just kind of jumped around with the numbers there. So
Speaker 1: the idea here is that it's a spinning space reflector,
Speaker 1: apparently sort of similar to the sun gun. I guess
Speaker 1: in the idea was that it would reflect a three
Speaker 1: mile wide patch or a five kilometer wide patch of
Speaker 1: light across a swath of pre dawn Europe. Uh. And now,
Speaker 1: unfortunately when they tested it, the clouds obscured much of this.
Speaker 1: But there were some observers who reported seeing a one
Speaker 1: second flash that was as bright as a full moon,
Speaker 1: and they were able to see this on top of
Speaker 1: the Alps. Apparently there were astronomers knew that it was
Speaker 1: being tested, so they were looking for it. Yeah, full
Speaker 1: moon shows up a lot as a descriptor for how
Speaker 1: bright this thing actually was. Yeah, which is you know, granted,
Speaker 1: full moon level of luminosity is pretty significantly sent right,
Speaker 1: especially for the purposes that they came up with. At
Speaker 1: least so the scientists at the Space Regatican Sortium. Their
Speaker 1: hope was that Zimaya two would lead to a constellation
Speaker 1: of space mirrors that would be an orbit around Earth
Speaker 1: and they would use these to light up cities with
Speaker 1: up to a hundred times the full moon's brightness. So
Speaker 1: you have multiple mirrors operating at the same time, um
Speaker 1: combining their efforts to illuminate an area. Yeah, and they
Speaker 1: thought that this would improve morale during the winter, and
Speaker 1: they would they would use it just after sun set
Speaker 1: or just before sunrise. And my first thought was that
Speaker 1: is so Russian like that is the coming from New England,
Speaker 1: which is is nowhere year as harshest a Russian winter.
Speaker 1: I can understand wanting to dispel the grayness of winter.
Speaker 1: Uh So, And I also thought about this, I wonder
Speaker 1: what they would do to human circadian rhythms, given how
Speaker 1: light interacts with the human eye and brain. Well, that
Speaker 1: was I think one of the the criticisms that that
Speaker 1: you saw is that people were saying, well, what was it?
Speaker 1: What is this due to the human circadian rhythm, essentially
Speaker 1: rolling out light pollution, more light pollution than uh the
Speaker 1: urban areas are already produced producing. So how's that gonna
Speaker 1: mess with the surrounding wildlife? Yeah. In fact, astronomers, other astronomers,
Speaker 1: not the ones that we're working on this, we're a
Speaker 1: little bit upset about it because they thought that it
Speaker 1: was going to obscure their view of the universe. But
Speaker 1: if they're looking up with the telescopes we're talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: they're gonna be getting all kinds of reflections and problems
Speaker 1: from the constellation of space mirrors. Um. But the other
Speaker 1: idea that they had, and this seems like a good
Speaker 1: one to me, is is that they could provide emergency
Speaker 1: lighting during disasters. So if a city loses its power,
Speaker 1: they you know, rotate the mirror is in boom, you've
Speaker 1: got light for an evening if you have to clear out.
Speaker 1: You know, probably given during a natural disaster. And I
Speaker 1: guess you could imagine it being used to in a
Speaker 1: scenario where all right, this area doesn't have power now,
Speaker 1: or for some reason there's an energy shortage. Instead of
Speaker 1: lighting up all the streets, you just cast the mirror
Speaker 1: and you down and then you can provide the at
Speaker 1: least the level of illumination necessary for driving around town. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: uh so this was fairly successful. They thought, okay, the
Speaker 1: one second of full moon light, that's enough for us
Speaker 1: to call this a success. So let's try it again
Speaker 1: with Zemmaya two point five in. Yeah, this is six
Speaker 1: years later that set out to try it again. This
Speaker 1: one was U and they were hoping to cast a
Speaker 1: seven kilometer diameter bright spot. Uh that was expected to
Speaker 1: have five to ten moon luminosity. So it's gonna be bigger, better,
Speaker 1: And this was gonna gonna be again a first step
Speaker 1: in establishing that constellation that we're talking about earlier constellation
Speaker 1: of reflectors that would allow us to really dose south
Speaker 1: the illumination. Um. The problem is that when they began
Speaker 1: to deploy this thing, um, the the the Z two's
Speaker 1: membrane caught on one of space station mirrors antenna and
Speaker 1: ripped it up. So that was not a success. And
Speaker 1: they didn't even get there their one second of full
Speaker 1: moon brightness apparently. Yeah, and eventually they just have to
Speaker 1: jettison in and it burns up on reentry. So that's
Speaker 1: so despite that, they still had you know, I guess
Speaker 1: it was already on the books, but they had proposed
Speaker 1: in MAYA three and the idea for this was that
Speaker 1: it would have been even larger, and its goal was
Speaker 1: to test a new reflector concept using something called film photovoltaics.
Speaker 1: And it was proposed to go up somewhere around two
Speaker 1: thousand or two thousand one. As far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: that never happened. Uh, but there's very little formation on
Speaker 1: it actually when you go to look it up. Uh.
Speaker 1: There is a BBC article that came out right after
Speaker 1: two point five failed that's basically like Nan and Nan,
Speaker 1: You're never gonna get three up. It's kind of fascinating
Speaker 1: little piece. It read a lot more like an editorial
Speaker 1: than it did like a science article. They're basically, uh,
Speaker 1: speculating that you know, this thing was way too expensive,
Speaker 1: it was beyond the resources that Russia had at the time,
Speaker 1: and that it was a leftover from when the Soviets
Speaker 1: had really big space aspirations. So they said, it's probably
Speaker 1: gonna stop, and as far as I can tell, it
Speaker 1: seems like it did. Um. But there's an interesting article
Speaker 1: that's out there after the antenna problem happened with I'm
Speaker 1: gonna call it Z two point five by a guy
Speaker 1: named n. Chapawkowski, and he comes up with five different
Speaker 1: proposals that they could have used to fix two point five,
Speaker 1: so that three would have been more operational. And I'll
Speaker 1: just go over these real quick. I mean, his papers
Speaker 1: very long and academic in nature. But he talks about
Speaker 1: using something called rational membrane unfolding technology that would leave
Speaker 1: some of the folds free, so peripherals like the antennas
Speaker 1: would stretch together with the rest of the mirrors to
Speaker 1: make it so that it is less likely to rip
Speaker 1: apart upon first deployment. Yep. Uh. The other idea he
Speaker 1: had was to increase the spin so that the membrane
Speaker 1: needed would have to be heavy enough to withstand the
Speaker 1: centrifugeal forces, but light enough to unfold quickly. And his
Speaker 1: idea was they use compressed air to rapidly unfold the memorane.
Speaker 1: They have little bursts of compressed air cheot out uh.
Speaker 1: And then building off of that, he adds the idea, well,
Speaker 1: why don't we put pipes into the membrane and run
Speaker 1: the compressed air through those. So three is really just
Speaker 1: kind of a two point five if we're sticking with
Speaker 1: the right of the note numbering uh. And then this
Speaker 1: fourth idea was you would have a compact packing of
Speaker 1: the membrane. It would unpack like an accordion in outer space,
Speaker 1: So it would go up all folded together, and then
Speaker 1: it would come out like an accordion. And this this
Speaker 1: led to his fifth idea, which is another similar thing,
Speaker 1: but the bands of the membrane would unfold in a
Speaker 1: concertina fashion. Okay, so I'm imagining essentially a big, vaguely
Speaker 1: accordion shaped reflective space balloon. Yeah, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: you know the conclusion of his article is basically like,
Speaker 1: maybe we could combine a little bit of idea number
Speaker 1: three with idea number one and idea number five and
Speaker 1: we can make this thing work out. But and never
Speaker 1: and never never went up. So with this and uh
Speaker 1: and some of these other applications of space mirrors, I mean, ultimately,
Speaker 1: what you're getting down to is the manipulation of light. Uh,
Speaker 1: not only in terms of illumination, but also as as
Speaker 1: far as energy is concerned. And so really the applications
Speaker 1: apply to any situation in which you would want to
Speaker 1: redirect solar energy for propulsion, as we've mentioned, for observation,
Speaker 1: as we've mentioned also just for the energy usage. You
Speaker 1: could potentially use these mirrors to to refocus solar energy
Speaker 1: onto some sort of a solar up into onto a
Speaker 1: solar energy collector. And that's what I was thinking about,
Speaker 1: is it if you wanted to get really serious about
Speaker 1: solar panels. Again, the State of the Union was last
Speaker 1: night and President Obama was talking a lot about solar energy.
Speaker 1: Build something like this and have it just beamed down
Speaker 1: the energy right at it. But I don't know that
Speaker 1: if that's practical or not. Yeah, that's always the challenge
Speaker 1: with with solar energy, whether you're talking something with space
Speaker 1: meters or just say passive solar home design. How do
Speaker 1: you best design the system so that you maximize uh,
Speaker 1: the benefits of the solar energy harvesting? Uh, and that
Speaker 1: it's not just some sort of you know, expensive plus
Speaker 1: one right exactly. Yeah, I would assume that given the
Speaker 1: costs involved. We've talked about how much it costs to
Speaker 1: fly things up and out or space before, especially we
Speaker 1: talked about space weapons and our rods from God episode.
Speaker 1: Uh that I don't know if would if the cost
Speaker 1: benefit analysis works out. Yeah, indeed. And now when you
Speaker 1: start getting into that far future area, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of like over it was discussing, you know, where
Speaker 1: we already have the Moon base in place, and then
Speaker 1: you can dream outward from that you get into a
Speaker 1: lot of really far fetched and and and really remarkable
Speaker 1: ideas about how you could use a space mirror. So,
Speaker 1: what if you had a space mirror large enough to
Speaker 1: reflect the Sun's rays back on itself in a in
Speaker 1: a meaningful amount, say you know, a giant space mirror
Speaker 1: position on the other side of the Sun perhaps uh,
Speaker 1: from Earth. Could you essentially make the Sun into its
Speaker 1: own solar sale and then you utilize this effect to
Speaker 1: propel the solar system in the direction of your choice. Wait,
Speaker 1: so the Solar system itself becomes a spaceship. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's kind of the idea here. And now it's definitely
Speaker 1: a type to Cardassian civilization, uh concept. But yeah, the
Speaker 1: idea is that if you had a basically a megastructure
Speaker 1: in space, this big reflective megastructure, you would have what
Speaker 1: is referred to as a class A stellar engine that
Speaker 1: would use the impulse of the radiation emitted by a
Speaker 1: star to produce thrust. And this is also called a
Speaker 1: Shakadov thruster. I imagine navigating spaceship Milky Way or sorry,
Speaker 1: not Milky Way, but spaceship Solar System would be extremely difficult.
Speaker 1: The calculations involved, uh, would be mind blowing. Yeah. It
Speaker 1: would definitely be the domain of a of a type too,
Speaker 1: sumplation as opposed to us um And I think I've
Speaker 1: seen this rolled out occasionally in sci fi. There's any
Speaker 1: n Ebanks book where the the the Earth becomes threatened
Speaker 1: by an orc cloud that is going to block out
Speaker 1: most of the Sun's rays and so therefore it becomes
Speaker 1: necessary to move the Solar system to to a different
Speaker 1: location um or perhaps they merely move the Earth in
Speaker 1: that in that's in that particular novel. I'm having trouble
Speaker 1: remembering off the top of my head. But yeah, when
Speaker 1: you start talking about capturing all of the energy in
Speaker 1: the solar system and the utilizing that, you're in this uh,
Speaker 1: this type two level of far future technology, and I'm
Speaker 1: just it's only just now dawning on me. I didn't
Speaker 1: even write down a note about this. And I don't
Speaker 1: want to spoil the spoil the movie for anybody who
Speaker 1: hasn't seen it yet. But there is something like this
Speaker 1: in the new Star Wars movie. Okay, yeah, you haven't
Speaker 1: seen I have not seen it yet. Plans keep falling apart.
Speaker 1: I don't know that it's mirrors necessarily, but they harness
Speaker 1: the power of the sun. Okay, some sort of some
Speaker 1: sort of solar super weapon. Then yeah, I'm the last
Speaker 1: person on Earth too that that has not seen I
Speaker 1: don't know about that. I'm sure that some of you
Speaker 1: out there haven't seen it yet either. That's why I
Speaker 1: don't want to go too far into it. But yeah,
Speaker 1: but hey, that's one more thing I have to look
Speaker 1: forward to when I see the new Star Wars film.
Speaker 1: So there you have it. We've We've rolled through just
Speaker 1: a number of the key key points in the history
Speaker 1: of space mirrors and some of their their actual and
Speaker 1: theoretical uses. But we're curious, you know, what else is
Speaker 1: out there, what's popping around your your head when it
Speaker 1: comes to either sci fi visions of space mirrors or
Speaker 1: just sort of possible UH uses for them, Like, for instance,
Speaker 1: what about the possibility of using solar UH mirrors in
Speaker 1: space to illuminate a particular growing area for crops. Yeah, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: that seems like it would be a natural one. And
Speaker 1: I didn't get the impression from either the German or
Speaker 1: Russian designs that they were thinking along those lines. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you could essentially have your own It's like having
Speaker 1: your own hydroponic growing area, except you could have just
Speaker 1: an enormous field somewhere. All you need isn't is the
Speaker 1: oribital mite of a It's like you just gotta have
Speaker 1: this multi billion dollar steaking up there. So yeah, if
Speaker 1: you if you have ideas about this or or more
Speaker 1: resources for us to follow up on, please let us know.
Speaker 1: And you know, like I said at the top, we
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Speaker 1: We don't just post our own stuff on there either.
Speaker 1: We like to uh curate a lot of the weird science,
Speaker 1: the information that we find or across the web that
Speaker 1: we don't have time to put into our episodes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so follow us on those accounts, uh if you use them,
Speaker 1: and you can keep up keep up with us that way.
Speaker 1: And hey, if you want to reach out to us directly,
Speaker 1: you can always hit us up on email. That blow
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